Over at the Postbox blog, they’re teasing the upcoming version 2.5 with a post about a New Addressing Widget. There’s only a screenshot, but it looks like a nice usability improvement – it looks more Mac-like. To and CC are in separate fields, so it’s easier to add a CC without using the mouse now, [...]

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About 700 words on how a client should display old reference emails that you need to look at, but not reply to. I decide that all the current clients I tried don’t support this well, and I argue that they should.

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Last year, I wrote up a list of restaurants I’d recommend in Austin for an intern from California who was going to spend all summer here and needed to know what not to miss out on. This is not just places around downtown. In fact it’s weighted toward North Austin, if anything – only because [...]

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Volatile and Decentralized: The death of Intel Labs and what it means for industrial research. Matt Welsh (ex Harvard Professor, now at Google) on the phasing out of Intel’s “Lablets”, which were a new kind of company-supported research center that was co-located with major universities. His blog post title notwithstanding, this doesn’t seem to be [...]

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Cram is a test framework for command line programs, originally written for mercurial’s test suite. I like the approach – it just reads a shell transcript and runs the commands it finds. If the output doesn’t match, it shows you a diff. It’s kind of like doctest. It looks refreshingly simple to get started with, [...]

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About a year ago, I decided to start a separate blog called ‘mikechecksmail’ on Tumblr to talk about the details of mail clients on OS X. I posted a few real articles there, then let things sit for a while as a dissertation, a new house, and a new baby have taken up my free [...]

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A conversation view for Thunderbird: Thunderbird Conversations – GitHub. From the screenshots, it looks pretty good. I downloaded it but lost energy after realizing that it’s only compatible with beta versions of Thunderbird 3.3. I have 3.0 or something, and the latest released version is 3.1, I guess. Or whatever.

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Some great samples and historical tidbits from Fresh Air: Before Ipanema: Stan Getz’s exquisite quintets Before he was famous for popularizing bossa nova with “The Girl from Ipanema” in the early 1960s, saxophonist Stan Getz recorded with small jazz groups all through the ’50s. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says a new reissue shows Getz was [...]

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Link: Adam Engst on GMail at Tidbits The start of a 3-part series on GMail from Adam Engst. He was a long-time Eudora user, so it’s interesting to see how his workflow changed when he moved to such a different program. Also, as a journalist I’m sure he gets tons more email than average people, [...]

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From The Axis of Eval: “Truth IS stranger than fiction”: Chuck McManis explains the cancellation and subsequent fame of Java. It’s fascinating to me how often you hear about these overnight successes that took years to develop and were canceled, given up for dead, etc. many times. I remember hearing similar stories about Self and [...]

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