Leaving Outlook

Of all the Microsoft Office products it was Outlook I thought I was most attached to. It was the first program I started and the last program I closed. I used it for my email, my calendar and my contacts. It was my friend.

And a few days ago I left it.

I left it for Mozilla’s Prism. Prism aims to fill that gap between the traditional desktop application and the new breed of web-based programs itching to take its place. If you’ve ever wished there was a desktop version of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Maps (just about any Google app); it’s your man. Or at least your prototype of a man.

Essentially, Prism is a program that launches an incredibly stripped down, separate Firefox window for every ’site’ you tell it to. The windows have no extensions, no tabs, no URL bar. All they do is display that one site you specify. Should you try to navigate somewhere else outside of the site they’ll just launch a new window/tab in your default browser.

While that might not sounds particularly interesting what it means in practice is that you can all but throw out your desktop applications and simply replace them with Prism instances of your favourite web-based alternative. In my case I’ve left Outlook behind and replaced it with two Prism windows: one running Gmail and the other running Google Calendar. I could get rid of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint if I so desired (replacing them all with Google Docs).

About the only thing Prism is missing is offline storage. Should you not have Internet access things get a little hairy. But to be honest how many of us aren’t online 24/7 with our computers these days? Perhaps I’ll be hit by some sort of Internet outage in the next couple of days that has me running back to Outlook, begging for forgiveness. We’ll have to wait and see.

Offline storage might not be that far away, anyway. Firefox 3 is supposed to have that covered and if it’s in Firefox chances are it’s likely to find its way into Prism. I’ll keep you posted on how the experiment goes.