As I look at the buzz over the soon to launch App Store for the iPhone, I have to wonder: Why is their so much buzz for building clients applications for a 3G phone?
Here’s my theory: While the development platform for building client applications for the iPhone has taken what’s possible in mobile software to a new level, there has also been a significant evolution in what can be done on the mobile web. The latter cuts into the value of the former.
Sketching it out, here is the trend I see:
Back in the day, people would pay quite a bit for really rudimentary software. But that was the only way to expand the functionality of their devices. However, as the web became easier to access due to a combination of better mobile browsers, more mobile friendly websites, and faster mobile bandwidth, the need for client applications has become less and less.
People are no longer standing in line at the grocery store playing Soduku on their phones. They’re checking headlines in their Google Reader mobile or iPhone edition, or CNN, or any number of things more valuable than the previously mindless distractions they paid to download and install.
Clearly, there are things that can be done in a client application that dwarf what can be done using a mobile browser, but is it enough to reverse the trend toward mobile web browsing? I doubt it.
This is a summary e-mail I sent yesterday to a few executives and friends who wanted my opinion on the new Apple announcements. I felt that the mobile blogging we did as well as the assessment after the keynote was enough, but after reading this I think there may be a few good tidbits and insight. This isn’t just a rehash of what happened, it is also sprinkled with a few of my opinions. Yes, I know it looks like a novel, but it really is a summary. Be glad I didn’t go in to detail! Enjoy.
Some cool stuff came out of Apple today.
No surprise but the iPhone 3G was announced. 8GB for $199 and 16GB for $299. To put that in perspective, the original pricepoint of the 8GB iPhone was $599 which was then very shortly cut to $399. So even the new high-end 3G phone is $100.00 less than the old 8GB iPhone. Awesome except that the price is subsidized. In the end this means that the special treatment that Apple got from AT&T is over. Dead. Gone. Oh Apple is still exclusive to AT&T in the U.S. though, but in part because there is no other good GSM carrier with a 3G network (Verizon and Sprint are CDMA and T-Mobile in the US has no good 3G which leaves AT&T). Apple almost needs AT&T more than AT&T needs Apple. Then again, how hard is it to really build a CDMA version? Sprint could use the help of the iPhone right about now and had better be pounding on Apple’s door.
Battery life seems to be OK, 5 hours on a 3G network connection which is a few hours more than what you can get with other devices today, but still no replaceable battery (doubt they will do that any time soon). Devices like the N95 can get better battery life with an extended battery, an option that is not available for the iPhone… yet… 24 hours of music playback, 7 hours of video playback, 10 hours of 2G access (EDGE), 10 hours talk time and 300 hours of standby time. Make sure to have a charger nearby if you’re going to be living on 3G. Consider investing in iPhone battery companies who find clever ways to add an additional battery to the iPhone without turning it in to a brick… Assuming we can find such a creature.
The iPhone 3G will be shipping July 11th (whaaaa?????) That means that Apple will have been out of inventory of the iPhone for 3 months before they had a product they can ship. This will hurt their sales over these last 3 months since no one (or at least hardly anyone) has been able to buy an iPhone for 2 months now and we STILL have to wait another month before we can get one.
The new iPhone 3G has an all plastic back which I believe will help with reception. I don’t think they talked about that in the keynote, but metal + radio signals = badness. This is actually a good thing and I’m excited that they decided to move to plastics.
There is an actual GPS chipset in there now which will get us much more accurate location information. More importantly it can track with you now, so it could be used for driving directions. When watching all of the 3rd party app demos that were up on stage, a vast majority of them had location awareness built in to their application in some way. Location aware devices and applications are the next big thing here. It’s gunna be HUGE! Watch this space closely, I believe this will be the next big leap in social networking and frankly mobile apps in general.
The iPhone 3G will be in 70 countries soon. By July 11th it will be in Canada for both English and French as well as the US. To see a full list of countries that Apple will be selling the iPhone in, go here: http://www.apple.com/iphone/countries/ This is one of the many reasons Apple went with GSM rather than CDMA and I highly doubt we’ll see them move any time soon (too bad for Sprint, but keep pounding on that door guys!)
You can watch the new iPhone ad here: http://www.apple.com/iphone/gallery/ads/hallway/
One thing that really sucks is that Apple no longer gets special treatment from AT&T. This means that the completely automated way that one could activate their phone is in essence dead. The iTunes activation feature was brilliant and I think was one of the three most forward looking aspects of the iPhone (the others being visual voicemail and multi-touch itself). One may still be able to activate via iTunes, but unlocking all features and getting the $199 advertised price will almost certainly require an AT&T or Apple rep of sorts. Stupid contract stuff no one likes to do. Imagine what the lines will look like when the iPhone 3G comes out and the headache one will have to go through to activate the iPhone with AT&T. One of things I really liked about the iPhone was the fact that I only had to deal with Apple who I knew would treat me right and I rarely if ever had to touch AT&T who I was pretty sure would do anything they could to screw me over. AT&T had better seriously step up their customer service or they are going to see a backlash and that could harm Apple in the long run as well.
MobileMe was announced. This is the refresh to the aging .Mac system. 20GB of online storage and basically a consumer version of Exchange. MobileMe offers push e-mail, contacts and calendar to all of your Macs, PCs and iPhones. In addition it has a very sexy AJAX powered web interface with e-mail, calendar, contacts, iDisk, etc. Make a change on any device and it will push to the cloud and back to the other devices. Make a change in the cloud and it will go back down to the computers and devices. Same price as the old .Mac system which is $99.00/yr and I assume they will still have a 5 user family pack at $150.00/yr. http://www.apple.com/mobileme/guidedtour/ has a fairly nice walkthrough. Yup, called this one the moment they announced Exchange support for the iPhone… I also predicted they will build many of the push services in to Mac OS X server, atop their own platforms. This has not happened yet but a new OS called Snow Leopard was announced and I assume there is an OS X Server equivalent of that as well. I expect to see push like services in Snow Leopard Server.
What DIDN’T happen today:
- No 32GB iPhone
- No iPhone (PRODUCT)RED
- No videoconferencing on the iPhone (awwww)
- No tablet device
What DID happen today:
- Microsoft wet themselves
- RIM wet themselves… twice…
- Palm just gave up
- Nokia still doesn’t care
We have a couple developers on the WWDC floor waiting to get in to the SteveNote this morning. These are the live updates they are able to provide.
11:49am PDT
Conference has ended
11:47am PDT
Rollout on July 11th at the same time across all countries they sell in. Will be sold in 70 countries in the next couple of months.
11:45am PDT
iPhone 3G will sell for $199.00 for the 8GB version. $299.00 for the 16GB model.
11:38am PDT
300 hours or standby talk time. 10 hour talk time in 2.5G. 5 hours of 3G talk time as compared to 3 hours for competitors. 7 hours of video playback and 24 hours of audio playback time.
Also includes GPS support. ACTUAL GPS support via built in chipset. Now they can do tracking.
11:36am PDT
3G iPhone is 36% faster than the Nokia N95 and the Treo 750 with better rendering. iPhone WiFi took 17 seconds to load a page and 21 seconds using 3G. 3G is approaching WiFi speeds on mobile devices.
11:33am PDT
All plastic back. Same 3.5″ display. Flush headphone jack. 3G support.
11:30am PDT
What is needed to take the iPhone to more countries
1 - 3G
2 - Enterprise support
3 - Third Party Apps
4 - Sell iPhone in more countries
5 - More affordable
iPhone 3G is announced. Taking it to the next level.
11:30am PDT
It is almost the 1yr birthday for the iPhone. 90% customer satisfaction. 98% are mobile browsing. 94% are using e-mail. 90% are using SMS. 80% are using 10 or more features. 6MM iPhones sold in the first year.
11:27am PDT
Mobile Me is $99/yr that includes 20GB of online storage. What about .Mac? Mobile Me replaces .Mac. You can continue to use .Mac services and .Mac address, but will be automatically upgraded to Mobile Me.
11:18am PDT
Drag and drop web based e-mail. Contact search available. Start typing in letters and as you type real-time results appear. Drag and drop calendar to move meetings around. Everything is kept in sync with the iPhone. Create a contact on the iPhone and it synced with Mobile Me in about a second. Works the other way too. Create a calendar event on Mobile Me and it will push down to the phone. Happened in about a second there too.
11:14am PDT
Mobile Me has a set of Web 2.0 tools built on the latest AJAX technology. Me.com is the web front end (not live yet). Keeps everything in sync, pictures, documents, everything.
11:14am PDT
Phil Schiller is coming up to talk about Mobile Me. It’s like having Exchange for the rest of us. Not all of us use Exchange server, but we would like to have synced contacts, calendar and e-mail. Updated wherever you are. Mobile Me stores your info in the cloud. You can get to it anywhere: Mac, PC or iPhone. Pushes info up and down keeping everything in sync. Works over-the-air.
11:12am PDT
An enterprise can authorize a set of iPhones and install apps on just those iphones. A way to add custom enterprise grade apps to iPhones without needing to distribute through app store.
11:10am PDT
Developers keep 70% of revenues. Apple verifies the apps to ensure they are secure. If developers want to give them away for free there is no charge whatsoever. Now going to be in 62 countries. If your app is 10MB or less the user can download it over Cellular, WiFi or iTunes. If it is larger than 10MB then it can only be downloaded on WiFi or iTunes.
11:08am PDT
2.0 update will be free for iPhone users and $9.99 to iPod Touch users in early July.
11:05am PDT
Steve is back and talking new features in the SDK
1 - Contact Search
2 - iWork Document Support
3 - Office Document support, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Also added bulk delete and move. Also the ability to save images available in e-mail to your image gallery. Scientific calculator. Added parental controls… Teenagers may not like this 
Added a lot of language support.
11:00am PDT
Scott Forstal is back. 1 feature requested is background notifications. Need to get alerts even when the application is not running. The wrong solution is to allow background processes, or to allow an app to continue to run even after a user thinks they have quit. This is bad due to battery life and performance. They are going to have a push notification service available to all developers. There will be a persisted IP connected maintained between the Phone and 3rd party server. You can push 3 types of notifications: Custom Alert Sounds, Texutal and Badges… It all works over the air WiFi and Cellular. This will be available in September. That’s the SDK update.
10:54am PDT
Xavier Carrillo from Digital Legends in Barcelona, Spain only started on the iPhone SDK 2 weeks ago. They are brand new to this platform. Built a 3D adventure game in 4 days from the Mac. Will be fully ready in September.
10:54am PDT
Mark Cain from MIMvista is now showing medical imaging software that a doctor can have on their iPhone. They can analyze and provide opinions from the golf course. Very active use of the touch screen. Full control over the medical images, contract, slice control, etc. They have taken a complex desktop application and placed it in the place of the hand of doctors and patients.
10:51am PDT
Dr. S. Mark Williams from Modality is up next. This is medical learning software. They used the iPhone SDK to create an app that is more portable and powerful than flash cards. Has a quiz mode that prompt the user to find things and gives immediate feedback. Designed for effective learning outside the classroom. They are also announcing that they have have a dozen apps available at the release of the 2.0 software and many more by the end of the year.
10:48am PDT
Jeremy Schoenherr from MLB.com is showing off MLB.com for iPhone… You can see who is on base, who is batting, pitching, etc. They took advantage of the iPhone media player to take advantage of real-time highlights. They create QT Reference movies on the fly to ensure you get the best experience, either on EDGE or WiFi.
10:46am PDT
Mark Terry is a solo developer from England who has written an app called Band. A music creation application. Crowd loved this one! Very fun.
10:42am PDT
Brian Greenstone from Pangea Software. They have ported 2 games from Mac OS X. Showing off CPU intensive games. They like the CPU in the iPhone. First game is Enigmo and the second is Cro-Mag Ralley which is a 3d racing game. They use the accelerometer on the iPhone as the controller.
10:39am PDT
Benjamin Mosse from AP is demoing Mobile News Net. Location based news. Location based services seem to be huge here! Get your local news based on your location. You can also watch breaking video from their news network. Community contributed news now available from the iPhone. All developed in a “few weeks”. They are already working on more exciting ideas.
10:36am PDT
Michael Sippey from TypePad is up next. Mobile Blogging on the iPhone. Upload pictures or add to your blog posts.
10:34am PDT
Sam Altman from Loopt is a location-aware social networking app that is working with Virtual Earth for mapping. Interesting since Google Maps are what is built in to the device naively. This app will be free on the iPhone.
10:30am PDT
Ken Sun from eBay is up next. Showing off auctions from the iPhone via a native eBay app. They decided to create the app 5 weeks ago. Has easy access to search, summary of activities and watching items. Buyers and sellers can easily see who is winning or losing. Bidding is of course available as well. App will be free.
10:27am PDT
Developers invited up to stage to show off the apps they have created. Sega is up first with Super Monkey Ball. Created 110 stages in 8 weeks as well as all 4 of the classic monkeys. App will be $9.99.
10:21am PDT
Scott Forstal is showing how to build an application called Nearby Friends. It will use the location APIs and AddressBook APIs to find all of your friends that are within a 10 mile radius.
10:15am PDT
SDK presentation from Scott Forstal
Rehashing what we learned at the iPhone SDK event… iPhone is based on OS X, share APIs, etc., etc., etc.
10:10am PDT
There have been 250k downloads of the SDK so far
There are 25k paid developers
Snow Leopard
iPhone 2.0
35% of fortune 500 companies participated in beta of iPhone 2.0
Top 5 banks as well
Video Stream Available
And because you simply can’t stop social media, we now have a live video stream available from inside the hall, brought to us by Yahoo! Live.
Audio Stream Available
Our engineers have lost Internet connection, but the wonderful people behind Ustream.tv and iPhone Alley have made an audio stream of the keynote available. Enjoy!
9:36am CDT
Question of the day: what’s faster EDGE or WWDC WiFi?
8:55am PDT
WWDC swag: laptop bag and a t-shirt. Come on Apple, you can do better! (I have no doubt this engineer wants a free iPhone, HA!)
8:34am PDT
MacBook pro $2,000… iPhone $400… WWDC pass $1300. Standing in line for 4 hours to see Steve - priceless.
8:30am PDT
Lose badge, go home. Attendee badges are not replacable. All information (with the exception of the Keynote) is confidential. Apparently we agreed to an NDA when we signed up.
8:28am PDT
First windows notebook spotted.
8:26am PDT
Live from Apple’s WWDC 2008. Waiting in line for the keynote. The line that spanned 3 city blocks started forming some time around 12am of this morning. Overall everyone is very civilized. Very little line cutting so far, but we have seen some sprinters on open spaces.
7:10am PDT
The line to enter the keynote started in the wee hours of the morning and is now over 3 city blocks long!
The MacBook Air is one thin computer. That’s the selling point. Apple has done an impressive job associating thinness with coolness since the launch of the laptop.
But could Apple’s “You can’t be too thin.” campaign be extrapolated by young women into apply to things other than computers, such as their own bodies?
That’s what one woman from the Eating Disorders Institute in St. Louis Park, Minnesota is concerned about following the launch of the MacBook Air, according to a report by Christina Capecchi at MinnPost.com:
Apple’s ‘Thinnovation’ marketing strategy — and Air itself — troubling to some
[Shannon McCartney-Simper] can’t help but consider the parallels between ultrathin computers and people who are striving to be ultrathin. “These laptops are really thin and portable — almost like you can hide them,” she said. “And then you take that to another level, and you think of how women so often want to hide their bodies.”
Perhaps, “You can’t be too thin.” was a poor slogan choice, but how exactly are you supposed to market a product that is differentiated by its thinness without discussing how cool the thinness is?
Personally, I chalk this one up to “unintended consequences.”
The MacBook Air is one thin computer. That’s the selling point. Apple has done an impressive job associating thinness with coolness since the launch of the laptop.
But could Apple’s “You can’t be too thin.” campaign be extrapolated by young women into apply to things other than computers, such as their own bodies?
That’s what one woman from the Eating Disorders Institute in St. Louis Park, Minnesota is concerned about following the launch of the MacBook Air, according to a report by Christina Capecchi at MinnPost.com:
Apple’s ‘Thinnovation’ marketing strategy — and Air itself — troubling to some
[Shannon McCartney-Simper] can’t help but consider the parallels between ultrathin computers and people who are striving to be ultrathin. “These laptops are really thin and portable — almost like you can hide them,” she said. “And then you take that to another level, and you think of how women so often want to hide their bodies.”
Perhaps, “You can’t be too thin.” was a poor slogan choice, but how exactly are you supposed to market a product that is differentiated by its thinness without discussing how cool the thinness is?
Personally, I chalk this one up to “unintended consequences.”
I’m extremely flustered with e-mail right now. When it comes to options for retrieving e-mail we have POP3 protocol or IMAP4 protocol. POP3 is basically one way and only works with the inbox and only the inbox. You can grab the messages from the inbox but if you have 4 computers you can’t keep them in sync. Read a message on computer 1 and computer 2 has no idea if you have read the message. IMAP aims to fix this by keeping all messages not only on the server but also keeps the flags for each of these messages in sync. Computer 1 reads a message and computer 2, 3 and 4 all show that message as read. Reply to a message and all computers show that the message was replied to and have a copy of the reply so you can access it anywhere. Sounds great, right?
WRONG!
The IMAP protocol itself is pretty good although it is missing commands like ‘move’ but these problems are easily overcome. The biggest problem with IMAP are the clients available. Finding a good e-mail client that not only supports mail but also calendar and contacts is darned near impossible for Windows and while easier for the Mac it is still missing features. Frankly whatever client I go with should be cross-platform so I can use whatever computer I want.
Lets look at Windows first. I have a couple of options here for e-mail but as soon as I want to organize my life it becomes much more difficult. Outlook 2003/2007 has all the features I want but Microsoft has severely crippled IMAP. If I want a global inbox of my mail messages which also has my calendar and contact data I can’t do it. I have to have a completely different PST file for those objects and they show in ‘Personal Folders’ while my IMAP data is in a completely different area. While PSTs offer more than 2GB now they only do so for POP3 and MAPI, not for IMAP. When you want to delete or move a message it won’t actually process the commands on the server like you would expect, instead it merely changes the flag and copies the message. You have to purge the mailbox if you want to get rid of the messages with lines through them or hide messages marked for deletion. All in all it is possible to get a system moderately working, but in the end it is a royal pain that only a true techie would endure. Clearly Microsoft wants to sell more Exchange servers (MAPI) and does not care about IMAP at all. End result: I won’t be buying MS Office any time soon.
Thunderbird is another option although the future of the project is a bit unknown. The problem with Thunderbird is that the UI is a bit unpolished, still no global inbox, and the calendar plugin Lightning which is based on Sunbird is really not ready for release. While there is contact support it is really, really weak. Want to sync your Thunderbird contacts to your iPhone? I have yet to find a good way though there are posts that try and outline methods that may help. Thunderbird is a good work in progress, assuming it will still move forward, but still nowhere near a good polished e-mail client. Sunbird and Lightning are even further off in terms of a complete project and it is just not ready for prime time yet. My calendar, contacts and e-mail should be seamlessly linked (not necessarily one application but definitely linked together) with a well polished, consumer friendly interface. Thunderbird/Lightning/Sunbird are great for the uber techies but don’t help push IMAP forward. I am being a bit harsh when it comes to the UI, but I guess my biggest gripe here comes in the form of the calender and contacts which simply don’t sync anywhere. I know, I know, this post is about IMAP but lets be real. The total package matters.
On the Macintosh there is Mail.app linked to Address Book linked to iCal. iCal leaves a lot to be desired but the UI is nice and it is a lot closer to a real product than Sunbird/Lightning. While I wish iCal had more power, it is a releaseable product. Mail.app is by far the best IMAP client I have seen and with Leopard it seems to work really nice with my IMAP Idle system. I can’t seem to unsubscribe from my ‘All Mail’ in my GMail inbox which means that I end up with a bunch of dupes since I use my GMail Apps account to backup my mail. A lot of Outlook attachments won’t come though correctly but all in all those are my only two huge complaints. I do have a global inbox or a separate inbox for each account depending on how I want to view my mail. This means I can look at all of the mail across all of my accounts at the same time to get a eagle eye view of my messages, or I can click on the specific inbox and see only messages sent to that specific account. Really simple concept that Microsoft, Mozilla and others do not seem to understand. I can set any mailbox as any object that I want such as junk mail, sent items, drafts and have these be local to my computer or on the server so that all clients can access them. Again, really simple concept but something that Mozilla makes more painful than it need to be and something Microsoft just refuses to implement. All in all Mail.app is the best e-mail client I have ever used, even with its quirks. There are add-ons that extend functionality and help fix a few things which are nice. This is nice if you have a Macintosh, but I also have a Windows system or two. What do I use for them?
The iPhone is a different story. What should be a painfully simple thing is much too hard to do, actually impossible. Things like subscribing to folders is simply not possible. If you have a server side rule that places all mail from your parents into an associated folder it is not possible to see those messages unless you first click on the folder on the iPhone. Then and only then will the iPhone connect to the server and attempt to actually retrieve any new messages. If you have an e-mail organization system that does anything other than grabbing items from the inbox it will fail with IMAP on the iPhone. Want to BCC someone? Nope. Want to attach more than 1 picture? Nope. The benefit of the iPhone e-mail is that I can actually read and fully reply to the messages unlike other devices like Windows Mobile or Palm where I can barely read the messages that come through unless that are plain text with no attachments or anything.
So here we have a protocol with great potential and everyone seems to be screwing it up. If Mozilla really wanted to steal marketshare from Microsoft they would throw some great UI designers and new developers at the Thunderbird and Sunbird projects to give them a swift kick in the pants. Don’t just accept that what we have today is good enough, push for a system that is usable and allows me to check for mail on any device and keep them all in sync. Why limit this to e-mail? I should be able to keep my e-mail, calendar and contacts in sync all via the cloud. Exchange does this but only if you stay inside of a Microsoft certified environment. That is silly. I don’t want to run Exchange. I don’t want to be tied to Microsoft. I don’t hate them but I also don’t like their clients. Entourage for Mac is pretty nasty, Outlook for PC is nice unless I want to use it on anything other than Windows. I don’t understand why this is so hard for anyone to do.
Where is my IMAP client that is easy and sexy enough for consumers to use with calendar, contacts and e-mail sync?
If you’re running IMAP on Windows or simply using IMAP to share your mail across multiple platforms and multiple devices with calendar and contact support, what are you using? How do you make it work? Is there a client I should be looking at that I’m missing?
EDIT: Fixed PSD to PST. No more Photoshop work while typing
I’m extremely flustered with e-mail right now. When it comes to options for retrieving e-mail we have POP3 protocol or IMAP4 protocol. POP3 is basically one way and only works with the inbox and only the inbox. You can grab the messages from the inbox but if you have 4 computers you can’t keep them in sync. Read a message on computer 1 and computer 2 has no idea if you have read the message. IMAP aims to fix this by keeping all messages not only on the server but also keeps the flags for each of these messages in sync. Computer 1 reads a message and computer 2, 3 and 4 all show that message as read. Reply to a message and all computers show that the message was replied to and have a copy of the reply so you can access it anywhere. Sounds great, right?
WRONG!
The IMAP protocol itself is pretty good although it is missing commands like ‘move’ but these problems are easily overcome. The biggest problem with IMAP are the clients available. Finding a good e-mail client that not only supports mail but also calendar and contacts is darned near impossible for Windows and while easier for the Mac it is still missing features. Frankly whatever client I go with should be cross-platform so I can use whatever computer I want.
Lets look at Windows first. I have a couple of options here for e-mail but as soon as I want to organize my life it becomes much more difficult. Outlook 2003/2007 has all the features I want but Microsoft has severely crippled IMAP. If I want a global inbox of my mail messages which also has my calendar and contact data I can’t do it. I have to have a completely different PST file for those objects and they show in ‘Personal Folders’ while my IMAP data is in a completely different area. While PSTs offer more than 2GB now they only do so for POP3 and MAPI, not for IMAP. When you want to delete or move a message it won’t actually process the commands on the server like you would expect, instead it merely changes the flag and copies the message. You have to purge the mailbox if you want to get rid of the messages with lines through them or hide messages marked for deletion. All in all it is possible to get a system moderately working, but in the end it is a royal pain that only a true techie would endure. Clearly Microsoft wants to sell more Exchange servers (MAPI) and does not care about IMAP at all. End result: I won’t be buying MS Office any time soon.
Thunderbird is another option although the future of the project is a bit unknown. The problem with Thunderbird is that the UI is a bit unpolished, still no global inbox, and the calendar plugin Lightning which is based on Sunbird is really not ready for release. While there is contact support it is really, really weak. Want to sync your Thunderbird contacts to your iPhone? I have yet to find a good way though there are posts that try and outline methods that may help. Thunderbird is a good work in progress, assuming it will still move forward, but still nowhere near a good polished e-mail client. Sunbird and Lightning are even further off in terms of a complete project and it is just not ready for prime time yet. My calendar, contacts and e-mail should be seamlessly linked (not necessarily one application but definitely linked together) with a well polished, consumer friendly interface. Thunderbird/Lightning/Sunbird are great for the uber techies but don’t help push IMAP forward. I am being a bit harsh when it comes to the UI, but I guess my biggest gripe here comes in the form of the calender and contacts which simply don’t sync anywhere. I know, I know, this post is about IMAP but lets be real. The total package matters.
On the Macintosh there is Mail.app linked to Address Book linked to iCal. iCal leaves a lot to be desired but the UI is nice and it is a lot closer to a real product than Sunbird/Lightning. While I wish iCal had more power, it is a releaseable product. Mail.app is by far the best IMAP client I have seen and with Leopard it seems to work really nice with my IMAP Idle system. I can’t seem to unsubscribe from my ‘All Mail’ in my GMail inbox which means that I end up with a bunch of dupes since I use my GMail Apps account to backup my mail. A lot of Outlook attachments won’t come though correctly but all in all those are my only two huge complaints. I do have a global inbox or a separate inbox for each account depending on how I want to view my mail. This means I can look at all of the mail across all of my accounts at the same time to get a eagle eye view of my messages, or I can click on the specific inbox and see only messages sent to that specific account. Really simple concept that Microsoft, Mozilla and others do not seem to understand. I can set any mailbox as any object that I want such as junk mail, sent items, drafts and have these be local to my computer or on the server so that all clients can access them. Again, really simple concept but something that Mozilla makes more painful than it need to be and something Microsoft just refuses to implement. All in all Mail.app is the best e-mail client I have ever used, even with its quirks. There are add-ons that extend functionality and help fix a few things which are nice. This is nice if you have a Macintosh, but I also have a Windows system or two. What do I use for them?
The iPhone is a different story. What should be a painfully simple thing is much too hard to do, actually impossible. Things like subscribing to folders is simply not possible. If you have a server side rule that places all mail from your parents into an associated folder it is not possible to see those messages unless you first click on the folder on the iPhone. Then and only then will the iPhone connect to the server and attempt to actually retrieve any new messages. If you have an e-mail organization system that does anything other than grabbing items from the inbox it will fail with IMAP on the iPhone. Want to BCC someone? Nope. Want to attach more than 1 picture? Nope. The benefit of the iPhone e-mail is that I can actually read and fully reply to the messages unlike other devices like Windows Mobile or Palm where I can barely read the messages that come through unless that are plain text with no attachments or anything.
So here we have a protocol with great potential and everyone seems to be screwing it up. If Mozilla really wanted to steal marketshare from Microsoft they would throw some great UI designers and new developers at the Thunderbird and Sunbird projects to give them a swift kick in the pants. Don’t just accept that what we have today is good enough, push for a system that is usable and allows me to check for mail on any device and keep them all in sync. Why limit this to e-mail? I should be able to keep my e-mail, calendar and contacts in sync all via the cloud. Exchange does this but only if you stay inside of a Microsoft certified environment. That is silly. I don’t want to run Exchange. I don’t want to be tied to Microsoft. I don’t hate them but I also don’t like their clients. Entourage for Mac is pretty nasty, Outlook for PC is nice unless I want to use it on anything other than Windows. I don’t understand why this is so hard for anyone to do.
Where is my IMAP client that is easy and sexy enough for consumers to use with calendar, contacts and e-mail sync?
If you’re running IMAP on Windows or simply using IMAP to share your mail across multiple platforms and multiple devices with calendar and contact support, what are you using? How do you make it work? Is there a client I should be looking at that I’m missing?
EDIT: Fixed PSD to PST. No more Photoshop work while typing
A couple days ago I wrote about Apple TV Take 2 and how it might very well kill BluRay (in my world HD-DVD is all but dead due to recent announcements). Alex wrote in the comments that we won’t see anything take over the HD market until broadband speeds up quite a bit. As I thought about it Alex was both right and wrong.
Assuming 90 minutes at 4Mbps we’re looking at a 2.5GB file. Can you imagine moving 2.5GB down your current broadband connection and not pulling out your hair? I can’t. The servers on Apple’s side (Akamai I assume) need to be able to take a great deal of load if the service gets popular with little to no slowdowns on their side. My local ISP has to be able to take the traffic and not slow down at all (which is doubtful since I have a feeling that my local Comcast over subscribed their network). There are a lot of pieces controlled by a lot of people that have to fall in to place just to get a video that will start quickly and not stutter if it’s in a progressive download mode. And even then we’re looking at a much lower quality video than what I can get on BluRay.
I own a 1080p HDTV and the best Apple TV can output is 720p (for those who argue 1080i is better please see here). I accept that in favor of not having to drive in the -40 degree weather here in Minnesota. You know, the kind of cold that seeps through windows, causes cars to not start and is deadly if you’re out in it to long. I want to be able to download movies, podcasts and television shows right then and there in the comfort of my 72 degree home. Why do I need a round shiny disc to play video? That’s so 90’s! The answer may be as simple and bandwidth. If I don’t have enough bandwidth for a smooth experience, I’ll end right back up on discs.
We won’t know for sure how Apple TV Take 2 performs until Apple releases the software update in the wild. I hope it works well with quick access to video start times, easy skipping around the media and decent file management. I also hope that telcos start realizing that investing in their Internet infrastructure will help them in the long run, not hurt them. Bandwidth rich applications push people to order more bandwidth, not QoS enabled bandwidth. Maybe someday they will understand this. Maybe the Apple TV will work as expected. Maybe it will all miserably fail. The future of Apple TV is, unfortunately, in the hands of the ISPs. I eagerly await my Apple TV update and hope that in it I see the death of BluRay.
Last summer, Apple figured out how to put a computer in a phone. Yet they haven’t yet figured out how to put a phone in a computer.
Jeffrey McManus’ post on what he’d like to see from Apple resonated with me on this topic:
Fake Steve Twittering Real Steve
I don’t need a smaller screen and a smaller hard drive, I need a bigger hard drive, 3G wireless everywhere for a fixed rate of $20 a month, and more battery life. And more memory. And a pony.
Other than the pony, I think he’s on to something.
If they really wanted to trick things out, how about throwing not one, but TWO phones into the laptop? One unlocked GSM and one CDMA. That way I can pick the best network based on where I live, or be in a position to get networks to compete for my data service.
I realize that’s crazy talk since it would cut into any contract benefits Apple would receive from offering an exclusive with one carrier. Yet it’s a seriously killer feature that would change laptop computing.
Last summer, Apple figured out how to put a computer in a phone. Yet they haven’t yet figured out how to put a phone in a computer.
Jeffrey McManus’ post on what he’d like to see from Apple resonated with me on this topic:
Fake Steve Twittering Real Steve
I don’t need a smaller screen and a smaller hard drive, I need a bigger hard drive, 3G wireless everywhere for a fixed rate of $20 a month, and more battery life. And more memory. And a pony.
Other than the pony, I think he’s on to something.
If they really wanted to trick things out, how about throwing not one, but TWO phones into the laptop? One unlocked GSM and one CDMA. That way I can pick the best network based on where I live, or be in a position to get networks to compete for my data service.
I realize that’s crazy talk since it would cut into any contract benefits Apple would receive from offering an exclusive with one carrier. Yet it’s a seriously killer feature that would change laptop computing.
Recent Comments