d00dism

I’m a fan of Low End Mac’s Mac catalog. It’s a quick and easy way to go look up vital stats about old computers, such as when they were released, the original specifications, and the original price. I’ve settled many quibble’s using its information.

However, their other columns present sometimes out of date, and sometimes even wrong information. For example, Charles Moore often writes about the failure of IMAP. This goes back years, but let’s check out the latest installment.

Why am I not an IMAP fan? Guess I’ve spent too many years with slow Internet access and prefer to have my email archives on my hard drive and accessible without being online. Not many wireless hot spots in this neck of the (literal) woods, and with IMAP your messages remain on the central mail server, whereas POP downloads all messages in your inbox onto your computer where you can access them for reference whether you’re online or not.

I appreciate that IMAP can be a good choice for people who need to access email from multiple computers, but for my own accounts where that is more convenient, I use Gmail with POP access configured to leave the messages on the Gmail server, which seems to me the best of both worlds.

The entire argument centers on the idea that IMAP doesn’t allow for email reading and searching when you’re not online. That would be a great argument against its use in some cases (as it is for webmail) if it were true. It’s not.

The fact is that IMAP email clients for as long as I can remember have cached the contents of your IMAP account. Mail.app does it. Entourage does it. Thunderbird does it. There may have been cases in the long past when this was turned off by default, but I can’t remember the last time I had to check the “Cache my mail” option.

If you’ve ever watched Mail.app’s Activity Viewer when working with an IMAP account, you’ll notice it making a series of connections as it traverses your folder structure, downloading headers, and the message bodies of all your email. It writes them to your disk and from that point on, if you try to look at that email and you’re offline, it simply reads it from the disk.

It seems totally obvious if you take a moment to think about it. When you do a Spotlight search, it goes through all your email trying to find that phrase. Does it really seem practical or even possible (when accounting for speed) that it would be prodding a server for all that information every time you did a search? Of course not.

The fact is that there is no good reason to use POP over IMAP anymore. None. Well, that is unless you have a hankering to use Claris Emailer again.

The recent Firefox 3.6 update made me re-examine my add-ons as always. What struck me as odd was that Google Gears wasn’t compatible. Clearly that was a mistake. Google couldn’t possibly ignore the chosen browser of most of the tech elite.

It’s not totally ignored no. Indeed there’s a ticket for the problem. It has a Medium priority. Medium? Not working with Firefox isn’t that important?

That got me thinking. The last time I checked, the latest Safari in Snow Leopard wasn’t supported. Still true. Also has a Medium priority.

So, it’s not supported on Safari in Snow Leopard, the latest Firefox, or Chrome for Mac OS X. That leaves… nothing. No Snow Leopard support using the latest browsers.

There’s two conclusions. First, Google Gears isn’t a priority for Google. Second, Mac OS X support isn’t a priority for Google. Take your pick.

Edit: Turns out that I missed the Google announcement that Gears was effectively dead in favor of HTML5’s storage capability. While a move to a standard is good, nowhere on Google’s Gears site does it mention this fact. Indeed this fact probably makes all non-security Gears tickets a “WONT-FIX” but it’s very poorly being communicated and does nothing to address the fact that today’s sites with offline capabilities still use Gears.

In order to get any satisfaction as a Snow Leopard user, you’ll need to download Firefox 3.5.x. That’s a little backward.

Update: Finally, some kind of acknowledgement.

Something has been building steadily for a couple weeks now and I just can’t contain it anymore. After countless hours of reading though, the rage within me has reached the spilling level. I read nearly every Mac website I can find (via RSS). I can give non-Mac news sources a pass on this, but the rest of you should hang your heads in shame.

Macworld, as in Macworld Magazine and Macworld Expo, is spelled as I have it. Macworld Expo is like Mecca, but for Mac users. It’s the ultimate event in the Mac universe. Given that fact, why is it so god damned hard to spell it right?

I’ve noticed two groups are the worst offenders, or at least get under my skin the most: vendors sending out promotional emails and Mac news outlets and blogs. The two most common misspellings are MacWorld and Mac World. Let me tell you something guys, it’s your responsibility to at least be able to spell the name of the event.

The news sites/blogs are the worst because they act as authoritative sources about Mac culture and information. How am I supposed to take your predictions and prognostications seriously when you don’t even spell it right. No matter how hard I try to displace my thoughts, all those articles end up looking like:

At teh MacWorld expo I preedict the AWEsome iPhone!!11!!!!!11!!

So please, I beg of the Mac community: spell it right. Don’t look like an idiot. Don’t make us all look like idiots.

I’ve been using Gmail for most of my mailing lists. There’s a very good reason for this. It groups things into discussions beautifully. I also subscribe to several mailing lists that reside on the same server. For example, I subscribe to BBEdit Talk and Yojimbo Talk, both of which are run by Bare Bones (shocking, considering they develop them).

They don’t have a domain that’s dedicated to mailing lists, so the addresses are productname-talk@barebones.com. I’m also a compulsive filer, so I apply labels to these messages for quick manipulation. One label is “mailing lists”. Rather than map email “To:” each of these email addresses, I’ve been using the fact that filters work on a contains instead of match basis to simplify. For the longest time a filter that looked for “To: talk@barebones.com” worked perfectly. It’s suddenly stopped working. It’s now an exact match.

Dear Google,

Don’t change filter behavior without notifying your users and giving them an alternative method to attain the same functionality.

Thanks,
Derik

Here’s the wacky part. If you filter based upon an email string with nothing preceding the at sign, such as “@barebones.com”, the filter becomes a contain based filter. Ugh. Say it with me: inconsistent.

I was willing to cut Google some slack with their filters and the fact that it can’t filter based on arbitrary headers (like the list headers that most mailing lists slap on for easy filtering). It’s annoying, but something I could live with. Now the filters are essentially useless. Why? It’s not hard to implement powerful, flexible filters. As accurate and fast as their search is, I still want to organize my email to help prune. It makes the results more manageable. It’s almost as if Google is intentionally trying make its filters impotent to the point that users have to stop using it, at which point, Google can axe it completely.

While I’m going on and on about utility companies (because let’s face it, Verizon and Comcast are rapidly becoming nearly the same), how about I write up the experience I just had.

I don’t normally expect visitors on a Saturday unannounced. Further, I don’t get packages. When I got to my front door, it was a Comcast employee. He warmed up by asking if I had Verizon home phone service. Well, seeing as I don’t like getting taken advantage of, the answer is no. He then asked me if I had a home phone. It’s clear where he was going, so I played along. Yes, I have internet phone service (Vonage in particular). He guessed that it was Vonage.

He then told me that Comcast offered the same service, but with better quality. That could be, but I haven’t had any issues. He then told me that Vonage uses their pipes (that’s not a quote, I don’t remember the exact phrasing) and that they allowed that, but they could shut them off at any time. For $8/month more than what I’m currently paying, I’d get a phone line through them and I’d get digital cable with a free year of Starz and HBO.

If I dropped Vonage, I would save money. However, I like the portability of being able to bring my box anywhere with me. When I go to Macworld Expo in San Francisco next year, being able to bring my phone with me will be a big bonus. Plus, I plan on spending a good amount of time at my parents’ fancy new house in Maine. I can’t do that with Comcast.

I’m sure you’re brain is bubbling, or you may be even screaming. Why haven’t I said anything about Comcast basically telling me that they could shut off Vonage whenever they want? Well, that’s because I wanted to get the other stuff out of the way first.

Pay attention boys and girls: this is Net Neutrality hitting home. Comcast threatened to degrade my independent internet phone service to the point of being shutoff in order to promote their own service. That internet connection they supply is for my use and what I choose to do with it is my business. If I want to use Vonage, I can use Vonage. The day they lock me out of it is the day they lose me as a customer. It’s unacceptable.

However, I think it’s all bark. The real question is do I want to pay $8 for an extra phone line, digital cable, and some premium channels. I think I might.