So I right click back on the original file and choose to open it with ‘Adobe Digital Editions’. And the old version of the software opened right up with the insistence to upgrade. With the upgraded version running right along side the original version … facepalm, headdesk. Its like they don’t want me to use their software. It’s ugly and horrible to use.

And these companies wonder why people pirate stuff. Because, Adobe, if I pirated DRM content it would easier for me to read it in any manner I want to read it you f–king morons, even when I try to use your idiotic software with with labyrinthine installation and upgrade bullish-t.

Let me put it this way. I will gladly pay a fair price for content, if it’s good content. I will also gladly pay for software, if I like the software (for example, I’m writing this blog entry in a fully-licenced version of the blog editing software Mars Edit). But don’t foist your insistently sh-tty, demanding-to-be-upgraded-right-now, eye-gougingly ugly, platform standard-breaking installation procedure using, old version littering montrosity on me even if it’s free.

Uninstall. Please go broke Adobe.

Alert sounds.

Sometimes it plays the alert sound for no discernible reason (I think because new mail has arrived in a sub-label/sub-folder, but actually I can’t be sure this), yet at other times, a new mail will arrive in the Inbox (I can see it) and no sound will play. Also it seems to update the Growl notification app at odd points (no discernible reason why it does or doesn’t). Consistent behaviour is critical here. Please guys, play the alert sound when, if and only if, a new email arrives in the Inbox of any account. Worry about configuring this behaviour only (maybe through filters?).

Image attachments.

If someone attaches an image to their message (e.g. a photo), when you select the message you see the image scrolling off the page, i.e. at 100%. However if you resize the window, even by the tiniest margin, the images snaps to the window size.

PDF attachments.

PDF attachments should be viewable in-line.

Gmail ‘important’ feature.

I can mark an email with Gmail’s ‘important’ tag in the message view pane, but not to a message or messages in the message list. Actually it’s because the ‘Assign label’ context menu is available for a message in the message view, but not in the list view. ‘Assign topic’ is on both – and it also has by default, a topic called ‘important’ but it’s not the same things as the ‘important’ tag in Gmail. That’s confusing.

Gmail ‘star’ feature.

‘Starring’ an email in Gmail is called marking the email as ‘To do’ in Postbox. In other mailers this is usually regarded as ‘flagging’ the message. Does not support the new Gmail multi-stars.

Message colours.

I’m really missing the ability to colour message text/background with the filters. It’s the only Mail.app feature I miss currently.

I was, and remain, an email power user (I know that this actually shows my age nowadays). In fact, for many years, I used to use elm, and then mutt in the Unix shell — it was only really once I got the invite to the Gmail beta that made me finally switch from mutt! I was never a pine user although I know a lot of people used to use that, and I never really super-loved any of the Mozilla clients like Thunderbird — its calendar integration is shit. Obviously Outlook, Entourage, and other Microsoft email software is purely for defectively-thinking droolers who hate the internet, send pictures to their friends pasted into Word or Powerpoint attachments, and have an Exchange server stuck up their bum so that doesn’t even enter into the equation. So, I love the keyboard with my mail program, I love seeing a threaded view of email conversations. I mostly love plain text email too (although this is not such a hard-core requirement for me nowadays). And I need it to work with Apple’s iCal and Address Book because I like those programs and I want to get this information onto my iOS devices over the wireless.

However, while Mail.app is probably a reasonable proposition for the average consumer-grade user and does many of these things pretty well, I never really loved it. I suffered with it these past few months. Its search (i.e. spotlight) is OK for email but no patch on Gmail. It doesn’t really play nice with Gmail’s labels and takes a “folder” approach. It has a thread view now but I don’t think it’s spectacular. It sometimes seems to forget that I’ve got a message selected and it should make it as “read”. However, I could live with it, I thought.

But, last night, I found Postbox 3 via a MacUpdate bundle. I decided to give it a burl. It’s actually quite awesome, despite the lead engineer being an ex-Mozilla guy (bearing in my mind my comments about Thunderbird above)! It plays nice with my Mac, and iCal and Address Book. Its integration with Gmail’s labels is also pretty smooth and I haven’t found and issues with it. It even supports Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts which is heaven for me. You can even configure it to connect to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in such a way that if you don’t have a picture in your address book for an email contact, but have a connection to them in any of those services, it will use the picture from the service. That’s a very nice feature. It has a way to get at all the various configuration parameters and fiddle with them (haven’t really explored that too much other than to look at it).

It’s not without rough edges though. For example, choosing an alert sound for new email; you can choose either to use the “System Alert” sound, or pick and choose any relevant sound file on your hard disk. What you can’t do is select from a drop down list of the available Mac System Sounds. You have to locate the relevant AIFF file in the System Library. And if you do choose “System Alert” you get get a horrible !plink! sound and not the actual System Alert sound from the Sound system prefs. And the ‘whoosh’ sound it uses for sent mail is not configurable other than on or off. It needs to know how to open a message in a new window, not just a new tab. You also cannot select a message’s colour (background or foreground), either manually or through filters (in Mail.app, I used this to highlight in a background colour the messages from people in my Address Book where I was an explicit recipient). It also needs a Unix “biff” style plugin for the menu-bar. It does integrate well with Growl but I don’t really like that for email notification. But that’s all pretty minor stuff. The major stuff, like Gmail integration, it does really well.

But, a really nice feature and a pleasant surprise is that when you reply to a long-running thread, it has a really nice way to summarise the emails from the various participants (see crappy screenshot below).

Overall I rate this program 8/10. Definitely sticking with it. Recommended.

Air France stops maintenance in China after screws missing from plane:

Air France suspended the maintenance of its aircraft by Chinese company Taeco after 30 screws were found to be missing from one of its planes, it said Thursday.

“Ok, we will have to design and build some sort of ICBM or buy one, that will cost a lot of money. Also, I’m not even sure you can get an ICBM that’s fast enough for that distance. And have we thought about acquiring land for the launch site or what sort of launch system will we considering?.”

“But I want to do it in my car.”

“Oh, well, that’s a big ICBM, to hurtle that sort of load in that sort of timeframe across that sort of distance. Molto-dinero. Also, re-entry procedures at the New York end could be tricky and …”

“No, I meant, I want my car to be used for the journey.”

“But that’s not possible!”

“What sort of engineer are you? Can’t you just soup it up a little?”

“Well even if we could make your car amphibious, there’s no way it can travel 5,500 kilometres in 12 minutes”

“I don’t want an amphibious car!”

“Have you considered a ship of some type?”

“Yes a ship will get me and my car to New York.”

“Excellent. It takes about a week for a ship to cross the Atlantic I believe.”

“But I just said in my specification that it has to take 12 minutes! Also I wish to travel via the Pacific Ocean, as it is prettier this time of year.”

” … !!! “

The Frustrated Architect:

Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of successful software yet it’s frustratingly neglected by many teams. Whether performed by one person or shared amongst the team, the architecture role exists on even the most agile of teams yet the balance of up front and evolutionary thinking often reflects aspiration rather than reality.

(Via coding the architecture.)

Update – if you go to this page you can get a video of the presentation; it’s about an hour long. A word of warning: I couldn’t make the video play on the site with Chrome, I had to use Safari.

You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.

(Via Pinboard Blog.)

Java is not the new COBOL | Craig Tataryn’s .plan:

A switch statement that I’ll actually use
Yes, finally my Java brethren we have a switch statement that actually works on Strings!

switch (lang) {
   case "Java" :
      out.println("I like frameworks!");
      break;
   case "Ruby" :
      out.println("I like Pabst Blue Ribbon!");
      break;
   case "PHP" :
      out.println("I like WordPress!");
      break;
}

My God this has been a long time coming.

Gmail redesigned, app coming to the iPhone?:

(Via Faster Forward)