I’m not having a good time with email clients. Earlier this month we learned that Thunderbird would not get any major feature updates in future (development will continue but Mozilla has reduced Thunderbird’s resources). And now Sparrow, my favoured email client on Mac OS X and on my iPhone, has been acquired by Google.
This may not sound like bad news but, alas, this is a ‘talent acquisition’ – a bit like when Facebook bought Gowalla last year. In other words, the people behind Sparrow will be working on new projects at Google, specifically on the Gmail teams, and won’t be doing any further work on Sparrow itself – this was confirmed by a Google spokesperson to Macstories. We can expect ongoing support for Sparrow, but no new features.
The Mac OS X version is reasonably complete in terms of features – in fact, it has just been updated for the new Retina displays in Apple’s latest MacBook Pro, and presumably will work with Mountain Lion without any problems. As for the iOS version, it can do almost everything that the stock email client for the iPhone can do (and more), but with the notable exception of push notifications of new email messages. This was likely to be a premium feature due to how push notifications work on iOS with background apps. Presumably, today’s announcement means that this won’t be forthcoming; similarly, a rumoured iPad app is now unlikely to be released.
Whilst I’m happy for Sparrow’s developers to be recognised for their talent, and presumably Google were able to give them an offer that they could not refuse, this potentially leaves Sparrow’s users in the lurch. Of course, there’s a limit to what you can do with what was always intended to be a simple email client – part of the reason for the slowdown of Thunderbird development – but the iOS client in particular showed a lot of promise that now won’t be realised.
The likelihood of Sparrow finding a new home in Google was slim in any case; Google doesn’t tend to do much in the way of desktop software (Chrome, Drive, Earth and Picasa are the only major exceptions) and there’s already an official Gmail app for iOS, which has been updated recently and, crucially, supports push notifications. And keeping Sparrow going at Google whilst its developers focus on other things would have been a distraction.
I hope that, instead, Sparrow offer to sell the branding rights and source code to somebody else, to keep it going. Or, better yet, make it open source, so that the community can keep it going. On iOS, the jailbreak community have already written various enhancements, such as Sparrow+.
I suppose I’ll have to investigate Apple’s own Mail app in Mountain Lion. I tried to use it recently as an alternative to Thunderbird, but in Lion it feels over-complicated and poorly designed.
Firstly, don’t let the ‘alpha’ tag put you off. It’s not a finished product, and there are some bugs (the Tweet Marker support doesn’t seem to work), but in my view it’s ‘beta’ quality at worst. This is from someone who has done a lot of beta testing in my time, and who also spent part of the week battling some paid-for software that acted like a beta product – but more on that another time.
Secondly, apart from being still in the testing stage, feature-wise Tweetbot isn’t finished. There’s not yet any support for synchronising your Tweetbot settings between your Mac and your iOS device, as this requires use of iCloud and is therefore only available to apps from the Mac App Store that Apple has vetted. This will be in the final release but not in any public test versions. Tapbots also intend for it to support Notification Centre on Mountain Lion, which, as well as being another Mac App Store-only feature, is also not available to test because only a few select developers have copies of Mountain Lion at present.
It’s also worth pointing out that, whilst this alpha build is free to test, there’s no support; furthermore, the final product will cost money, as with the iPad and iPhone apps.
So, with those caveats pointed out, what it’s actually like to use?
Well, it works pretty much like any other Mac OS X Twitter client, to be honest. The main difference between the iOS app and the Mac desktop is that, whereas on iOS, tapping a tweet brings up a bar with buttons to retweet, reply and favourite, these now appear when you hover over a tweet with the mouse. But you’ll be pleased to know that the swiping gestures from the iOS app made it to the dekstop, so swiping from left to right shows the tweet details, and from right to left shows the tweet in a conversation view with its replies.
‘Streaming’ support, where new tweets are automatically loaded as they are posted, is enabled as standard. Along the left column, all of the various views are shown, like on the iPad app, so there’s easy access to your profile, lists, retweets and saved searches. And this desktop version of Tweetbot retains its formidable support for third-party services, so there’s integration with Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, Pinboard and bit.ly as a ‘read later’ service (most other apps just offer the first two and Readability if you’re lucky), plenty of third-party image hosting services (but not a custom one yet) and a choice of URL shorteners. And curiously for a desktop client, you can add a location to your tweets.
The other great thing, for me, about Tweetbot is its mute feature to hide tweets that don’t interest you, and this feature is also present on the desktop. So far, in this alpha, you can only mute specific Twitter clients, like Twittascope, RunKeeper, Waze, GetGlue or any other services which auto-tweet things that don’t really interest me, but eventually you will be able to mute specific hashtags or keywords, or put some users on mute – this is great when you follow someone who live-tweets a conference and would otherwise dominate your timeline. The mute settings will also be synchronised between clients when iCloud sync is enabled in the final release.
All in all, in my opinion Tweetbot as it is now – even in its alpha state – is still better than the official Twitter client for the Mac, and just beats out Osfoora which was my previous favourite (I reviewed it back in March). If you use Twitter on a Mac, and have Lion installed, give it a try whilst its free, and, if you like it, buy the final release when it comes out. I don’t think you’ll regret it.
It is with a little sadness that Mozilla Thunderbird will no longer receive resources from the Mozilla Foundation. The decision has been made to focus on other products (mainly Firefox), and that there’s not much room for further innovation in desktop email clients – especially as many people now use webmail services exclusively.
I’ve been a long-time user of Thunderbird – right back to version 0.1 alpha (then called Minotaur) which I reviewed back in April 2003. It’s come on a long way since then, and is still my favourite email client on Windows – especially with the Lightning extension adding a calendar feature. A myriad of other extensions has also allowed me to customise it how I want.
That being said, in some ways it’s no longer meeting my needs. I use at work – officially we’re supposed to use Outlook but there are many people using Thunderbird instead, as its IMAP support is much better. This is fine for our email server which is Unix based, but if we ever move to a Microsoft solution then the lack of support for Exchange, even after all of these years, makes Thunderbird fall short.
I also no longer use Thunderbird at home; earlier this year, I moved to Sparrow which offers a much simpler and lighter experience. Thunderbird is great for an all-singing, all-dancing email client and great for the large volumes of mail that I get spanning different folders, but at home, I just want something basic that can stay in the background. It may have far fewer features but Sparrow suits my needs better. Thunderbird is still installed for the few times when I work from home, but I may now look into Apple’s own email client instead.
As I understand it, the next release of Thunderbird will be an ‘extended support release’, at which point it will receive fixes for major bugs and security issues, but no new features – at least, not from Mozilla themselves. It’ll still be hosted by Mozilla and, being open source, should ‘the community’ want to contribute patches to it then they will be welcome to. Postbox remains as a commercial fork of Thunderbird, although its £30 price tag is high.
It’s a shame to see Thunderbird fade into further obscurity but an understandable one. Many users just don’t need a desktop email client anymore, because they pick up their email on a mobile device or webmail. Outlook and Lotus Notes rule the corporate roost. That doesn’t leave much of a market for Thunderbird to serve.
Today marks the 30th successive day that I have posted a blog entry. This used to be something that I could do with no effort – in fact, go back to 2002-2004 and I was often blogging several times a day. Nowadays, it requires much more effort.
Back then, there was no Twitter or Facebook. Consequently some of the posts I made were merely a couple of sentences – maybe a very brief commentary on an interesting link. Those sorts of things now go on Twitter or Delicious, with the subsequent digest of links being auto-posted on Saturday mornings. Unless I can come up with a few paragraphs of thought, I tend not to bother with blogging about one particular news item.
Plus I have less time to write blog posts these days. Back when I was at university, I had enough breaks during the day to post regularly. Now that I work full time, I only have lunch breaks, evenings and weekends to blog. Generally, I will write several entries in one go, and then schedule them to be posted on each subsequent day (I actually wrote this on Sunday afternoon, for example). Whilst I have managed to produce something every day recently, it hasn’t been easy and I respect those people like Dave2 who are still able to produce substantial blog posts every day, year in, year out.
I’m going to try to keep on with posting something every day for as long as I can. It isn’t easy, but hopefully keeping it as a habit will help, and you can also support me by commenting on posts to show that what I write is worthwhile.
To which, my response is “yay!”. I really like Tweetbot on my iPhone as it looks good, works well, and offers plenty of features. It can do everything that the official Twitter for iOS app can do, but will also let you use third party URL shorteners and image upload sites, and offers integration with services like Tweet Marker and Readability which aren’t often available in other Twitter apps. There’s also the ‘mute’ feature, which easily lets you mute certain hashtags that do not interest you, or particular clients like Waze, paper.li, Twittascope and various other services that auto-post things on your friends Twitter feeds that don’t interest you. You can also mute users, and you have the choice of muting them for a short period or indefinitely – great for when someone you follow live-tweets a conference that doesn’t interest you.
I haven’t yet found a desktop Twitter client for the Mac which does all of these things as well as Tweetbot, although Osfoora, my current client of choice, comes close. What excites me most is that Tweetbot is able to synchronise its settings using iCloud, for those that use it both on their iPhone and iPad, and so I’m looking forward to this extending to the Mac OS X app when it launches.
We don’t know much more about when Tweetbot for Mac will launch – there’s nothing about it on the Tapbots web site yet – but I imagine it’ll be after Mountain Lion gets released later this month (19th July). I’ll be almost certain to buy it, although I’ll happily keep on with Osfoora until then.
Last weekend Christine and I visited Creswell Crags on the border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. It is a limestone gorge with various caves along the sides, in which evidence for occupation by human ancestors during the ice age has been found. They are also the only caves in the UK to have cave art on the walls, which was only formally discovered in 2003.
The gorge itself was a beauty spot in Victorian times, and various archaeological excavations have taken place since then. Many of the finds are now in a museum and visitor centre, to the north of the site, which we also visited, and this organises tours of two of the more interesting caves. The caves are normally closed to the public, so it is only by going on the tours that you can see the cave art, which are simple animal depictions carved into the rocky walls of the caves. There’s possible evidence that these were painted at one time, like in other caves in continental Europe (I visited Lascaux, or rather the mock-up at Lascaux II, back in the 1990s), but nowadays just the carvings are visible.
It’s a very interesting site, and the museum explains how the area was in different periods in time – before the last ice age, there would have been hippos in the water and hyenas hunting. The museum was opened in 2009 and is an interesting piece of architecture in itself, and has the ubiquitous café and gift shop.
It’s worth a visit – you can wander around the gorge itself for free, but the tours inside the caves and the museum cost money – up to £13 for adults to do both tours, although this is valid for a year for any repeat visits. There’s a picnic area if it’s a nice day, and the gorge is very pretty.
I’m going to engage my public transport geek mode once again and talk a bit about the latest extension to Manchester’s Metrolink tram network.
Firstly, a bit of history. Metrolink first opened in 1992 and took over operation of two formerly ‘heavy rail’ (regular train service) lines, combined with track through Manchester city centre. Manchester has two main railway stations in the city centre – Piccadilly and Victoria – and the tram service allowed these stations to be linked together.
Of the two heavy rail lines converted, one was the line from Manchester Victoria to Bury; this used electric trains built in the 1960s and non-standard electrification equipment that wasn’t used anywhere else in the UK. Furthermore, this equipment, and the trains, were life-expired, so this was a good opportunity to upgrade to newer equipment. The trams could use the same track, but instead run from overhead electric cables.
The other line went south of Manchester towards Altrincham. This line had a lot of stations over a relatively short line, so using heavy rail trains wasn’t particularly efficient, so putting trams on this route made sense, on the whole. That said, not all trains called at all stations and this lead to some of the faster services being diverted through to Stockport, which now has capacity problems. This is because, unlike on other light rail networks such as the Tyne & Wear Metro in the north east where trains and light rail vehicles share tracks in places, Metrolink is kept separate from the National Rail network.
So that was the first phase. Its success spawned a second phase – a new line to Eccles, opened in 2000. This didn’t follow any existing railway lines, and served Salford Quays which has seen a lot of regeneration recently.
Getting the third phase – known as ‘The Big Bang’ due to it almost doubling the size of the network – built has been more of a challenge, due to money. It was denied central government funding in 2004, and so was split into two small phases – 3a and 3b – with work eventually starting in 2009. The first bit to be completed was a short 360 metre spur from the Eccles line to the new MediaCityUK complex in Salford which also better serves The Lowry and the Imperial War Museum North, and last year the first phase of the South Manchester Line opened to Chorlton-cum-Hardy – eventually, this will reach Manchester Airport. Although the South Manchester Line does follow the route of an old railway line, it was one that closed many years ago, as opposed to an existing line that was converted as with the lines to Bury and Altrincham.
The next bit to open was the line to Oldham, which I alluded to in the title of this post, and it is this particular line that I’m going to focus on. Like with the Bury and Altrincham routes, this follows an existing railway line that was converted – in this case, the Oldham Loop Line, which ran from Manchester Victoria to Rochdale where it met the Caldervale Line and looped back to Manchester. (I wrote about the Caldervale Line a couple of years ago – this is now the line I use to go to work every day, although not this particular bit)
The railway line closed in October 2009, and so it has been almost three years since Oldham had any public transport other than buses serving it. Opening last week, trams leave from a temporary station at the site of Oldham Mumps railway station, and head towards Manchester Victoria – they’ll then head through Manchester city centre and onwards to Chorlton-cum-Hardy. When the project is complete, trams will also serve Rochdale, new stations in Oldham town centre and continue through to Manchester Airport.
Trams will run roughly every 12 minutes – or five each hour – initially, but will increase to ten per hour (a tram every six minutes) in a few years time, once a second line through Manchester city centre has been built. This compares favourably with the old heavy rail train service, which ran four times an hour (but two of those only called at key stations), and once complete it will serve more destinations – there will be direct links to Deansgate railway station and Manchester Airport for the first time, plus there are extra stops on the new line serving places like the new Central Park development. The existing stations have all been rebuilt to be wheelchair friendly, and the trams can be boarded by wheelchair users without assistance, unlike the trains. And the trams are electric, so they won’t emit diesel fumes like the trains they replaced.
But arguably it’s not a complete improvement. The extra stops and slightly longer route means that the service is slower than the old heavy rail service, even with the improved acceleration offered by the trams over trains. The trams are smaller and have fewer seats that the trains, although they will run more frequently, and do not have toilets on board. Bikes also cannot be carried on board the trams, unlike on trains.
Tickets on Metrolink are not integrated with National Rail, so it’s no longer possible to buy a through ticket from, say, London to Oldham. And although the trams will serve more places than before, this does not include Manchester Piccadilly station, although they do call at Market Street which is somewhat closer than Victoria where the trains previously terminated.
On the whole I do hope it’s an improvement in service for the people of Oldham, and it will hopefully relieve pressure on the Caldervale Line which has been taking the strain from passengers displaced by the closure of the railway line. Issues like integrated ticketing with National Rail could be solved with computer and ticket machine upgrades, and there should be cycle storage at tram stops for cyclists. But converting lines to light rail like this, although providing many benefits, can also make things worse, especially for some groups of passengers.
A few months ago I decided to stop using Google’s Picasa for editing my photos and instead switched to Apple’s iPhoto. Doing so has been an enlightening experience and although (spoiler alert!) I prefer iPhoto, I also think it’s worth mentioning why I switched but also what Picasa has going for it.
Firstly, a bit of background – I’ve been a Picasa user for quite some time (since January 2005 apparently) and used it prior to becoming a Mac user. In the early days of Mac ownership I used CrossOver to run it, before later running the Mac OS X version of it when that finally came out. I never really touched iPhoto until this year, when I bought the latest version.
I’m therefore comparing iPhoto ’11 with Picasa 3.9.
Price
Unless you have a reasonably new Mac, you probably won’t have iPhoto ’11. If you do, then it’s free; if not, it’s a £10.49 purchase from the Mac App Store. Picasa is a free download so it wins there.
Image editing
In my opinion, iPhoto wins here as it offers many more features for making adjustments to photos. Both will offer basic features for adjusting light and colour balance, and a one-click button (‘enhance’ in iPhoto, and ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ in Picasa – it is a Google product after all) to automate this. The one-click enhancers in both were a little hit and miss – I found iPhoto sometimes over-saturates pictures whereas Picasa makes them too bright. But iPhoto excels by also offering noise reduction and better controls for lighting pictures – I was able to fix a few of my under-exposed images much more easily in iPhoto than Picasa. On the other hand, Picasa also supports Instagram-style filters should you wish to apply those.
Speed
iPhoto is slow. Like, really slow. If you like seeing the spinning beach ball, then you’re in luck because you’ll see it a lot in iPhoto – especially when you have more than a couple of other apps open at the same time. Picasa is much faster – which seems odd, since Picasa is a cross-platform app written by Google, whereas iPhoto is native to OS X and by Apple. Apple didn’t announce any updates for iLife at WWDC earlier this week but hopefully efficiency improvements are on the cards for iPhoto ’13.
Sharing
If you want to share your photos with others, both apps will let you upload them to the internet. Picasa supports its own Picasa Web Albums service, with two-way synchronisation of photos between your computer and your Web Albums account, as well as Google+ and Blogger. iPhoto supports Facebook and Flickr, and users of OS X Mountain Lion can also share pictures on Twitter. For me, support for Facebook and Flickr is far more useful than Google’s own properties, but this depends on what you use.
Incidentally Google used to offer an Export plugin for iPhoto that would allow you to export from iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums, but this is no longer in active development and has been removed from the Picasa web site. You can still download it from MacUpdate though.
Interface
Of the two, iPhoto is naturally more Mac-like, although it does use a number of non-standard user interface conventions (in comparison to other Mac apps). Picasa feels like an app brought over from Windows – which it is – and the interface is thus less visually appealing. I also found that iPhoto presented its features in a clearer and more easily accessed way – Picasa has a habit of hiding things in menus.
Slideshows
Both apps will let you create slideshows from your images. To me, iPhoto slideshows look more professional, and allow you to easily import music from iTunes to accompany it. On the other hand, Picasa will let you export your slideshow directly to YouTube; iTunes merely saves a QuickTime file and you’ll need to either upload it manually or use Apple’s iMovie, sold separately, to get it on to YouTube.
Other bits
iPhoto will let you order prints and other printed items from within the app itself, which is a nice touch – with Picasa it’s necessary to export images first, and then use a third-party service. iPhoto also lets you browse your Flickr sets and Facebook albums from within the app itself, which includes the use of the slideshow features.
Both will let you tag people in your photos, so that you can also browse by person as well as folder or event; iPhoto uses contact information from your Address Book and Facebook, whereas Picasa uses Google Contacts and Google+. When you upload these photos to Facebook or Google+ then these people will be automatically tagged if you are friends with them or have circled them.
In my experience, Picasa doesn’t see, to get much attention from Google; version 3.9 was still the most recent version as of December 2012, having been out for 9 months; iPhoto has had several minor updates in that time such as adding support for Twitter sharing. Finally, iPhoto naturally supports full-screen mode in OS X Lion and Mountain Lion, which Picasa does not as yet.
Summary
On the whole I feel iPhoto has more to offer than Picasa, but by switching from one to the other I’ve had to sacrifice some features (and speed). Consequently I imagine that there are some people for whom Picasa will clearly be the best option – but, in my case, it isn’t.
This post was revised in December 2012 to add more information about slideshows, Twitter sharing, photo tagging and Picasa updates.
Over the Mayday weekend, Christine and I went to Newby Hall with my parents. It’s a privately owned manor house, which, along with its extensive gardens, is open to the public. I used to go there a lot when I was younger as there’s a brilliant adventure playground for kids, but this was my first visit there in a long time.
I went to RailFest 2012 at the National Railway Museum yesterday. As it’s still on until Sunday, I’ve decided to write about it now, just in case you have time to go and visit.
Firstly, if you’re not normally interested in trains, then, to be frank, RailFest probably isn’t for you. In essence, you have several items of the NRM’s own collection, mixed in with some visiting trains, both old and new. This is great for train geeks like me, but not so great for those without a passion for rail travel, like Christine, who did not accompany me on this occasion.
You can go onto the footplate, or into the drivers cab of many of the trains on show, and there are plenty of volunteers around to talk with you about the train. Plus, every train on show has an information board, with many answering the question ‘Why is this here?’ as some locomotives are notable. There’s Sarah Siddons, a Metropolitan Railway locomotive preserved by London Underground which is now Britain’s oldest working electric locomotive. Or a class 43 High Speed Train locomotive called 43159, which was part of a pair of locomotives that set the official world speed record for a diesel locomotive, and which is still in regular revenue service with First Great Western. And next to it is 41001, the sole remaining prototype locomotive for the High Speed Train which has just commenced restoration. And then there are the more well-known locomotives – both Mallard and Sir Nigel Gresley were available for footplate talks, as was Tornado, a steam locomotive built in 2008 to original LNER designs.
But in a way it was nice to be able to get up close to some of the trains that we see every day, or look behind the scenes in places where passengers don’t normally go, like the drivers cab. It was particularly interesting comparing the cab of 41001, which dates from 1972, with the cab of one of the Class 395 Hitachi trains which operate on High Speed 1 for Southeastern’s domestic high speed services (and the Javelin services for the upcoming Olympics) which were introduced 37 years later in 2009. Both seem to have a similar number of buttons and controls but the latter could do so much more.
There were also a number of train rides available on standard, narrow and miniature gauge trains, although I didn’t take this up even though they were included with the entry price – £13 for all day if bought in advance online. The site was quite busy, especially in the afternoon, and, unsurprisingly, most visitors were older men with cameras and excitable young boys. The museum itself is open as usual, and remains free to those who aren’t interested in RailFest.
If you are going, allow at least 3 hours for RailFest alone, on top of any time you want to spend in the rest of the museum. I’d also advise bringing your own food as the catering on the RailFest site is extortionate (best part of £10 for a cheeseburger, chips and a bottle of cola). And also think of lots of questions to ask, as the volunteers are more than happy to answer them. It’s well worth the visit.
