Yearly Archives: 2005

Gee! (your app smells terrific)

Macintosh

The worst part of having multiple e-mail addresses is keeping on top of new messages without spending every waking moment checking each account in sequence. That’s why I love “Gee!”:http://www.lloydslounge.org/gee/, a functional little GMail notifier for Mac OS X.

Gee (I’m going to stop exclaiming it) checks GMail’s Atom feed for my messages and updates a small blue circle in the menubar with the count of new ones. Pretty standard, but Gee goes one louder: clicking on the circle drops down a list of the senders’ addresses (or subject, or a combination depending on preference) so that I can quickly tell the difference between spam and an important message without pulling up GMail itself. If that’s not enough, Gee also lets me reset the counter so I can _choose to ignore it_ until something newer comes in.

That combination of simple features provides the best attention-span booster I’ve had in weeks. Of course, I just blew any productivity gain by blogging about it, but I had to share the love.

return to flight july 13th

Space

According to a recent AP article, Space Shuttle Discovery is “ready to launch on July 13th”:http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20050628-1403-spaceshuttle.html. Perhaps even more interesting is a little blurb at the end of the article:

_The Iran Non-Proliferation Act would effectively bar U.S. astronauts from staying on the space station after April 2006. The bill, passed in 2000, had aimed to prevent Russia from helping Iran expand its nascent nuclear program._

Whoops. That might be something to look into…

a flaw in the AJAX model?

AJAX

I’ve been using GMail a lot lately. I’ve shunted my public-facing e-mail address through it, and the spam filtering has been surprisingly effective. I’m also interested in the AJAXy goodness they’ve implemented, which gets around some of the interface headaches inherent in Webmail.

Unfortunately, I’ve noticed something disturbing when using GMail in the same context as a traditional mail reader. It doesn’t seem to respond well to multi-tasking. Specifically, if I try to fire-and-forget something (like “Archive these three messages”) and switch to another window or tab, GMail stops acting on my request and gets stuck on “Loading…” or similar.

So, is this a symptom of the J in AJAX causing trouble? Is Firefox stopping the Javascript flow when I switch windows, or is some important object no longer available to GMail? Or is GMail not handling some common environment change that occurs when the window is out of focus? Either way, it’s a caveat to be considered when trying to replace desktop apps with AJAX Web apps.