Category: How to

Thinking about email

Recent questions from a client turned to email and caused me to investigate and re-evaluate my ongoing use of the default Mail.app on OSX

On one hand I love Mail on the Mac, but while I know it is a bottleneck and that I shouldn’t use it as a todo list – I do anyway.

On the other hand, I know I must revise my behaviour and develop better skills to handle my email and perhaps reach the mythical ‘Inbox Zero’

Below is not a review or recommendation, merely a series of links to interesting options I am hoping to learn more about.

1. Mailhub. Looks a bit low rent, but offers the ability to do powerful things like file or delete by sender and create reminders at the moment you send.

I have had a play with this and I am liking it
Mailhub

2. Mail Pilot: an Innovative, To-do Style Approach to Your Emails (according to app storm)

A very cool looking web based, subscription, non free email client.
This works on the premise that incoming email is incomplete and needs to be actioned
If it does what it says on the tin it will easily be worth the price of admission

3. .Mail
Sounds great, but I’m not sure much will come of it.
Actionsteps are the big feature.

In comes Actionsteps. These three red squares allow you to set the importance of an email and filter out what is important and what isn’t. Think of it as a mini To-Do list, that ranks your emails by three different levels of importance.

4. Attachment Tamer: Attachment Tamer gives you control over attachment handling in Apple Mail. It fixes the most annoying Apple Mail flaws, ensures compatibility with other email software, and allows you to set up how attachments are displayed and sent.

I’ve never really considered inline attachments to be a problem, but clients have asked about them and how to avoid or, on Windows, receive them properly.

I’m most interested because of the ability to attach as icons without polluting my outgoing message window with giant representations of the attached images

5. Cargolifter: One of the big selling points of Sparrow was the ability to send links rather than attachments.

Cargolifter adds this feature to Apple’s Mail.app

6. Airmail:

Airmail was designed from the ground to retain the same experience with a single or multiple accounts and provide a quick, modern and easy-to-use user experience. Airmail is clean and allows you to get to your emails without interruption – it’s the mail client for the 21st century.

7. Persona: A people focussed email experience where you can manage your message threads with specific contacts quickly and easily.

Sounds good too. I like the messages style conversational view and the attachment view – arriving soon

8. Universal Mailer:

Universal Mailer will be useful if any of these sound familiar to you:

Your sent email contains unwanted ATT00001.htm attachments that prevent some email clients from viewing the complete text, You are used to alternate text and images inside your emails but your recipients can’t see them as intended, Your sent emails are hard to read because they are displayed with a small font by some email clients

No-one has complained…

9. Apple Mail or Mail.app: I teach people how to manage software on their Macs and iOS devices. As such it is important to be comfortable and conversant with their tool of choice.
Switching to Mailpilot, dotmail, airmail or any alternative would make it more difficult to properly help these clients.

Lifehacker.com and mac.appstorm.net have both provided inspiration to improve my lot while sticking with the default OSX mail app

How to Turn Mac Mail Into a Fantastic Email Client

appstormTurning Mail.app Into the Best Mac Email App

I haven’t yet settled on an option or options, but I will continue to consider them all as I hopefully work towards email nirvana.

How to create a Slow Motion Wedding Photo Booth

http://vimeo.com/72365593

I watched this wonderful video yesterday and came to wonder how easy it would be to recreate without a huge budget.

The guys who did this had access to a Red Epic which shoots HD up into hundreds of frames/second (This camera was used on Prometheus, Hobbit and the like)
Even they were limited (to 160fps) by a limit in the amount of light available.
These 160 fps videos are then played back at quarter speed.

So, what about that budget – There are going to be two problems.
1. finding an affordable camera with the right specifications
2. dealing with a requirement for serious amounts of light.

1. Finding a camera – Most consumer cameras with high frame rates or fps drop off in resolution as the frame rate climbs.
Interesting cameras to look at include;

Panasonic Lumix FZ200, which can shoot HD (720p) videos at 120fps and VGA-level (640 x 480) movies at 240fps
Nikon 1, which shoots 640 x 240 at 400fps
Sony A77, which shoots 1080 at 60fps for super smooth slow motion
Note, there are tricks employed by manufacturers to give higher frame rates. Lots of reviews should be read and tests performed in selecting your camera.

Make sure to consider file formats, access to bright lenses, high ISO performance, frame rate (fps), resolution etc.

Another thing to consider is the availability of software to interpolate between our frames.
This offers the advantage of increasing the range of cameras to choose from and presumably reducing the need for such high shutter speeds.

vision Effects’ Twixtor, a plug-in for Adobe’s After Effects, is the best-known program for creating slow-motion videos from standard footage. It can produce stunning results with the right sort of input, such as high-quality videos from a Nikon or Canon digital SLR.

Unfortunately, Twixtor costs more than most digital compacts (just over £200) while After Effects costs £911 at Amazon.co.uk. This is not a good option for amateurs.

However, anyone who fancies this sort of thing could try the free, open source slowmoVideo.

Jack Schofield
Friday 11 January 2013

Wanted: a cheap compact camera for shooting slow-motion videos

2. Lighting – We have a couple of ways to ensure we have enough lighting.
Being video we must have a continuous light source which ideally doesn’t run too hot (though our subjects won’t remain under lights for more than a minute or two.
It is difficult to describe what lights will be needed since a Sony A77 will be able to handle low light better than a Nikon 1 or Panasonic Lumix due to it’s clean high ISO

You might choose to spend a few dollars on some halogen work lights, but this is going to generate a ton of heat.
You might opt for LED, but this would prove expensive and you would need a lot of them.
You could go for the large banks of lights commonly used in TV Studios for the last couple of years.
You could even manufacture your own lights from a skip full of fluorescent lights.
Problems to solve here include cost, brightness, running cost, convenience (size/weight), suitability (flouroscent lights may cause flickering on video).
This whole area is a bit of a minefield and since your camera, budget and needs will be different to the next person, you will simply need to experiment until you find a solution.

Luckily, here in Australia, we have copious amounts of continuous daylight.
A large scrim or diffuser (or even a large white outdoor tent) might be all we need to get started.