So yesterday AT&T finally rolled out MMS capability to iPhone users a feature that just about every other phone on the planet could do but for some reason AT&T decided to wait on for the iPhone.

Personally, I grabbed the update as soon as I could and tested it out with a buddy of mine who has a Blackberry Storm on Verizon. I took a quick snapshot and sent it along and a few minutes later he had it, I’m thinking the delay may have been network traffic (about 5pm Eastcoast and shortly after the update became available), or maybe the size of the picture file, but the important thing to me was that it worked.

Of course this begs the question, will I use this feature? To be honest, I don’t know as up until now I knew the feature wasn’t there and really didn’t care. When I share pictures with most of the time I sending the photo to someone who wants it on their home computer, not in a text message so it gets sent by email. Will the fact that this feature is now available change that? Only time will tell.

So what do you think? MMS on the iPhone – is it a thumbs up for you or just another, “yeah, ok, it’s there?”

Sound off in the comments and thanks for sharing.

For those that use reQall and Evernote this news could not be better – reQall now and utilize Evernote.

If you’re like me you’re always on the look out for the next great thing to help you just Get Things Done (GTD) and for the last few weeks I’ve personally been working on using reQall more. I”ve always wanted a good task manager and it seems to fit the bill (I’ve been working with it off and on for quite a while) and with my purchase of an iPhone (you can read about that here) I can now carry my list with me all the time and manage it as needed via their app.

Now, while reQall is starting to handle my day-to-day tasks I still need a way to collect my thoughts, ideas, research and manage projects. For this I’ve recently returned to Evernote. Evernote is a great program which does all that while allowing me to tag items, post pictures – which they OCR – and best of all access it from my phone, yes, there’s an app for it as well.

I could put my projects into Evernote, tasks in reQall and things were looking good but about a week ago an event occured that caused me to upgrade my reQall account to their Pro version – I believe this is the first time I’ve upgraded a software service – reQall can now access my Evernote notes.

It’s great – I can now review my projects in Evernote and place the next actions in reQall (with place context which is allowed with my Pro account). Ok, I realize that I could do that before (minus the context) but now I can hit the ‘related items’ button on the task information screen on my iPhone and those items in Evernote that may be related are displayed. The accuracy goes up with proper tagging and titling and so far I’ve been very pleased.

Is this a GTD system that will work for all? I’m not sure and my personal experimentation with this system is still early on but for the low cost of a reQall upgrade ($25 a year) and my existing free Evernote account it’s been a boon to my daily productivity.

Do you use reQall or Evernote? Both? I’d love to hear how you use them.

It isn’t just you, there’s a whole lot of us that are now without our Gmail accounts as there is an outage.  According to Google:

We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 1:53:00 PM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

I know we all need our email fix and can only hope that they come back up online soon.

I’ll update again if I hear anything.

Update: The outage is impacting the folks on the inside of Google as well:

Posted by David Besbris, Engineering Director

We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now — we are too, and we definitely feel your pain. We don’t usually post about minor issues here (the Apps status dashboard and the Gmail Help Center are usually where this kind of information goes). Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we’re currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly. If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. We’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible.

For those looking to setup IMAP or POP you can get that configuration info at: http://su.pr/2q9lsD

Update 2: Web based service is now restored – how did you fair?

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I mentioned a couple of weeks ago about how you could update Twitter using Launchy well this week I want to pass along how you can incorporate the date that a particular web page was published. This hack takes advantage of the tip published on 4 May 2009 over at digital inspiration – Find the Date When a Web Page was First Published on the Internet.

The secret lies in adding the sequence &as_qdr=y15 to the end of your search – the folks over at Lifehacker pointed this out already in their post Display the Date a Web Page Was Published in Search Results but since we’re going to use Launchy we need to change search tool.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Bring up Launchy
2. Right click and select Options.
3. Click on Plugins
4. Select Weby
5. Find your Google search
6. Double click on the Query field
7. Add &as_qdr=y15 to the end of the line so it looks like:



8. Click Ok

That’s it, the next time you evoke a Google search from Launchy the publish dates will be included.

First off, I did not “mark all as read,” I still want to read a number of these items but as the graphic below shows I am a bit behind on my reading . . .

There was a feature released just about a week ago for folks just like me and you may have missed it as there was no big “splash” about it – the ability to mark items as read by their age via the a drop down menu.

As you can see there are a few options and depending on how much you are willing to just let go you can select from a day old to a couple of weeks old (the selection I opted for) and then you just need to confirm it:

As you can see below I was able to clear 440 items using this and while I continue to read through my backlog of items I will continue to use this feature to also whittle off the other end – the one time burning the candle at both ends is a good thing.

How do you manage your backlog of RSS items?  Sound off in the comments or follow me on Twitter, http://twitter.com/scotnewbury, and send me a tweet!