But, I did buy a very satisfactory new home phone:

It securely clips to any clothing I’m wearing (even if it’s just boxers), the buttons never get pressed accidentally, and the headset is light and comfortable in over-one-ear mode (it also has a full on call-center style over-the-head rig you can use if you like).

I give this thing two thumbs up (since both my hands are now free). And it’s not expensive.

Definitely an improvement over the homebrew tape-and-miffy-clip solution I had been making do with:

so

i will be fine with eel bones and hot milk

The bummer is that The Community has to build it, which is always a slightly dubious prospect. But once in a while, that works out.

There’s just no economic justification for the investment (of money/effort) required to re-engineer a complex application that is, after all, a core part of every modern OS. That’s why we haven’t seen, and almost certainly won’t see, a commercial solution. (I personally would buy Brent’s mythical $500 IMAP client, in a heartbeat. But that only makes about three of us.)

I’ve been on a technology pilgrimage to IMAP mecca since around 1997. (Actually, a bit before, but memories get hazy — the best carbon-dating I can do is remember how excited I was about Ethan’s pitch for a Newton OS IMAP client, and the Newton got Steved in ‘97.)

Nowadays (and for the past several years), if you aren’t using IMAP for your email, then you’re doing it wrong. But the pilgrimage continues, because while things are much better than before IMAP was widely implemented, none of the email clients have really nailed it yet.

Over the years, I think I’ve at least launched every single IMAP client developed for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Palm OS (lol I’m serious), and fiddled around a bit further with most of them. Off the top of my head: Mulberry, mutt, Eudhorfa, Outlook Express, Entourage, Outlook, pine, Outlook full turd, Opera, Mail.app, Thunderbird and friends, Windows Live or Whatever The Fuck It Is Called, Chatter, PowerMail, Outspring Mail, … well, the list is too long to even fit on the top of my head.

But ugh, they all suck. In different ways of course. And everybody has slightly different needs. For me, absolute minimum requirements include:

• reliable offline mode
• Japanese compatibility and UTF-8 support
• indexed search
• rule-based triggering of custom processes
• multiple identities (addresses/servers)
• SSL/TLS support

Even this short-ass list, sadly, isn’t satisfied by most existing clients.

Throw in some other requirements, like:

• good UI
• tree-display threaded view
• high performance
• custom IMAP flag support
• so-called “smart mailboxes” (i.e., canned searches)
• decent scriptability/automation support
• attachment removal (leaving the message on the server)

…and you are left with ZERO EMAIL CLIENTS. Not one client in existence satisfies all of those. For me, the one which comes closest is (sigh) Mail.app. It does most of those things, but is has some very major problems. Serious bugs. A crappy threaded view. It can handle my 60,000-message personal/business archive, but not that plus the 500,000 or so messages of archived mailing list mail (had to move those to gmail, which also sucks). With a bunch of accounts, it sometimes takes over ten minutes to quit cleanly (on an 8-core ‘09 Mac Pro), but reacts badly to being force-quit. And on and on, blah blah blah.

And this application is, on balance and IMNSHO, the best IMAP client in human history. But I yearn for something better. As far as software goes, this is probably my deepest and most long-standing wish.

So, do I want Brent’s Magical Pony IMAP.app? Fuck yeah! Fuck yeah.

But is this the rare project that The Community can actually pull off? Well… I mean, frankly I doubt it, but there’s at least some hope. Brent is a well-known and well-respected dude, so out of the gate the project has more momentum behind it than normal. As I write this, the mailing list has 171 messages posted to it, after existing for only 12 hours.

I would love to work on this, too. I mean LOVE it. Writing code, I mean. But I recently did this scary analysis where the cumulative behind-schedule-ness of all my active projects is something like four years[2]. So will I really be able to? Uhm… I uh,… I dunno. I assume most of the folks getting all hyped up about this idea are in a similar position. But I hope so.

And there it is: the reason I have a bit of hope for this project is that most of the people who actually really need a superpower IMAP client are people who can contribute something to making it real.

So will we? I guess we’ll probably know in about a year.

–

[1]: we the email power-user subset of Mac users, that is; mainly businesspeople who rely on email

[2]: Yeah, I have thirteen actives that are between two and fourteen months behind initial schedule. And that’s only work projects–I am not including personal projects like my Hasbro Baby’s First Open Source Release that I hoped to ship in 2004, or cancelled projects like the distributed native-Cocoa issue tracking app some of you wasted an hour listening to me rave about in 2008. (And, ahem, that’s not to say I am a total slacker, either; I did finish a few projects in 2009, a couple of which may have even been on time.)

Whyever that is, I’ve been wanting a decent set of wireless headphones for late night guitar/TV/PC/game use, but hadn’t known what to buy.

I wondered: is this just because decent wireless headphones just don’t exist? But… surely they must! And they do, it turns out: the Sony MDR-DS4000, released almost five fucking years ago.

Not quite as cool as the wireless headphones of my imagination, but unlike every other set I could find in the real world, all the flaws are flaws I can deal with.

Before summarizing the good and the bad, I think it is worth noting what is wrong with most other wireless headphones: THEY CAN’T FUCKING STREAM AUDIO WITHOUT FUCKING SKIPPING AND STUTTERING DUE TO RF INTERFERENCE. It makes me wonder how in the fuck these products are even on the market, but I guess there must be some places where they work okay.

Most of these headphones use the 2.4GHz band that is also used by WiFi, cordless phones, your neighbor’s X10 pervcam, etc. And somehow, at least in dense areas like where I live in Tokyo, they just can’t seem to pump enough data to the phones to make an uninterrupted sound stream. I’ve tested a couple borrowed/stolen wireless headphones here, and had the problem that the sound drops out sporadically for a second, or fraction thereof. So I never bought any of those.

For a long time, though, I have been wanting some wireless headphones for late night Guitar Rig sessions, gunning people down on the PS3, etc. Recently, I found myself in Akihabara with an hour to spare, so I tested EVERY SINGLE MODEL AVAILABLE at Yodobashi Camera (about 8). Granted, at 8 stories tall and about a city block in area, it’s probably the densest electronics store in the world, replete with radio interference from every device known to mankind, but jeez–EVERY SINGLE ONE of the digital 2.4GHz headphones experienced dropped audio in a single minute of testing with a bit of head bobbing and weaving and spinning around.

But the infrared ones didn’t. And the Sony MDR-DS4000 was the best of these.

In my dwelling, I have a lot of radio waves caroming about, but there’s no infrared interference, since IR doesn’t go through walls. (I’ve read that if you have a plasma TV, or certain kinds of domestic robots (but apparently not including my Roomba), you may suffer from IR interference.)

Obviously, not penetrating walls means you can’t leave the room and still hear. But to me, that seems a hell of a lot more acceptable than sporadically not being able to hear when you are sitting directly in front of the screen. So: IR FTW.

PROS:

+ No fucking interference, wooohoo!

+ Very comfy

+ Sound quality as good as my ears can detect

+ No perceptible latency at all (great for Guitar Rig)

+ Not insanely expensive

CONS:

- Line-of-sight only[1]

- Charging the batteries takes a while compared to newer models

–

[1]: but seems to bounce off walls and stuff well… only drops the audio connection when I physically leave the room

Well, *I* fucking expected it!

However, that’s not because I am a keen analyst of the valley’s machinations, or anything like that; it’s simply because I happened to read Neil Mcallister’s Developer World article almost two weeks ago, when it was published.

Spoiler alert: peep the URL.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/what-if-oracle-bought-sun-microsystems-859

(I appreciate Gruber’s war against the Douchebar.)

UPDATE: Gruber wins.