Speaking of usability -- GMail

I was a happy user of elm, and then mutt since.. oh, I don't know -- about 1992 I believe. Yes, text only mail reader.

I started using GMail a couple of months ago just out of curiousity at first. In a month I moved most of my various mail accounts there leaving only one out of the loop -- just in case.

Why do I tell that? To show how much I am impressed and how I think GMail is a really high quality product.

And now, all that said, here is what bothers me most about GMail:

1. Make these buttons stay put
   Look at these two screenshots of what is essentially the same thing -- message view:
   
   
   
   
   Notice that the buttons at the top are different -- to the point that in the same image width the dropdown does not fit in one image. You have to actually read the labels and if the intent is to "archive" you have to hunt for that option in the "More..." dropdown menu.
   
   Now, I do realise that deep inside the "Archive" and "Remove 'todo' label" are actually the same button -- "Archive" is essentially "Remove 'Inbox' label". But this is a technicality I as a user don't want to be concerned about. I don't want to re-read ever shifting buttons every time I want to do something -- I just want to click and be done with it.
   
   This is so basic that it goes back to 1997 Jakob Nielsen's top ten mistakes list, and has been re-iterated many times since.
   
   
2. Message editing - [TAB] misbehavior
   
   At least in Firefox if while you're typing in the message you hit "Tab" and then "Space" -- you end up sending the message, no questions asked. Whereas all you probably wanted to do was to add some white space in the message. Ask me how I know.. or ask people who got half-baked messages from me.
   
   Either suppress tab altogether or make it behave like it is intuitively expected when typing up text in an editor.
   
   
3. Hilight messages from people in my contact list
   
   Title says it all -- such option would be very convenient. Can be implemented as a checkbox in filters "message is from somebody in my [dropdown] contact list" and add one more action -- "highlight it".
   
   
4. Filters -- add priorities and "this filter is final" checkbox
   
   Due to filters being all on the same priority level and all executing for every message there is no way to do certain things. For instance, if I want to move CVS commits to their own label, skip the inbox and not apply any other tags I can't do that -- because they are addressed to my "technical" email and they get labeled as such as well. As the title says -- add priorities and a checkbox to say "this filter is final, skip the rest". Yes, it may be confusing for mom-and-pop somewhere out there, but can't I wish?
   
   
5. Custom from problem
   
   What Danny Sullivan says in his #18. Very annoying to have to answer to people about what is my actual email address. If you give an option to have a custom from -- make it work. If the reason is branding and advertising of gmail -- let me pay for it, I won't mind paying.
   
   
6. Multiple froms, why not provide MX'es?
   
   And speaking of custom froms -- why not provide MX'es for domains? Free or pay-for, I don't care -- but it would have been nice. So that someone buying a johndoeontheweb.org domain could point its MX record at gmail and happily get all of that domain's mail in his inbox without a need for redirects.
   
   
7. Working with individual messages
   
   This is minor. But sometimes it can be useful to work with individual messages, not whole conversations -- if a lengthy conversation resulted in some decision, or a nice technical trick I'd want to tag that one final message with a "todo" or "howto" label.
   
   
8. Bulk upload of old mail
   
   I know it's possible, but some nice interface where you can actually upload an old mailbox and let gmail parse it out, archive and make it searchable would have been nice.
   

Did you make it this far? Thanx, I owe you :)

And if you work for google -- count me in, I won't mind testing new features and interface layouts.

Google Calendars missing feature

I am not much of a calendar user. Yes, I always liked the idea of scheduling and yes, I did make a couple of attempts at using various calendar apps over the years, but... the most I do typically is circle a day on the fridge paper calendar at home or email myself reminders in the office.

Hopefully that's because I use wrong types of calendars. May be what I need is the new Google Calendars feature.

It looks and feels great, I like it. But I think there is an immediate problem with it -- there seems to be no way to say "this event repeats every {{period}}". Which is especially strange with their default suggestion of "Mom's birthday" for the entry field.

Am I stupid and simply can't find it, or is it truly not there?

And if it does not show up in a condensed way somewhere on the gmail screen -- I'll probably end up forgetting all about this new calendar app as well...

Python library for ISBNdb.com's API

Since we lack a section for 3-rd party tools on ISBNdb.com I'll post it here for now -- Daniel Bickett has created a Python module for accessing ISBNdb.com's API.

I'm no expert in Python, but it looks like an easy to use and nicely implemented project.

Thanx, Daniel!

Tracking referrers in a hosted blog

I got curious about where people come from to this blog (not that I have swarms of visitors -- I should have probably said "curious IF people come to this blog").

Since this is hosted by Blogger.com and I don't have access to the server logs I used this simple webbug -- added this javascript one-liner into the template:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"><!--//
if(document.referrer) {
  document.write('<img src="http://ejelta.com/images/myblog.gif?ref=' +
                 escape(document.referrer)+
                 '" width="1" height="1" alt=""/>');
}
//--></script>

It sends a request to the server where I do have control over server logs, so I can grep for myblog.gif and see the referrers.

Thought I'd post this in case it may be useful for somebody else.

Google Reader's lack of overview

I spent half-an-hour to see if I can migrate to Google Reader after reading about their cool new sharing feature. That did not exactly work out unfortunately. It's fast and pretty looking, no question about that, but the thing it's missing is a high level overview of some sort -- something that would say "there are 4 new posts in that blog", two in this and one in that. Some blogs I want to read right away, some may safely wait till a coffee break and some I may just "mark as read" at the end of day if I did not get around to reading them. Reading an unprioritized blogroll is too much for me.

Back to trusty Thunderbird.

Obligatory first post

It took me a couple of years to finally give in to this whole blogging thing. Let's see if I end up posting more than once a year.

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