People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.

You can learn more about how this works and how to get started using it in the full post.

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The app is simply fantastic. They really nailed the user interface and the very challenging puzzle of how to make it easy for the user to access the study Bible notes without interfering with simply reading the text itself. There was clearly some detailed, user-oriented thought that went into developing this app. This is what we need more of. It is a great service to not only make the Scriptures and God-centered content available, to make them easily available in a user-centered format.

Thank you, Crossway!

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OmniFocus for iPad isn’t just some gussied up version of the iPhone version either: the app’s been redesigned for the iPad from the ground up. You can organize tasks into projects, folders, and sub-tasks and nest them until your heart is content; tasks themselves support detailed options like start dates, due dates, repeating schedules, audio notes, and photo attachments.

If you want to organize your tasks by category or specific context (”things to do while you’re at the computer,” for example [by the way--I think that's a bad idea!]), you can do that too. And if those contexts involve specific locations–your local supermarket and post office for example–you can look at a map to quickly get an idea of where all your tasks might take you.

If you’re an OmniFocus user on the Mac and/or the iPhone, OmniFocus on the iPad will happily sync with them, making sure your tasks are always up to date, no matter which device you’re on. If you ever run into problems, The Omni Group even offers free customer support via both e-mail and phone.

You can get OmniFocus for iPad in the App Store here.

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Two of the leading makers of electronic-book readers, threatened by the success of Apple’s iPad, slashed prices in a move that could further drive e-readers into the mainstream.

• Video: News Hub Analyzes Price Moves
• Digits: Is Price Low Enough?
• E-Reader Pricing War Heats Up

Interestingly, this corresponds to Godin’s post from a few days ago.

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One gap right now is that OmniFocus is not yet available. You can run the iPhone version, but there are lots of limitations to that. Fortunately, it looks like a version of OmniFocus developed to take full advantage of the iPad will be releasing in June. Here’s an update from their site.

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Apple’s new touch-screen device has the potential to change portable computing profoundly. It could challenge the primacy of the laptop and eventually propel the multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface.

Here’s another interesting part:

The iPad is much more than an e-book or digital periodical reader, though it does those tasks brilliantly, better in my view than the Amazon Kindle. And it’s far more than just a big iPhone, even though it uses the same easy-to-master interface, and Apple says it runs nearly all of the 150,000 apps that work on the iPhone.

It’s qualitatively different, a whole new type of computer that, through a simple interface, can run more-sophisticated, PC-like software than a phone does, and whose large screen allows much more functionality when compared with a phone’s. But, because the iPad is a new type of computer, you have to feel it, to use it, to fully understand it and decide if it is for you, or whether, say, a netbook might do better.

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I finally looked in to how to do this, and found a forum that contains a solution that works.

First, here’s a more detailed statement of the problem, which explains the very complication that I used to run into whenever I would try this before:

I am using Word 2008 for Mac. I always want page numbers, but I always need to select it from the Insert menu. Is there a way to make this the default so I don’t have to manually select it every time? I have tried this: See the Word help topic ” Template locations in Word” for more information, which says to edit the Normal template and add them there: they will then appear in every new document I create. But this doesn’t seem to help. When I open the Normal.dotm file, it appears as Document 1, so I can’t actually change Normal.dotm. I can make a new Page Numbers doc but I’ll have to select it to use it. How do I make a default Normal, or how can I get Page Numbers to open as the default?

Here’s the solution that was proposed:

Open Word, New document, select File Open. Navigate to where normal.dotm is located: /Users/you/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/normal.dotm

Open it and make the changes to it that you desire. Save normal.dotm, save all, and close Word. Open Word again and the changes you made should be reflected as part of the normal template. The old normal template will be renamed and saved in the same location as a backup.

Now I can add: that solution works.

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According to the survey, Macs were cheaper to troubleshoot and required fewer help desk calls; system configuration, user training, and servers/networks/printing were all cheaper for a Mac environment than a PC environment. Software licensing fees turned out to be nearly identical for both platforms.

The survey doesn’t factor in the costs of the Macs themselves; Macs do present a large up-front investment, especially compared to the budget-priced Dells you usually see populating most office cubicles. However, half of the survey respondents noted they switched to a Mac platform because of a lower total cost of ownership.

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Josh Sowin rightly observes: “This is really exciting from a design & reading standpoint. It will be the experience of reading a magazine, but with the interactivity of the web. It’s going to be a really fun decade.”

(HT: Josh Sowin)

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Electronic books should not simply be print books made accessible in electronic form. Rather, they should be conceived and created to take full advantage of what a device like the iPad makes possible, while remaining true to what a book is and what a book is for.

I have lots of thoughts on this I may post if I have the time. In the meantime, TechCrunch also has a post which begins to offer some thoughts on this.

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By now you’ve probably seen the videos on Apple’s site showing the iPad. But those aren’t always indicative of the way it actually works in real life. Luckily, Apple had plenty of iPads in a demo pit area after the event today and we captured some footage of a few applications actually being used.

In the video below see Apple’s new Keynote app (built specifically for the iPad), as well as the new iBooks app, in action. As you can see, the device is very fast. Also note the Apple employee talking about using the iPad to make calls.

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