communications

OK, mailing screenshots via MS Word attachments – …

OK, mailing screenshots via MS Word attachments – I am sort of used to it. Still hate it, but used to it. But inserting screenshots into MS Excel and emailing that is something out of this world. Seriously. Please stop!

Out of sync

Yesterday, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out if Crowd Favorite had yet released an update to the FavePersonal WordPress theme that I am using on this site. It’s been quite a while since I installed it, and I didn’t remember any mentions of newer versions coming out. After some searching across their website, I decided that there has been no update released yet.

Today, I see a notification in my WordPress administration interface of some updates available. Guess what? You are right. Indeed, a new version of the FavePersonal has been released today. But that’s not the end of my lack of sync.

I rush to the Crowd Favorite website once again, trying to find some kind of Changelog that would describe the changes that went into it. And once again I fail. Surprisingly, a company that does so many awesome things for bloggers, doesn’t have a blog on its own site.

Just as I am switching tabs away, getting slightly disappointed, I open up my Gmail and there is an email from Crowd Favorite with release announcement, changes, and all.

Now, if that is not me being out of sync, I don’t know what is.

P.S.: Please don’t take this post as bashing of Crowd Favorite. It is not. It’s just me ranting about timing issues. Crowd Favorite people and products are awesome.

Exclusive: Inside Hangouts, Google’s big fix for its messaging mess

How Google built its new messaging platform for Gmail, Android, iOS, and Chrome… and what took so long

Reinvent payphones

Via this Habrahabr post (in Russian), I’ve learned about a Reinvent payphones initiative, which I think is pretty cool. According to the article, the contract for provision of payphone services for the New York City expires in 2014. So the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has started the initiative to figure out what would be the best use for such a vast infrastructure (around 11,000 booths throughout the city). Some of the ideas are really cool, for example:

Free WiFi hotspot
Power socket for recharging mobile devices
Weather and air quality censors
Location and other information (“you are here”, places around, etc)
Ad-supported free services

Here are some of the project suggestions: beacon, NYFi, smart sidewalks. Also, read more here.

Proper email client

I had a brief discussion with a colleague at work today about email clients. Once again I had to say that I do miss Mutt. Gmail is pretty good, but it still lacking a lot of Mutt’s functionality. And that thing that Outlook and Web Outlook thing that they force us to use at work, is horrible, no matter what you compare it to.

As I was going through the things that I love in Mutt, I mentioned the threaded discussions and quoting. It was a bit difficult to describe the details, so I quickly searched for a screenshot. Here’s one.

Unlike grouped replies in MS Outlook and Gmail conversations, here you can clearly see which email is a reply to which email. Once you get into group discussions, with multiple participants dragging the conversation into different directions, this kind of discussion view becomes extremely useful.

And one other thing is about quoting. Gmail at least tries to be useful. MS Outlook is completely horrible in this department. It quotes full messages UNDER the replies. So if someone forwarded you an email with quotes from a long discussion, you’ll spend a day reading it. You’ll need to scroll to the bottom of the message, then scroll up a bit to read the first message in the discussion. Then scroll up to the second message, and scroll down while reading it. Then scroll up again to the third message, and scroll down while reading it, and so forth. I get dizzy just by thinking of that.

Mutt users are from a different culture though. (Truth be told, not only Mutt users – this culture comes from many years ago, from the times when bandwidth was expensive, rules were strict, and people respected each other’s time.) In the image above you can clearly see the part of the original email to which the reply was done, and all the other bits of the conversation necessary to understand the current state of discussion. In fact, the message above includes relevant details from four messages (!!!). And one look at it is enough to tell who wrote what and when.

Just that screenshot alone makes me want to go back. And, in fact, given how things have changes since my last thoughts on that, maybe I will. I won’t get rid of Gmail, since it is mighty convenient to have access from everywhere and good integration with even my mobile phone. I also can’t imagine the life without Gmail’s SPAM filter. But, maybe I can find some middle ground and configure Mutt on my hosting server to access Gmail via IMAP. I’ve done it before, I think it might be time to do it again.