However, since yesterday, I started to see very old tweets on my HootSuite for iPhone. Very weird… Even Tweets from last year ! But only from one of my friends, no one else… See screenshot here:

And this only happens on the iPhone app. On HootSuite web site directly, I see no problem. So, is this a problem from HootSuite, from their iĥone app, or is this something wrong with this friend of mine ?

I will be giving this workshop with friend and ImpressCMS co-founder Steve Kenow with whom I’ve been working very closely in the last few months on the new version of ImpressCMS. Perhaps we will be able to preview a few improvement of this up coming version at FSOSS!

I’m also looking forward to meet with another long time friend, Julian Egelstaff from Freeform Solutions, developer of Formulize, a very useful module now working on XOOPS, ImpressCMS, Drupal and WordPress.

And of course, I’m really looking forward to meet with all the nice people attending this symposium, year after year. I’ve been going to FSOSS since 2007 and every year, it’s a rush of excitement, new ideas and new projects in the open source world!

At first, I didn’t understand why. Then, I saw an icon I had never seen before in the status bar (top right):

If the icon could speak, it would probably state my exact problem: the rotation is locked! I love icons that speak!

So I searched everywhere in the settings to try and find something related to the rotation. Nothing. Then I googled it. At first, the only things I found were apps allowing me to control the rotation, but this is not what I needed. It had to be something in the OS, not in an app.

Then I found this: How do I lock rotation with iOS 4 / iPhone OS 4?, Exactly what I needed!

It seems the option to lock the rotation is a new feature in OS 4. The only weird thing is where it is located. In my opinion, it should have been somewhere in the settings, but it’s not. It’s in multitasking view (click twice on the Home button), then swipe right to see something like this:

It’s the left icon, which is kind of confusing as it’s near the iPod controls. It looks more like something to “refresh” your iPod playlist… Anyway, now I know. Problem fixed!

Emails are at the very root of my professional life. It needs to be “in the cloud” and accessible 24/7 from anywhere in the world.

I don’t want to download them locally,  update or troubleshoot a local application, and I don’t want a large overhead. And let’s face it; none of the email clients currently on the market can even remotely compete with GMail’s outstanding features like threaded emails, filters, labels and all those cools Labs features.

Unfortunately, this has also created a serious problem.

When I switched everything to Google Apps two and a half years ago, I archive nearly every email, but this came with a price: For the last year, I’ve been using 95% of my 7Gb quota.

I’ve read all there is to read on GMail size control. I’m:

• Using custom searches to delete old emails with attachments.
• Using filters to locate and remove repetitive messages.
• Eliminating emails and mailing lists I don’t need.

I did everything I could think of, and they did get me through the last year, but the size is still increasing all the time.

One option I read about involved downloading old emails to a local email client and deleting them from GMail. This clearly defeats the purpose of not storing emails locally, but I didn’t see any other option. Also, a friend of mine recently told me he upgraded to Ubuntu 10.4, which came with Thunderbird 3. This version seemed to be a complete rewrite with a lot of cool features and it looked good!

So, I thought I’d try to get Thunderbird on my Ubuntu 9.10 install. Well, Ubuntu 9.10 comes with Thunderbird 2.x, and you can’t upgrade to Thunderbird 3 very easily, but after some Googling, I found How To Install Thunderbird 3 Shredder in Ubuntu 9.10.

Great! And it’s easy too:

• Add the Mozilla PPA in your source list using: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa
• Update source list using: sudo apt-get update
• Install Thunderbird 3 using:sudo apt-get install thunderbird-3.0

All I had to do was restart, and the Thunderbird 3 was working! I configured it to synchronize with GMail’s IMAP, messed around a bit to synchronize the ‘All Mail’ folder only, and learned how to delete a message in GMail without deleting it locally. Unfortuantely, this took ages since I had more than 100 000 emails. In the end, I simply gave up. Too much trouble, too long, and too complex!

I read about using a new GMail account to store/archive old messages. Still, complex…The last solution I had was to upgrade our Google Apps account to Google Apps Premium, which would give us (and me ) 25 Gb of storage per account, but I would still run into the limit problem sooner or later…

Suddenly it hit me!

What am I trying to achieve? I want to keep emails forever, but is that really what I want to do ? In a time where information usually loses its relevance a few hours after its release, why would I want to keep emails forever? I realized it isn’t the emails I want to save at all. I want the important information.

Now, I use Highrise to manage my interactions with the people/subjects that matter. I forward very message with value to Highrise. So I have a copy of those that matter anyway, right ? As for the rest, do they really matter? Is it really a problem if I don’t have an email someone sent me a year ago?

I’m starting to see the problem the other way around. Why should I bother trying to keep emails archived forever? Instead, I realize I should focus on making sure the emails that really matter go to Highrise. Now, instead of focusing on the 80% (and more!) of useless emails that crowd my inbox, I can focus on the 20% (and even less) that really matter!

What do you think? How do you manage your emails? How long do you keep them? And why?

Also known as MonDev, it’s a celebration of Open Source technology and community in the Montréal area. The whole week is populated with outstanding events!

Open Source Demo Camp at Brutopia it tonight at 6PM. Then tomorrow, Wednesday, there are three not-to-be-missed events: WebCom Montreal, WebCamp and StartupDrinks. On Thursday, it’s the long awaited Make Web Not War, followed by the Make Web Not War Party!

I will be attending WebCom tomorrow and Thursday’s Make Web Not War where I will demonstrate ImpressCMS! In addition, I will have the honor of being one of the panelist on the discussion called “Why Just One Isn’t Good Enough”, with John Oxley, Director at Microsoft Canada,  Julian Egelstaff, Technical Architect at Freeform Solutions, and Guillaume Bouchard, CEO at NVI Solutions. INBOX International is also co-producing WebCom Live.

So, if you are nearby Montreal this week, there is plenty for you to do! Hope to see you there!

For me, it was a wonderful opportunity to finally meat with someone I’ve been working with for the past 5 years, Steve Kenow, one of the initiators of the ImpressCMS project. We have been working together since in the XOOPS days and started the ImpressCMS adventure together with other great people. We’ve been talking to each other nearly every week for the past few year, but yet again, I had still to meet with him! This was accomplished this week!

I also met with Steve M., another dedicated XOOPS and ImpressCMS user/developer. It’s so nice to meet with people sharing the same interest, in this case, open source CMS. Although CMS users and developers represent a large number of people across the world, you don’t connect with them in real life every day.

So far, the conference was a great way to meet with a lot of people using CMS. The 3 same players come back all the time: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. But it’s great to see people very committed to these CMS actually interested in other systems. We also met with a few vendors currently offering professional services around Drupal and Joomla, who were also interested in learning more about ImpressCMS.

It was also a very good time to discuss with the 2 Steve’s about where ImpressCMS is and where it should go.Roadmaps were mentioned quite a few time but we came to a very clear conclusion: Roadmaps are overrated. And Steve K. already blogged about this earlier today.

Roadmaps are a list of features that needs to be implemented for a specific date. This holds 2 problems: a list of features, and dates. Features needs change through time. How can me know today, what feature we will need in a year ? The web evolves so quickly, new technologies, new ways of doing thing, new tools get created every day. So, actually, tomorrow, we will have more information about what we really want to add in our product. Then why corner ourself with a list of features and dates which would become irrelevant in 2 weeks ?

Another important element explaining why Roadmaps are problematic is that people need passion to create greatness. Developers need passion to create genious code, designers need passion to create outstanding designs, etc. If we write in a stone the specific things we want to do, then we need to find people passionate enough about each individual item to make it happen. Why not do the opposite ? Ask what people want to create today, and let them do it!

But then again, we don’t want to create “free for all”! This is why we need a vision. We need general guidelines, general concepts to guide people and guide the orientation of the project. Like a compass. And this is coming very soon…

Anyway, great conference so far. I’m sad that tomorrow is already the last day! but we will be back next year, you can count on it !

Not a big deal though, because now I have a little more time to accomplish some outstanding work that needs to get done by tomorrow. And I have time for this blog post .

When I pass through security, I beeped, even though I had no metal in me pockets. So I had the privilege of a real corporal search. The lady agent asked me if I preferred this to be performed by a man or a woman. Funny world we are living in . The good thing is, if I had something illegal on me, they would have definitely found it. Somehow I feel more secured .

Change of topic: I can’t wait to get to Chicago to meet with Steve K., and Steve M. Never met them in person yet. It’s going to be great! And we’ll surely find some time to do some coding session for the upcoming ImpressCMS 1.3. It will actually be the first time I’m actually coding for ImpressCMS in the physical presence of other developers.

I’m also very excited about the flyers and posters I got printed today. It was a great collective effort by the ImpressCMS team. Thanks to Madfish, David J., Steve K, and Ana, our great designer at INBOX. The result is quite impressive! We’ll make the PDF available for download on the ImpressCMS web site very soon.

More blogging posts soon!

Although we communicate virtually with each other nearly every day, nothing can beat the power of meeting with someone face to face. This is when the true bonding happens. Well, in Chicago, I will have the honor to meet with a great friend of mine, Steve Kenow, who I’ve known for a few years already. But we never actually met in person! I will also have the chance to meet another dedicated user of the ImpressCMS community, srmcatee. And of course, I’ll have the privilege to meet many other great people! A simple glimpse at the list of speakers tells me that Chicago IS the place to be next week if you are even only remotely interested in CMS!

So if you are around Chicago next week, come by the ImpressCMS booth to say hello! If you are not registered yet, have a look here. Oh, and of course, we will be blogging, tweeting, and facebooking the hell out of this conference! Search about it on any of these sites with the hashtag #icmsexpo.

I’m so looking forward to this!

If you’ve been on this blog before, then you already saw a few mentions about 37signals, creator of Basecamp, Highrise and other great products. They recently launched a book: REWORK. It’is the logical sequel of their first book “Getting Real”, where they were exploring the key concepts which they have learned and used to build their products. That first book was focusing on building an application more then anything else. But many of the concepts they were applying at building a great product, they also applied at a higher level, management a successfull business. So a few years later, it was time for REWORK to go out, a summary of pretty much every interesting concept they explored in their blog “Signal vs. Noise”, in their talks, their conferences, etc…

I’m biased, I know. I simply love pretty much everything they do. But that book was seriously awesome. It is so refreshing to see a company NOT following the “usual” path of doing business. You know, the one we see everywhere, the one they teach in business schools, the one the boomers are convinced is the only way to do business. The one with a 5 years marketing plan, and a sales VP and 200 sales representative, and 100 project managers to manage 100 developers. The one where the executive don’t talk to the “simple people”. The one where profit is the ONLY reason you do things. The one where you need a board of directors, because you brought in venture capitalists, and where you have your exit strategy all planned. The one where, to be able to give 1 million dollars bonus to the CEO, they needed to cut 20 jobs. The one that do not care about its clients. The one that tells you your call is important to us. The one you need to fight to be heard, as an employee or as a client.

It’s funny because when I started my company in 2003, (yes, a little bit younger and a lot more naive , I had this belief: the only reason you should be in business, is to help people. That concept got me some rolling eyes from many people, probably thinking I was just another teen still lost in the Romantic age who should have read more business books and less Victor Hugo.

But I was deeply convinced of that. If your primary focus is not to solve problems, help people, make their life, their family, their business better, then you are doomed to fail, one day or another, whether it’s in 10 months or 10 years. And yes, I know, that concept can not stand alone, it needs to be backed up by a second one which is: you have to make profit. Because if you don’t generate value, if you don’t create profit, then you are equally doomed to fail, and much more earlier!

37signals is doing all this, and in a beautiful way. They create great products that solve problems, they create great value and generate profits. They have encapsulated all that they believe in, all that they have learned since their beginning into REWORK. I totally recommend this book to anyone interested in learning how to do things differently. Because yes, it is possible! You can do things a better way. And you should !