August 20, 2007 – 12:52 pm
Inspired by Khoi Vinn’s and Mark Boulton’s presentation Grids are Good, we’ve decided to take a deep look in the articles about grid-based designs. We’ve read through over 50 articles and selected some of the most important and interesting facts web-developers should know about the grid-based approach. Besides, we’ve listed the most useful references, tutorials and tools we found - with precise descriptions of what the articles are about.
Designing With Grid-Based Approach | Developer’s Toolbox
Ionut Alex Chitu writes in the Google Operating System blog that for $20 a year, you will be able to get 6 GB that can be used in either Gmail or Picasa.
This is good news if you need the additional space, but what I would like to see is for them to step up and offer IMAP Gmail accounts, even if as a paid premium feature.
12509 signatures to date on the IMAP facility for Gmail petition.
Pay for More Gmail Storage
UPDATE: Confirmed via The Official Google Blog: A simple way to get more storage
August 9, 2007 – 12:29 pm
Two similar questions posed today on O’Reilly Mac DevCenter and Lifehacker got me thinking. Is there really a competition between .Mac Web Gallery and Flickr? Or, are they instead complementary?I gave the new .Mac Web Gallery a spin last night. It’s fast and very easy to use. Literally within minutes, I created a new event in iPhoto ‘08, published it to .Mac and sent out a polished invitation. Setting access restrictions is painless should you decide not to go public with an album. Capabilities to upload via email and from the iPhone are great to have. One neat feature that may be easily overlooked is that, once an album is published, it is in effect a subscription. Any future additions, either from other people such as event participants or from yourself via the iPhone will automatically sync back to iPhoto. Performance was decent; browsing through an album or playing a slideshow were fast, responsive and smooth even on the iPhone over EDGE. As for looks, I found the rather subdued interface with a selected few large icons to be just about right for its intended purpose and audience.Surely, it holds no comparison to Flickr and its many features. But I don’t think it was ever intended that way. Instead, I think its purpose, from the start, was to simply enable you to quickly and easily get your pictures out there, and do it in style. In this case, I think it fits the bill very well and it will be a hit. And for me, it will be complementing Flickr just nicely.
Good rebuke to exactly the mentality manifested in my previous post, .Mac Wishlist.
Chuqui 3.0.1 Beta: Why the geeks were wrong about .Mac….
I am stoked about the new .Mac gallery though, so there may still be hope…
I am not sure when or how this happened, but it appears that Google Reader has recently been updated to detect the iPhone. Where before visiting http://reader.google.com/ on the iPhone would simply bring up the desktop reader, now it automatically redirects to Google Reader Mobile at http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/.In addition, Google Reader Mobile has now gained the sharing capability previously present only in the desktop version. This is something I have long wished for and it is great to finally have it available at all times.I don’t have a camera (or a second iPhone!) with me to take and post a screenshot, but it does look great. News items fill the screen with no horizontal scrolling. Almost all the features from the desktop version are present, including “See original”, “Add/Remove star”, “Share” and “Keep unread”. At the top of a news item, a header has status icons for both Starred and Shared; and it does fit well within the Safari look and feel. The subscription list has live icons to the right indicating the number of unread items for that particular feed. Finally, the Tags link brings up a similar list of unread items per tag and links to both Starred and Shared items.
August 8, 2007 – 10:30 pm
Wow. Quite intriguing, though I’m not entirely sure how other widgets would be different from the ones already present on the phone. I’m talking about Stocks, Weather, etc. Would this be a way to maybe group installable widgets beyond the space alloted on the iPhone’s home screen?
iPhoneology : Blog Archive : Widgets, Spotlight Coming to iPhone?
MacRumors, AppleInsider, AppleGazette, TUAW and I’m sure others are all hinting at a possible .Mac refresh to be announced at the Apple Media Event today, based on a “scheduled maintenace” outage to coincide with the event.I’m hoping to see at least some of these being announced today:
- Push email for iPhone and Mail.app, hopefully using IMAP IDLE and not whatever proprietary mechanism Yahoo! is using. Considering they’ve announced IMAP IDLE as one of Leopard Server’s upcoming features, this should have a pretty good chance of seeing the light.
- Spam controls in .Mac Mail, ideally through SpamAssassin. Once again, Mac OS X Server 10.4 includes SpamAssassin, so it shouldn’t be such a big deal.
- Live spell checking in .Mac Mail.
- Load Images whitelist in .Mac Mail. Right now, there is only a Load Images button that needs to be clicked every single time with no facility to always load images from a particular sender.
- More than two email addresses per contact in Address Book. Mirror the Address Book fields from OS X and iPhone.
- Do something, anything, with the Bookmarks. That pop-up window is so ’90s.
- Increase the amount of storage offered by default. With Gmail at almost 3GB today and Yahoo! offering unlimited storage, .Mac’s 1GB seems puny especially for something that costs $99.95/yr.
- The calendar widget on .Mac’s home page has been a static calendar ever since I remember it. There isn’t even any indication of days holding events. Google’s Calendar widget is nice and functional, not only showing days with events as links but also having an agenda.
- .Mac Calendar! What calendar? There isn’t even one at .Mac, with the exception of the home page widget that links to a page explaining the benefits of syncing, publishing and subscribing to calendars.
- Refresh the HomePage feature altogether. Last time I tried publishing a photo album on .Mac, it was such an embarrassment compared to Flickr or Picasa that I gave up in less than five minutes.
I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
OK, for the life of me I can’t understand how iPhone’s launch caught Google Mail so unprepared.They do have a renewed love for all things Apple. Its top brass sits on Apple’s board. They’ve partnered to deliver YouTube content to AppleTV and iPhone. They’ve been into mobile applications for quite a while. So who forgot about Gmail?I used to be an avid Gmail user. I loved the usability, I was delighted by the hacks and clever tricks and I even liked the design. Before iDay, I was living in Gmail for half the day, with a big help from the Gmail Notifier. I used the Java Gmail Mobile in a pinch, which, aside from no background mail notification, worked reasonably well even though the Treo 650 was unsupported. Even its POP implementation wasn’t so bad. Yes, I had to process everything twice but, with a little bit of filtering in Mail.app, all my stuff ended up where it was supposed to.But now, with the iPhone into the mix, I wonder why do I even bother using it anymore? The POP Recent mode caught a lot of people by surprise, including myself. And I can’t turn it off, not without committing the iPhone to be the sole POP client. Google themselves acknowledge it to be an issue they are working on. And, even without this one snafu, things are quite messed up as I’ve detailed in my previous rant.I simply found that, once the iPhone arrived, my patterns around email have changed. I no longer keep the browser or Gmail Notifier open and instead simply use the phone as mail notification for all my accounts. And, since I’m already there, I just use the phone again for all but the longest messages. Flaws aside, its Mail application is just that good.So I think it is farewell Gmail for now. But I am counting on you Google to wow us again.
Our son, Ryan Ethan, turned one month today.
August 3, 2007 – 11:36 am
Oh, what a clusterfuck I got by mixing the iPhone, webmail and POP access.Got me a little iPhone and hooked it up with few email accounts. Gmail, which I had and love. Yahoo! Mail Plus, because it’s the only push mail that works with the iPhone, at least for now. And a regular ol’ IMAP account, because it’s like, you know, sane.Now, when I am on the go or just futzing around with the iPhone, I do my mail on it. When at work, I occasionally get on webmail. At home, on the PowerBook, I totally dig Mail.app for speed. Not all that exotic, is it? Last, Mail.app downloads email from all three accounts to back them up and expose them to Spotlight. I do go back and refer to older emails quite often.So, let’s read some mail. On the IMAP account, pure bliss, only need to process a message once. Yahoo! plays nicely within the iPhone - Yahoo! Mail duet, since the iPhone somehow syncs up with the mail directory. Bring POP access into the mix however and now all messages retrieved via POP will show as unread in Mail.app. Gmail gets one better: messages already read on the iPhone show as unread in both webmail and Mail.app, since now both iPhone and Mail.app use POP. We knew this; this is POP .Moving on to sent messages. The whole thing turns mind boggling. Let’s look at these charts to see where a sent message actually shows up. Please keep in mind that the scope is to assess the status quo - default options including recent: mode in iPhone’s Gmail and no filters anywhere (which the iPhone lacks anyway).New message, sent from iPhone:New message, sent from webmail:And, finally, new message sent from Mail.app:Naturally, IMAP shows how things should work. And, with the exception of iPhone not supporting IDLE, it is just perfect. Yahoo! once again works nicely iPhone to webmail and viceversa. However, it isolates Mail.app into a silo from where it doesn’t see or is not seen by any other client. The Gmail fun and joy continues. With recent: mode turned ON on the iPhone, the default, messages sent from either iPhone, webmail or Mail.app also show in the iPhone’s Inbox as new messages.Where on the receiving side it’s just more work handling every message several times, the charts show that dealing with sent messages is just insane. So, where is that message I sent last week using either Gmail or Yahoo!? Did I send it from the PowerBook or the iPhone? Or, was I using the browser?The iPhone is still a great device and I love it with all this insanity. If anything, this rant isn’t against the iPhone but POP and its limitations when used with multiple email clients. And, even more so, against all email providers not offering IMAP. While POP works well when using a single device, beyond the simplest setup the party is quickly over. So what’s it going to be? Give up on Mail.app and POP? Pipe Gmail and Yahoo to IMAP? Use forwarding and filters to put things right? I’m still looking into it.How are you managing email? Am I alone thinking this is just too much work? If you would like to share, please let me know in the comments.
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