Well AT&T has caused another revolt with their recent announcement to change their data plan and tethering options, or at least a revolt amongst heavy users. However, they have stated that the majority of users would be best served by the new categories; as well as released more detailed data on usage.
I am not an AT&T subscriber (luckily for the sake of the people that I call). I live in another country. Pertinent to this post, I live in a country where tethering is an option that was not just announced but that already works. I agree that the unlimited usage might be overkill for *most* users, however I think tethering could change that. I know for certain that a lot of business travelers would gladly tether their iPhones to laptops while on the road. Personally, I prefer not to tether, but have used it often when out of reach of WiFi or when I really cannot accomplish something with just my iPhone. With that said, I do prefer the charging scheme that my provider gives: time based charging. I can opt to pay a flat fee for a period of time browsing. This is very similar to the likes of WiFi hotspots throughout the world in places like airports. I think it is the most suitable type of charge for a tethering options, because honestly I think keeping track of the MB’s used is difficult. AT&T has created options for keeping track of this which is a definite plus, however, just like cell phone minutes, I think data minutes are more effective and easier to track.
Now here is a concept to get excited about (via TUAW):
Filed under: iPhone, Jailbreak/pwnage
Cables, schmables. Why occupy valuable USB slots when you can make iTunes data fly magically over virtual intertubes to and from your home computer? New to the jailbreak world, Wi-Fi sync introduces over-the-air sync to iPhone devices.
The application works like this: you install a client app on your desktop computer (10.5 and 10.6 Mac only at this time), which you can download for free from the Wi-Fi sync website. Then, run the $9.99 Wi-Fi Sync application on your iPhone. Your phone will appear in iTunes’ sources list as a connected device. You can then sync your device, just as if it were plugged in at a standard USB port.
TUAWhacksugar: Wireless iTunes syncing makes it to jailbroken iPhones originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 14 May 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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I have spent the last two years feeling slightly disappointed with Mail applications for the Mac. While there are not a lack of choices, I do feel that there is not one strong candidate who can get the task done the way I would like to see it done.
Mail.app
For the most part, Mail.app fits the bill as a default mail application, and it is the most well-rounded of the bunch that I have used. It is also my default email client and the one that I feel most comfortable with. However I always find something is lacking in the feature set it offers. Specifically, I am disappointed with the search functionality it offers, the obvious lack of multiple search fields and or a Boolean option are difficult to overcome when I have nearly 15,000 emails in my work account alone. (Yes, I know of Inbox Zero, haven’t gotten there yet, but only half of those are still in the Inbox. However, when I do need to reference an email, Search would be the way to go.) Also, I would love to have tabbed-browsing for emails, since the feature was released, it has brought so much order to the chaos that use to be window-browsing. There are times and emails that I cannot reply to immediately, but need to pull up four other conversations, documents, and sites as reference and then collate into a reply. That is the beauty of the tab, it’s not cluttered like having windows all over the place, yet it is still there to be quickly accessed and drafted. I hope that Apple will integrate tabbed-browsing soon. However, Mail does do one thing that has saved me quite a few times, it re-opens all the windows (messages) after quit or a crash. That my friends, has saved me from epic disaster, and something that the king of email Outlook does not even have (To my knowledge).
Plugins:
Plugins are a great feature (hack) for Mail.app. I use a lot of them. My issue with most plugins is this: I use Mail.app for email, I use an iPhone for email, I use the web interface of Google for email (*sometimes*). I want the information from one interface to seamlessly and effortlessly be available in all. *This isn’t necessarily Apple’s fault, it could be the plugin developers, however this is a flaw with the design.
Mail.app is the best all-around contender in the lineup, however there are drawbacks, especially for heavy e-mail users. It is also very easy to become relient on Quick Look and the calendar integration for quickly adding events, the majority of the other clients lack anything to counter these.
Postbox
I tried this during its beta and up to version 1.1. I liked it for the most part. Tabbed email view is an outstanding feature, it (like tabbed web browsing) just makes sense. Too many tabs can be detrimental to productivity or to actually dealing with something. Search operators are nice, but they should be universal to all interfaces. I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of it, but bottom line for me: It feels like Thunderbird.
Thunderbird
As of version 3, Thunderbird is now native. It still doesn’t look or feel native.
Mailplane
I go back and forth between Mailplane and Mail. Mailplane is an application that interfaces with Gmail. It has some nice features like being able to setup multiple accounts, integrate with other OS X Apps, Services menu, and you are in essence in Gmail, so any interaction from a web browser would properly reflect accordingly, but when I do switch back to Mail.app, my message replies/forwards are not linked. It is very usable and clean. It doesn’t have tabbed emails, but you can open up emails in new windows. One issue I have is the handling of multiple accounts, however, I am not sure there is a fix. When you switch accounts, any open windows (emails) will be closed, not a big deal as long as you know ahead of time, but sometimes I need to pull info from one account while drafting from another. Obviously, this can be worked out, but from a process optimization standpoint it can slow things down.
The one feature that keeps me going back is Google’s search. It is glorious.
Entourage
This is the email client of my workplace, and Microsoft’s horse in the race. After many tries with it, I just found it couldn’t do everything I wanted to do. Due to the overwhelming shadow of Outlook that Entourage is often lost in, maybe the expectations were just too high. It now appears that MS will be bringing Outlook to OS X in the next release of Office.
This could be a very good decision, or it might backfire entirely. In my opinion, it is most dependent on the Integration aspect with OS X, specifically iCal and Address Book, as well as the design of the UI.
Overall
There are mail application options. The strongest contenders in my opinion are Apple’s client and Mailplane (web). The second is based on gmail, so it would vary for other web-based email clients. However, there is a lot of room for improvement, and that is why I am excited to see that Brent Simmons has opened it up with his post on email: http://inessential.com/2010/01/16/email_init
I look forward to seeing what Letters comes up with as well as what MS does with Outlook. I feel that we are at the same state of the email applications that we were at with the client-side vs. server-side mail protocols just prior to full-blown IMAP adoption. Things are moving to the “cloud” or on a more practical scale, to handsets (iPhone, iPad, Android…). The key to all of this progress is to have a unified interaction across multiple platforms that reflects in all.
Another amazing app for jailbroken iPhones: ProSwitcher. It’s a frontend for the background process and let’s you switch apps in a Safari-esque manner. Simply amazing.
This is certainly a hot topic amongst OS X users right now, and rather than going into the technical underpinnings that *were* handling it, I will focus on my personal experience with this and a possible alternative path.
I first noticed this after upgrading from OS X 10.5, when I browsed to my Sites directory, and double clicked the index.php, which I needed to edit in Textmate. I grabbed my cup of coffee and took a sip, expecting Textmate to have launched when my focus returned. However, to my surprise, I was looking at my page in Safari. I returned to the Finder, ctrl-clicked and issue the Open With > Textmate. I made the changes to the php file that I intended, saved, and tried again from the top. Again, Safari started…
The most coherent points that I have read on this topic were from John Gruber:
Today, on the other hand, many of the files we work with use common, open file formats: text files, JPEG and PNG graphics, MP3 audio, MP4 video, etc. When you double-clicked a MacPaint file in 1985, there was no question which app you wanted to open it: MacPaint. Today, though, there might be a dozen apps on your system that can open a JavaScript source code text file or an MP3 audio file. “The app that created it” can no longer be assumed to be the answer to the question “Which app would you prefer to open this file with by default?”
The situation is therefore far more complex today. One way Apple has dealt with this complexity is with the fairly-recent addition of the “Open With…” contextual menu in the Finder, which shows a list of apps that claim to be able to open files of the selected item’s type. And there’s always drag-and-drop.
As he mentions, the complexity of file-types has certainly changed, however while Snow Leopard is impressive in many ways, the ctrl-click Open With is not a solution robust enough to effectively handle this. Further, as Gruber states:
Apple could have replaced creator codes with something superior, based on bundle identifiers, but they did not. And even if they plan to do so in the future, there is no good reason for dropping creator code support from Launch Services now, before the replacement arrives.
I agree the bundle identifiers, such as “com.apple.Safari”, have and continue to offer the platform to achieve this, it is just a matter of execution. There are certain files all with the same extension, that I want to open in different applications. While I can assign a System-Wide default by doing Get Info, the complexity of file-types cannot be handled by a single preference. The current solution “Open With” is tedious, as I found last night for example. I had recently created PNG files in Photoshop and wanted to edit them again, by habit I opened them via Finder expecting Photoshop to launch, but was brought back to reality as they opened in Preview. Had creator codes been in place, or a similar setting using bundle identifiers, this would not have been the case. (Yes, I know that ctrl-clicking, Open With > Application, is not that hard; it is the usability that we have come to expect from OS X that this seems to go directly against.)
Apart from a solution utilizing bundle identifiers, which I still think might be the easiest path, the only other similar product solution I have seen is Choosy, which allows you to set preferences for launching the right browser. Again, the drawback to this approach is that by no means, do I want to define the “choices” to choose from such as Preferences. However, as I stated, I find the Open With dialogue choice to be tedious, but the Finder could have a “Similar-to-Choosy option” that would prompt the user with a “Visual Open With dialogue” to choose from the current Open With Applications.
Just had a thought the other day: We need a way to quantify the vast amount of time that we are investing (or merely tracking others) in the vast array of social sites. Has someone quantified this already?
Well, this is a little something that I have been working on. First let me just say that I love Google Voice, however I don’t live in the US right now, but I do have a vast majority of my friends and family there. International calls and SMS are expensive, more so for them than for me, but it puts boundaries on communications. Google Voice frees that up…well sort of…
Currently, Google Voice only supports US telephone numbers, so what I decided to do was to use it with another service: 3jam. 3jam would most likely be categorized as a competitor of Google Voice, but honestly my goal wasn’t to find an alternative, but rather to find something that would allow me to set up a Mobile phone with a US number in Google Voice, so that people could SMS my GV number and it would forward to my actual cell phone. That is precisely were 3jam came into play. They provided me with at US number for a small fee, for calls and SMS, that I could forward to my Philippine cell phone. I set the number up in 3jam, added some credit to enable the International forwarding, added and confirmed the number within Google Voice, then tried out sending an SMS. FAIL! This was the only major glitch that I found: even though I had credit in my 3jam account to forward SMS’s on to my cell phone, they were not forwarding. I was sending from another Philippine cell phone, so I was not getting a reply. I then sent a test from my GV account, and got a reply from 3jam, saying I did not have enough credit to forward. I sent an email to 3jam with the problem, and they fixed it a little while later.
Now I can go to Google Voice, or use the iPhone app that I got before it was yanked from the App Store and send SMS’s to my friends and family in the US for free. When they reply, it forwards to my Philippine cell phone for a small fee per message, granted that you do have to subscribe to 3jam to get the number, but until GV is open to international numbers, it works.
I use backblaze for my backup storage. While my ISP (from the Philippines) slows it down a bit, I do love the ability to have an online backup that is off site, in case of problems.
After signing up, I was very curious as to how they could scale this model without breaking the bank, and I initially thought they might be using Amazon S3. It turns out that they are not using Amazon S3, nor any of the other mainstream storage offerings. They recently gave a detailed view of their primary storage structure, the Backblaze Storage Pod. While it does not go into detail on their web app, which is the key ingredient to their structure, it does give great insight and instructions to their building block of a scalable storage solution.
One of my friends Robert Feuille is fighting cancer, and some of his friends put together a site with some great ways to help him out. Check it out here: http://fightforfeuille.com/