I use Gmail for all my personal email, mainly for the spam filters and quick searching. I do sometimes miss the feeling of a desktop application for working with my email though. I also do a lot of website development in firefox, which gets bogged down with extenstions.
Enter Mailplane. At its core, it is a stripped down safari displaying Gmail, which makes it really fast to open. Toolbar buttons and hotkeys turn Gmail into a real application. Receive a new message and you are notified through Growl and with a count of new messages on the dock icon.

As well as the application “feel”, Mailplane has some features that can only be done with a desktop app:

• The screenshot feature opens grab with the selection tool active. Drag around what you want to email and it is captured and attached to the email as a JPG. No messing around with menus in grab.
• Multiple accounts are displayed in an account drawer on the side of the window, allowing for many, many accounts to be managed.
• iPhoto integration lets you browse through iPhoto and choose photos to send to Mailplane
• Even Google Talk is supported, and in a new window

The only drawback I’ve found so far is not being able to use greasymonkey hacks to customize the gmail interface. You can however create your own stylesheet for Gmail.

The program is currently in private beta and available only for Mac OS X, but I highly reccomend it.

Mailplane for OS X

I tried a few popular ones, NetNewsWire 3.0, NewsLife 1.0.1, and Newsfire 1.4 and decided on the last.

Newslife is too basic for me – can’t even navigate items very easily with the keyboard.

NetNewsWire is like one of those pocket knives that’s too thick to actually carry in your pocket. It has more options for viewing posts, searching, and even syncing to an online reader. I’m normally pretty demanding, but its starting to feel bloated. There comes a time when features should be optional via plugins.

Newsfire does all I need, including spotlight integration and easy keyboard navigation. The interface also fits in well with the iLife apps. It even has smart folders, which will be familiar to many iTunes users.

Flock has just released the next beta, based on Firefox 2.0. I’ve been testing it out for most of today and have to say the graphics don’t make up for the features advanced users are accustomed to. My grasp of Flock is integrating online services more with the browser, so I’ll start with the services I use:

News: Google Reader
Photos: Flickr
Media: YouTube
Favorites: Del.icio.us
Blog: Wordpress (self-hosted)
(I put everything online so I can access it everywhere)

Design
Sure, it looks pretty, but how does it work? It definitely captures the web 2.0 feel within the browser. The toolbars have a glossy appearance and the sidebars use thick gray and orange blocks. The Media Streams bar is a work of art in its self. Even the tabs looks better than other browsers.

The address bar expands on Firefox’s RSS feed icon and adds search engine and media detection icons, however they are always present and taking up space, unlike in Firefox.

On the left of the bookmarks toolbar is a tiny toolbar with tiny icons for the most important parts of the browser. It looks very slick, but I have to study the toolbar for a bit to figure out which one is which. I would have liked to be able to add these icons to the main toolbar.

Online Services
Adding online services you use is often as easy as signing into that service’s website, although this doesn’t always work and there is no obvious method to get around that – the sidebar just says to click and sign in. The only service I had a problem with was LiveJournal, which I added in the configuration options within the blog editor.

Search
I know the yahoo search integration with everything is to generate revenue, but couldn’t we at least choose between Yahoo or Google? Firefox gets money for every search using Google, why can’t Flock? If the site you’re looking for isn’t found, there’s a Yahoo search button, and only Yahoo. If you type a search term in the address bar and expect it to just go to the first search result, you’d be wrong. You are presented with a Yahoo search page. Even the ajax-style search in the search box right of the address bar is powered by Yahoo, although I think Yahoo has better web services. All of these Yahoo searches completely disregard the default search engine option.

Favorites
Two things I like about Flock’s favorites: there’s a wonderful feature in the small search box in the top right that not only searches the web as you type, but also your favorites and history, and it also keeps your online favorites in del.icio.us separate from favorites stored on your computer.

The previous version of Flock had limited del.icio.us integration – it let you tag and organize into collections which showed up in the toolbar. The new Flock is better, but can’t beat the plugin from Yahoo. When I click on favorites, all my del.icio.us tags are there with the bookmarks under the tags – problem is all tags are expanded (and I have a lot of tags). Doing a search narrows down the list but if a favorite has multiple tags, it will show up multiple times, making the list much longer than it needs to be. There also isn’t a way of sorting del.icio.us bookmarks by when they were added, which is a feature I use all the time.

Even the adding favorites pop-up has some issues. On a mac, the pop-up isn’t wide enough and I can barely see the “add” button which is cut off. There is also no tag suggestions like with the Yahoo plugin or the bookmarklet.

In Flock 0.7, I kept hoping they would allow the collections in the toolbar to use a tag in del.icio.us. That way I could add a bookmark at work and my toolbar at home would show that bookmark. The solution in Flock 0.9 is to remove del.icio.us from the toolbar altogether. Ok then.

News (RSS)
I have 110 feeds I monitor, and I like to organize those into folders like most people would. I don’t mind having to use folders instead of tags like the Google Reader I’m used to. I like the clean layout the news is presented in, and when the bugs are cleaned up, I might actually consider switching.

Folder organization has some bugs which I would hope are fixed before this leaves beta – mainly, folders don’t like to stay closed. They also implemented a cool feature that automatically marks items as read when you scroll past or read them, but that’s also buggy and misses items sometimes in 2-column view.

One thing I think they really need to add with this is a new posts filter. With the scrolling bug, I’ll go through everything and still have 20 items marked unread. Without a filter, I don’t know if its actually a new item or if it just neglected to mark it as I scrolled past.

Another thing that bugs me: you click on the news icon because there are new items. Then you click on a folder to see what’s new and instead of opening a new tab, it replaces the site you were browsing.

I do like the way the posts are displayed, but again, it needs some tweaking. A bold heading is the only sign an item is unread until you get to the bottom of it, and all images are resized whether you like it or not. I also had issues with some advertising script in every post of a feed – I’d be glad if it was hidden instead of 20 lines of code attached to every post.

Blogging
Blogging in Flock is so close to being good, but its limited to small personal blogs without the ability to categorize posts or set other options. I know its not supposed to take over for desktop blogging clients, but the Web Clipboard looks so useful for blogging. Think of it as “Blogging for dummies”. Drag the content you want to steal into the Web Clipboard, drag it into your post later, type “look what I made”, and click Publish.

Media
I love Flickr, and I love the Media Streams bar. It just keeps getting better now that YouTube is integrated with it. Its like a Web 2.0 filmstrip of goodness.

Turn on the advanced options and there’s even titles now, and dates the photos were uploaded. It keeps track of new content in your favorite “streams” so you know when your contacts post new photos and such. There’s even back/forward buttons for the media you browse, independent of the browser.

I just wish they hadn’t made one drop-down menu with everything in it. Its now an exercise in navigation to find a contact’s photos instead of just a drop-down like they had before.

The other thing is when you hover over a photo from a supported service, a flock tag appears so you can share the photo or view it in the MediaStream bar. This used to be a small icon in the bottom corner. Now its a massive icon which can make adding notes in Flickr difficult. Maybe there’s a hidden configuration option somewhere to just turn this thing off.

The photo uploader is still as great as it was in Flock 0.7, I actually use it over all other uploaders for Flickr.

Conclusion
For my needs, Flock looks pretty but doesn’t quite make it. The blogging component is very basic, the news sidebar needs some raid, and favorites doesn’t feel finished. As this is a beta, I was expecting some bugs, but I don’t quite feel comfortable with it yet. Flock 0.9 is perfect for the average user without many needs – the people who don’t want anything complicated. I’ll continue using Flock for browsing media and uploading to Flickr, but I’m back in Firefox for now.

With the release of “DRM-free” music on iTunes, people might feel compelled to share said music using torrents or other services. Before you do, you might like to know that your account information is embedded in every “DRM-free” file you download. This is obviously an anti-piracy move, with the goal of identifying and stopping the free music providers.

The idea behind DRM-free music was to allow you to take those files out of the Apple world and onto other devices you own (although they have to support AAC). The improved quality is said to be unnoticeable to the untrained ear.

As I live in a mac world right now, and I can’t discern much difference between 256 and 128-bit compression, I’ll continue to buy the $0.99 tracks. This move was also influenced by all the problems users are having trying to download these “plus” tracks – I couldn’t even preview one, whereas the DRM version played instantly.

Update: Check out JHymn to remove the personal information from iTunes plus music

Upgrades here in Canada cost $0.40/song, 30% of the album price, and $0.80/music video (We still don’t have access to tv shows or movies). Buying iTunes Plus songs without already owning it is $1.39 per song.

An iTunes Plus option allows you always see the higher-quality, drm-free version of a song when available.

Another new option is Complete My Album, where you receive credit for songs already purchased when buying an album.

With these new features, I’m noticing delays on the store as everyone flocks to the site to upgrade their music. I can’t even preview a “plus” song, but the old one previews fine.

More screenshots of the new iTunes

Via TUAW

Panic’s new app for the Mac called Coda is rapidly becoming my favorite environment for developing. I hate reading long paragraphs, so I’ll split this up…

Pros:

• Split a window up to 4 times horizontally or vertically, and different documents, previews, css files, terminals, and reference books in each pane.
• My newest favorite feature: a function index. Some php scripts can get very long, so it is great to have an index pane.
• Changes made to a site are tracked so you know which files were changed before uploading
• Edit remote files directly – great for fixing that typo before the client sees it
• The file browser is a real file browser where you can create folders, rename files, open with a specified app, etc.
• Its easy to forget all the possible css properties, so Coda organizes all the properties into groups and drop-downs. As a coder I prefer CSS Edit for CSS, and Coda even lets you right-click a file and edit in your favorite editor
• For the people who know *nix, there’s a built-in terminal for ssh connections
• The preview window uses WebKit and adds javascript and DOM inspectors
• Code hints as you type as well as syntax highlighting and code snippets – even shared editing over Bonjour.
• The trial only counts days you open the program – very nice!

Cons:

• Find and replace only works in the current document. There are times when I rename a folder and have to update all files with the new path, which currently cannot be done with Coda.
• The excellent reference manual requires an internet connection. Believe it or not, I don’t live online. I run a local web server to develop sometimes – the internet can be distracting.
• I’ve had issues with ftp uploading all files to the root folder of some web hosts, though a reply to my support request says this is fixed in 1.02 with a publish command.

Hints:

• If you’re used to coding in Dreamweaver like me, you may remember selecting a block of text and pressing tab to indent it all at once. In Coda, the shortcut is CMD-] to indent or CMD-[ to reverse it.
• Explore the menus and preferences for hidden options and features.

Take a look at the website for visuals and download.

http://amnesty.mesadynamics.com/GeneratorMac.html

I’ve always like the web for its interaction; the ability to make everything interactive. I’m not talking drag and drop, but more working with databases and such – the things we expect of desktop applications. Finally the ultimate “mashup” of technologies is in alpha and it allows web apps to behave like a desktop program.

One of the benefits of having a desktop program installed is interacting with the filesystem on your computer. Forget about the malicious side of that and think of the possibilities. One sample application called Maptacular will read vcard files (contacts) from your computer and plot them on Google Maps.

More sample applications include an RSS reader, a webpage structure analyser, and one that lets you draw over anything on your screen.

Adobe’s Mike Downey did a demo of an eBay-branded Apollo application. It showed a nice interface for browsing, integrated webcam support, and even creating auctions offline which are posted when you reconnect. [Watch it here]

One of the biggest benefits is there is only 1 browser to code for, which happens to be the same one used by Apple’s Safari, WebKit. Apollo will be supported on Windows and Mac, and behave the same on both, with Linux support coming a bit later. Web designers and developers are always struggling to get the site working in all major platform/browser combinations, but eliminates that problem, saving time and money.

My first thought is a CMS for client websites. Imagine giving the client a CD which just works. It doesn’t matter if they still have IE 6 or if they have a Mac.

For me and I’m sure many others, it will be fantastic to be able to create applications which don’t require learning more programming languages like C++ or Java. I could use just HTML and JavaScript, although flex looks to be well supported in Apollo.

Not only is this runtime going to be free, Adobe plans to contribute back to the WebKit open source project with any bug fixes and developments they can.

Now it is still in alpha, which means it could be changing before being released (first half of 2007), but you can find all the details and downloads at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/. After you’ve installed the runtime you can download some sample applications from http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:Applications:Samples.

Download and feature list
(Requires .NET Frameworks 2.0)

XML, for those that don’t know is basically a very flexible way of storing information, and is made to be easy for the machine to understand. XSL is a way of styling the XML so people can also understand the information.