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.

Therefore, I took the splurge yesterday and upgraded. It took a little while, mainly because my ADSL was flakey as hell yesterday, but eventually it completed, and I’ve been using it since then. It did not get in the way of my PhD research this morning (which at this early stage mostly involves me doing a literature review anyway, that is, searching article databases for relevant academic papers and taking notes).

Some observations;

1. The reverse-scrolling thing on the trackpad or magic mouse surface takes only a short while to get used to. I am pretty much used to it now after a bit more than 24 hours.
   You just have to think of it as if the surface of the pad as pushing the document about, not the moving the view port. So you push “up” to move the document up through the window, rather than “down” to move the view port down the document, just like you do on an iPhone or iPad. Like that experiment where they put the inverting-prism glasses on a guy who at first staggers about wildly, but quickly learns to adapt (and when they take them off, having to relearn to see the world “normally”), you quickly get used to the new paradigm. … BUT … and there always was a “but” coming here … the keyboard behaves just like it used to. The “up” arrow moves the view port (or the cursor) up to the top of the document; Page Up likewise. There’s a disconnect here; the keyboard moves the view port, and the mouse and trackpad surface moves the document. For someone like me who spends a lot of time at the keyboard, both for coding, and for writing, this could be a bit of a gotcha, switching between these paradigms.
   This is not the first time Apple’s has this type of disconnect either. In Pages, the arrows move the cursor/selection as you’d expect, but the Page up/down keys move just the view port. I’ve found myself caught out before while writing a long document (as you tend to do quite a bit when you do postgrad study in a historical discipline!) when I’d hit Page Up a couple of times, saw the text on screen I wanted, then hit one of the arrow keys to adjust the view of the text slightly, only to find myself two pages down the text only a line or two from where I started!

 

2. Spaces is gone, replaced by Mission Control. I don’t think a lot of people will miss Spaces. I used it a lot, but then I’m coming off a Linux and X-window background, where the concept of multiple “virtual desktops” was not uncommon. I don’t find a lot of other 10.6 Mac users using Spaces much – my wife doesn’t seem to use it much on her iMac. Mission Control is nice, although I did prefer the  ”2D” approach of Spaces, to the “1D” approach of Mission Control. But Mission Control’s view of the open windows when you press “F9″ is just gorgeous. I did find it however rearranging the order of the Desktops, from 1,2,3,4 to either 1,3,2,4 or 1,4,2,3 and I only found out later what was triggering that (the preference “automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use”). You can just drag them back into any order you want. You can also create and destroy additional desktops easily. The short cut keys ctrl-1 to 4 don’t seem to extend past the first four desktops (i.e. ctrl-5 doesn’t get you to Desktop 5 if you create it).

 

3. Choosing a desktop picture seems randomly screwy. You have to configure it for each new desktop. Often when I go to change it it insists that I had previously selected a picture I hadn’t selected and is not showing. Sometimes opening the Desktop Picture system preference pane changes the picture on the Desktop straight away (often back to the “default” photoshopped Andromeda galaxy). I can’t select pictures from Aperture anymore, I assume because I’m still running Aperture 2 (the ver 3 upgrade is running as I type).

 

4. I ran Launchpad once to look at it and quickly shut it off. If I wanted a desktop full of application icons I would have created one years ago. I know that it gives its a more “iOS” feel but I mostly use Spotlight to find programs I want to run (and I’m tending to even use search on my iPad to locate apps rather than flicking about for them).

 

5. The biggest, fattest, and ugliest p-ss-r is still the way that you can’t properly integrate iCloud calendars and address book to the Google versions of the same.
   I’m a dedicated Gmail user and I’m sticking with Mailplane. The Mac Mail.app is much improved with some cool features, although the new threaded conversation view totally sucks (wrong order guys, the oldest message should be at the top of the conversation)! Therefore  I still want the Gmail interface which I know intuitively and even more importantly, the use of the powerful Gmail filters, of which I have very many. While the Gmail tags can be exported via IMAP to look like regular mail folders, it’s not the same thing. The iCloud calendar, like the “upgraded” mobile me calendar before it, just hates to be also synced with something like Google. You can have a Google Calendar or an iCloud one, but you can’t apparently share between them. I was using Spanning Sync to sync “local” calendars to the Google ones but it doesn’t work anymore for iCloud-based calendars. For the moment I am going to try to use iCloud ones and see how it goes. The ability to add a calendar entry on my iPhone and have it sync automatically with everything else without having to do a sync is just too powerful a pull for me. I know that Google is now Apple’s mortal enemy, but guys, some things you just gotta cooperate on!

 

The Calendaring issue has existed for some time with mobile me anyway so I’m used to it being a bit fiddly. I was (probably naively) hoping that in Lion and iCloud they would have improved Google integration a bit.  Overall I’d rate my experience so far as 4/5.

from MobileMe <MobileMe@insideapple.apple.com>
date Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 13:02
subject Upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar by May 5, 2011

Upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar by May 5, 2011

Dear MobileMe member:

On May 5, 2011, MobileMe will transition completely to the new Calendar service that we launched in October. The new MobileMe Calendar includes calendar sharing, invitations, and a new Calendar web application. To maintain calendar syncing between your devices and to continue accessing your calendar at me.com, you must upgrade to the new Calendar by May 5, 2011. Please follow these instructions to complete the upgrade …

So Fuck You Too, Me.com.

As for non-Google email, my work uses Exchange – and I can’t reach an secure port for that without firing up the work VPN, so usually I use the shockingly clunky webmail alternative anyway – so its not like I am losing out on any functionality. I have a .mac address which truth be told doesn’t get used that much – and Gmail can suck in pop-based email into it’s own accounts anyway. It can be used with an unlimited number of Gmail accounts.

If you are a Gmail user on a Mac, I’d definitely recommend having a look at Mailplane.  It’s a nice way to get the Gmail-native way of handling email (which generally I love)  onto the Mac. I think its needs some improvement, such as integration into Apple’s iCal, and perhaps, if possible, the abstraction of some of the Gmail interface elements (such as gmail’s list of labels) out into native interface widgets.