andyfrank.com

Played with the new Inbox2 beta today. Very promising application. Really tries to build a new email model from the start instead of trying to bolt things to the side of a 10-year design. Looking forward to see where it goes.

After following the mailing list briefly, I figured this project was doomed from a “too many cooks in the kitchen” approach. Good software is the result of a small group of really good people making really good decisions - often deciding what not to implement. To be fair though, the S/N ratio was very high, and it was good brainstorming, so I reserved judgment until I saw who was elected “president”.

So I was surprised when I saw that John Gruber was elected as “president”. John gets Mac software and good software in general, so this little project still has alot potential.

Very timely since I’ve been searching for a new email client (grown tired of using two different webapps to manage my personal and work email). I’ve been using Postbox which is the best I’ve found - but still leaves a bit to be desired. And while Postbox’s theme (its built on Thunderbird) is nice - still would love a pure-Cocoa client.

See info on Brent Simmon’s blog. Hope this goes somewhere.

I’ve used a number of RSS readers over the years, and even wrote a few of my own (Newsfox, Fizzle, Beatnik). However, when I bought my MacBook Pro a few years ago, I settled on NetNewsWire as my app of choice. After getting my iPhone, the NNW app was one of the first I downloaded. I signed up for NewsGator to sync my feeds and read/unread between my phone and laptop. I might have too many feeds for the iPhone app to work well, but it did its job, and I was pretty happy with the setup.

Not long after that, I realized I could access all my synced feeds in NewsGator from the browser. So now I could read my synced feeds on my daytime Windows dev box. The online NewsGator app is pretty much abysmal, but it works, and syncs, and since I couldn’t do any of that before, I was happy enough.

So when I got wind that the next release of NNW was dropping NewsGator syncing in favor of Google Reader, my ears perked up a bit. On one hand thats interesting since NewsGator bought NNW, but I was more interested in the browser experience. It had been several years since I’d tried out Google Reader, and while I thought it was ok, I don’t remember being overly impressed.

But I decided to give it another go. I exported all my feeds from NNW and imported them effortlessly into Google Reader. The UI seems to be the same as before. But this time it “felt” alot better, not sure why (is it the enormous performance gains we’ve seen in the last year or two that makes it feel zippy now?). I found it easy to scan and read all my feeds. In fact, I like it so much I might just drop NNW altogether and use Google Reader exclusively.