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.

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.

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.

Remember the iPod?

A pet peeve of mine is pronouncing that the device is DOA. I have no idea how well it will do, but some amount of perspective is in order, here. Only a very small set of people have actually used the device, and the ones that aren’t under NDA only got to use it for a little while.

Remember, too, that the iPhone lacked a great many features that the 3GS has today. An iPhone without apps is nearly unthinkable, given how prominent the App Store is these days. But the iPhone launched without one. It didn’t have GPS. Or cut-and-paste. Or even 3G.

The real clincher for me? Well, does anyone remember the original iPod launch? It launched in October of 2001. It was roundly criticized. People hated it! It was too expensive ($400). It supported FireWire only. It didn’t support Windows! Now, of course, the iPod is widely praised. It’s ubiquitous.

So that’s why I shake my head when I hear people talking about how this thing doesn’t do enough of this or that.

Closed systems

My biggest concern about the iPad and its potential popularity lies in the software. If we’re to infer from the iPad Apple’s vision of the future, it’s quite different from the world today. Apps are heavily controlled, meaning that whatever Apple doesn’t like won’t make it on to the device. That’s a huge difference.

Now, I am sympathetic to the reasoning behind this. Isn’t users running all kinds of unauthorized or sketchy software one of the biggest problems we face in computer security? A single repository of curated apps is an effective way to mitigate this problem, as well as a bunch of others that modern operating systems face.

And all right, sure: you can use web apps. And I use a heck of a lot of webapps. I spend most of my time reading RSS feeds and e-mail, both of which happen in a browser.

But in terms of the device, the iPhone is surely among the most locked down computing devices in the industry. It works out that, in this space, DRM is the rule, not the exception. You do with your device what Apple says you can, and no more.

E-readers

I don’t really care for e-readers, but I suspect that Amazon’s got a bit of a dilemma right now. As I understand it, most people probably aren’t interested in e-readers. But they are interested in netbooks, if netbook sales over the last year or so are any indication. Furthermore, if the rumors of a high return rate are to be believed, the iPad is pretty well positioned, price-wise and functionality-wise, to become a new standard among satellite computing devices.

For these people, the fact that it’s an e-reader will be one bullet point among many. E-books will be a couple of taps away in iTunes, which by the way keeps your credit card on file. That makes it fiendishly easy to buy music, apps, and now, ebooks.

Another question, of course, is price. I don’t mean the Kindle vs. the iPad. I think the iPad has it beat, if nothing else, in terms of value. The sole difference is whether eInk is worth sacrificing a full-fledged Internet device. I think most people will opt for a netbook-like device that, incidentally, is an e-reader.

No, by price I mean: will people pay $13 or more for an e-book? Amazon sells new hardcovers for, what, $9.99? It’s a reasonable price, I’ll admit. But I’m not sold on e-books myself, and I suspect most other people aren’t, either. An unscientific survey of Amazon’s best sellers indicates that the majority of books that people buy are either free or cost less than a couple of dollars. Is the iTunes e-book store liable to suffer the same fate? I think it might.

Ubiquitous Internet

I’d say that the thing that excites me most about the iPad, if I can be said to be excited, is the notion of ubiquitous Internet computing. That’s really just a fancy term for Internet everywhere. I’ve only recently stepped into the world of smartphones, and it’s lovely. It’s just too bad it’s so damn expensive to get something like that on your laptop, right?

WiFi is nice, but at the rate that municipal WiFi is taking over the world (cough), it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to use a WiFi-only device on the bus or the train.

Consequently, what excites me is a device I can carry anywhere, confident that it has an Internet connection. It would have to be big enough to read stuff on, but not as big as a laptop. And that’s roughly what the iPad is aiming at. If that’s the proposition, I’m very nearly sold.

TTFN

Beth is telling me to wait for v2, and given that we’re gearing up for some Big Things nowadays, that seems like the best bet. It won’t be out until June anyway, and in the meantime, I’d like to get the heck off of Windows as my main machine. (Latest anger point? Lack of RDP in Home Premium. Why should I pay $80 more for a single feature that, by all rights, should be free?)

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.

iMac pls

Let’s get this out of the way: my apostasy is worsening.

Back in 2006, Tycho/Jerry of Penny Arcade went into the PC vs. Mac thing (here and here). Like Jerry, I didn’t like Apple’s marketing campaigns, and it cast a pall over pretty much everything they’d do. Once I read his pieces on this, though, I had to think twice. I started to let go of my grudge. From there, it became just a matter of time: I had to use a Mac Mini; I chose a MacBook Pro over a PC for my work laptop; I bought a unibody MacBook this past March; and I got Snow Leopard.

At any rate, I’ve coveted a Mac on my desktop ever since my Mac Mini experience. I’m glad I waited! It’s likely I’ll spring for one in November, and the 27″ Intel Core i5 seems like a really, really solid choice. The new mouse looks pretty cool, too, although I have some misgivings as to whether or not it’s practical.

My reasons for Mac lust? In short, I feel it’s the best trade-off between usability and power. Windows isn’t powerful or transparent enough for me, and Linux is often too transparent and fairly clunky. OS X is running freaking BSD under the hood, and has really solid UI design.

Windows 7

So, um, I also like Windows 7. In fact, I’m typing all of this on a Windows 7 machine right now. It’s shiny! It’s new! Granted, I play video games, so I can’t avoid Windows and I’m sick of running an OS that was showing its age a few years ago. But it helps to be, you know, excited about the whole thing, and I am.

For instance, I like how you can search the start menu. I like how you can search the control panel for settings. The Dock new taskbar is solid, what with Aero Peek and all. In general, I enjoy the sort of cognitive dissonance or brain shock that comes from seeing and learning a new user interface, and given that I never used Vista for very long, I’m quite happy to use it.

Of course, it’s still Windows, which means they cripple parts of the OS so they can charge more. I’m a bit peeved that Home Premium doesn’t include a Remote Desktop server. Whereas I’d prefer RDP over VNC, I don’t $80-like RDP and [TightVNC] is $0.

The method for looking at logs and whatnot is absurd— I was trying to troubleshoot a problem where my machine would go to sleep (good) and wake up 30s later (bad). It would do this all night and all day (really bad). I fired up Event Viewer or whatever it’s called and, of course, all of the logs are in XML, so they must be parsed! That’s ~3s where I sit there trying not to twitch.

Karmic Koala!

Aaand I’m also excited about Ubuntu 9.10. Maybe I just have a thing about operating systems? I use Ubuntu at work, and I really appreciate it in that context. I even took the step of using a fairly minimalist tiling window manager to maximize screen space and performance.

If this seems at odds with my affinity for Mac OS, you’re right. It doesn’t make sense to me, either.

I think I’m just fascinated with the idea of an OS that’s completely transparent. Everything is designed to be poked and prodded or used, from /proc to everything in /etc. The command line tools revolve around and interoperate using a simple building block: plain text! I think what it comes down to is that when there’s a real problem with my system, I want any fancy features to get out of my way— I want to get as close to the bottom as I can. Linux is good at that, which is part of the problem with it, of course.

I’m not sure when I’ll find time to install and use it. This is actually kind of a problem: I don’t have nearly enough monitors to install and run simultaneously some four-odd operating systems. Plus I’ve got to do the whole clean install thing for Win7 to do. And I figure in a month or two, I might be running an iMac as my main machine, meaning I’ll need to transfer over various media and miscellanea. Whee!

That’s all for now

I’m done geeking out now. Have a good night!

If you’ve tried to get IPython working on Mac OS X Leopard (that’d be 10.5, and 10.5.7 in particular) with an Intel based CPU, you’ve probably had some problems. I know I did! Let me cut to the chase, with a more technical explanation to follow. Oh, and some mild bitching, too.

I’m following the instructions I originally saw here, on IPython’s Launchpad site.  Yes, my instructions are merely a reprint of someone else’s bug report. More on that after I explain.

Quick instructions

I’m going to assume you haven’t downloaded anything, although if, like me, you wrestled with this for a while, you can still do these steps and it’ll work. It worked for me, anyway. :/

1. Download the .egg for readline, presumably the latest version. Get IPython if you haven’t already. As of this writing, you can get it here at the IPython download site. You can s/i386/fat/ if you like.
2. Copy it to a directory, such as ~/python.
3. You can try to install readline and IPython: sudo easy_install readline ipython. One or both will fail.
4. Open /usr/local/bin/ipython in your favorite text editor, and replace the contents of the file as described at the IPython Launchpad bug linked above. The key is to hardcode readline into the Python system path immediately after sys, and then to launch IPython explicitly.
5. Launch ipython.

You should be OK now, tabbing and all. If you haven’t checked this shit out, using IPython for your system shell, I highly recommend that you do. It’s none too shabby. There’s a book on this, too.

Technical stuff after the jump.

wtf, man

So, here’s the skinny. It took me an hour or two to figure this out, which is way too long. I’m writing this post so that hopefully I can nail some of the search terms that weren’t around when I looked for it on the Googles. I’m mentioning a whole bunch of keywords and specific stuff in the hopes that the next person who has this problem gets here or to the Launchpad site and manages to solve their problem.

Anyway, the technical background: IPython wants GNU’s readline library (tabbing!), but Mac OS X ships with libedit. If you somehow manage to get IPython to work, tabbing won’t because IPython is using libedit. It sucks and practically defeats the purpose of IPython. I had this working briefly, and then I broke it somehow. Whee!

You can download the readline egg and try to install it with easy_install. It will try to compile, then error out. In particular, it errors out on Modules/readline.c:681 a bunch of times. I’m not 100% sure why it does this, and I’m too lazy to remember/figure it out again. I think it’s trying to compile the readline lib specifically for Python and failing because of some mismatch. It sucks and it makes me sad inside.

When I tried to run IPython anyway, I got a bunch of errors about unable to find an entry point. I suspect this is some failure related to  easy_install, egg, or pkg_resources and readline being missing, although it’s vastly unintuitive if so. You’ll get an ImportError related to console_scripts and ipython. It’ll say entry point not found.

The fix appears to be skipping the egg, easy_install, pkg_resource shenanigans by explicitly adding readline to your path and then explicitly invoking IPython instead of giving something else a chance to error out. Sounds good to me!

readline + IPython + Fink?

I didn’t try doing anything with Fink. Fink does have both a version of IPython and readline, so it’s possible that Fink would be a better choice overall. Honestly, I’d try that before anything else. I was too stubborn to give up halfway through.

Of course, not having tried it, I don’t know that it’ll work. It’s gotta be less painful than the hackery above, though, right? Right? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?