Category: Technology

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.

Print range selection feature missing from iPad

I was recently asked how to print a range of pages from the iPad and despite having seen ‘Range’ as an available feature many times in the past I could not immediately fathom why the feature was absent under ‘Printer Options’. Experimenting on an iPhone revealed the same problem.

After a little bit of research it became clear (smacks head) that the iPad will allow you to print a range of pages only in apps that support it.

The penny has now dropped and apps like Mail or Safari will not be able to offer the range option due to the fact that web pages and emails are not structured in separate pages in the same way a pdf or word document would be.

Instead they are a continuous body of content, images, attachments and so on that reformats itself to fit the device or zoom level – for Mail or Safari to print individual pages they would have to guess how much to print on each page and which orientation would be appropriate.

Apps that support ‘print range’ include apps like Quickoffice Pro HD, Pages and iBooks.

If you have a document (for example a multipage pdf) received as an email attachment then you can ‘send’ it to another app (an app with the capability to do ‘range selection’).

Usually a pdf attachment will be displayed ‘inline’ somewhere in the main body of the email. Sometimes attachments are displayed as a simple icon* instead.

Long Tap on the attachment and when the grid of available options appear just choose an appropriate app.

If the attachment is a pdf then you could use iBooks to print.

One problem with sending to iBooks is that the pdf will then be stored in your iBook shelves unless you then follow through and delete it.
Another issue is that a different type of document, .docx for example, might require you to select a different app instead of iBooks.

Further research reveals an iOS app called Print Agent Pro which can handle most of these file types and offers a few more functions.
Print Agent Pro is $6 for iPad and $4 for iPhone. I’ve yet to test it out, but it sure looks to be the ticket.

*Interestingly, a readable attachment that doesn’t display inline can be printed using Range Selection by long tapping, then tapping Print from the available options.

Using Bigpond email with multiple devices

Please note: the following is my understanding and simplified view of a complex landscape of options and protocols
It is intended to provide insight for the inexperienced, rather than a complete and accurate technical description

If you are reading this as a customer of another ISP then just assume that every mention of Bigpond is a reference to your provider. While things that are true of bigpond might not be true of your provider this should still get you most of the way there

Bigpond and others provide email addresses for free with their services, but in reality this is nothing more than a trap to prevent you from switching to another service – in my opinion there is no reason for a Bigpond customer to use one of these addresses

Apple iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. are portable when you switch to a different Internet Service Provider and remain capable of being used with standard settings anywhere in the world (as do properly setup self hosted emails like myname@myowndomain.whatever)

A bigpond address often fails to send when you are not connected to the Telstra provided infrastructure forcing users to access expensive solutions like global data roaming or clunky solutions like webmail

In addition a Bigpond address is not designed (at time of writing) to properly sync between multiple devices

Why? Bigpond use a protocol known as POP which offers advantages for the provider including reduced ‘chattiness’ between devices and the email server, but none for the user – especially when the user has more than one device*

*status of messages (flagged, read, unread, deleted, forwarded, replied) is not echoed between devices

Other protocols exist – IMAP, Exchange, Google Sync, iCloud

Exchange is a Proprietary (Paid) Microsoft protocol which supports multiple devices for mail, calendar, contacts and notes
It is typically used by businesses with their own domain

Google Sync is similar to Exchange and is apparently based on it
Google Sync, with the right settings makes it easy to sync mail, calender, contacts and notes between iPad, iPhone and presumably other mobile devices
while it works well on mobile, due to licencing restrictions, it doesn’t work fully on the desktop and is quite frustrating and time consuming to configure on a PC or Mac (Purchasing Outlook may be a solution to this)
One major advantage of Google Sync is the ability to set it up with your own domain
Update: Unless you were already using Google Sync or a paying Google Customer, Google Sync is effectively dead – http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2716936

iCloud is a proprietary (free) protocol for those who own one or more Apple computing devices
iCloud makes it easy to sync mail, calender, contacts, notes, bookmarks, documents, location, device backups, reminders between all of those devices and a few items can sync with a PC running the iCloud Control Panel

IMAP is a non proprietary email protocol which works on any device, but must be supported by the provider of your email;

Bigpond – does NOT support IMAP
(email addresses ending in bigpond.com or similar)

Gmail – Supports IMAP, but I have seen the uninitiated become confused by the way Gmail handles IMAP
(email addresses ending in gmail.com)

iCloud – Supports IMAP, but setting up as iCloud is easier (iCloud email can be easily used on PCs with Outlook, Macs, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Setting up on a different device requires careful configuration)
(email addresses ending mac.com, me.com, icloud.com)

email addresses ending in internode.com, adam.on.net, yourdomain.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, iPrimus.com
Internode – Supports IMAP
Adam – Supports IMAP
Your own hosted email may or may not support IMAP, although most do
Other providers like Yahoo, Hotmail, Dodo, iPrimus etc. may or may not support IMAP to one degree or another

POP – Some of these emails support POP, but I generally recommend avoiding it. If you have a bigpond address which you have shared with many people and you now use multiple devices it is normally*** best to switch to an iCloud or Gmail address and have your incoming Bigpond emails redirected there

***Not all bigpond addresses are equal. In all cases we can forward emails received at a bigpond address to another address, but it is not always possible to prevent the bigpond inbox from continuing to fill up requiring us to keep checking in

Update:I have experienced varying interfaces with Bigpond webmail and settings.
In all cases those settings allow mail to be forwarded to another address, but most of the time there is no option to stop the Bigpond inbox from continuing to fill up. Since writing this blogpost I have helped people set this up 3 or 4 times and it is starting to appear as though address ending bigpond.com are of the inferior variety (inbox continues to fill) while those ending in bigpond.net.au appear to be capable of forwarding emails WITHOUT, at the same time, continuing to fill up themselves

We can use pieces of each protocol – for example

A bigpond user might use POP for his email, but use iCloud for his Calendar and Contacts

A Gmail, internode or Adam user might use IMAP for email and Notes with iCloud for Calendar and Contacts

While these solutions work they require more configuration than a single solution like Exchange or iCloud (Google Sync is similar but much less easy unless we are only interested in using mobile devices)

iCloud seems to be the best overall solution, but your needs will vary depending on your email address, willingness or ability to change address, current devices, future devices

Now go and have a lie down…

Update:Adam it appears do not allow email addresses provided by them to be forwarded at all – if you are an Adam customer I recommend avoiding their free email accounts like the plague

Update March 6, 2013:Chariot – www,chariot.net.au – also omit options for forwarding, but a call to their helpdesk reveals that they can set it up manually for you

Snapseed – Nice Photo Editor for iPhone

Having had a quick play you when I first downloaded Snapseed months ago, I finally got around to giving it a proper go over the last couple of days.

It really is quite an amazing little app with a lot of options that I was surprised to find on an iPhone app, including such things as control points and a ’tilt shift’ effect.

Below are a couple of images created in Snapseed with the untouched images included at a lower Resolution for comparison.

20121123-203332.jpg

20121123-203853.jpg

20121123-203347.jpg

20121123-204023.jpg

Easily removing ghost text while scanning

When scanning pages from books and magazines it is common to see a ‘ghost image’ of the text from the back side of the page being scanned.

There is an easy fix for this and it’s so obvious you will kick yourself

During the scan, simply place a sheet of flat matte black paper immediately behind the page you are scanning.
This destroys the contrast of the ‘ghost’ text or images rendering a much better quality scan with little to no visibility of the reversed image from the page behind and no visibility of the next page either (I have seen people use white paper, but this only solves part of the problem)

The one downside is that it reduces the contrast of the scanned image too, but that is easily fixed by adjusting the highlights – for example (if I remember correctly) by dragging the right hand slider to the left in the Photoshop ‘Levels’ tool

Please link to this one if you find it useful

iPhone accessibility – swipe to scroll

Having played with accessibility on the iPhone it is clear that iOS must be the most accessible device yet.
However I think I have discovered a weakness in the scrolling system and a solution for the flaw.

The following feedback was therefore recently given via the iPhone feedback form – let’s hope it gets seen

Three finger scrolling for the visually impaired could be dramatically improved by enabling the action that brings down the notification panel (unused during VoiceOver) to be used from each edge of the screen to scroll.
it is very easy for a blind user to feel each edge of the device and swipe across the screen rather than swiping with three fingers, which sometimes drag and don’t always perform the desired action.

For those who don’t need accessibility the same gestures from the left, right and bottom (but not the top due to notifications) could be used to move the cursor in a body of text as though using arrow keys.
Perhaps a swipe would move one character in the swipe direction. Swiping but then pausing mid swipe might cause the cursor to continue moving one character at a time until the finger was removed from the screen.

Offline Media with Lightroom broken in Windows 7 – You Couldn’t make this up!!

I have a client with years of images across a dozen or so large hard drives.
Long story short – after a few false starts I have taken to adding each drive of images to a Lightroom Catalog on a donated PC under Windows 7 before transferring them somehow to a Mac formatted 8TB drive (I can’t afford to tie up any of my Macs with this task and besides there seem to be some issues with copying large NTFS drives to the Mac)

Drive 1 was added to the catalog without incident, then disconnected in readiness for drive 2

Drive 2 was connected, import selected and images started to stream into the catalog.
WHOA!! wait a minute – the wonderful feature of Lightroom where offline drives and their capacity can easily be seen in the left sidebar is showing only one drive

It should be showing two drives (drive 1 should have a red light and every image and folder should have a question mark while drive 2 should have a green light)

Instead it is intermingling online and offline folders. A little experimenting shows that renaming the drives (they are both My Passport drives – of different capacity) does not help

I suspect that connecting all the drives at once would work, but that’s a lot of spaghetti (12+ drives)
I also suspect that connecting all 12 drives one at a time would have every drive intermingled within lightroom

Changing the drive letter and starting again seems to solve the issue. I just have to remember to choose a different letter for each drive

This is crazy – how are normal people supposed to deal with these types of issues?
(the Mac has always been able to distinguish between even identical drives)

Still, I’m sure the problem doesn’t exist in Windows 8

Create like a professional. Pay like a student.

The title of this post is the subject field from an item landing in my inbox a few days ago.

Adobe have announced pricing of just $14.99/month for students or teachers to access their entire library of software.

Join Adobe Creative Cloud™ to get access to every Adobe® Creative Suite® 6 desktop application, plus online services* and other new apps. All this for less than the cost of Adobe Photoshop® CS6 alone!

Make an impression with awesome portfolios and projects across print, web and video. For a limited time, you can have it all with an Adobe Creative Cloud™ Student and Teacher Edition membership at just $14.99 per month for the first year.† Hurry, offer ends November 30, 2012.

Creative Cloud includes;
Photoshop
Photoshop Extended
Photoshop Lightroom
Illustrator
InDesign
Adobe Muse
Acrobat X Pro
Flash Professional
Flash Builder
Dreamweaver
Edge Animate
Fireworks
Adobe Premiere Pro
After Effects
Adobe Audition
SpeedGrade
Adobe Prelude
Encore
Bridge (included with download of other apps)
Media Encoder (included with download of other apps)

Device and PC sync
Cloud storage
Business Catalyst
Typekit
Story Plus

Wow. I think this is a great step for adobe and will stop a lot of students starting off as software pirates.

Until now it has been prohibitively painful for students to setup a licence for adobe products, not to mention expensive.

Learn more at the following links;
Creative Cloud
Buying guide

Not a student?
Click here

Lightning fast?

My iPhone 5 just charged from 63% to 83% in 20 minutes
This was using the included charger and lightning cable – I can’t remember my 4s charging so quickly.
It’s risen another 4% in the last 4 minutes. Further testing is required

I can’t wait to see how fast the next iPad charges (I imagine Apple were not delighted with the ten hour charge time of the current model)

Update: I will keep posting unscientific observations here
1. Monday Oct 1st – at least an hour off the charger and still at 99%
2. Eight hours off the charger now and my battery is at 84%
3. Tuesday Oct 2nd – 17 hours off the charger now and we are only down to 70% (a lot of this had to do with not leaving the house, but it shows how good the battery life can be when the iPhone isn’t struggling to amplify its connection)
4. 40 minutes charging and we are up to 92%
5. Tuesday Oct 9th – Charge the client iPhone 4S today, 10 minutes to charge to 2%
6. Saturday Oct 13th – From 28% to 90% in 61 minutes

I haven’t given this much thought for a while, but my iPhone was on 5% today at 8:34pm.
I put it on charge and by 8:46pm it reported 30%. In the last 4minutes it has added another 6%
That’s pretty amazing – Lightning by name…