First, the problems I’m having on my Mac. Since upgrading to Lion my Mac isn’t going to sleep. It is frustrating as I’m the type of person that never, ever shut my Mac down. Instead I usually would just close the lid and be on my way. But, now, when I come back to my Mac the fans are spinning and in some cases the battery is drained. I’m hoping that a forthcoming update to Lion will fix this otherwise I may have to take drastic measures.

Also Lion related, I believe, is Mail.app is a bit crash happy. I’ll be scrawling a note to someone and poof – instacrash with no warning. And although Lion touts itself as the resumable OS and I am usually able to pick up just about where I left off this is still frustrating.

To top it off my Mac is running fairly hot. I don’t believe my fans turned on more than once a day on Snow Leopard but on Lion they don’t seem to shut off and there aren’t any processes that seem to demand it. Again, I’m hoping that a update to Lion will cure some of these things.

Next up, my iPad. Twitter for Mac is one crash happy application. I think it has a lot to do with the way it tries to handle the various types of media that people are tweeting. I’ll do a search for baking (yes, I do searches for baking) on Twitter and within one or two tweets – crash. Unlike Lion on the Mac I can not resume where I was. I have to start over. I appreciate that the team at Twitter wants us to have a unified experience for how media is displayed but it is killing the reliability if the app.

One more gripe about Twitter for iPad. I separate the accounts that I follow into Lists. So, while I only follow about 60 accounts I’m actually keeping up with hundreds using Twitter’s Lists. It’s great. Except that on the iPad app I’m very limited in the number of tweets I can load. On Tweetbot for iPhone (which is arguably the best twitter client ever built) I can go back much further in the timeline. The problem I have is that some of my Lists are rather bloated – like my Software list. I follow many accounts that relate to software that I use this way I can keep up-to-date. But I have hundreds of accounts in that list. Which would be fine if the iPad didn’t limit the number of tweets I can pull up. Give me infinite scroll!!

The App Store on the iPad is dated and I hope that Apple works very hard on making this experience much better. Back in the days of the App Store having hundreds of applications it worked well. Now with hundreds of thousands of apps it doesn’t hold up. For instance, last night I was searching for travel planning applications. For our trip to Ireland I would like to store a list of possible locations to visit based on their location. So, if I’m going to be in Killarney and I want to pull up an already curated list of places we’d like to visit I’d think there would be a good application for that. Hint: there isn’t. Back to why the App Store doesn’t work – I kept having to start my search over at the beginning. Doing a text search turned up very little so I decided to go into the Travel Category. I ordered it by highest customer rating first and then paged through 174 pages of applications. The problem is that when you view an app and then click the back button your back to page 1 without your filters stored. It’s horrible and I ended giving up after only two or three tries.

So, yeah, Apple and Twitter have some work to do – for me. I feel better, thanks.

However, there are times when I just want to focus on what I’m doing. Mac OS X Lion’s new fullscreen feature is designed to help me focus on a single application at a time. However, when Skype, iChat, Mail, or Twitter are open they will notify me (audibly or with bouncing icons) when they’d like my attention. They will inevitably pull me away from what I’m doing to see what is going on.

Skype, for me, is the biggest culprit because our team at Viddler uses Skype as the primary way to communicate. So even though Skype is notifying me that there is something new in Skype sometimes it is just some of the team members chatting about what’s for lunch and really isn’t meant for me and isn’t high-priority.

So there are times that I do not want to be distracted or even notified that something is going on in Skype. I want to be left completely alone and work on whatever it is I’m focused on. Enter Shh, an AppleScript and/or Alfred Extension (I love Alfred) that will quickly close these four applications. It is a dead simple script that closes all of these applications at once (rather than closing them individually).

I’m guessing that I will extend this script to include other applications over time and even enhance it in some way (perhaps by forcing the foremost application into fullscreen mode on OS X Lion or turning off Growl notifications) so if you’re interested in such things be sure to watch this project on Github or contribute to it yourself.

Eliza and I wanted to invite a few of our friends over and I thought it’d be a good opportunity to create an invitation since it is something I’ve been waiting to do for a while. Being that I’m not all that creative or talented I decided to do something simple.

Here are some photos to show the process of creating our invitations in a bottle.

Simple custom DHARMA logo made in Illustrator.

Used watercolor paints and coffee for dirt and blood effects.

Dried the paper a few times between paintings.

Cutout art paper for name tags.

Same dirt/blood treatment for name tags. Spatter!

Crinkle the paper, a few times, to make it seem aged.

The finished invitation.

I used Dollar Store bought bottles, wrapped up the invitations like a scroll, and tied a short piece of twine around them to keep them from unraveling and threw them inside. The corks were from our cork collection, so they were easy to find.

All materials used: Art paper, water, watercolor paints, coffee, a lighter, hot glue gun, twine, bottles, corks, my printer, printer paper, Adobe Illustrator, some scissors and a pencil.

I’m pretty happy with how they came out and I already know what I want to do for next year (something completely different). Have you ever done your own custom invitations? Care to share them?

Fixes

I hope not to sound as if I use iChat begrudgingly because, on the contrary, I rarely find fault with iChat during my normal usage. However if I really turn a critical eye to it, I find:

Error messages should be more descriptive when a video or audio conference, or file transfer fails. Many times there are issues with NATs or Firewalls getting in the way of iChat trying to make connections. iChat typically reports with an error message along the lines of “blah blah blah”. If iChat could have a built-in utility to test your connection for possible problems, and then offer ways of solving those problems based on it’s findings – that’d be cool.

Better Address Book integration is something that I’ve long for since the beginning. Both Adium and iChat both pull your contacts address cards to add buddies to your list – however they also hold their own lists separate from the address book. I’d like to see every contact held within iChat to be in the address book, and vice-versa, by default. What typically happens is, if I sign up for a new AIM account, and load up iChat – I will be forced to go in and add each buddy from my address book into iChat – rather than it just recognizing them. Perhaps there is a reason that they do not do this (perhaps some would find it annoying) – but for me – I think it’d be neat to at least have the option.

File transfers that don’t work when video and audio do seems really strange to me. If I am talking to someone on video and I try to send them a file, and it doesn’t work, that seems strange to me. Why can we make a connection for audio or video and not for transferring files?

Update the tooltips which are used to show your buddy’s info. If you hover over a buddy, you can see some quick information about them – usually their AIM name, and current status. Like Adium, I’d like to see this updated to show a larger version of your buddy’s icon – along with a way to quickly send them an email, an invitation to an event in iCal, a link to the song currently playing in iTunes, etc. This could also be considered a feature request, but I’ll get more into that in a second.

Feature requests

There are a few of my feature requests that delve slightly into what we already know will be included in the next release – but bear with me because I think they need to be refined a little more.

System-wide iChat integration could go well beyond what we see now with Mail and Address Book. Currently you can see who is online from within Mail (if you have that particular email address associated with the current AIM username), and also from within Address Book. This is sufficient in my opinion though anywhere address book information is used (i.e. in the Address Book widget), it’d be nice to see a person’s online status as well.

However, there are many more ways I’d like to see iChat integrated into the OS. If we take a look at the four reasons I currently use iChat, perhaps we can see a way to integrate it more.

1. Text messaging. There are several ways I could see this being used. Contextual menus in Safari, as just one example, give you a way to “Search in Spotlight” and “Search in Google” when you have highlighted text. Perhaps “Send to buddy” would also be available instead of having the need to copy/paste all the time. This may seem like a very small thing, but just think of the amount of time it could save.

Perhaps this feature could be extended a bit further to actually be an option from within Pages.

2. Audio chat. Audio chat should not be limited to only sharing one’s voice. With a little jiggery pokery, or software like Audio Hijack Pro and Soundflower, one could potentially share their tunes with someone working remotely out of the office or with a computer not directly connected to the LAN. Or, maybe two people would like to collaborate on a project in GarageBand, and they could do so by “porting” the output of GarageBand in the current audio chat.

The implications could be fairly endless here.

3. Video chat. Just like with Audio chat, I’d like to see a way to share video via the video chat feature. I realize that the upcoming release will have some screen sharing, iPhoto slideshow, and other features. But being able to open iMovie and show someone a rough cut of a project their working on – could prove extremely valuable.

4. File transfers. What about being able to send a file from anywhere in the system to someone on your buddy list? You can do this now by dragging that file onto your buddy’s name in your contact list – but what if you could do it from within the application you are working on the file with. Say I’d like to send that same rough cut of the iMovie project to someone so that they can edit it further. Emailing it is not an option (too big). I could send it to him in iChat but that means I’d have to save it, open finder (or use Spotlight) and drag the file onto their name ect. What about a button to “Send to Buddy”?

Update (9am on Nov. 15): It turns out there is a product for doing something like this with Skype. It was written about on TechCrunch. Interesting.

I could also envision this feature being awesome from within iPhoto. Quickly send someone an entire album. Sure, this would bypass Apple’s .Mac photo-sharing service built-into iPhoto. But I think .Mac sucks.

Final thoughts

As I said, I really don’t have many issues with the current iChat. Not enough to make me jump ship to something like Adium (which I would have to write a 5-part piece to say what I don’t like about it). I’m going to stick with iChat – and I’m looking forward to the new stuff coming up.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]apple, macintosh, mac os x, osx, wish list, leopard, ichat, buddy list, aim, adium, audio hijack pro, soundflower, safari, spotlight, mail, garageband, imovie, iphoto, finder, itunes[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt3-ichat[/slug]

Fixes

Here are some things that I believe should be fixed in Mail.

Smart Mailbox rules are seemingly complete – though I find one oddity among them. When you select the “Message is in Mailbox” filter, you are presented with every Mailbox you’ve setup – even the Smart Mailboxes that you’ve already created. However, if you select the “Message is not in Mailbox” filter, you are not given the Smart Mailboxes as options. I’ve thought about this for awhile, and I still can’t figure out the reason.

The search box should allow for multiple filters such as you find in the current Finder. Searching for a subject, then being able to click + to drill down until you find what you are looking for. I have about 12,500 pieces of email, and finding the 1 that I am looking for can sometimes prove difficult with a single search filter.

The address book panel seems very OS 9-ish. It works, but I’d like to see the design of this updated a bit.

Feature requests

I realize that Mail is getting “a significant upgrade” when Leopard is release, though the major feature additions looked atrocious in my opinion. Here are some things I’d like to see.

The iLife Media Browser would be an awesome addition to Mail’s default set of icons on the New Mail window. Attaching photos from your iPhoto Library is quick and easy – if you already have iPhoto open. I envision a time where we can click on the Media Browser (similar to what you find in Pages, iMove, etc) and find a photo or photos and attach them with ease.

Side note: The new version of Mail will have “stationary” – and from what I can tell from the screenshots released so far there is a new button called “Photo Browser” at the top. I hope that this is not a brand-new, non-standard media browser that does not use the same frameworks that are used throughout the system so far. And, I hope that this button is not only enabled when you choose a particular style of stationary that allows for photos. We need this feature to be available any time we want to send normal attachments.

An all new way to attach files would be nice. Utilizing a media browser to attached photos, audio, and perhaps even video – would be nice. But I can see definite improvements that could be made to attaching documents, spreadsheets, and compressed archives too.

Imagine you need to attach an Excel spreadsheet, a PDF document, and a .Zip file full of product images to an email. When you do this, I would like to see a preview of the document that I am going to attach. (This does currently work with PDFs and Images) I’d like to see previews for Excel spreadsheets, Text files, Rich-Text Files, Word Documents, .Pages documents, Keynote Presentations, and anything else that usually resides in the document window.

As per .Zip archive files, it’d be nice to select a zip file in the “attach file” panel and be able to see the file names of the files within the archive. This would ensure that I’ve selected the correct file to attach.

Automatic compression of multiple file attachments is something that was “introduced” by AOL back in the mid to late 90s. I have not used America Online since then, so I have no idea if this feature still exists.

If I had an email with multiple attachments, as described above, Mail could automatically compress those files on send. This way, the transmission of data would be slightly smaller. On the other end, Mail.app would uncompress those files into their original state prior to displaying the message to the recipient.

Side note: The biggest problem with this feature in AOL (circa version 2 or 3) was that when you sent email to anyone that was not an AOL user, they’d just get a .zip file. Back in those days .zip files were not yet the norm, and so you had to have people go to winzip.com or something to download a utility to uncompress those files. In other words, their email client did not have the “automatically uncompress files upon receipt” feature. Annoying to say the least.

The other problem with this is, Mail would have to have a slightly proprietary compression format so that when a .zip, .tar, .bz (etc) type of file would come in, it wouldn’t always uncompress those files. If I was sent 1,000 text files in a .zip archive, I wouldn’t want those files automatically uncompressed by Mail.

Final thoughts

I’m trying not to be too picky, otherwise this list would get quite long. Any application that is used as often as an email client always gets more than it’s share of scrutiny. I’m fairly happy with my email client to-date, and I hope that the trend continues.

Side note: Leopard Mail will include Stationary, Notes, To-Dos, and RSS feed reading ability. From what I’ve seen so far, I do not “like” any of them (even though what I did see would be considered BETA).

The Stationary seems a bit superfluous though I can see people having a ball using them. The Notes doesn’t make sense to me yet simply because I do not email myself notes. There are hundreds of ways to “take notes” on the Mac OS ranging from widgets to small menu bar applications to full-blown GTD applications. The “to-dos” in Mail seem like they’d be better kept and updated within iCal. I’m sure the integration between iCal and Mail will be might tighter this time around – so I’ll have to see that integration prior to passing judgement.

RSS within Mail is a completely new headache to me. RSS feeds within Safari is only made for those people who keep track of a few web sites. With constant attention to feed management you may even be able to get away with having 100 subscriptions in Safari without pulling your hair out. Unless the integration of RSS feeds (which should be called “Feeds” but we’ve already talked about that), rivals that of NetNewsWire, then I see no improvement than using Safari for your subscriptions. Too much synergy may not be a good thing in this case.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]apple, macintosh, mac os x, osx, mail.app, mail, iphoto, ilife, safari, leopard, mac os 10.5, wish list, ical, gtd, stationary, notes, to-dos, rss[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt2-mail[/slug]

Here is a list of my 10 13 favorite applications for the Macintosh.

• Textmate
• NetNewsWire
• MarsEdit
• QuickSilver
• iTunes
• iPhoto
• Delicious Library
• Safari
• Transmit
• Colloquy
• PHP Function Index
• Chax iChat extension
• Mail.app

I was supposed to stop at 10, but oh well. There is no particular order to the above, I kind of just jotted these down as I thought of them.

I suppose I’ll ask Mike Stickel, Tantek Çelik, and Mike Rundle to do the same.

[tags]meme, apple, macintosh, applications, textmate, netnewswire, marsedit, quicksilver, itunes, iphoto, delicious library, safari, transmit, colloquy, php function index, php, ichat, chax, mail, email, programming, browser, text editor[/tags]