As more and more work gets done online, we spend much of our time shifting between the tabs of the browser. Be it emails, chats or scheduling some meetings, there is an app for it all. And this could leave anyone overwhelmed with scores of tabs and managing them soon gets out of control.
This is where I found value in a unique application called Rambox. Their website mentions it as a workspace browser which allows users to manage several applications in a single place. This is a huge productivity booster. With a one shop stop for personal and professional email and several other services which I use day in and day out, I finally found something which lives upto the expectations.
What it is in a nutshell, is a clean and simple user interface where you can add tabs for various services that you use. Most of the services are for email and messaging. I opted for the Community Edition which has alomost 99+ supported apps. The installer was also available as an AppImage for Linux which made me even more excited. Gmail, Google Calendar, Duo, Hangout, Yahoo mail, WhatsApp, Outlook, Slack are just to name a few. Each service that you add shows up as a seperate tab on the user interface.
I quickly setup my tabs for Gmail, Outlook, Twitter, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp and Google Calendar. The Rambox admin screen gives options to manage these services, enable/diable them or remove if required. I also configured Rambox to run at startup, so I no longer have to login into individual services to access my data. Its up and running as soon as I log in. This has worked wonders for my ability to stay on top of things and handle mutiple things simultaneously. Precisely the productivity boost I was expecting from using this app.
What makes me like this application even more, is its ability to add a custom service to its configuration. Any webpage or web application on the internet can be added as a custom service. The configuration screen allows you to configure a name of the service, its url and an icon. This allows me to add some more things that I do online and manage them all in one place.
For custom services, I was able to add my blogger account, my dropbox account etc. My digital bullet journal 2021, which essentially is nothing but a url to a label “Bujo 2021” in my google keep account, is also a candidate for my custom service setup. Another thing I could add and make use of is a permanent url to the world clock converter called WorldTimeBuddy. So a url like this shows up as a world clock tab in Rambox making it very easy to look up different time zones and schedule multi-location meetings.
This blog post was edited and posted via the WordPress account configured on my Rambox setup as a custom service. I am also thinking on lines of adding a podcast url, or some audio streaming service like spotify or pandora. If it can run in a browser tab, then it should run as a Rambox custom service as well. The possibilities are endless.
I find Rambox to be an apt tool for better productivity and it has just enough zing to keep me on top of things that I tackle on a day to day basis.
Leisure Linux 