Today I took a relatively big step in terms of my coding workflow. I purchased a license for Sublime Text 2 and immediately began using it as my full-time code editor.
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Tags: st2, sublimetext2, vim
I am extremely biased. I’ve been involved with Gmail as a product for some time. And I’ve had a Gmail account since 2004, when Gmail first came out. And yet I’ve become conflicted lately.
When Lion came out, I decided to check out the state of the art in ostensibly user-friendly (read: GUI) email clients. I don’t pretend to know much about how Apple Mail It was purely curiosity. But a number of issues have cropped up in my mind.
Gmail can get really bloated, memory-wise. I was surprised when Mail took up less than 200MB; I assumed all mail clients routinely took up at least twice as much. Gmail often takes up something north of 500MB. (I suppose Chrome doesn’t help, if only because its multiprocess model necessarily involves a RAM tax.) Part of this is that I keep it open all the time, or rather I used to; now I feel obligated to close it now and then to keep my RAM clear. On balance, I don’t want to care about RAM, but in practice I feel I have to. I share a laptop with my -girlfriend- wife, which means Gmail effectively occupies 1GB or more. Running a Minecraft server on my desktop machine means I’m consistently down by 1GB, at least until I move it off.
The idea of having my mail on every machine is less of a concern now. Chiefly this is because I have a smartphone; if I don’t have a laptop with me, I always have my phone. IMAP means that changes on one client propagate elsewhere automatically, whether it’s on the phone, the iPad, or a full-fledged computer.
I can use an email client offline. This doesn’t happen that often, admittedly, and when I am completely offline I’m typically on vacation. Still, there were a couple of occasions recently where my connectivity was poor enough to make Gmail sluggish. A mail client simply had to download my messages once and I could read and search all of them without hitting the server via my flaky connection.
An email client is consistently faster when it comes to common UI operations. This is not to say that Gmail is slow, at last not most of the time. Most of the time, it’s fast enough. But when it’s not, it’s quite frustrating when a simple search takes longer than it really should! Contrariwise, once a client downloads my mail, I’m not subject to network delays. Yes, the client can be slow due to limitations of my machine, but those same constraints apply to the browser as well. Furthermore, the difference between searching my mail via Gmail and on my own machine continues to narrow, at least for me.
With Gmail + IMAP, I have the best of both worlds. I can check mail via a browser should I need to, but should I have the need, I can use the client. This is the strongest point in favor of retaining Gmail, modulo other logistical issues: it does’t have to be either/or.
That said, there are some significant drawbacks, at least to Apple Mail in particular as well as Gmail/IMAP.
Gmail/IMAP integration isn’t that great. Or maybe I should say that IMAP itself isn’t that great. It’s a folder-based paradigm, which treats emails like files. I think that’s ridiculous. IMHO, people only think about emails that way because it’s been thrust on them, and it’s not like most people understand the filesystem paradigm in the first place. Labeling/tagging a message is a “copy” operation, which is dumb. Archiving a message means “move to All Mail,” which is silly, too. Overall I’d say the mapping is somewhat leaky. I’m not sure it’s anyone’s fault in particular; I prefer Gmail’s model, but I wouldn’t expect Apple to sign on to that model wholesale.
Your -filters- Rules don’t sync across multiple machines. It seems that previously you’d have to pay for MobileMe to get this, which is/was ridiculous. Perhaps iCloud will fix this? It would be surprising if it didn’t, esp. considering they’re offering a full-fledged email service as far as I can tell.
The keyboard shortcuts aren’t nearly as good. Although there are hitches now and then, for the most part I can drive Gmail entirely through keyboard shortcuts. Mail’s keyboard shortcuts are merely OK.
All this really amounts to in terms of my behavior is that nowadays I often have Mail open on my personal machines. I don’t shy away from using Mail on iOS devices, either. Beyond that, I still use Gmail for chat and I use it for most email operations that aren’t simply reading or deleting. The thought remains that I could, if I really wanted to, make the switch. I’m just not sure what it would take for me to do it; certainly I have no reason to now or in the near future.
I don’t think I’ve documented my Mac apostasy by this point. I feel like I should, but maybe another time? The point is that for everything but video games, I prefer MacOS, which recently saw an upgrade, 10.7 aka Lion.
autocorrect
I didn’t realize this was going to be as big a deal to me as I thought. Actually, I’d forgotten about it entirely until I started writing a couple of blog posts. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the built-in autocorrect is actually pretty handy. The vast majority of the time it does the right thing! Were I using Vim to do most of my writing, it might not matter so much; Vim has so many handy motions that it’s easy to jump between words, sentences, and lines in order to fix mistakes quickly. For a standard (read: less arcane) input method like this one, though, I’ve only got the standard ctrl-a, ctrl-e, alt-left, alt-right, and so on. Having the OS correct the litany of stupid typos I make regularly helps.
I had sort of wondered why this wasn’t an OS feature in the first place. Input fields are common as mud and autocorrect has been a feature in word processors for a long, long time. So why isn’t it in the OS? Who knows? It is now.
Irrationally, I worry that a feature like this will erode my typing accuracy.
fullscreen apps
To some extent, I’m being conspicuous when I use them. There’s no real reason that I need to use Safari fullscreen while blogging. After all, Chrome is my main browser. But it does have a nice way of focusing my attention. I’m also trying out Apple Mail, and segregating it to its own space means I’m less likely to fidget with checking it.
mission control
I was a litte worried about Mission Control doing away with Snow Leopard’s way of laying out windows via Exposé. Leopard laid out windows sort of haphazardly and without obvious consistency. Snow Leopard made it into a grid layout, which made it a little harder to figure out which window was which but looked a lot neater and cleaner overall. Mission Control looks to restore it back to a semi-haphazard layout, grouped by application, which seemed like a loss of functionality.
What rescues it is the presence of a gesture for application-level Exposé. With that, I don’t have to Cmd-` my way through two or more Chrome windows. I’m not sure how useful Mission Control’s facility for selecting one or more of an app’s windows is, though.
launchpad
It’s pretty! I’ll give it that. But I am not sure how useful it is.
It looks like it finds all of your apps, which is a good thing overall. It’d be dumb if it didn’t.
However, putting them into iOS-style folders and whatnot is odd. For example, I’ve got a bunch of git clients (Tower, GitY, GitX, GitHub) sitting in my Applications folder. There’s also a Development folder in Launchpad. Except it actually corresponds to /Developer. When I moved my various Git.* apps around in Launchpad, it created /Applications/Developer which had only the Git.* apps in it.
Call it a leaky abstraction, I guess. Or a corner case, given that the majority of apps go under /Applications in any case.
scrolling, gestures
I’m fine with the new scrolling. I guess I’ve lived with it for a week, like I said I would, and I don’t feel like turning it off.
The gestures are kind of messed up out of the box, though. Two finger swipe for fwd/back is fine in theory but it doesn’t work at all in Chrome (expected; I presume they’d have to make a code change) or even System Preferences (!). It’s easy to switch it back to three finger swipe, and I did that.
I like the new scrollbars, although once again they’re hideous in Chrome. Chrome still has the old scrollbar gutter, and the gray scrollbar is always present. The Chrome team is working on it, or so I hear.
TTFN
That’s all I’ve got for now.
I sort of want to write something about Resume and whatnot, but I’m out of steam at the moment. Perhaps another time. John Siracusa’s excellent review of Lion covers this in more detail, and he probably says it better than I would anyway.
Hoo boy. The Internet has worked itself up into a fine frenzy now, on account of Apple’s latest device, the iPad. For my part, I’m already sick of hearing people pontificate about it. The extent to which people believed baseless Internet hype isn’t terribly surprising. What I did find surprising is that people’re pissed that Apple’s device didn’t live up to the mythical device people had built up in their heads.
Oh, sure, if we’re talking about the actual device, I’m intrigued.
I decided a little less than a year ago that I had no interest in a netbook. The small form factor and low price were attractive. The keyboards were cramped; I didn’t want Yet Another Windows XP machine; and ultimately, I saw the lackluster performance firsthand. I could’ve gone for Linux, I suppose. My girlfriend’s netbook, originally an XP machine, now has a bunch of Linux Problems.
By contrast, I could see myself buying an iPad, either this generation or next. I own an iPod Touch and a Nexus One (disclosure: I work for the big G, meaning I received the latter as a Christmas gift). I frequently make use of one of my miniature devices, and while I enjoy the browsing experience, it could easily be improved.
Beyond that, I have some other thoughts.
I try to keep my browser windows segregated by task, but sometimes tabs can proliferate to the point where you want to split them off into a new window.
Trouble is, sometimes I don’t stick with that, and I want to move all those tabs to a new window. Most browsers have drag & drop functionality, but that can be tricky to use. Pulling a tab off of a maximized window to make a new window means that when you try to drag another one onto the new window, the maximized window takes up focus.
In Windows, you can effectively tile your windows by selecting a window, holding down the Windows key, and pressing a direction. So I might Ctrl-N to create a new window, Win + Right to move it to the right, Alt-Tab back to the main window, Win + Left to move it to the left, and then start the drag-and-drop procedure.
All right, no more procrastinating.
Tags: win7
All right, so let me get this out of the way: I am a sucker for new and shiny things.
That might lead you to peg me as a Mac guy. You’d be half right. I like anything that’s new and shiny. Here’s what I am excited about right now.
It’s an absolutely fascinating time in the PC industry right now.
First of all, a little known company released a little known operating system. [Perhaps you've heard of it?][win7] It’s kind of a big deal! Vista was a black eye, for a variety of reasons, and Windows 7 is very much an attempt to recover from the loss of reputation and generate interest in their operating systems once again.
In light of Windows 7′s release, you can find a whole heck of a lot of analysis about Vista, Windows 7, and (of course) Apple. Read the rest of this entry »