Newsgator Outlook Edition trouble? Reinstall!

Robert W. Anderson — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:51:00 GMT

I have been using the Newsgator Outlook Edition for the past year and was pretty happy with it, but I just realized that it has been discarding posts somewhat arbitrarily.

For example, I had subscribed to the PDC Bloggers feed and hadn't gotten a new post since the Wednesday of the conference. With all of the feeds I was reading, I didn't even notice. Several other feeds have been behaving the same way. Newsgator online was working fine, though. Definitely not the feeds, just the reader.

A trip to the Newsgator support site clued me into “Shift-Refresh” as a way to force a refresh of a feed. This didn't work. A service release (SR2) was released earlier in the month. Upgrading didn't make a difference.

Uninstalling and then re-installing did work. Now I have (unfortunately) a whole lot of posts marked as unread. It is a good think that Newsgator can sync your feeds from the web site. Handy feature, really.

Microsoft wins the PDA OS war

Robert W. Anderson — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 13:16:00 GMT

Business Week is reporting that soon there will be an announcement of a Windows Mobile Treo. This was expected, but now it is (almost) official:

Microsoft has won the PDA OS wars

Being an avid user of Palm OS devices since the Pilot Professional and recently a user of the JASJAR (a Windows Mobile 5 Phone), I have to say that Microsoft won this one on marketing.

That is not to say that technically Windows Mobile isn't impressive. It certainly is; however, the ease of use and responsiveness of the T3 stands in stark contrast to the slowness and complexity of the JASJAR. OK, I should try other Windows Mobile devices before I make a statement about relative speed, but the overall complexity of the PIM functionality makes Windows Mobile very hard to use.

I just don't see how an average (non-technical, non-geeky) user could use a Windows Mobile device as their PIM.

Update: fixed a typeo and an admission: no, Windows Mobile devices are not necessarily slow.

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Newsgator Outlook Edition trouble? Reinstall!

Microsoft wins the PDA OS war