inconsequence

Mailplane v. Gmail Notifier

Friday, March 5, 2010

I finally clicked one too many mailto: links that launched Mail.app (which I immediately quit from, having never — since I installed Snow Leopard on this laptop — reconfigured it so it will actually run) and decided to try out Mailplane.

Mailplane is a simple, clever, and well-executed idea. Build a simple webkit wrapper for gmail, and then use gmail’s keyboard shortcuts and API combined with Cocoa to deliver a proper Mac experience. Mailplane works (with a few minor glitches) as advertised, and has some brilliant convenience features, such as providing deep integration with iPhoto and drag-and-drop file attachments.

And, of course, it handles mailto: links.

The problem is that in the twenty-four hours I’ve been using it, my single greatest annoyance with it is that it’s not running in my web browser. Needing to alt-tab to another app to copy something from my email (or, now, Google Buzz) to a web page or vice versa, or middle-click a link in an email (or Buzz) to open the page in a new tab, is a royal pain in the ass — and it affects me every few minutes, versus the once-in-a-long-while that mailto: links annoy me, and the once or twice a day that file attachments annoy me.

So, far from being “The most productive way to use Gmail on your Mac”, I find Mailplane to be, essentially, a bad idea.

So I googled for “mailto links safari gmail” and quickly found Gmail Notifier for Mac. I assume the Windows version is similarly good. It’s free (vs. $25 for Mailplane), and essentially provides basic desktop integration of Gmail and Google calendar. I don’t use the latter, and I find being shown random ancient unread emails to be annoying, so I’ve turned off most of its functionality. But it does handle mailto: links.

Which brings me to my second pet peeve with Gmail, and something Mailplane addresses really well.

There’s a Firefox extension that provides drag and drop attachments for gmail, but it only works in some (older) versions of Firefox and I’ve pretty much sworn off Firefox, and totally sworn off crufty old Firefox. While lamenting the lack of such a goody for Safari, I came across this post (strangely enough, rated one out of five stars):

Safari allows you to drag and drop to any Choose File… button.

I checked this and yup, it works dandy. The only remaining issue is that Gmail doesn’t give you a target button by default, which costs a click. Oh well.

This is why I use a freaking Mac.

Incidentally, the main reason I don’t simply configure Mail.app to send mail via Gmail and be done with it is that I have this nasty habit of leaving crap in my Gmail inbox (over 3000 unread items, mostly borderline spam) and there seems no simple way to stop Mail.app from trying to download large portions of it. Of course I haven’t tried lately, so chances are if I did it would work perfectly and I wouldn’t have typed this pointless blog entry.

Post Script

Nope, Mail.app still sucks. Maybe iTunes and Mail.app will get married and move out.

Filed in Google, Software, Usability | Tagged 3000 unread emails WTF?, Apple rocks and I feel like a dufus, Email, Gmail, Mailplane, mailto: links, Teh Internets | Comments (0)

Good v. Evil

Thursday, March 4, 2010

It’s not like Apple is a patent-troll shell company that needs these suits for income. It’s not like the government is going to shut down everyone’s Android phone already in the market. It’s purely an anti-competitive suit. Which, for consumers, just limits innovation.

Business Insider, Apple’s wimpy patent suit is proof that it’s terrified of Google

I have news for you, Business Insider. Patents are anti-competitive. That’s why they exist.

There are several questions raised by Apple’s lawsuit against HTC. Is it right or wrong? Can Apple win? Why is Apple doing it?

I have no clue about the last two questions, but like everyone else, I have strong opinions on the first.

John Gruber thinks it’s all about Steve Jobs being emotional:

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

That’s not the language of a licensing dispute or the beginning of a polite negotiation. That’s the language of a man aggrieved.

I think he may be right, after all from an emotional standpoint it seems to me that Apple is, again, being ripped off by competitors. While what Apple’s imitators are doing seems wrong (and after all, the “emotions” we’re talking about come directly from our sense of “justice”) it seems to be perfectly legal, right? Well, surely if it seems wrong and it may in fact be illegal, doesn’t Apple have the right to try and find out?

Fortune (Steve Jobs: A Man Aggrieved) quotes Paul Graham as saying that Apple is in danger of becoming Evil:

“Apple is inching ever closer to evil,” writes Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, using the word in Google’s low-bar don’t-be-evil sense, “and I worry that there’s no one within the company who can stand up to Jobs and tell him so.”

Now, the funny thing here is that I don’t think Apple is anywhere near Evil in any Moral sense (and what other sense is there?), but it may be being Evil in using a broken patent system in an attempt to pursue its idea of natural justice. But how is that different from using the Tax Code to throw Al Capone in prison?

I’ll finish off with words from Wil Shipley (who himself has been victimized by Apple — note, I don’t think Paul Thurrott speaks for Delicious Monster):

If Apple becomes a company that uses its might to quash competition instead of using its brains, it’s going to find the brainiest people will slowly stop working there. You know this, you watched it happen at Microsoft. Enforcing patents isn’t a good long-term play: it’s the beginning of the end of the creative Apple we both love.

It’s a nice sentiment, but seems to be completely without factual basis. Did the brainiest people slowly leave Microsoft? If so, was it because Microsoft used its might to quash competition? It seems to me that Microsoft’s problem has never been a lack of brains, but a lack of taste. AT&T was, for many decades, a powerhouse of innovation, built and maintained by quashing rivals and enforcing patent laws. I seem to recall similar admonitions that Steve Jobs’s obsession with secrecy would damage Apple’s culture of creativity.

Filed in Apple, IP Law | Tagged HTC, Look and Feel, The Nature of Evil, Troll Bridges | Comments (2)

MacHeist, Flow, etc.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Flow in Action

I’ve just paid for the latest MacHeist bundle. The funny thing is that the app I buy the bundle for is usually not the app I end up using. For example, the app I bought the last big bundle for was Espresso (the rival to Coda from the MacRabbit, developers of the excellent CSSEdit), but Espresso — while still promising — has proven very buggy (not to mention that it’s a royal pain in the ass to customize color settings, and the developer keeps changing the CSS tags so old color preferences become obsolete), and it still lags far behind Coda in most respects.

Aside: these days I live in Cornerstone and use a variety of text editors rather than Coda or Espresso.) In the end, my favorite app from that bundle turned out to be Acorn, which I had almost no interest in. I should add that Acorn also has problems — indeed, I think I email a new bug report or gripe to the developer every other day… Then, as I mentioned the other day, that bundle also includes The Hit List, which I’ve just started using (in fact it’s become one of the apps I “live” in), so that bundle has paid for itself several times over.

My reason for buying this bundle is really the Monkey Island game (which I probably won’t have time to play). But after downloading the bundle apps, the one that really impresses me is Flow. I remember a while back when Transmit first came out — Panic did a good job of publicity and so (noticing it had a nice icon) I decided to give it a shot, fully expecting to delete it immediately. After all, I already owned Anarchie (or whatever the frack it’s called these days) — The Best FTP Client In The World™ — right? And FTP isn’t exactly rocket science, what can this new app add? Well, turns out the answer was “not quite enough”. I played with Transmit long enough to decide it wasn’t quite up there, emailed some suggestions to their email address, and went back to “work” (those were the days!).

Of course, within minutes Cabel Sasser had responded to my emails (at what must have been a very odd hour), and within months Transmit had most of the new functionality I’d suggested along with a loyal user and evangelist (I think the big big that I wanted Transmit — and FTP clients in general — to do was transparently modify a test file on the server, get its modification timestamp, figure out what the time difference between Here and There is, and deal with file replacement accordingly. I once made this point at a Macromedia conference in Sydney which got a standing ovation from the audience and completely perplexed the (American) presenter. I don’t think anyone has actually done this yet, it’s very annoying. It was even more annoying back then as I lived in Australia and maintained websites on US-based servers, so timestamps were often very misleading.)

OK, what was I talking about? Oh, that’s right Flow.

Flow is a new(ish) FTP (SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, etc.) client for the Mac. Its design goal appears to be to make remote servers behave as much like your local hard disk as possible, with additional — very thoughtful — goodies such as letting you bookmark a folder on a server and set it up to automatically copy the URLs of uploaded items to the clipboard. So far, my only problem with Flow is the way it morphs the sidebar from a set of local bookmarks to a local file hierarchy. I’m not exactly sure how to do what Flow is doing better, but it seems like a bit of a kludge.

It also makes me wish that its developer(s) would simply build a complete Finder replacement, since they clearly “get it”.

I think I’ve found my new favorite FTP client. Sorry Panic. (Well, we’ll see how easily I can reprogram my muscles to stop typing “command spacebar T R A N enter”.)

Filed in Software, Usability, Web Development | Tagged Coda, cornerstone, Flow. Extendmac, FTP, It's called Interarchy these days and no-one uses it, Panic, Transmit | Comments (0)

Director 11.5

Monday, March 1, 2010

I made most of my income as a Director coder for almost ten years (and used it as an animation program for a few years before that), so it’s sad to see how badly it’s been neglected. I just came across this “review” of Director 11.5 (which has been out for ages, a year I think) via MacSurfer.

I own licenses for most versions of Director from 4 thru 11 (and had licenses through my employers for versions 2, 3, and 3.5) but version 11 was so tragically bad that I completely lost interest. Here’s the kicker: Director 11.5 still hasn’t added support for AS3 Flash. I mean, seriously?!

I also see they’ve bolted PhysX on to the long-neglected 3d engine. Yeah, not having physics is the big problem with Director’s 3d engine. Thanks guys, how about — um — FBX support so we can import some actual content? It’s essentially a maintenance release with its most important “new feature” being “hey, it runs under Leopard”. (Heck, based on my experience with v11, “hey it runs” would almost be compelling.)

(Bear in mind that “DirectX 9″ support means it runs under DirectX 9″. It doesn’t actually use any DirectX 9 features.)

Oh yeah and multiple undo for text editors. Wow, think we might get multiple undo in the main UI in version 15?

Yeah, let’s rely on these guys for a vital piece of web infrastructure.

Filed in Software | Tagged Adobe sucks, Stick a fork in its ass already | Comments (0)

What to do?

Monday, March 1, 2010

Back when Things was in beta I was a pretty avid user, but (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere) when its price ($50) was announced I baulked, and never ended up getting a license. This was a shame because it’s a fine product, but — I think — too expensive.

Now (as others have pointed out) a product is either worth its price (to you) or not. If not, don’t buy it. Fair enough. I didn’t buy Things. Things has done quite well, thanks very much, without my help. They seem to have a staff of nine people (and they still can’t do syncing between two Macs). Build a better to-do-list manager and, apparently, the world will beat a path to your door.

It’s still cheaper than dead trees…

By way of comparison, Filofax (don’t you hate companies that require you to divert to a country-specific site from their .com address? If you’re going to do that, figure it out from my IP you morons) continues to sell their diaries for north of $100 (personal size refills for the “daily week on two pages” diaries — which ruled my life in earlier times — sell for $10.50). And it’s not like Dayrunner is significantly cheaper (in Australia and the UK, “filofax” is a household word, like aspirin, but not so much in the US, at least not on the west coast).

Remember The Milk

For a while, I used Remember The Milk, which has the huge advantage of being web-based and — if you want — free. (Sadly, it seems to offer no compelling reasons to upgrade to the paid-for version.) Unfortunately, RememberTheMilk’s UI just isn’t very good. In fact, it sucks. The way it handles selecting tasks and doing stuff to them (the single central user interaction) is abominable. I’ve been using it for weeks and it still annoys me every time. (It’s free — go try it and see for yourself.)

If I were the developer of RTM, I’d focus on fixing the core UI. The feature set is pretty much fine, but it’s a royal pain to simply mark items complete (the “checkbox” selects the item, you need to hit a button to mark it complete).

Every so often I would check back on Things to see if (a) its price had gone down, (b) it had been upgraded in functionality to a point where its price was justified (e.g. syncing multiple Macs), or (c) there were discount coupons compelling enough for me to take a leap of faith that (b) would happen before they charged me — let me guess — $25 for an upgrade. After a while, I started seeing a lot of comparisons between Things and The Hit List.

There’s no question that The Hit List owes a lot to Things. The developer of The Hit List quite openly admires Things (and even seems to agree on pricing, cough). Once I realised that The Hit List would, if anything, be more expensive than Things I decided to write my own to-do-list manager (or, rather, build one into my “does everything I need, and nothing I don’t utility gizmo” that I’ve been thinking about but never getting around to write for years). Then I realised I already owned a license thanks to Macheist 3.

The Hit List vs. Things

My take on The Hit List vs. Things is that it steals the best features of Things, including the global “hit this key to send a task to your inbox” while adding super keyboard control (it’s a nice feature, but I hardly ever use it). You can basically build and modify your to-do-list without touching the mouse.

I’m no “my hands must never leave the keyboard” (i.e. emacs) fanatic, but it’s really handy to be able to move to-do items around using TAB and WASD, or to add tags by simply typing “/<tag name>” while entering a task description, or to move due dates using [ and ]. It’s not just that it has shortcuts for almost everything, but it builds on shortcuts (like WASD) you probably already know and it also displays common shortcuts at the bottom of the main display (until you learn them and turn this off). Very, very slick.

It even has a timer function built in so you can time a task for billing.

I only really have minor complaints. My biggest annoyance is that you can’t operate in the “today” view as you can in any other view (because if you add a task in “today” then, by default, it’s not “today” which… it’s nasty…). What I’d like is for you to be thrown into the project tab of the item you’re editing as soon as you start adding stuff to it. Or something. The interaction of tag/project hierarchy and dates presents a bit of a conundrum.

For a product that isn’t even 1.0, it’s really very nice. But I wouldn’t pay $50 for it.

Filed in Software, Usability | Tagged Dead Trees, filofax, Flawed Masterpiece, Remember the Milk, The Hit List, Things, To-Do-List Managers | Comments (0)