Though it appears that the world is entering the age of the web app, I personally have an aversion to them in general. Why? I’m not really that sure to be honest. Maybe I don’t like relying on on something that could go away tomorrow, taking my data along with it. Or perhaps I prefer the ’solidness’ that (most of the time) defines one’s experience when using a Mac.

I’m inclined to think that it’s the later. I like the idea of opening an app to do task X, the concept of opening Safari, navigation to website Y to do task X doesn’t resinate with me.

I’m very much aware of the distinct advantages of of a cloud based application but right now, owning both a notebook and iPhone I’m very happy sticking, for the most part (because there are a couple of exceptions), with desktop applications.

One of the truly great things about the App Store is that one can go through the entire catalogue of applications and know, when they download an app that it will run on their iPhone, whatever the model. This is a breakthrough in mobile applications that no one seems to have picked up on. No worrying about getting the same application to work on varying pieces of hardware. You can install an app on your iPhone and know that it will operate perfectly as there have been no other models to ‘distract’ the development of the application.

However, with the release of the iPhone 3GS, I think that Apple are making the first steps to diverging the iPhone line, in terms of different hardware functionality. And this will be a problem in the future.

Right now, we’ve got two models of iPhone on sale. The 3G and the 3GS. Both these phones, on the whole are very similar, with the 3GS only having a handful of features, such as video capabilities, voice control, a magnetometer and a 3 megapixel camera with autofocus differentiating it from the previous model.

This leaves very few extra requirements that an iPhone application may have for added functionality or a certain feature to operate at its best. And yes, a lot of the time, we’re only seeing quality improvements. For instance, a barcode reader, to be effective might require the autofocus lens of the 3GS. As with the 3G, the application would struggle to get an accurate image of the barcode. But the app would still be able to function, it’s just that a lot more care would have to be taken in scanning the iPhone. Be it, making sure the lighting conditions are okay and keeping a steady hand.

Now imagine the iPhone landscape a few years down the line. A couple regular iPhones? Plus an iPhone Nano with a smaller screen? This leaves Apple with a very large problem. With there being different capabilities and physical limitations on the iPhone product line – we’re going to see several versions of a single application; first changed depending on physical capabilities, and secondly, games may be changed depending on the speed of the hardware that they run on.

The irony of this of course, is that at WWDC 09 Phil Schiller called out Nokia for this exact issue:

Not all the apps run on all the phones. It’s really complicated so we took a lot of the phones and added them together to make a bigger number [to give a number of apps on the store].

In this scenario, we’d be stuck with possibly hundreds of thousands of apps on the store, some that can run on your specific iPhone model, but other versions that may not. My feelings are that, for Apple to solve this problem they’re going to have to take a tough stance.

Imagine, you bring your shiny new iPhone home after picking it up from the store. Once you’ve plugged it in, the iTunes Store would detect which model you were using and only display the relevant apps that operate on the model you own. So when you go searching for that game that requires a certain CPU speed to run, you won’t purchase the version that doesn’t operate well on your iPhone. In fact, you won’t even know the other version of the app exists. In turn making the browsing experience of the App Store (which right now is pretty poor) a lot more tolerable.

I favour this idea because it hits two birds with one stone; it simply cuts down on the amount of apps in the store and allows you to not have to worry about getting the optimum experience from applications from your iPhone. Not being a developer however, I’m unsure how they’d react to such a system. I’d envision a series of boxes for the developer to tick, suggesting which iPhone models the app will run on.

The other option, of course, is to go to the simple, and effective method of stating ’system requirements’ in the app info section on the store, requiring the purchaser to check if the application is compatible with their model of iPhone. I just feel that the afore mentioned solution is a more elegant way of handling this inherent issue with the current way the App Store functions.

PS: My bud, Chris Gilbert, has written a piece on this very same topic, it’s worth a read.

The folks over at Panic software are having a crazy 50% off sale on all of their apps. Definatly worth a look if your a Mac user. I’ll personally be picking up Coda.

They’ve also released a promotional video that’s sure to entertain.

[via TightWind]

It’s not a pleasant sight when you get up in the morning, to find that your inbox is stacked up with over fifty new messages, all varying with importance and you have no idea where to start. Recently, I’ve made an effort to organize my email more appropriately and be more objective with what is relevant and what isn’t. Say you’ve got five emails telling you that you’ve got a new Twitter follower and an important email buried far below – you’ve got to decide which is more important to you.

Enter Rules. A solution that has been built into Apple’s Mail application for years, but has gone unnoticed by many. Rules happens to be the most useful asset I have found in Mail to date, and believe me, you’ll find a use for them, if not today – someday. So what does Rules do? It’s pretty much an automated filing system for your email that uses conditions that you set. Now, at first Rules can seem very daunting and may take a bit of time and experimentation to set up – but after you’ve spent that first half an hour you’ll find it second nature and very intuitive.

Creating a Rule

My aim in this guide is to streamline and cut down that thirty minutes into ten at the most. Firstly, you’re going to need to head over to the Rules preference pane. Go, Mail, Preferences and then to the Rules tab on the preference pane (see below). You’ll find that Apple already has a preset Rule about emails from them – you can ignore it or delete it, by doing so you won’t effect anything that this guide will be looking at.

Next, you’re obviously going to want to click the ‘add rule’ button which will bring down a menu for setting up rules. From here you’ve got quite a few options to mess around with. First of all, it’s probably a good idea to give it an appropriate name instead of something ambiguous. Next you’ve got to choose if all the terms you’ll be laying down have to be followed or just one of them – in doing to you’ll allow emails to move into a certain mailbox in your sidebar. To put this in perspective:

Say I wanted an email to be sent to me every time one of my posts got commented on and I wanted all those emails to go into a mailbox named ‘Project X’ in Mail’s sidebar. However, I also wanted any other emails that I received from my co-editors mentioning Project X that I received to go into that same folder. If I chose the “any” option – only one of the requirements would have to be met for Mail to put it into the Project X mailbox, however, if I chose the “all” option, the emails would have to meet both the requirements and therefore the emails about comments wouldn’t go into the folder because it was not from an editor – as I had requested.

Extra Options

It gets quite easy from here on out, you now need to choose what you want Mail to look in when it sees an email. This can vary from who the email was from, the date it was sent on, or even if the email was sent from someone in your address book. After this you’ve got to give Mail a little more information about the text your going to be defining later on. The email may have to contain a phrase, begin or end with something – there are a couple of other options available for you that I won’t go into at the moment.

Now that you’ve allowed Mail to chose the right emails thanks to your parameters – what do you want it to do with them? In the case of Desktop Vibes, I have those emails sent to a mailbox called ‘Desktop Vibes’. However there are some other, pretty cool scenarios that you could put together if you wanted.

Here are a few I came up with:

• Once you’ve replied to an email – have it archived or even deleted.
• Any emails you receive from social networks can go straight into one ‘Social’ folder, so you can reach the important correspondence.
• Do you get a lot of school assignments via email? Give them their own mailbox!
• Want to ingore all those

Conclusion

Rules turns Mail from one of those applications that you like into one that you love. That’s big. So go and have a mess around with Rules in Mail. You’ll soon find it a lot easier to reach that magic inbox number – zero.

Do you use Rules in Apple Mail (or any other email application) to help sift through all of that mail? If so, how do you use it?

The Hit List now has a public preview and I’m loving it. Sorry Things.

I never understood why Microsoft were selling software to protect their own operating system. It’s good to see they’re taking the software in the right direction - lightweight, nonintrusive and best of all free.

There has been a lot of hype over the last week about EventBox, a new piece of software for the Mac which is designed to aggregate all of the social networks you use and also act as an RSS Reader – all within one application. So not wanting to be left out, I downloaded a copy of the free 15 (why not 30?) day trial for a spin, The verdict so far? I can’t say I’m that impressed.

First of all, I don’t really like writing about software that doesn’t work for me, after all I’m just one guy with one opinion. However, as EventBox is currently in beta I thought it would be best to give them some constructive feedback from some of my experiences with the application. So why not start with the good points – primarily the actual concept behind the application. I’m surprised that it took so long for an app like this to be created, it has all the right elements to make it a fantastic program.

I think that a lot of people have been looking for something to bring together all of the sites they visit of a regular basis. For me the key applications that this would replace are NetNewsWire and Twitterific. So as far as I’m concerned – they are the main competition for EventBox. Don’t be surprised if you hear me comparing them a lot – I think it’s quite fair to.

I’m not going to complain about the amount of social networks, because I’m sure more are coming but I want to talk about why this app hasn’t been earth shattering for me.

Information Overload

Every time I open EventBox up, things start flashing at me and numbers increase rapidly, I just can’t take seeing the number 500 in my dock. So most of the time I’d close EventBox and open up both NetNewsWire and Twitterific because lets face it, information is a lot simpler to digest in chunks. It’s a lot easier to move from doing one task to another; for me it’s Tweets first followed by RSS.

One idea I had was to have a ‘breakfast mode’ in which you can customise what section of EventBox gets your attention first. Let’s put this in context:

I open up EventBox at 6AM (and the apps notices this) and find the Twitter section of the app is all that is available to me. All the other sections are grayed out and there are no numbers alluding to how many feeds there are in the dock or sidebar. Once I’ve caught up on all my Tweets I can press this big button in the bottom of the window saying “Finished!”. From there I automatically get sent on to my RSS feeds, or Pownce, Flickr…. whatever you want.

It may seem unnecessary and infantile to a lot of people, but for people like myself who are easily distracted – this could be a godsend.

Layout

When I see my Flickr images within EventBox I can’t help think what a waste of space it is. A long bar with the image on the left and just space to the right of it across the window is a bad idea. Why not have a grid view, like iTunes, that when clicked on flips around, in a similar fashion to Dashboard Widgets, showing the information and meta-data for the picture?

I believe that there are a few changes that could be made to the layout in the RSS section of EventBox. I only have a 13.3″ of screen real estate. At the moment I’m only able to see about three feed items at once. I’m a big fan of how NNW gives you a list view of just the title and other details in one line – before you click on the post, I think that’s all you need. If the title grabs me I’ll read it. And yes, I have adjusted the preview sizes.

Twitter & Pownce

Both the Twitter and Pownce modules for EventBox were done very well, I enjoyed little touches such as it filling in people’s usernames in the post box if you click on a tweet. Though it may be a good idea to increase the differences in colours for @ and direct messages.

One way that I think EventBox could really set itself apart from other Twitter clients such as Twitterific, is by having filters for certain subjects. I suppose this could be done in a similar way to how Apple’s Mail works with rules. A good example for this would be all those times when you get someone tweeting: “New Blog Post…”. It would be great to have those not appear in the main feed – just a separate folder.

At The End Of The Day

Eventbox is one of those pieces of software that with a bit of time and a strong community behind it could really flourish. And I hope it does. But I just can’t say it works for me… yet. I hope that if anybody from EventBox is reading this; they post a rebuttal. I’d be interested in hearing more from them.

PS: Does anybody know why I keep accidently referring to this software as OpenBox?

The ‘Joys’ Of Installing CS4 –

Nice. So now we have a bunch of things, one of which is called “Setup.app” and is presumably the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium installer application. Never mind that everyone else on the planet uses the verb to install rather than to set up. Never mind that the file’s name contains no indication of what it is that it is going to be “setting up.” Never mind that there are all kinds of other things in this folder that the user does not need to see. Never mind that the application in question has the exact same icon as the thing that you’ve just clicked on, which was a folder.

I own CS3 and can’t say I found installing it a pain – but the updates are. I made the mistake of uninstalling a few of the apps from the suite and now those I do use won’t update.

I hope Adobe can get their act together, they seem pretty in tune with the internet community so maybe we’ll here something back from them. Until then, I’m steering clear of CS4 – not that I’d use most of the new features anyways.

Even if you don’t use any of Adobe’s products, this makes a highly entertaining read, even if it wasn’t meant to be.