I’m on the road this week. At the moment, I’m in a Starbucks. Those of you who know my travel habits know that this is where you’ll usually find me at 7AM when I’m on the road. (Mmmmm…coffee. Must. Have. Coffee.)

Once the caffeine hit my nervous system and my brain commenced something approximating normal activity, I noticed that the “The Way I See It” quote on the back of my Venti cup was particularly relevant for those of us doing Agile development:

“If we really want to understand innovation and collaboration, we have to explore shared space. Consider Watson & Crick: How many experiments did they do to confirm DNA’s double helix? Zero. Not one. They built models based on other people’s data. These models were their shared space. Their collaboration in that shared space powered their Nobel prize-winning breakthrough. If you don’t have a shared space, you’re not collaborating.”
– Michael Schrage, MIT design researcher and author of Serious Play.

I’m now enjoying my Venti drip even more than usual…

HUGE thanks to MattJ for recommending Unison. I ditched svn for Mail syncing and went with Unison instead. Way cool. (Of course I’ll still use svn for content/code where I actually do need to keep track of versions.)

Next request: contact management.

My needs are simple, but more than the basic Address Book can handle. I need the basics most small businesses need: to be able to associate contacts with organizations, track the usual contact info, to add notes and bits of information, and to send personalized individual emails based on templates. (No, I do not spam my clients. But I do send out newsletters/announcements a couple times a year.) It also needs to keep my contact information locally so I can work effectively offline.

It does not have to sync between multiple users. Quality Tree Software, Inc. is a really small company, and for the foreseeable future I’ll be the only one with access to the contact database.

I don’t want a do-everything Personal Information Manager that will try to take over my life. iCal (with subscribing to Google calendars) handles my calendaring needs. I use paper (gasp, yes, paper) for my to do lists. And I don’t need or want a sales management tool. My contacts are people I want to keep in touch with, not “Opportunities” in a sales funnel.

By eliminating packages that tried to do too much, I made my short list really short:

• Contactizer by Objective Decision
• Now Contact by Now Software

I’m evaluating Contactizer now. It’s been a trifle glitchy, but so far immensely better than the PC product I use.

Anybody have any opinions on Contact Management apps I should be looking at (or staying away from)?

I went with the MacBook. White, 2Gb memory, 120Gb disk. Remembered the mini-DVI to VGA converter too. I’m writing on it as we, er, speak.

I timed the acquisition I can take my new toy with me on the road next week when I do a class where I’m driving instead of flying. (That way I can take both my old and new laptops easily. It’s always risky when presenting from a new machine - but even more risky when that new machine represents a whole new OS. Having the old Windows machine there as a backup for the first time out mitigates the risk.)

I’m really pleased with how smooth the transition is going so far.

I use subversion for my course materials and slide decks. So I just did a “check out,” and *pouf!*, the new laptop had my most important presentation materials. Same thing for code, of course.

So…speaking of subversion…and about email synching - I’ve been thinking and tinkering.

I checked out the folder structure Mac Mail uses and discovered that emails are stored in flat files, one file per email, with file system folders as mailboxes. Not only does that seem much more sensible than Microsoft Outlook’s gigantic pst files, it also opens up the possibility of using subversion to synchronize my email in the same way I use it to synchronize my content and code.

So I started experimenting. Early trials are promising. I can check in my Library/Mail directory contents on one machine, svn up, and see the results on the other. But it’s not seamless. First I discovered that I had to set up accounts manually on both machines. Then I realized that every deleted email results in an svn client “! - item is missing.”

If I seriously want to make this work, I’ll probably need to write a little Ruby script to do the synch the way I want it.

But this is certainly more promising than anything I tried on a PC. Gotta love UNIX.