Category: Geek

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Evolution of Webmail

I’ve always regarded webmail as a “last resort” — something to use when you don’t have the option to configure a mail client. Even if I’ve only got 15 minutes of email to do on a strange machine, I’m more likely to spend the 30 seconds it takes to configure an IMAP account than I am to mess with webmail. I hate it that much. But one thing I’ve learned running a hosting business is that I don’t have a lot of company in this department. I keep encountering power users who depend on GMail, Yahoo, etc. It used to surprise me, but I’ve been paying more attention to the options lately.

Sure I can see the advantages of webmail systems, but in my mind, the downside outweighs the upside. I work with a lot of mail, and tend to flip it all over the place – grab 10 non-contiguous messages at a time and drag them to a folder or delete them. Sort via column headers. Forward entire threads as a single message. Mark with colored labels. Set up rules and filters for custom handling, etc. Most webmail systems either don’t support those activities or make them very cumbersome. I hate not having a preview pane, and I really hate that hitting reply always quotes the entire message, not just the bit I’ve selected. Webmail address books tend to suck, and lack integration with the OS. I could go on.

But webmail has changed a lot in the past few years. GMail’s integrated search — and accompanying dismissal of folder-ization — has a lot going for it. But more interesting to me is the Ajax-ification of webmail we’re seeing in webmail clients like Roundcube (which Birdhouse now provides). Suddenly it’s possible to select non-contiguous messages with Cmd-click or Shift-click and drag them into folders, or delete — a huge step forward for webmail. A few days ago, Apple released a new version of .Mac webmail, which takes some of the basic ideas of Roundcube and pushes them to the next level, emulating the Mail.app experience almost completely (it even has a preview pane). However, .Mac webmail still insists on quoting the entirety of a message, rather than just the selected part (I wonder how much webmail as a whole contributes to gross over-quoting?) But webmail is definitely getting more usable than it used to be.

Ajax is quickly enabling web-based apps to emulate the full power of desktop applications. The responsiveness isn’t quite there, but the feature set is catching up. If the trend continues, I can imagine myself spending more time in webmail before long, though I still like the idea of having a master repository on a drive I control.

Webmail: Love it or hate it?

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Music: Clem Snide :: Joan Jett Of Arc
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Edgy Eft

Ubuntu Linux 6.1, aka Edgy Eft, has been released, and Birdhouse is proud to announce that we’re functioning as a seed for those downloading the distribution via BitTorrent from one of the official mirrors. The seeding occurs through an installation of the web-based TorrentFlux client, managed by mneptok.

Birdhouse is providing space and bandwidth for the seed as a small token of appreciation to the open source community for the innumerable ways we benefit from the efforts of OSS developers every single day. My life would be very different without the LAMP stack, both at home and at work. A moment of silence. ;-)

Now, go grab it while it’s hot.

Music: Bix Beiderbecke And Frankie Trumbauer :: There’s A Cradle In Caroline
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Geeks, Nerds, and Dorks

Having some Ajax fun lately, digging into the Dojo toolkit. Came across something in the documentation, where the developers are trying to explain whether Dojo is actually a toolkit, a library, or a framework. While some people might think the three are functionally equivalent, there are differences. They illustrate by example:

Geeks, Nerds, and Dorks: A geek has a very focused knowledge of a subject (that guy that memorized the language of Myst), a nerd is a master at many subjects (that girl you go to when you need homework help), and a dork is just plain socially inept (Napoleon Dynamite).

Music: Tom Waits :: $29
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Keyboard in the Dishwasher

The converted boiler room I call my office is extremely dust-prone. A stream of delivery and construction trucks parades by just outside, leaving a thin film of black soot on everything. After a recent office cleaning jag, realized that my white Apple USB keyboard had become positively embarrassing — the keys stained a mottled gray and black, every crevice stuffed with grime.

Had read before that it’s possible to put a keyboard right into the dishwasher, and decided to give it a shot. Worst case would be that I’d have to get a new one if it didn’t work. When I left Friday eve, strapped the keyboard to my bike rack and headed home. Saturday morning gave the keys a quick pre-scrub with a plastic pot scrubber, then placed the keyboard upside down on the top rack, facing down.

Thought it might not make sense to use the heat-dry function, so removed it afterwards to air-dry. Blessed with warm, dry Santa Ana winds all weekend, but after 24 hours my heart sank when I tested the keyboard for the first time. At first all seemed well, but quickly realized that some keys were stuck on infinite repeat. But after a second full day of outdoor drying, I’m pleased to report that keyboard is in perfect working order (typing on it now). And it literally looks like it just came out of the box. Shiny perfect sparkling white.

Have seen other reports that keyboards will dry faster if you remove all the keys. Doing so may have saved a day of dry time, but if you can live without the keyboard for two days, I’d say don’t trouble yourself.

Music: William Shatner :: Has Been
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Mac Marketshare Increasing

According to the Gartner group, “Sales of Apple’s Macintosh computers over the past twelve month’s have grown faster than any other major PC manufacturer, boosting the company’s share of the U.S. PC market to 6.1 percent.” Meanwhile the iPod bubble seems finally to have burst. I’m sure there are many factors that account for the rising marketshare, but wonder whether the iPod actually has functioned as a gateway drug (as planned), its user experience seducing new computer buyers to try a Mac?

Music: Pere Ubu :: Crush This Horn
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Pageviews are Obsolete

As web applications become more desktop-like, URLs become less significant. Ajax does away with a lot of page refreshes as it becomes increasingly easy for state to change without requesting new documents. The “what about the Back button?” question has been well-explored in the Ajax community. Less-discussed is the fact that the same phenomenon wreaks havoc on traditional analysis of web traffic. Throw in the fact that access logs are already heavily skewed / made less meaningful by heavy RSS consumption, and the value of traditional, URL-based traffic analysis is decreasing.

Jeremy Zawodny: “How the hell do we count stuff in a zero page refresh Web 2.0 buzzword compliant world?”

evhead, in Pageviews are Obsolete:

There will come a time when no one who wants to be taken seriously will talk about their web traffic in terms of “pageviews” any more than one would brag about their “hits” today.

Music: The Mountain Goats :: Moon Over Goldsboro

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Viva Eudora

Eudora is dead. Long live Eudora.

More info in the press release. Looks like there are already plans to blend Eudora and Thunderbird into a hybrid client:

The Penelope project’s intention is to join the Eudora user experience with the Mozilla platform. We intend to produce a version of Eudora that is open source and based on mozilla and Thunderbird. It’s *not* our intention to compete with Thunderbird; rather, we want to complement it. We are committed to both preserving the Eudora user experience and to maintaining maximum compatibility, for both developers and users, with Thunderbird. It is our goal to build a single development community around Thunderbird and Eudora, so that both mailers advance faster than they previously have.”

Music: Ali Farka Toure :: ASCO
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How to Convince a Client They Don’t Need a Splash Page

An old topic, but thought this was funny and to-the-point. Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering, in an article at Marketing Sherpa:

When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today.

Here’s a bunch more reasons why Flash intros don’t work. Start with the fact that 80% of users say they hate them, and 25% say they just click away from the page as soon as they see one.

Music: Tim Buckley :: Phantasmagoria In Two
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Apollo

Attended a fascinating – but somewhat puzzling – focus group sponsored by Adobe tonight. Apollo is an upcoming Adobe product* that’s sort of difficult to put a finger on. Blurring the line between web and desktop applications, online and offline use, Apollo is a desktop run-time for any combination of HTML, JavaScript, PDF, and Flash, which can be packaged up into a downloadable cross-platform application that runs without aid of a browser. Fairly good description of the platform here.

Adobe seems to be putting a fair amount of emphasis on Apollo’s off-line capabilities, which are interesting, but what device isn’t connected 24/7 now? With everything going online – Writely, Google Spreadsheets, Basecamp, all the “rich” Web 2.0 Ajax stuff, Apollo is being introduced at an awkward time. How is it that Adobe is returning to the desktop right when everything is moving to the web? The desktop is becoming less relevant every day. I’m thinking the big markets for this will be car dashboard displays, kiosks, point-of-sale devices, handhelds, and cell phones. Personally, it’s hard to imagine developing any HTML/Flash/PDF system that I would also feel strongly should also be available as a standalone desktop application. But I could be wrong – look at the popularity of both Apple’s and Yahoo’s “widgets” systems (Apollo is like widgets plus BALCO).

If there was ever a product that needed a focus group to hone its message and understand its market, this was it. The eight web developers in the room had very different takes on what Apollo was, what it could do, or what it could mean to the web. Still, some very cool demos, and I have to admit it’s nice to be able to drop the browser chrome completely, go full-screen, use window transparency, etc.

Like Java, Apollo apps have the ability to access resources on the local machine (a developer demo’d a file manager like the OS X Finder, but running on Windows). Didn’t hear much about security (no time), but clearly it will be an issue for Apollo. Also, no PHP/CF/ASP services available, unless developers also create a server back-end for it to talk to.

Whether it has the potential to explode or will fizzle on the vine is anyone’s guess. Its amorphousness may make it hard to explain to users. If tonight’s session was any indication, it may be tough to explain to developers as well. A key to success will be in making it dirt-simple to generate Apollo apps. I would expect HTML or Flash developers to be able to drag a .swf or folder full of .html docs onto an icon and have an Apollo app be spit out the other end, or to export to Apollo directly from Dreamweaver, Acrobat, or Flash. Another Adobe-length learning curve could kill this thing.

Anyway, pretty cool tech. I just worry that the browser already “owns” cross-platform app space, and that it will be hard for Adobe to find a sweet spot for this.

* No, I’m not breaking any NDAs here.

Music: The Fiery Furnaces :: Inca Rag/Name Game
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How To Steal an Election

Princeton researchers have successfully cracked a Diebold electronic voting machine and produced a clear – and extremely chilling – demonstration video.

  • Any voter can insert an altered memory card containing vote manipulation software.
  • The lock protecting the card can be picked without a key in under 10 seconds.
  • The crack can delete itself from memory when the election is over, leaving no trace it was ever resident in memory (but with the altered votes intact).

It’s not about what John Q. Public might do in a voting booth – it’s about what a corrupt candidate or PAC with a bunch of money and lots of motivation might do. This is what we get when we build public policy atop closed / proprietary / corporate processes.

More info at itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting. Discussion at Gizmodo.

via Aldoblog