Installing Jello Dashboard is a straightforward process. Although the whole process is semi-automatic, the installer and the setup utility somehow manage to do the job. I can tell this from the number of installation related questions from users which dropped to zero.
However, installing Jello for running two instances of it at the same time (using different settings) is not something easy to figure out.

The whole idea is that we need to have Jello installed in two separate folders and then setup each one as a homepage of two Outlook folders and define their settings journal entry name.

This is not so hard as it seems. In fact you could skip the setup as homepage into an Outlook folder step (3) if you plan to run Jello standalone.

So here’s how it’s done:

1. Install Jello twice in two different folders of your systems. Folder A and Folder B.

2. After each installation use the Jello Dashboard control center to fine tune your installation. If you wish to do this at a later time just navigate to each folder, find the install.hta file and run it.

3. From the Jello Dashboard control center, first click on the Set in Outlook button to choose the folder where Jello will reside.

4. Still in the Jello Dashboard control center, click the Settings location button to set up the settings journal entry. The only thing that needs to be done is to change the Settings folder location or/and the Settings Entry Name of the second installation. So you can leave the first installation using the default setting values and just change the Settings entry name for the second one (eg.<Jello.5 Settings 2>).

That’s all you need to do! After that, you will be able to maintain two separate Jello setups with their own settings.

You can also use the Settings location screen of the Jello Dashboard control center to fine tune your single installation. Reasons you want to do this: Your default Journal folder is on a server which wipes all journal entries every day or it’s on a really slow exchange server which freezes Jello.

I got some requests back to the version 4.00 of Jello Dashboard for digital clocks and gadgets into the homepage. Later, as I was coding for the new version and created the new homepage I though of running a couple of tests using google gadgets without any real expectations.

Then for a strange reason and despite of Outlook’s web browsing limitations some gadgets worked!

After working with some more widgets I have found some ways of using almost any gadget from google’s repository. So you can safely add an Web page widget into your Jello Dashboard homepage and paste the following URLs to their web address parameter:

Clock and date:
http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.canbuffi.de/gadgets/clock/clock.xml

Word Clocks
http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.ljmsite.com/google/gadgets/worldclocks.xml&up_messageid=0&up_mode=ana2&up_servertime=1&up_meetingplanner=1&up_digiformat=12&up_digifontsize=14&up_analogformat=12&up_dateformat=date&up_showseconds=1&up_tz1=UTC&up_tz1name=Clock%201&up_tz2=UTC&up_tz2name=Clock%202&up_tz3=&up_tz3name=Clock%203&up_tz4=&up_tz4name=Clock%204&up_tz5=&up_tz5name=Clock%205&up_tz6=&up_tz6name=Clock%206&up_tz7=&up_tz7name=Clock%207&up_tz8=&up_tz8name=Clock%208&up_tz9=&up_tz9name=Clock%209&up_width=10000&synd=open&w=320&h=300&title=__MSG_Title__&lang=en&country=ALL&border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999

Dictionary.com search:
http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://rmicka5478.googlepages.com/dictionary.xml&up_boxcolor=%23c0c0c0&up_textcolor=%23000000&synd=open&w=320&h=100&title=Dictionary.com&border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999

You can test any widgets copying the code from the Google gadgets directory keeping in mind the following rules and limitations:

• If gadgets use any pipe characters into their parameters they cannot be used
• Gadgets using cookies cannot be used. Cookies are blocked by Outlook
• In some cases, not all user defined settings can be used (it depends on the resulted url)

So select the desired google gadget, press the Get the code button and go to the HTML code field.

Copy it to the clipboard and paste it into any text editor

Now you got something like this:

<script src=”http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.matt.org/modules/GoogleClock.xml&amp;up_vsize=240px&amp;synd=open&amp;w=320&amp;h=200&amp;title=Google+Clock&amp;border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999&amp;output=js”></script>

Then strip the <script src=” characters from the beginning of code and the &amp;output=js”></script> from the end.

http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.matt.org/modules/GoogleClock.xml&amp;up_vsize=240px&amp;synd=open&amp;w=320&amp;h=200&amp;title=Google+Clock&amp;border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999

Try pasting the remaining code into a Jello web page widget and see what happens. Some gadgets won’t accept any user settings (the URL part after the first &amp;). In that case you can try removing all of user settings having a lot smaller URL (eg http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.matt.org/modules/GoogleClock.xml)

Now choose your favorite gadgets and experiment. Who knows? Maybe you will be able to use it inside Jello Dashboard!

Being a Nokia/Symbian mobile user, I’m faced with some problems when it comes to task synchronization between my Outlook installation and mobile phone.

You can have your full task list into a Nokia phone as a long list, something really useless when you’re dealing with a 50+ item list. Of course contexts or tags are not supported and I had to think of a way to have my GTD system always with me bypassing Symbian’s difficulties and without using third party software which cannot synchronize tasks with Outlook.

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