Category: Life

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Life Technology

Why No Google Apps

Last year I moved my main email address from a generic Gmail account to my own domain. The reasons were many, but the main gist of it is so that I will control my email no matter what happens with a service provider.

In the past I had signed up for my first email account with Yahoo, then Hotmail, then finally Gmail. Having my email under my own domain name allows me to switch providers for whatever reason while still using the same address. It also gives me more control, which I am a fan of when it comes to my online life.

However, I moved to Google Apps instead and that created a number of problems for me.

  • ANOTHER Google account of some sort … which included work, my Gmail account, my business, and then my personal one
  • Google having access to my personal email, which wasn’t a problem for my conscience in the past, but was becoming more of one
  • Google’s mail is not your generic IMAP account with folders, they do a lot of other stuff
  • Google has begun limiting Apps accounts and might do so again in the future

Now, the Google Apps service is still superb, and as I have said before, it is good enough that I think it has killed a good portion of the hosted email business, but I still wanted to move to something else.

Well, for now, that “something else” is Atmail Cloud. As of earlier this evening, both my business and personal email (along with This One Podcast) is now going through Atmail Cloud. They have been wonderful so far and are still working out some kinks in the whole thing, but their support has been superb. I’ll write up more about Atmail Cloud later.

So I no longer have a personal or business Google Apps account and this has simplified things nicely. Now I can enjoy Google’s services without thinking about which account I should be using. I now have only one (my old Gmail account) … and that mail is already forwarded to me.

Categories
Life

Skeptical of Free

In the tech world I see three basic categories for “stuff”:

  1. “Stuff” you pay for
  2. “Stuff” you don’t pay for
  3. “Stuff” that is open

Item 1 and 3 I tend to gravitate towards. For the first one, I feel like I have at least a little bit to do with its longevity and that the company or person at least has some motivation to treat me, the customer right. I paid them, they need me to do that and to get other people to pay as well.

“Stuff” that falls into Category 1 include Instapaper, Harvest, Tweetbot, my Apple stuff, Reeder, Textmate, etc.

I also trend toward the third category as well, mainly when it has to do with my development environment and the tools and libraries that I use. In this case, the person (or persons) was “scratching their own itch” and a community has grown up around this thing where there are a bunch of people scratching itches and hopefully some of those itches I might need scratched … well, this fell apart a long time ago.

‘Stuff” that falls into Category 3 includes (but is not limited to) Ruby on Rails, Ruby, WordPress, Apache, Ubuntu, Vim, etc.

I don’t want to come out too harshly against the second group here, but I am increasingly skeptical of that “stuff” that I don’t have to pay for or that isn’t open … or at least that I’m not explicitly paying for with my own money or that isn’t completely open source.

“Stuff” in Category 3 would include (but once again is not limited to) Facebook, Google Search, Google Apps (and Gmail, and most Google services), Twitter, etc.

It’s not that they are not good services (even though I have my gripes with Gmail and Google Apps at the moment), it is that I am not sure what value I actually have to Google. Am I a valued customer or am I something they are looking to monetize. It seems that most of the “whiz bang” startups at the moment run into the same issue: they get a ton of users and then need to “monetize” those users somehow.

The easy, no thought, no-one-gets-fired-for-choosing-IBM decision is to slap ads on it and then increasingly try and leverage the data you have on the users.

Perhaps the simplest, most forgotten way is to build something that is worth paying for in the first place!

Google garners something close to 95% of its revenue from ads. That’s an icky number to me, but I’m a strange person. If a company is that reliant on a single revenue source, what happens if that source “dries up”? I don’t know what Google will do when it happens (or if it does), but it will be interesting to find out.

I am more comfortable paying for something. That might make me weird, but I’m very skeptical of free.

Categories
Life Technology

Some Tiny Thoughts on Patents

Now that Honeywell is suing Nest, the whole patent issue is coming back in the software community again. A tweet conversation I had with Ben Bleikamp ended with this:
https://twitter.com/bleikamp/status/166677721269800960

I’m not a fan of patents mostly because they’re now being used to stifle and intimidate than to protect. I would much rather see all patents be dismissed than add any more strength to the patent system.

I do wonder, though, what the economic impact would be of dismantling and destroying the patent system. A lot is focused on the innovation that would be possible if people were not afraid of getting destroyed by a larger company (looking at the Nest vs Honeywell situation, you can understand that), but I think it would be interesting to look at the other issues it would cause.

Licensing agreements go away. Partnerships born out of mutual destruction go away. There is a lot of economic destruction that would need to happen if it did happen. Is it good? Is it bad?

I don’t know, I just hope that cooler heads prevail.

Categories
Life

My Twitter App

This is the basic list of what I want from a Twitter app for iOS.

  • Uses the built-in Twitter keyboard from iOS
  • A minimum of wasted UI chrome (take a look at Twitter for iPhone for an example of wasted UI chrome)
  • Has DMs as a first-level option (Tweetbot and Twitterrific do this right)
  • Fast
  • Push. Notifications.
  • Doesn’t force you away from the Twitter stream for tweet actions
  • Easy conversation views
  • Good icon
  • Some integration with the built-in Twitter auth in iOS 5

That’s about it. Sadly, nothing hits on all of the points, but there each one hits on just a  few. As of today, Tweetbot seems to get the closest … if only they would use the built-in Twitter keyboard.

Categories
Life

Keeping Track

I’ve always had an issue with keeping track of the stuff I need to get done.

So I was quite interested in an article by Daniel Markovitz over at the Harvard Business Review titled titled To-Do Lists Don’t Work.

While I do not agree with everything stated, he does bring up a lot of good points. His actual advice, “living in your calendar”, has its own problems associated with it, but the whole article brought up enough ideas that I’ve decided to write about what I use here.

My Field Notes

This is my main, day-to-day way of keeping track of tasks. I have a number of Field Notes notebooks that I keep both at work and at home, and I write down anything I need to get done in there that isn’t a long-term task or part of a long-term project.

I also write any notes down in there at meetings which I will then transfer over as soon a I get back to my desk or computer. I’ve found it to be the most frictionless way for me to get down what is needed and move on. I’ve tried a number of different pens and really haven’t settled on just one to use, but I prefer black ink.

For longer-term projects I work with Things for Mac. I’ve tried other electronic task organizers and nothing really comes close for me. I also use Things for iPhone and have Things for iPad, but really don’t use it much since I moved to just keeping things in Field Notes notebooks that isn’t a long-term, need-to-use-my-MacBook-Pro, type of task or project.

The most frustrating thing about using Things is that it doesn’t do over-the-net syncing yet. It has been promised, but it has not been delivered. So I use it mainly on the Mac and wait for a more complete experience for the future.

I also use Reminders on my iPhone for lists of things, like groceries. While I could use it on the iPad as well, I just haven’t found a use.

That’s about it. I don’t follow any crazy system, I just keep thing separated by the kind of project and then use notebooks for the rest. Sometimes what has worked in the past still works well in the future.