TaoSpace

Inevitable...

It was bound to happen: A band that uses the record-company's tactics against them.
Marillion has managed to "resurrect" itself by employing promotors and pluggers themselves. Result? Airtime for their new single for the first time in years and a number 7 position in the charts.

...Oh yeah...and they also pocket all the proceeds instead of the usual pithy royals with cash deducted for all the record-company's costs as explained here by Courtney Love.

My guess is that the first company to offer completely independent a la carte services like this to musicians at a reasonable price will do very well indeed.

Putting real thunder into the bird

The mozilla visual identity team has released the design for Thunderbird's new icon. Like the previous icon for Firebird it looks great, as does the new Pinstripe theme for Thunderbird.

All this effort has ensured that Thunderbird looks great, but unfortunately it is still only average email client. Specifically Thunderbird is average in terms of reinventing the way people deal with email. Basically there is no real difference between TB and Mozilla Mail in the way email is presented and managed. Sure it is faster and smaller, but that's not enough.

Look at some of the other contenders in the email field:
Outlook 2003
Has virtual folders populated with those emails that match a certain query, like all email from Dave about gardening sent last year.

It also has a 3 column, but done better then TB's. The list of emails in a folder takes up way less horizontal space because it divides the information about an email over two lines. TB's version takes up too much space making this feature hard/unpractical to use, even on a wide-screen Powerbook.

Opera's M2
Built into the Opera browser. Also has virtual folders.

Apple Mail
OK, Mac only, but still. Has very nice email thread handling and can filter the email list on the content of the entire message, not just Subject or Sender like TB.

Zoë
Although not meant for sending email it is one of the best ways of managing email. Its searching and linking features are second to none at the moment.

Remail
Although not generally available IBM's research platform comes up with some interesting new ideas and concepts, like annotation, thread-visualization, etc.

Note I did not mention junk-mail detection. Although the Thunderbird site mentions this as a "killer-feature", everyone has it these days.

Based on this, how could we improve Thunderbird?

Some ideas:

• Incorporate a search-engine (CLucene?) to index all email. Preferably including attachments (nothing fancy, just strip the strings from any attachment and index them). This should allow for things like searching/filtering the email-stream based on full content of the mail as well as virtual foldering.
  
• Add tabbed mailing. Firebird has tabbed browsing, why not have tabbed mailing in TB? Alt-click on a mail to open it in a new tab. Put new mails the user is writing in a tab as well, so you don't need zillions of windows if you don't want them.
  
• Copy Outlook 2003's 3 column view, including the way it organizes emails in sections: "Today", "Yesterday", "Last week". Allow for other ways of sectioning too: By sender for instance.
  
• Add annotation support. Although the current "label" function does something similar it could be improved by the use of icons and of easier ways to add them to emails. Right now it is buried in menus.
  
• Put in linking features as Zoe has. While reading an email from Dave I should be able to see all mails from him with one click. Same for all mails from him to the same group of people as the mail I'm reading. Or all mails involving all the people this mail refers to (including the ones I sent out). One should be able to do similar things around dates instead of people.
  

I'm sure there are other features that could be included. Maybe somebody will read this (yeah right!) and use it to start a discussion. Whether or not one agrees with the points mentioned here is irrelevant. The discussion about the future of Thunderbird needs to happen anyway...if it wants to be at the forefront of email innovation and stay there that is.

Wireless Woes

There's an AirPort card in my Powerbook. There's a wireless card in a PC laptop. The Mac is connected to the internet via ethernet. Sharing that connection through Airport should be easy right?

Not so. Setting up the Mac side of things seems easy. Just use "sharing" in the system preferences and use the internet tab to set from to "built-in ethernet" and to to "AirPort". Click the AirPort options button and set a network-name and WEP encryption keys.
Press "start" and presto! One shared internet connection.

The PC laptop instantly detects the AirPort network and tries to connect. It will ask for the WEP key and giving that it comes back claiming to have a connection. You'd think this would do it.

Na-ah. Browsing doesn't work. Pinging something doesn't work either.
Trying "ipconfig /all" in a command-box shows that Windows has autoconfigured the IP address of the card to some weird IP address. Note that this is not a DHCP address given out by the Mac, as you would expect. This is self-assigned, as can also be evidenced from the fact that there is no gateway set up. In other words, the "physical layer" is there (the two wireless cards are connected, like an ethernet cable linking two computers) but the network protocol layer (both computers acknowledging eachothers existance and having the ability to send packets across) isn't.

I tried all sort of combinations of settings. Tried disabling encryption. Tried releasing the DHCP lease on the PC side. Tried giving both wireless cards fixed ip addresses on the same network segment and setting the gateway of the PC to be the Mac. Tried slamming the two laptops together to see if they would generate sparks in utter frustration...well almost.

This is pathetic. The problem is compounded further because of the fact that I have no idea what side is to blame. Mac or PC. I even tried switching the whole thing around, i.e. hooking the PC laptop up via ethernet and sharing that connection via wireless. No dice. The PC doesn't even have an option to create a new wireless network! It only seems to be able to join existing networks.

Documentation on both sides is scarce to say the least. The Apple documentation just has a terse description which basically mirrors what I said about setting up connection sharing on the Mac above. Nothing about what kind of settings the computer making use of the shared link should have. On the PC it is even worse. There is no documentation under XP about how to set up these kind of networks. Looking at documentation on how to share between several PC via wireless just shows a stylized picture of a home with several PCs connected via wireless. Even if that picture is what I want to achieve, how the hell do I do it. The answer is found elsewhere: "Connect to a wireless network to get online" (or words to that efect). Gee! How helpful.

Good to see...

Oliver is back from holiday in Dubai. What is extraordinary about this (besides the mind-blowing decadency of it :-)), is that he managed not to blog at all for the entire duration.

Perhaps blog-o-mania isn't as crack-like as one would have thought.
This strikes a blow for getting out and away from the computer! For experiencing the great outdoors! For giving that significant other some much needed attention! For the notion that geeks too can be well-adjusted individuals!

Or perhaps he just cheated...

What Google is up to

OSNews.com posted a link to a very interesting article about Google. It argues that Google is basically building a web-scale operating system for everyone to use.
It can do this because of the scale it already has. Anyone else would have a serious problem matching any of this, as doing so from scratch would be prohibitively expensive.

This also explains why Microsoft has "declared war" on Google. Like the browser-war with Netscape before this is about "owning" a new platform (that could replace the desktop as we know it), not being the largest provider of a certain "service" or even getting ad-revenue from that service (Microsoft doesn't particularly need the advertising revenue).

Also note that Oliver Thylmann's post (from January) already touches on this, albeit from a different perspective.

New Photos

Check out the new photos in Fiat Lux.

In-laws

Had my three brothers-in-law from Norway over for the weekend.

We found lots of cool places to go in Amsterdam and spent a truck-load of money. Boom Chicago was excellent and is highly recommended.

Did Batavia and was very impressed with the whole thing. Just don't try and visit the nearby city (Lelystad) however. It makes Alexanderplatz look cozy.

Also met my friend Erwin and discussed some interesting ideas for a new editor. Perhaps more about this soon.

Overall I took some 150 photos and kept less then 50. I'll put some on Fiat Lux soon.

Situated Software

As the whole blogging world probably knows by now (Do they?) Clay Shirky has written a piece on what he calls Situated Software.
The premise is basically a software analogue to the Chaordic movement. Natural growth versus planned execution. The community versus the rest of the world. Small is good.

It is also something me and my friends have discussed many times and a principle that I continue to try and apply to my everyday work.
Putting something together quickly and for a small community of people is often better then speccing out something huge that is supposed to be useful to everyone.

In the company I work for the result of the latter is painfully evident. Although we sell document management and workflow solutions to large corporations and government we do not have any internal information system like that to speak of. Tired of waiting for a formal company-wide solution, I'm now working on getting a standard enterprise search-engine up and running on our intranet as well as a Wiki. Neither of which are products sold or implemented by my company.

I am however pretty sure that the above two tools will work just fine because they are likely to solve 90% of our current needs. Sure our sister offices in other parts of the world won't have direct access, but if that is needed email will do fine aswell.

More hidden features

Keep getting surprised by the amount of hidden features in MacOS X.
Just found another one. Alt-clicking on a folder in list-mode opens up that folder and all of its children, so you can see the entire sub-tree at once.

Add that to this (already impressive) list.

Spatiality

Reading through the GNOME 2.6 preview at Ars Technica it seems the spatial desktop debate is heating up again. This is because the new Nautilus desktop in GNOME 2.6 defaults to a spatial way of viewing.

As is often the case with these kinds of debates there is a my-OS-is-better-than-yours discussion behind it. In this case the spatial-lovers are Mac-heads (because that is the way MacOS 9 worked) and the browse-lovers are in the Windows camp.

The spatial idea in a nutshell is that every folder has its own window, complete with size, position, column-settings, color etc. This means next time I open that folder the (new) window appears exactly the way I left it last time.

In the browsing metaphor there is only one window that gets reused by every folder you open. The folder you open replaces the folder you were looking at.

There are of course pros and cons to both approaches and it is hard to decide which is best. The fact GNOME switched from a browse- to a spatial metaphor whereas MacOS switched from being spatial in version 9 to a browse metaphor in X bears testament to this.

Personally I'm not sure. I'll happily use either, although at the moment I'm using MacOS X's (hidden) spatial mode. Anybody who has not tried this (especially those weird people still using MacOS 9) should do this right now. Just click the lozenge-shape button at the top-right of a finder window and you'll get spatiality back. You can change the view mode in the menu (Icon, list, columns) and you can change backgrounds etc. using "Show view options" (Before sure to select "This window only"!), although that only works for Icon-mode.

Alt-clicking on a folder will close the current window before opening a new one, thus preventing clutter. Apple+Arrow-Up gives opens the parent window or selects it when it is open already. Ditto for Apple+Arrow-down, that selects the child folder.

So far I'm quite happy with it. The lack of metal-chrome also seems to make everything a bit snappier, but that might just be my imagination.