Back in November, I tested out NudgeMail, a program that could come to the rescue of any swamped-but-purportedly-organized individual. The beauty of the service is in its simple and straightforward ability to turn any e-mail client into a reminder system, without any registration, plug-ins, or widgets to toy with. Today, NudgeMail is attempting to take easy organization to the next step by pairing up with Google Calendars.

So how does it work? Again, simplicity is key in this relationship. Just send an e-mail to a date (and time, if you so desire) @nudgemaul with the activity in the subject line. So if, for example, you want a reminder to call your mom on February 12, you would send an e-mail to Feb12@nudgemail with the subject line "call mom," and that will be added to your Google Calendar as well.

Of course, in this case, you will actually have to follow a few steps in order to give NudgeMail permission to access your Google account. This also serves to connect the two so you can send e-mail updates from any client, not just Gmail.

Right now, the service is in beta, though anyone can test it out. Current features include the capability to see all of your NudgeMail reminders in an easy-to-scan calendar format, as well as receive in-browser reminders ahead of important messages. You can also set up SMS alerts for all of your NudgeMail reminders via your Google Calendar. Currently, you cannot edit or remove existing reminders via the Google Calendar or set new NudgeMail reminders via the calendar, but these capabilities are set to be added going forward.

Originally posted at Webware

With plenty of competitors breathing down its neck--Microsoft's IE9 in particular--Mozilla is fixing the final bugs that lie in the way of a Firefox 4 release.

Last night, Mozilla released Firefox 4 beta 10 (click to download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux). This version focuses mostly on stability and performance rather than on new features--although one new option is the ability to start Firefox in safe mode by holding down shift when launching on Windows.

Flash should work better on Mac OS X with the new beta, and memory usage should be better, Mozilla said in a blog post yesterday.

Next up are one or two more beta versions, then the release candidates, and if all goes well, a final Firefox 4 release in February. In a planning message last night, release manager Christian Legnitto said Mozilla will build beta 11 and, if too many bugs remain unfixed, beta 12.

Mozilla recently divided its blocking bugs into two categories, soft and hard, with only the latter able to hold up release of the new software. As of Wednesday morning, excluding security bugs, there are 194 soft blockers and 76 hard blockers.

In practice, it won't make much difference whether Firefox 4 is released before Internet Explorer 9: most people don't change browsers that frequently. But competition is fierce right now, especially with Google's Chrome edging in on the early-adopter stronghold Firefox once had more to itself.

IE9, currently in beta testing, changes the competitive dynamic in the browser marketplace. Microsoft for years lagged rivals for support of new Web technologies. IE9 embraces many of them, though, and adds significantly improved performance at the same time. It's not clear when exactly IE9 will be released, but Microsoft's developer-oriented Mix conference in April seems a fitting venue.

One of the headline features in Firefox 4 is hardware acceleration using computers' graphics chips. However, Mozilla has decided to implement the feature cautiously to begin with to avoid crashes or other problems among its 400 million users. Specifically, Firefox 4 will disable hardware acceleration except with new graphics drivers and with a whitelist of video hardware makers: Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.

"We just want to minimize our initial risk here," graphics team member Joe Drew said in a mailing list discussion. Mozilla plans to remove the whitelist later, he said.

Originally posted at Deep Tech