Like a lot of people, I use GMail as my main inbox. Several email accounts are ‘fetched’ by GMail and all that email ends up in one convenient in-box. I’ve got GMail set up so that when I reply to an email, it appears as if I replied from the account it was sent to, rather than the GMail account itself. This is pretty easy to set up  (instructions are here) and it allows you to separate work and personal identities, as an example.

However, my iPhone / iPad has frustrated me in this regard. I have been limited to one email address and when I reply on my phone, it comes from my default email address on the phone, which may not be the one it was sent to, leading to some confusion. I have gone so far as to create two email accounts on my phone which actually access the same GMail in-box so I could separate work and personal, and the right email address would send the account.

I’ve discovered that there’s a much simpler way to do this on the iPhone / iPad. If you follow the instructions below, you’ll get a pick list like the image above, where you can reply to any email using your choice of addresses. So, you can end the confusion and get rid of those extra accounts.

To add additional email addresses for sending mail to an iPhone / iPad Mail email account do the following (this assumes familiarity with basic email on the phone and copying and pasting):

• Figure out the email addresses you want to use as sending addresses.
• Type them into an email and send it to an account you can access on the phone. Separate each address with a comma followed by a space.
• Open the email on the phone and ‘copy’ the whole set so they are in the phone’s copy and paste buffer.

Now the email part:

• Make sure the account is set up as an IMAP or POP account (using Other while creating the account, not Gmail, for example).
• Tap Settings on the iPhone or iPod touch home screen.
• Select Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
• Choose the desired account under Accounts.
• Tap the Address field under IMAP Account Information and select it all.
• Tap “Paste” which will replace the one email address, with all the addresses you might need. This is the important step.
• Tap done and exit out of setting

Now, when you are sending a message or replying from your email on your phone, you can tap “From” and select the address you want to use. It’s that easy!

GMail has a lot of good support files around this subject for more information. I was also pleasantly surprised that About.com has a very in-depth set of resources around email written by their ‘guide’ Heinz Tschabitscher.

I was really excited to upgrade my iPad to iOS 5. Face it, I’m a geek. But, along with a host of other interesting new features, were gestures for the iPad.  One of the joys of the iPad is the tactile sense of working with it and the ability to use the whole screen for touch – to pull and zoom things, use apps that take advantage of it. Using gestures to switch between applications, and closing apps with a pinch makes you feel like a wizard.

So, imagine how pissed and puzzled I was when I upgraded and my gestures were gone! Some marketing genius had decided to reserve gestures for the iPad2 only. In other words, you’d have to upgrade to a new iPad to get gestures.

What was especially galling was the fact that this was purely a marketing move. I had enabled gestures on my original iPad for 6 months at least. There had been a developer loophole that anyone could use to enable gestures. The gestures worked perfectly, and I had grown to rely on them.

For the first time, I could really understand why people get so frustrated with Apple’s style dictatorship and jailbreak their iPhones and iPads to tap into all the creativity out there that Apple doesn’t want to allow for one reason or the other.

So that’s what I did too. The developer loophole had been closed, so I did a simple jailbreak to get my gestures back. The instructions are here, thanks to Lifehacker. Now that I’ve bitten the jailbreak apple, maybe I’ll try other tweaks that Apple doesn’t like.

This story originally appeared in PRWeek Insider on 04/18/11 (subscription required).

Two weeks ago a Marc Jacobs intern publicly melted down on Twitter and then quit. Two weeks before that, Chrysler experienced some Twitter road rage, and an agency was fired. And two weeks before that, the Red Cross had to confiscate the keys from their tweeter for #gettngslizzerd.

Imagine if these accidents had happened in a healthcare setting? We don’t need FDA guidelines to understand the hot water we’d be in.

Pharma company Twitter feeds are heavily stage-managed. Posts are vetted by an army of regulatory and legal staff, and updates are timed like Obama’s inauguration. The few branded Twitter feeds are even more tightly controlled. But who tweets and how? It’s usually a junior staffer copying and pasting the approved post and frequently using their own choice of software. That’s the weak link. The examples at the beginning are a cautionary tale of people inadvertently mixing their personal and professional profiles, and of tweeters going off the rails.

Software Rx: Twitter feeds are frequently handled using a dashboard like Hootsuite which can manage a number of feeds at once and offers analytic capabilities for tracking tweets and mentions. It can handle Facebook pages as well, enabling you to easily syndicate content selectively across the social platforms. Even multiple clients can be set up. The lure is strong to add your personal accounts, and create a mothership dashboard so you can be complete master of your domain. Resist it, it’s a bad idea. It’s all too easy to click the wrong icon and post to the wrong account – especially late at night or in a busy airport. One wrong click and you blast your personal tweet about that new band to your client’s followers. Or, you might post that handbag website to your client’s Facebook page. Amusing, yes, but it’s not as funny the next morning.

The best practice is to create separate dashboards for work and personal accounts using different email addresses and logins. Then using themes, give them radically different colors and backgrounds so you can easily distinguish between them, no matter how flummoxed you might be. For added safety, consider using different browsers, like Chrome for work and Firefox for personal.

Mobile Rx: The same goes for mobile devices. For tweeting on the go, use a different mobile app for your clients and personal tweets. Put them on different pages or folders. Don’t tweet and drive.

Content Rx: If you’re tweeting for a pharma company or brand, your hands are already tied and the blinders are on, just carefully press ‘send,’ per the above. If you’re fortunate enough to be tweeting for a hospital or association in a less structured way, you need to have some guidelines for the voice of your feed. You are the spokesperson of the brand, and while you want personality and authenticity, behave as if your every tweet could be on the cover of USA Today, because if you screw up, it will be. Consider using a workflow where tweets are approved before they are issued.

So take your medicine and tweet me in the morning @markhdavis.

I’m now commuting daily into Manhattan and taking my iPad. When you commute, its amazing how a bag which you hardly even noticed carrying getting out of the car, feels like it weights a hundred pounds by the time you get to the office.

So, I wondered, how far could I go being paperless and reducing everything I carry down to that iPad? Could my new hobby be reducing my carbon footprint?

It turns out I could go all the way. The iPad itself pretty much takes care of books. How about work files? For the most part, I want to review documents on the train, not write something complex. That means I could use PDFs. Creating PDFs is no problem, and the iPad reads them pretty well on it’s own. However, I found an app called Goodreader that is absolutely amazing. Not only does it open even enormous PDFs, it let’s you highlight, annotate, and draw! It will also let you open other files, like PowerPoints, either in the reader itself or in a different app like Keynote.

So how do you get the files on the iPad? I did a lot of experimenting on this. There are slow, clunky ways, like using iTunes. However, there are also extremely frictionless ways using wireless. I turned to the cloud.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably familiar with the expression “Cloud Computing.” if not, you will be soon. The term refers to storing data or accessing application “in the cloud” on the Internet where it can be accessed from anywhere, rather than locally on a PC, laptop, or iPad. The cloud and the iPad are like peanut butter and jelly – made for each other.

I had heard about Dropbox, which gives you 2 free gigs of cloud storage, but I had never used it. It’s unbelievably smooth. It behaves just like any other  folder you have on your computer. Drop files in and almost instantaneously they are available anywhere.  When you use it the same files are available at home on your laptop or on your iPad. No USB drives required!

Dropbox has its own iPad app, but it’s even better used with Goodreader. You just open up Goodreader and pull what you need down from the cloud. You can make changes and send it back up to Dropbox as well.

Similarly, I’m in love with Evernote. Evernote is also cloud based. It allows you to capture almost anything: notes, pictures, web pages, screenshots, etc. Additionally, you can easily work on it when you’re not on the Internet.  It is my primary tool for note taking. When you connect again everything gets synced. For example, I copied the train schedule into it and it’s now on my iPad and smartphone. Springpad is a new app that is similar and also has some project planning features. I wrote this blog post on it.

My last new favorite is Instapaper. Instapaper is a simple tool to save web pages for reading later. It’s great for scanning through those web articles you don’t have time to read at your desk.

A big advantage to the cloud based approach is that most of these applications are available on your iPhone and PC/Mac as well. And all of your data is now backed up in the cloud.

I tried out a lot of other apps and combinations to get to this point. I’ve been using this combo for a couple of months and I’m happy with it. The app store is like a candy store, and for $5 – beer money – you can get amazing pieces of software.  It probably has reduced my carbon footprint – though not enough to offset my commute.

Last August the camera in my iPhone 3GS started producing photos as if they were taken through a jar of Vaseline or a screen door – neither one a very pleasing effect. It didn’t inconvenience me much, but I do find the camera handy for a quick informal shot or as a reminder for something I need to remember, so I missed it.

I went online and found that the camera lens has a protective coating and that sometimes it produces the problem I had. I tried every remedy from rubbing alcohol to lens cleaners but nothing worked.

I made an appointment at the ‘Genius Bar’ at the Apple Store in Short Hills, but I missed the appointment by 5 minutes. If you are late you’re cooked and have to wait for the next opening – in that case 3 hours. Bye, bye, Short Hills.

I finally got around to making another appointment in late October. I was determined to get there early (a personal first for me) and I did. I showed up to the genius bar and showed the resident genius my problem. Clearly something was wrong with the phone, so he disappeared into the secret back room. I waited…and waited some more. He showed up with a new phone! (Ok, refurbished.). Now that’s great customer service – delight the customer. Even though my phone was two months out of warranty, they replaced the whole phone to fix the camera.

I’d forgotten how useful it was to have a camera. Many stores this holiday season have QR codes on their price tags and I’d be sunk without camera to scan them. I can fool around with fun tools like Hipstamatic (photo above) and Instagram. And if a flasher ever bothers me, I can catch them in the act.

Ok, so Grandma (Mom in my case) can’t figure out how to view the pictures from the link she got in an AOL email. I suppose AOL should be the tip-off that some help would be needed. The trouble is she’s 230 miles away and trying to do tech support over the phone is a frustrating experience. Wouldn’t it be great to look over her shoulder as see what’s on her screen? Or, better yet, be able to take over her PC?

There are several programs that can enable remote access, but it’s been a few years since I looked at them. The macs have screen sharing built in to the OS, but Grandma’s on Windows. Hmm. So here’s my rundown.

Gotomypc works quite well. The interface is easy and controlling the remote PC is pretty smooth. You can get a free trial, but then it’s $14.95 a month. Pcnow, from the WebEx folks, is similar. The experience should be familiar to anyone whos’ used WebEx. I prefer it because you can remote control either a PC or a Mac – while Gotomypc can only handle PCs. There’s really no issue with either, except they both run you about $15 a month, which is steep for personal use.

A little searching and looking for solutions led me to Teamviewer. It’s similar in that you install a small client on the remote PC or Mac (you can also run an executable file for one-time use). Then remoting in is very smooth. There are many options to control screen size, resolution, transferring files, etc. And guess, what? It’s free for non-commercial use. How generous is that?

I’ve encountered no issues in using Teamviewer. It’s great for helping Grandma with technical issues. I can remote into my home Mac and Photoshop a file I transferred over. I can look at my son’s homework assignment on his MacBook. It’s now installed on several machines.

Thanks Teamviewer, for making this available for free! Next time I choose remote access for work, I know what I’ll use.

Facebook introduced a service called Places last week in response to similar marketplace efforts like Foursquare and others. In a nutshell it allows you to share where you are and connect with friends nearby. The advantage to Places is the gigantic reach that Facebook has with a membership of over 500 million and its position as the social network of choice. That makes Places truly useful and a way to connect with your already established network (rather than creating a new one.) It also appears that Facebook is willing to partner somewhat with location based services on Yelp and others, rather than to wipe them out. Places currently works only on the Facebook  iPhone app and with other phones which support W3 geolocation.

However, Facebook still hasn’t learned from its privacy stumbles. The privacy default for Places allows you to check in your friends and tag them to a location without their permission. This can create alarm even in those digerati who are used to broadcasting their locations, as shown by a user’s experience in the New York Times this last weekend. Who wants to excuse themselves from a dinner date only to be ‘outed’ at a party down the block by Places? So, I recommend going in to your privacy settings in Facebook and disabling ‘allow others to check me in.’

This privacy issue is similar to others where Facebook has defaulted user updates to ‘public’ and has taken heat. They either won’t learn and/or truly see this as the way social networking is evolving. In spite of this I believe Places will soon be a leading geolocation service – purely due to Facebook’s size.

Tweets are the new quotes. However, screen shots of tweets are a pretty limited way to share. You can send links to an individual tweet by directly clicking the timestamp and copying that, but it’s not pretty. So now along comes Blackbird Pie. Embed your tweets like the following and they retain their interactivity.

Ten years ago I bought a personal 800 number. Then I forwarded the number to wherever I was – cell phone, office, home. It worked pretty well, provided I didn’t screw up and leave the forwarding to the wrong number. Voice mail was a bit of an issue too.

You’d think in the intervening ten years someone would have come up with a solution to the issue of having three numbers on your business card and three disjointed voicemail systems, but there’s nothing widespread. Now Google has.

I’ve been using Google Voice for close to six months now. Here’s what it’s like. Someone calls your Google Voice number. All the phones you’ve set up ring simultaneously. You pick one of them up and you get told the name of the person calling. You have choice of answering, sending to voicemail, or sending to voicemail while you listen. Voicemails get transcribed to text and sent to your email and SMS. Plus everything shows up on the Google Voice website which is set up like Gmail.

There are some other cool features. SMS is the same way – comes to your phone and shows up on the website. You can SMS by typing on the website (easier than a cellphone) and the history shows up on the website. Want to make an outbound call? You can pick the number out of your address book and tell Google Voice which phone to use. Press the button, the phone rings, and you’re connected to the person your calling.

Want more? Check out the widget on this website. You can use it to call me right now. You can set the times different phones ring…set different greetings…go crazy. It’s free. It doesn’t seem to be rolled out to everyone yet, so if you want a pass, email me. Google may rule the world.

My new sig

OK interconnected world, I’ve got a couple cool new tools. First, let’s start with a social signature. How many emails do you send each day? If you’re like me, it’s a lot. Why not use that as a way to link back to your social networking sites, blog and twitter updates?

WiseStamp does a great job at this. As you can see from the image at the top, my sig includes links back to my main social networks as well as the latest blog entry. WiseStamp lets you you add a personalized signature on any webmail service such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL mail, and Hotmail.  The main feature is the ability to add icons and links to profiles on most of the popular social networks and instant messenger services. This allows you to create dynamic Internet-ready signatures that connect to all of your online accounts.  The ability to connect signatures to social network profiles is an  excellent addition to our email experience. WiseStamp is a FireFox extension. Additional features are that you can configure both a personal and a business signature.

Next up is a little trick that I will give credit to my buddy Brad Pendergraph, social media evangelist extraordinaire. How about if you could give out a URL that easily connected the recipient with your main social presence? Does is sound compelling? It is. For instance if you click on NetworkWithMark.com it takes you to the about page of my blog where many of my main social links are listed. Typing ILikeMark.com into your browser takes you to my Facebook page. Cool huh? It makes an impact when you give it out. Brad says it isn’t his original idea, but the Internet is pay it forward medium. So now I’ve given the tip to you. Put it to work for $10 a year and a simple redirect.