Once again, the tubes are clogged with people who just aren’t getting it.
This Daring Fireball post was the first one that I’ve read that hits the nail on the head. The iPad isn’t just a “big iPhone”; rather, the phone is a dinky little miniaturized version of the pad.
Brent Simmons posted something interesting today: “Email init“. The gist of the idea is that we[1] need a really good IMAP client; no such thing exists; so fuck it, let’s make one.
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:
Even this short-ass list, sadly, isn’t satisfied by most existing clients.
Throw in some other requirements, like:
…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.
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[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.)
protip: while at the office, don’t accidentally visit python.com when you meant python.org
Why is it that whenever I have a question I really need google to answer right NOW, I only get some random dude on the internet tubes asking the same question to no avail?
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
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.
There is no easy way to tell Microsoft’s IME what kind of keyboard you are using to input Japanese. In various circumstances Windows will just decide that since you are typing in Japanese, you must be using a Japanese keyboard layout[1]. Often that is not the case, but there’s no GUI to change it. You have to edit the registry.
Since I work in Japan, and usually use Windows via VMWare on a Mac with a U.S. English physical keyboard, this comes up for me a lot. So, for posterity, here is how to do it.
Although there are many Japanese dictionary/tool apps on iPhone, including at least one fairly decent free one, the $20 Japanese.app is not only the best fucking Japanese reference app on iPhone, but also the best Japanese reference app I have ever used on any platform, including all the weird proprietary platforms developed solely for providing an electronic Japanese reference tool.
I cannot wait to pony up some more ¥ for the Mac version, which they say is planned.
It kicks too much ass for me to even describe; I’d get tired. Just buy it if you need the best Japanese reference tool available.
It might be the different perspective afforded me by living 4784 miles away[1], but it sure seems to me that Americans are taking stupid to a really uncomfortable new level.
I’m not even referring to their political ideas, which do tend to be pretty stupid across the generally accepted right-left political spectrum[2]; I mean the more fundamental kind of stupid. As in, unable to derive, comprehend, and internalize plain facts from the world in which they live.
The “birther” people and their weird forged Kenyan birth certificates? An Obama euthanasia squad killing Palin’s retarded baby? “Brownshirts”, Nazis, Hitler? These “town hell” events where pathetic fat white people froth at the mouth and waddle around with quasi-religious fervor venting without irony about keeping the damn government out of their fucking Medicare?
Gross, dude. It’s embarrassing. We’ve never been short of idiots, but from here it looks like US and A has reached a new and scary high-water mark. Something like 1 in 5 Americans is impervious to any unwanted facts[3] and proud of it, you liberal cocksucker, so hallelujah praise jesus and GO FUCK YOUR RACE-TRAITOR LIBERAL SOCIALIST FAGGOT ASS IN THE FUCKING ASS!
It seems to me, they used to more THINK that kind of shit than actually SAY IT OUT LOUD IN PUBLIC in the mainstream news media without fear of ridicule. In some cases, this kind of shit *is* the mainstream media. Not just with the fat radio ‘entertainers’ and the pudgy sobbing TV ones, either: pretty much every major TV news network offered sober coverage of Sarah Palin’s wigged-out paranoiac screeds, but none of them really managed to get across the real story, which is: HOLY SHIT THIS LADY WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN ONLY ONE OCTOGENARIAN’S CORONARY AWAY FROM THE LAUNCH CODES IS A DERANGED LUNATIC WHO LIVES IN A PARANOID FANTASY WORLD.
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[1]: By which I mean, maybe the USA was always this dysfunctional and intellectually broken, and I was just better at tuning it out when I lived there. But I don’t think so, because I’ve lived abroad for enough years at different times that I have at least some basis for comparison.
[2]: accepted, but fundamentally flawed and incapable of describing actual political discourse, since there is actually more than one fucking political issue on the table at any given time
[3]: Starting with the fact that an uppity half-breed jigaboo was elected President of the United States, and just kind of going from there…
You know, like for the record and shit.
A kinda awesome screed from Uli K.
UPDATE: While the thrust of this post is that my Samsung SSD with the fixed 2009 June MBP firmware works great, there are some bogus problems that other people are apparently having with the update…
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Hey, remember like a week ago when all those fucktards were clogging the interweb tubes with moronic posts insisting that the (imo inexplicable) 1.5Gbps SATA-I 2009 MacBook Pro firmware debacle didn’t matter “in the real world”? Well, yeah, they were wrong.
These numbers are interesting enough that I wish I had time to do better tests (but I don’t). As soon as Apple released the SATA-II firmware update, I bought the new MBP 13, along with a Samsung MMDOE56G5MXP-0VB SSD unit (spec sheet claims 220MB/s read and 200MB/s writes).
I wouldn’t have bought the laptop if Apple hadn’t fixed the firmware limitation, so I obviously was going to update, but before doing so I decided to run Xbench:
As you would expect, the results were: 1 dogshit-slow, 2 okay, 3 good, and 4 good.
The new firmware confers a significant performance boost, according to Xbench and subjective user opinion.