Among other things, I finally got fixes or work-arounds for two problems that have been plaging my SaaS work-world for awhile.
del.icio.us
For sometime, as you can see above, my del.icio.us page has been displaying all whacky in FireFox. I’ve had to use Safari when looking through my bookmarks. This morning I finally sent off an email to del.icio.us support, and quickly got a reply:
Eep! You ran into the mystery bug, unfortunately. A couple other users have reported this happening to their bookmarks, and we’re really not sure what causes it. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far.
Common elements of the three affected accounts: several thousand bookmarks, lots of bundles, and lots of tags.
It doesn’t happen if you:
a) use the cloud view (in “tag options” at the bottom of your tag list)
b) close the “unbundled tags” bundle (click the title)
c) set minimum posts to 5 (also in “tag options”)
d) use a non-Firefox browserThe best help I can give you right now is to use one of those things as a workaround. I’m not really sure how soon we can fix this — it’s a terribly obscure bug. I’m sorry about that; we’ll try when we get a chance.
Sure enough, once I set the display the cloud view (which, for the number of tags I have is actually nicer), it worked just fine.
Yay!
The remarkable thing here is how quickly and “humanly” Yahoo!/del.icio.us got back to me. If that kind of support can be depended on then, as Ian Murdock said, “there’s a new business model in town.”
A big thanks goes to the support person on the other end of the email. Thanks!
Zimbra iSync
As Steve has chronicled, we’ve switched over to using Zimbra. So far, it’s been great. To be fair, I’ve taken somewhat of a 180 over the past few months and rely heavily on desktop apps (Mail.app and iCal.app) for my email and calendaring. I know, I’m a little weirded out myself. OS X apps are just addictive; or, I’m just sick.
I’ve been battling with the Zimbra iSync Preference Panel for sometime now. I’d run the installer, everything would go fine, then I’d open Preferences, and something (OS X?) had deleted the Zimbra.pref from /Library/PreferencePanes. Meaning, it didn’t work.
After much help directly from the Zimbra crew (I even sent over some logs!), I finally say down today and put on my support hat from long ago.
Before I started up Preferences, I copied Zimbra.pref over to the user-based preferences directory, ~/Library/PreferencesPanes.
Now it works just fine. After a few days, I should be able to give a review of how Zimbra works out with Mail.app and iCal.app as a front-end. So far, it’s been good. My only concern is how much processor time the syncer will take up.
As always, since this post if RedMonk IT related, it’s dedicated to Brandon, who I know can’t get enough of them.
Tags: del.icio.us, zimbra, hosted, email, calandering
When we looked at Zimbra last year it tended towards the slow side, especially when you brought the browser in from a background window. How "beefy" do you find the Zimbra UI now?
I don't use Zimbra's web app UI too much. My clients are Mail.app and (trying to be) iCal.app.
That said, Zimbra's speed has been fine for me. I haven't really ever thought: "this is slow." There's a slight delay when loading a week full of events in the calendar, but the code-monkey in me expects that.
So, the answer is probably: as fast as you'd expect/want a web app to work…but not quite as fast as GMail and GCal ;>
But, Zimbra does more than those two of course.