The Infinite Forum (or The Freeforall or Guten Tag )

The specifics of the forum structure would be these:

• There would be no mandatory “forum categories” per se. Or, if there were they would only be organized according to some politeness schema (like age appropriateness, potential offensiveness level) or maybe along lines of preferred language spoken.

• In place of standard topical categories each post would be defined by a unique identifier and a set of tags. These tags would take the place of standard forum categories. This is the centerpiece of this system, the cornerstone around which the rest of the forum software is generally organized.

• New Posts — When a person starts a new post (unrelated to a previous post) they must apply at least one tag to the post, though multiple tags could be applied as the poster sees fit. A list of suggested tags might be provided (and related or sub-tags suggested when a given tag is chosen). When someone starts typing in a tag a list of commonly used tags containing those letters will pop up (somewhat like the bookmark utility from Furl.com), and one of these tags may be chosen or the user may continue to type in their own unique tag.

• Lists and “clouds” of tags would be available helping indicate popular tags, or tags often used in conjunction with other tags, or tags frequently used by the specific user.

• Reply Posts — By default all replies to a post get tagged with the unique identifier of the post they are responding to and with all the tags of the posts they are responding to. Any tags can be added or deleted by it’s creator until the post is locked. To preserve continuity of posting chains posts may be deleted but they will still leave an empty place-holder connecting prior posts to those further down the chain.

• Each post also would contain a posting date, a “last edited” date, and would be “locked” after a certain period of time (maybe a couple weeks). After locking additional material could be added to the end of the post but no content could be deleted without moderator intervention. This is done to preserve material for historical reference and prevent infinite revision of posts which could cause later posts in a chain to appear as if they were responding to text that no longer exists. The allowance of additions after locking is to allow for things like the author realizing awful mistakes at a later date or pointing out replacements to links in their original post which no longer function properly.

• Posts can be displayed in either a tree structure or in simple chronological order. Filters in the search engine can be used to narrow down queries to specific dates, specific tags (or combinations of tags), or any other relevant piece of information; also the search should be able to find “all except” specific tags, dates, etc.

• Of course people will want to be able to do “open” queries (without tags) for specific post contents. These will be allowed but might be given low processor priority since (I assume) they involve a lot of crunching on the part of the server’s processor.

Challenges

• Moderation — As Vulcan said in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen “Oh, we cater to all types here.” So in a forum with this philosophy the challenge arises: What needs to be policed and what doesn’t?

• Objections — There should be some way to flag posts as inappropriate or in need of editing. The reasons I can see might include: Rude (but marked as polite), inaccurate tags (could be considered subjective), age inappropriate as compared to markings, criminal activity (blackmail, sharing of someone’s personal information, child porn, etc.). Other reasons for objection might also exist, though they don’t come to mind at the moment.

• Processing power — In my understanding one of the biggest problems with maintaining forums is that as they grow in size people start searching them more and more frequently for the contents of old posts. In the case of at least one forum I was a member of this actually led to the forum crashing on a relatively frequent basis. I’m not really an expert on these sorts of technical details. My only solutions would be to get some sort of superior/efficient search algorithms and/or throw additional processor power at the issue. But I have a feeling these solutions are probably a bit short-sighted and there may be other aspects to consider. I wonder if there’s any way some of the work could be farmed out to distributed computers (like the protein folding or SETI projects)? Doesn’t exactly seem like the type of thing that would work since forum queries are typically expected to yield real-time results, not get processed in bulk packs. And who wants to install a piece of software just to search a forum? Still, all those wasted processor cycles out there, it’d be interesting to figure out how to harness them to take a little pressure off servers.

• Interest vs. ability — I want this thing to exist, however my programming skills are pretty much nil. Any entrepreneurs and web developers interested in taking up the challenge?

“Protozoic has always given me plenty of love. Maybe they’d have some insight into this whole issue.”

So here’s the project at hand:

We have this old Gateway 2150 laptop that we never used for about 5 years due to the fact that it ran really slowly compared to our newer computers, and had a tendency to crash even when operating standard Windows 98 applications.

Also the battery doesn’t seem to recharge.

And also the fan didn’t seem to come on ever.

But this year I decided I’d try resuscitating the thing. I only plan to use it for word-processing, a little e-mail checking on occasion, possibly to learn linux.

I assumed by this point any parts necessary to fix it would probably be available cheap. And for the most part that seems to be the case. All except the replacement battery which is still generally about $100+.

The road to recovery seems to have quite a few bumps along the way, especially for a guy like me who barely knows the inside of his computer from a toaster oven. So I take wild guesses.

When I noticed that the fan didn’t seem to be activating ever I thought maybe the thing was getting overheated as a result, thus causing all the other problems. So I started to take it apart. Instructions here were pretty helpful, but didn’t mention the fact that the cooling fan is wedged so far in the back corner that you need to unscrew the two halves of the machine to get it out.

But I finally got the whole machine apart and took the fan out. Then I fiddled uselessly with the fan a bit, put it back in, turned on the computer and it still didn’t work. A couple days later I put the fan back in again and suddenly it works!

But now that I’ve taken the thing apart and put it back together a couple times there’s a new problem:

When I start up Windows it runs fine for a maximum of 5 minutes and then spontaneously switches off like the power has been cut. This seems to happen whether I start it in regular Windows mode, in safe mode, or using a linux CD. Also, after a few more minutes, the battery light goes off as well (though the computer is plugged into the wall).

I’ve tried the following:

1) Checked for loose connections, but couldn’t find any obvious ones (ie. the wires connecting the motherboard to things in the upper half of the case seem secure).

2) Different batteries. I have the thing’s old battery and also a used battery bought cheap (as is). Neither seem to remedy the problem. Note that for years the thing would run even with a dead battery as long as it was plugged in.

3) Started it with the battery removed. In this case it seems to try going into hibernation during the disk-error-check portion of startup, but tapping a key wakes it up again. Then at some point it does a hard shutdown anyway.

4) Removing and reseating the CPU. This had no effect.

5) Starting it with or without the CD Rom installed. Again, no effect.

So… any ideas on what the problem of the day might be? Or how to remedy it? Or where I might even begin to look for a solution?

All help is certainly appreciated.

But let me take a step back from this issue for a moment and digress heavily.

A couple weeks ago She Dragon dragged me to the Boston Museum of Science to see the new Star Wars (tm) exibhits. That was fine and all (though the Millenium Falcon ride was sort of a rip-off), then afterward we toured the rest of the museum which She hadn’t seen yet.

Somewhere near the electricity demonstration that they had a computer lab set up with different programs for kids: games, simulations, and the like. And among these programs we stumbled over a little something to win my heart: GollyGee Blocks.

Golly Gee Blocks is basically a very simple CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) program for kids. Though not very useful for precise design it renders a variety of three dimensional shapes quickly and intuitively. In this capacity it’s also a cheap substitute CAD program for those like myself who are too cheap to buy a real CAD program/never took a CAD class/wouldn’t know what CAD program to even look for.

She Dragon promptly bought me a copy for Christmas, and in her typical flair for gift giving couldn’t wait until the holiday to disperse it. Thus I can provide a couple 3D diagrams to help render a few thoughts on the subject of sofas.

Here are two different perspectives of the same scene:

The Knight standing at the table (standing inside a chair) represents Jonathan while the winged girl represents Cecily. The flock of birds represents Cecily’s path as she runs around the back of the room, past the window, in through the door, throws the mail on the table, and continues on through the room and to her final destination behind the sofa where she ducks down to hide in that little pocket between the arm of the sofa and the corner of the room.

Alternately, for a more acrobatic maneuver Cecily could clamber onto the sofa cushions and sort of jump or tumble over the arm of the chair like so:

Either way though she ends up in the pocket between the sofa and the wall. Conveniently, while “hidden” from the door and window in this location Cecily would be clearly visable to the audience (camera) and in a position where she’s facing across the room toward Jonathan at the table as she peeks over the sofa arm.

Although I’m not sure exactly what space you’d be working with here and how the perspectives would be. Or maybe I just misunderstood your conundrum altogether.

• You use OS X 10.4 — mandatory since this stuff uses Automator.
• You use Adobe DNG (version 3.2) — not mandatory, but you have to take out the dng conversion steps.
• You want your photos stored in a date hierarchy, specifically /yy/mmddyy/yyyymmdd-xxxx.dng. The xxxx is the original number from the raw file. As an example, a photo taken on Aug. 11th, 2005 would be stored in /05/081105/20050811–2927.dng.
• I use a Canon Digital Rebel, so the naming conventions are CRW_xxxx.CRW, CRW_xxxx.THM, and IMG_xxxx.JPG

I started using DNG quite a while ago. Now that the DNG converter application has command line functionality and the ability to embed full sized previews, I couldn’t be happier. I’m not professional, so take my opinions with a grain of salt, but I am fully satisfied with my photos in DNG.¹

I keep my photos organized in the fashion denoted above. I have a “Photography” folder in my “Pictures” folder. Underneath “Photography” resides “DNG”, which is where all my DNG files reside in the date hierarchy. It looks like this:

The first feature of my workflow is a Folder Action that automatically sorts photos into the appropriate year (yy) and day (mmddyy) folder in the hierarchy. If the required folders don’t exist, they are created. If the file doesn’t fit the “yyyymmdd-xxxx.dng” naming scheme, it is left alone. In my Folder Action (named “Sort to Date”), one could easily change the extension checking by adding more extensions to the extensionList property. In order to sort by different naming schemes, a bit more script hacking is required.

A folder named “Raw” also resides in the “Photography” folder. Here I keep the raw files until I burn 1 DVD backup. I typically keep them in in the xxxCANON folders found on the flash card. There is another Folder Action (named “Sort Raw Photos”) attached to the “Raw” folder that examines the raw file name and sticks it in the appropriate xxxCANON folder (ex. CRW_3214.CRW and CRW_3214.THM would both go into the “132CANON” folder).

At this point, if you manually copy files off of your flash card, manually run them through the DNG converter, and manually rename them in the above naming scheme, at the very least, you can use the two Folder Action to help you sort your photos automatically. Here’s where it starts to get a bit more complicated.

I use Unix every day as a graduate student, so I have no fear of the command line. The next tool in my tool box is the excellent ExifTool. ExifTool is a Perl module/command line application that reads and modifies EXIF, IPTC, XMP, and a whole bunch of other acronyms. It also reads a bunch of file formats. It’s also quick; I use it to rename my DNG files to my date scheme. I have a short perl script does this (ex. CRW_3214.dng -> 20050814_3214.dng). My script only reads files that are in the “Temp” directory under “Photography”. This is very easy to change if you want to store this directory somewhere else. I have this set as the output directory of the DNG converter.

The final piece that glues this all together is Image Capture and an Automator workflow that I wrote. This workflow is diagrammed in the image below. Basically, Image Capture downloads images off your compact flash card into a directory of your choosing. I send them to “Photography/Temp/DownloadFolder”. Once they’re there, Automator picks up the files and does the following:

• Gets all the CRW files (easily changed in the workflow).
• Sends them to the DNG command line converter (set to compressed — lossless, preserve raw image, don’t embed original, and full sized preview).
• Tells exirename.pl script uses ExifTool to rename the dng files to yyyymmdd-xxxx.dng.
• Drops pictures into the “DNG” directory, where the “Sort to Date” Folder Action takes over and sorts them into the appropriate folder.
• At the end, the files in the “Temp/Download” folder are moved to the “Photography/Raw” folder where the “Sort Raw Photos” that puts these files into appropriate folders.

At this point, all of my photos have been downloaded, converted to dng, renamed, and stored in my photo directory without any extra effort. Additionally, the original raw photos are stored in another directory ready to be backed up. Everything can be downloaded here.

¹ My backup routine is 1 working copy on my laptop hard drive, 1 hard drive backup, 2 DVD backups of the DNG files, and finally 1 DVD backup of the original raw files.

Mac’s have been on PowerPC chips since the early 90’s. Prior to that, they ran on 68000 chips from Motorola. The PowerPC chip architecture was a joint Apple, Motorola, and IBM venture. Motorola was the main supplier of chips for Apple until the late 90’s, when they began to have problems with chip yield and in boosting the operating frequency of the cpu’s, namely the G4. At this point, IBM was brought in to start developing the next step processor, the G5, which is a derivative of IBM’s Power cpu’s.

Even though the future looked bright with the G5 and IBM, in the past year, there have been significant delays and problems with G5 production, and I guess Apple finally decided to switch to Intel chips.

I’m not going to comment much on it, since there are much better writers who said more interesting things yesterday, but I do want to make a couple quick points.

1. I agree with what many others have said about the Mac platform losing something with this transition. The PowerPC chip did set it apart from Intel–land, but ultimately, I use the computer as a whole, not just the cpu. I’d much rather have an Apple Intel computer than a Dell PowerPC computer.¹

2. As far as Apple shooting themselves in the foot sales-wise since people will hold off on machine purchases (who is going to buy a new mac now — why not wait?), this has always gone on in the world of Apple. Heck, I waited 6 months before buying my laptop because I wanted the new design Powerbook which was “rumored” to be coming. Sure, they might have some slow quarters, but with the way iPod sales have been going, I’m sure they will survive.

3. I think its great that Mac OS X is portable enough that it can run on 2 chip architectures. I hope this is something that isn’t lost. I also think it speaks highly of Apple that they’ve transitioned from one chip architecture to another, navigated a massive change from OS 9 to OS X, and they’re going to do the chip thing again.

Ultimately, I look for a couple things in my computing experience, and these things have kept me on a Mac, and will most likely continue to.

1. Menu bar at the top of the screen, not at the top of each window.
2. BBEdit
3. Unix command line (new addition with OS X)
4. Launchbar (OS X)
5. The Omnigroup (OS X)
6. General ease of use (this has certainly evened out with Microsoft in the last 5–6 years).

I want my next computer to run OS X. Who cares what chip is in it?

¹ I guess it’s kind of like an RX-8 and an S2000. The fact that the RX-8 has a rotary engine certainly is cool, especially since it goes to 9000 RPM. The tech nerd in me can appreciate the fact that while 99% of cars on the road use piston engines, here is a car that uses something different and as a result, is able to do something pretty impressive. Of course, the S2000 engine isn’t a rotary, goes to 9000 RPM, and gets better mileage. If my goal is to use the oddball technology, then I’d go with the RX-8, but if it’s to have a car that I can abuse the engine up to 9k on the tach, then maybe the S2000 is a better idea with it’s superior mileage. For me, I just want OS X.

The primary motivation for this script is to let me sync my to do list to my phone, which only syncs through iCal. I’m sure others might find other uses for it. If you like it, have a suggestion, etc., leave a comment or send an email.

Here is the “Readme” out of the script:

This has not been tested with OmniOutliner. I would imagine if you are using OmniOutliner, just remove the “Professional” from the tell application lines.

Hopefully this script will export all types of outlines. The ideal outline would have 4 columns, the main being “To Do”, with 3 additional columns of “Date”, “Priority”, and “Category”. “Date” should be a date type column, while the other two should be popups.

The values I used for the priority popup is in the first line of the script: “Very Important”, “Important”, “Not Important”, “None”. This corresponds to the priority levels displayed by iCal.

Values used for the Category column are left up to the end user. If a Category is not set, the item is placed in the “Misc” calendar in iCal — I like the ring of that more than “Unfiled”. iCal calendars will be created for category values in which there is no corresponding iCal calendar.

Outlines that have multiple levels will get exported to a flat listing as follows:

• First
  • Two
    • Three
• Four

will get exported as two todo items, “First: Two: Three” and “First: Four”. Hope this works for you.

I’m sure this script could be prettied up a bit. I will leave that for others to do. Please feel free to change, modify, and customize this script. It would be great to hear back from you if do.

My prefered web browser, Opera, for its speed, low system resources and customability, turned me on to mouse gestures (a system which Mozilla subsequently copied). Mouse gestures are mouse movements, including clicks, wheel rolls and drags, that allow quick access to functions normally without having to use a keyboard (also useful for those who have trouble using a keyboard). According to Wikipedia, Mac actually invented the first mouse gesture, the drag and drop. Since then, it’s been all Opera for pushing the bill and popularizing it. I can go forward, back, reload, stop, change/close/open new browsing tabs, open link in new tab, etc., including things I’m not even aware of yet. This is to the point that, thanks to Opera’s configurability, I don’t even have a browsing toolbar. No arrows, stop signs or anything, because I wouldn’t use any of it; the gestures are simply quicker and more convenient.

Back to the point, while watching the movie I thought how cool it would be to interface my system like I do my web browser. Actually, it’s a common habit of browser gesture users to try to navigate Windows like they do their web browser, and just end up openning a drop-down menu instead of doing something else. But, again, this technology is already here. StrokeIt is a pretty powerful Win app that puts gestures into your OS, but goes from application to application, so it doesn’t interfere with gestures in programs you already have. Some gestures are pretty arbitrary, but it also incorporates Graffiti, that Palm OS way of writing letters with a stylus. It can do anything a hotkey can, which is apparently alot, with just a flick of the wrist. I didn’t even know there was a hotkey that could close MDI windows, or windows within windows. Anyway, I’m using and customizing it already, but I’m just scratching the surface, so I don’t have too much to say at the moment.

You Mac-ies should look into what kind of gesture software is available.

Also, yes, I have tried the voice commands thing, like I mentioned above, with a program called Dragon. While, according to a co-worker who worked with people with physical impairments, it supposedly works great. She says that some un-impaired people use it to dictate papers instead of having to type them. Though, I didn’t find that kind of ease of use to warrant me using it over a keyboard.

My big gripe is with Adobe Photoshop. I purchased Photoshop 7 the other year. PS is not a cheap program ($650 to non educational users). There was one update to 7.0.1 in August of 2002. There have been some minor plugin updates to the program, but the meat of the program was not touched for more than a year. Then version CS came out. Thats it. To upgrade would cost me $169. This is a professional program made by a company that is apparently intent on selling a product and getting you to pay $170 every year to stay current, with no hope of minor feature additions with out paying. CS has been on the market for over a year with out any updates. I suppose that means that CS 2 will be out soon. Adobe Illustrator is the same way.

Lets take a look at Apple. They do it right and they do it wrong. Final Cut Pro seems to get it right.

Version 4 came out and had some amazing new features. There were some bugs. Versions 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 came out a couple of months later and fixed some bugs and added some performance. v4.1 came out and added some new features, followed by v4.1.1 that fixed some bugs. A year after v4 was orginally released, v4.5 HD was made available for free and gave a whole slew of new features, one of which was support for HD video. At no point during this process did the end user have to spend a dime on his software other than the original cost it took to get into version 4 of the software.

I bought Final Cut Express about a year and a half ago when I got my new computer. I got version 1. I dutifully updated to version 1.0.1 that fixed some bugs. That was it, even though FCE 1.0.1 had some serious bugs that were acknowledged by Apple. It was on the market for 11 months with no bug fixes, only to be superseded by FCE 2. In the three months following this release, v2.0.2 and v2.0.3 came out and fixed some bugs. I’ve not used v2.x at all, so I don’t know if there are any more outstanding bugs in it, but v3 was just announced, so v2.x can be considered as dead.

BareBones gets it right. Sure, some complain that the software is over priced. BBEdit is expensive for what is ultimately a text editor, and who would pay the price of Mailsmith when there are so many free email programs around? Almost every update, even a little bitty x.0.1 update has bug fixes and (minor) feature addtions. There are frequently large updates that that add/fix a whole bunch at once, not the BBEdit software is buggy to begin with; it is in fact quite the opposite. You get a lot for your money here. Never mind that you can get a special competitive updgrade price on most of their software, usually using a free program as the one you are updgrading from. This means that BareBones software is cheaper than it looks at first glance.

On to their “consumer” version of BBEdit, TextWrangler. Originally it was a cheaper feature limited version of BBEdit. Well, version 2 came out the other week. It is free, not to upgrade, but the whole dang program. Free to all, free as in beer. One might think that this is a slap in the face to existing owners. Well, BareBones gave full credit for the original price of TextWrangler to all owners of the software. I’d like to see some other software companies do that for software they’ve EOL’d.

These programs aren’t cheap to upgrade. $100 for FCE, $300 for FCP. I think the FCP is worth the steep entry/upgrade prices, because at least you know that you will end up with a relatively bug free piece of software. I’d rather pay $300 every 2 years and get working software (with more capabilities) than $100 every 6 months, only to put up with feature crippled, buggy software.

I think if companies want to do the “feature limited” cheap version of a professional program, than that program should at least be bug free, and not end up costing more to upgrade than the pro version.

If the company is not offering a pro/consumer distinction in its software, then maybe they shouldn’t be cranking out a new version each year just to get some more cash. Maybe they should be trying to add some bug fixes and minor feature additions in between major versions to make the consumer feel like he/she is getting something for their $100 that they dutifully pay each year.

At least this is better than the yearly subscription model of Eudora, a program that used to be very dear to me. Or maybe it’s not. At least they are up front about the yearly nature of the “deal.”

IDL Language Module for BBEdit

From Betalogue:

I knew that Word’s grammar checker was bad, but I hadn’t really tried it in years. Well, I must said that its degree of failure exceeded all my expectations.

Precisely why I don’t use Word anymore; LaTeX all the way. I’m actually going to do my APS poster in TeX this year too¹, finally shedding PowerPoint.

¹ I’ve been playing around with the beamer package for LaTeX. Quite nice.

I took a look at the PHP code for the Bö plugin to see if I could modify it myself for the above mentioned behavior, but it appears to me that the plugin doesn’t slurp the actual footnote text until after it writes the footnote link in the main body. This makes it a little difficult to insert that variable into the link. Of course, hardcoding the “Return to main text” in the second link of each foot note should be straight forward. (I’ve actually decided to do exactly that — changes have been made.)

Try the two examples below to see what I mean.

• Example 1^[0]
• Example 2²

^[0] This footnote is hand coded, with the footnote text in the title attribute of the link.
² This footnote is made with Bö.

SmartyPants is just plain cool. No thinking, just type and nice “edumacated” quotes come out the other end. And it works in BBEdit too. Nice.

I played around with Markdown about 2 weeks ago. It didn’t strike me as anything that great as a BBEdit plug, but now I am beginning to see its power. It really does make posting much easier. Another score.

Bö is very well done, but at first, I wasn’t sure if I would really use it that much. Now that I think about it though, I do use a lot of parenthetical remarks that would be much better if relegated to a footnote.

I’m really looking forward to using these tools more. Hopefully Bö will grow into a BBEdit plug just like Markdown and SmartyPants are.

¹ PHP version of Markdown for WordPress is available here
² PHP version of SmartyPants for WordPress is available here
³ PHP version of Bö is available here

I’ve been thinking about mail a lot recently. In 1997, I started out in Eudora. I used it all throughout college and for the first year of graduate school.

I was always impressed by Eudora’s unblinking speed when handling mailboxes with thousands of emails. I was also always fond of the interface. I know many thought the interface was horribly outdated, but it made sense to me. I really don’t like the preview pane found in many mail clients; I don’t want to scroll by a message and have it marked read if I don’t open it.

The last killer feature of Eudora is its ability to option-click (I think thats the right combo) on a message and have all of the other messages from that person group around the highlighted one instantly. No fiddling around with sort methods when you need to find other emails from a particular person, just bang!

Anyway, Eudora was the center of my mail universe for a good 5 years. After graduating from college, where a Eudora license was provided for free, I purchased a copy of it for the then new OS X.

A year later, I became displeased with Eudora. My license that I had purchased had run out. An update to Eudora was released (the first major update in more than a year) which finally fixed SSL compatibility with OS X. Qualcomm wanted me to pay for said upgrade. I wrote and complained to them, and to their credit, they extended my license by a couple months. However, my eye had been on Apple Mail for a while.

Apple Mail

During that first year or so of OS X’s existence, I tried Mail a couple of times. Each time, I got fed up with how Mail would choke on my large mailboxes. As much as I liked the idea of a system wide address book and the cool little label on the icon displaying unread emails, I always came running back to Eudora, usually in a matter of days.

The release of OS X 10.2 changed all of that. Mail got faster. Mail got junk mail filtering, which at that point in time was becoming a large problem for me. I switched over to Mail and became relatively happy with it.

Life with Mail was good. OS X 10.3 rolled around and Mail got better. Faster, highlighted threads, etc. At times I felt like I was missing being a “power user,” whatever that means, but Mail did most of what I wanted. I started to play around with running scripts in my mail filters, but it just left me wanting for more.

Recently, I got sick of Mail. I got sick of the interface. It was too much of a fight all the time. That damn mailbox drawer got annoying. Scrolling through messages didn’t have that “just hit the spacebar” feel that Eudora had going for it. Then I read about MailSmith. I already liked BBEdit (though I did skip out on the upgrade to 7, BBEdit 8 is great), so I thought I’d give it a shot.

MailSmith

MailSmith has some neat features. I liked its text-only attitude. I could take or leave the whole distributed filtering paradigm, though it does have fantastic filtering capabilites, as well as most of BBEdit’s text capabilites (mmmm, Regex…) and amazing apple scriptability.

Most importantly, it’s being actively developed. The Eudora development cycle has slowed down considerably in the past few years, and let’s face it, Mail get’s a face lift with every .1 update of OS X, but that’s about it.

That’s not to say that I am completely happy with Mailsmith. Its POP3 only, but I ran my IMAP accounts pretty much like a POP3 accounts anyway. (That’s not to say I don’t want IMAP support in MailSmith — it certainly does make multi-computer use easier). It can also be a bit slow with some tasks. I think the interface could use a bit of tweaking as well.

While Eudora will always hold a warm place in my heart and Mail is a great client for the normal user, I think I will be sticking with MailSmith for the forseeable future.

Gmail

Recently I’ve played around with Gmail. Its not bad. Certainly better than many of the free web-based email services. Its fast, has lots of space, and has a clean interface. The labeling thing is nice, but the only real difference from traditional mail boxes is that it lets you categorize messages with more than one label at the same time. Perhaps this biggest feature of Gmail is it’s phenomenally fast searching. Of course.

I’m interested in seeing what OS X Tiger’s Mail will be like. Smart folders could end up being very similar in one sense to Gmail’s labels, though even more useful in others. Hopefully this is something other clients will adapt.

Miscellaneous Notes

Two things to state here. First, a mail client I used quite a bit while hopping around from dorm room to lab to home was Pine. I know one can get into quite a debate about the UNIX mail clients, but Pine in conjuction with a couple of IMAP accounts can go a long way. I have a lot of respect for this client.

Secondly, the dreaded spam. When I first started to get a noticeble amount of spam, the University had SpamAssassin already in place. It merely took a filter on my part to trash anything marked as spam. The unfortunate part of this setup was that SpamAssassin never learned from its mistakes.

Mail’s junk filtering was better, but it never really took care of the whole picture. Enter SpamSieve. SpamSieve comes free with the Mailsmith license, and the two are really integrated nicely. Though I’ve never tried it with other clients, SpamSieve is supposed to play nicely with them as well, so I thoroughly recommend checking it out. Since SpamSieve is run locally, one can really tune it to your mail patterns. In the six weeks I’ve been running it, its filtered about 10,000 messages, with an accuracy of 99.1%. Not too bad considering that it was a bit inaccurate at first when I was training it. A really quality product.