eriksmartt.com/blog

Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 1 available

I just saw the news that Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 1 is now available. The link was hard to find off mozilla.com, but a quick google turned up the Release Notes page which contains the download link.

So why am I mentioning this? Well, because I haven’t been able to get Thunderbird 1.5 to run reliably on my new laptop (a Dell running Ubuntu Edgy), but I’m not exactly thrilled with Evolution just yet either. (I’ve actually been using mutt lately, if you can believe that; though it’s not the silver bullet either.) I haven’t spent much time in Thunderbird, but I’m hoping that it’s extensibility helps the customization a bit. (At the moment, I’m really missing Mail-Act On’s ability to bind a filter to a key-command in Apple’s Mail.app.)

Mobile Gmail application from Google

Google has released a mobile Gmail client! See the press release for details and download instructions: “Email On-the-Go Now Even Easier — Google Launches New Mobile Application for Speedier Access to Gmail”

So far, it’s working quite well on my Nokia N90. The previous mobile browser-based interface to Gmail was ok for emergency use, but this new Java client looks nice enough to actually use.

Thanks Google!

Dashboard Widget to mash iTunes library with OnTour.net

Just the other day I had a friend mention a desire to scrape tour schedules in MySpace so that he can find out when artists he’s interested in are in town. (He eventually decided it was too much hassle and would like someone else to do it, which is why I’m able to mention it here.) It’s a cool idea, though the OnTour Dashboard Widget takes it to perhaps another level.

The Widget monitors tour information in OnTour.net and compares it to the music you have in your iTunes library. The downside being, of course, that you have to hit F12 to get a notification. But otherwise, the interaction model is perfect — meaning that you don’t need to change your behavior at all, yet you gain new value and information. Brilliant.

(Via Lifehacker)

Feature-bloat and customer satisfaction

In my day job as a Product Manager of mobile development tools, there’s a frequent struggle between feature-bloat and a desire to simplify the development process. Even when you know that it will improve the user experience, it can be difficult to build a business case for removing features or re-factoring a user interface. Because of this, I’m always excited to find any tangible data on the ROI of simplifying complex technology. (ie., It’s not enough to say “customers will like it better”, and it’s not easy to find compelling data to clearly demonstrate a tie between improved usability and improved consumer uptake.)

Even still, war stories and the occasional bits of research do help the cause. For example, the post “Capability, usability and feature fatigue” offers a short summary of a Harvard Business Review article titled, “Defeating Feature Fatigue“, which features the following quotes:

“Before use, capability mattered more to the participants than usability, but after use, usability drove satisfaction rates. As a result, satisfaction was higher with the simpler version of the product.”

“If companies conduct market research by asking consumers to evaluate products without using them, too much weight will be given to capability, and the result will likely be products with too many features.”

This idea ties nicely to another Harvard article, titled, “Feature Bloat: The Product Manager’s Dilemma“, which also caught my eye.

(Via In-store good or at-home good?)

Aptana Web IDE

Earlier this week I was looking for a nice HTML editor for Eclipse to help ease life when using PyDev with a Django project. I didn’t have much luck, other then finding a few syntax coloring tools that were HTML aware. That changed today when I found Aptana: The Web IDE. It’s a free, open source IDE for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, built on Eclipse (available as a stand-alone application, or an Eclipse plugin) that offers target-browser aware code assist and syntax checking. The site includes some great screencasts to demo the product (and an interesting use of a .tv domain name.)

Though it’s officially unsupported on Eclipse 3.2 (they only support 3.1), it seems to work just fine in my environment.

(Via eHub)

[Minor update: Aptana ran fine on my OS X machine, but crashes hard on my AMD64 Ubuntu Dapper box running Eclipse 3.2.]

FireBug and JavaScript debugging

I finally got around to watching the video of Joe Hewitt’s FireBug demonstration at Yahoo! The video production is a little annoying, but the content is worth it. I’ve been using FireBug already for basic XMLHttpRequest monitoring, but I didn’t realize until watching the video that FireBug can also handle the kind of debugging I generally use Venkman for. And I love the integrated JavaScript console when debugging!

On a related note, I noticed over the weekend that ActiveState is adding Komodo to the list of JavaScript debuggers for Firefox. I haven’t tried the Alpha yet, though it does sound interesting to try debugging the front- and back-end of a Django or Rails web app using a single IDE!

Links:

• “Video: Joe Hewitt Talks About FireBug“
• “Komodo 4.0 Alpha 2 now available“

Blogging with TextMate

I’ve been using TextMate to write my blog posts for quite some time now. I enjoy the convenience of MarsEdit, but TextMate lies in the center of my GTD process, and it’s such a nice text editor that I hate to leave it. Of course, actually making blog posts has required a little copy/paste action to my web CMS, but not anymore — TextMate now has a Blogging Bundle! Check out the screencast to see it in action. (And yes, this post was made directly from TextMate ;-)

Dabble DB taking on the Spreadsheets

In my recent “Google Spreadsheet Storage” post I mentioned how important an API will be for the online spreadsheets. I think Google will get there eventually, but it looks like Dabble DB will beat them to it. Furthermore, Dabble DB is taking steps to improve the traditional spreadsheet-interaction, blending ideas from spreadsheet authoring and dynamic Content Management Systems. Take a look at the new Dabble DB screencast to see for yourself. Even if you don’t see a need for it, Dabble DB is an impressive web app.

The Dabble DB blog has more to say on the issue:

“…when it comes to managing data, [snip] other web-based spreadsheets [are] only solving half of the collaboration problem. [They let] everybody access and edit the same data over the web, and that’s an important improvement over the email-the-Excel-file-around strategy many groups are stuck with. But it also forces everybody to look at that data in exactly the same way.”