Critiquing Apple’s Mail & iCal
Posted by clark in Commentary, Mail on 2010/03/08
MacApper has a critique of Apple’s Mail. A few of their points are good. While Mail supports HTML stationary it’s simply too hard to add your own. (I’ve not encountered the attachment problem, but then I rarely use stationary myself since HTML doesn’t always render properly in other email clients) Several of the other problems are due to how limited iCal and Address Book are.
Realistically many people want something far more robust. I’d say 90% of my practical complaints of OSX reduce to iCal and Address Book being too limited.
Programming the iPad
Posted by clark in Commentary, iPhone on 2010/03/01
No, not writing formal apps. I mean interactive languages like Basic, Python, Ruby or even Logo. Ignore the Code had a good post on this.
Macworld has an article on Apple’s shareholder meeting. Macworld reports that a shareholder asked Apple about «a simple programming language on the iPad». Strangely, Steve Jobs is quoted as saying «Something like HyperCard on the iPad? Yes, but someone would have to create it». I’m not sure where the misunderstanding is, but clearly, if somebody built something like HyperCard for the iPad, Apple would not approve it. Apple’s App Store rules do not allow apps which interpret code. One example for such a rejection is BasicMatrix, a BASIC interpreter for the iPhone.
In my opinion, this restriction makes the iPad problematic for usage in schools. Basic programming courses are an important part of a proper education. Programming helps kids understand how computers work, it helps them to understand logic, and it’s also incredibly empowering. What’s more, being able to write Excel macros or simple AppleScripts is a useful skill, regardless of what these kids eventually end up doing with their lives. Schools won’t be able to use iPads for such a course unless Apple changes this rule.
iPhone and Background Apps
Posted by clark in Commentary, iPhone on 2010/02/26
First, let’s call them Background Apps rather than multitasking. As everyone knows the iPhone multitasks just fine and all the Apple applications multitask. Apple’s just restricted the ability for regular apps to be able to do this. Clearly there are some important uses for this. Primarily 3rd party music and IM styled applications. This frustrates users. The only other advantage is quicker start up time which can be an issue when switching between say 1Password and Safari. (Although 1Password has its own browser to get around this issue somewhat)
Google gets credit for having Background Apps but from what I understand this is misleading. (Important caveat: I’ve not developed for Android so this is all thirdhand from friends who have) The solution Google offers is pretty smart and I’d lay really high odds we’ll see something similar from Apple at WWDC in June. Basically Google allows an app to schedule background processes that run in the background but kills the main process when it is not running. I’m not sure how or if it is kept in memory. I’ve heard stories both ways, but given the small amount of memory in all Android phones I’m pretty skeptical they even could keep applications in memory. There has to be virtual memory swapping going on. But being kept in virtual memory is still better than being restarted.
Displaying a SalesForce Contact’s Emails in Mail
Posted by clark in Applescript, Automation, Mail, Python, SalesForce on 2010/02/23
When I’m looking at a lead or contact though it would be nice to see a list of all our emails back and forth at a glance. The following script does that by creating a smart mailbox for the email address of the currently viewed lead or contact.
While I wrote this to access SalesForce it would be trivial to modify this to use a different source, such as Address Book.
Limits with Applescript and Mail
Posted by clark in Applescript, Automation, Mail on 2010/02/22
So I spent a big chunk of Friday night trying to write a script that would bring up emails for the current lead I was looking at in SalesForce. However I quickly ran up against some pretty serious limits in Mail’s Applescript support. Specifically there isn’t scripting of Smart Mailboxes (which are really just saved Spotlight searches).
Now you can try and hack around this using mdfind from the shell. You’ll be able to find the actual email files and tell Mail to open them. They’ll open fine. You’ll think that you can then get the relevant information from them so you can create a useful list. However you’ll then discover the Mail offers no way to get the message associated with a window.
This is a real big limit. Ideally what you would want to do is create and select smart mailboxes on the fly.
Thoughts on SalesForce
Posted by clark in SalesForce on 2010/02/19
I’ve been using SalesForce.com along with one of our employees for a few weeks now. I really like it. As I mentioned I prefer it to the stand alone Mac apps I’ve used. (Primarily Daylight and Contactizer Pro) Surprisingly while both those programs offered nice Address Book and Calendar integration they just were confusing to use. (Daylight especially) I was actually about to buy Contactizer Pro, as my CRM of choice when my business partner announced he’d purchased a license for SalesForce.com. His concerns were pretty valid. He used a PC and thus didn’t want me to use a Mac-only program. Further he wanted to be able to access the sales info from his iPhone while on the road. That pretty well left Zoho CRM or SalesForce — in terms of the programs I’d used.
We’d been using Zoho CRM a bit with our prior salesperson but he didn’t utilize it as much as I’d have liked. I found SalesForce to be superior to Zoho in a few ways — primarily UI. (I really like SalesForce’s “ToDo” window) Although honestly they are very similar. For low use I think Zoho CRM is the better choice. SalesForce.com has a solid API though. Right now we’re using the “el cheapo” version though. Since we were restructuring sales going with SalesForce was an easy choice and offers more expansion in the future.
All that said, there are a few complaints folks ought be aware of.
Microsoft’s Interfaces
Posted by clark in Commentary on 2010/02/17
Great post at And Now It’s All This on Microsoft’s text-like interfaces. I’m withholding judgment on Windows Mobile 7 until it’s released. The Zune actually wasn’t all that bad – probably the best alternative to the iPod honestly. But I think the above really captures well what’s wrong with Microsoft’s thinking. That said they’ve been moving away from it on Windows. (See Office’s ribbon for instance) So we’ll see what ships.
Overall what’s been the problem with most phones coming after Apple is that there is so much to do. Apple had three iterations of the iPhone to really get a compelling product (IMO – it wasn’t until that third iteration that it even had cut and paste!). The problem is that other vendors have to compete not against the steps Apple went through but the iPhone of this summer.
This has been a big problem for most vendors.
On Supporting Snow Leopard
Posted by clark in Commentary on 2010/02/15
Interesting letter up at Inessential. Roughly it is the argument that developers should drop support for older versions of the OS and go Snow Leopard only so as to take advantage of the many new features. I’ve heard this argument many times but there are issues.
For one, many people still do run Leopard or even Tiger. You have to know your market. Since Apple dropped support for PPC with Snow Leopard people on those machines (which really aren’t that old) are stuck with Leopard. I have a dual 2.5 G5 sitting here beside me that we use quite a bit. While I run and love Snow Leopard and hope to eventually replace that machine with a Mac Mini, the reality is that this single machine would hold me back from upgrading to software that is SL only. Simply because I need our workflow to run on all our machines.
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Patents
Posted by clark in Commentary on 2010/03/10
There’s a good discussion of software patents at ignore the code. I’d second most of what he says, but there’s an other point I heard brought up at Econ Talk. (I think it was this podcast, but I honestly can’t recall for sure) The point there was that originally any device dealt with one or rarely two or three patents. But the typical modern device has hundreds of patents and it’s almost impossible to track down all the patents and sign contracts.
If the government is going to allow patent protection to these ideas then it has to provide the resources to easily deal with the patents modern equipment has to navigate. If (as is the case) the government isn’t willing to make it possible for small businesses to deal with patents then it simply has no right to award them.
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