Something's Awry…

Email is a daily fact of life for most people. Whether it’s just getting the updates from web stores about special deals or swapping files for work, email plays a big part of our lives. And I’ve begun to hate it on the Mac.

This seems like an odd statement and especially as its aimed at just OS X and Apple. Don’t get me wrong, I use email a lot. It’s de facto communication method at work and I use Gmail and iCloud like others but I’ve begun to dread sending emails for a variety of reasons which I’ll discuss.

Formatting

My first bug bear is formatting. Regardless of the email client I use on the Mac, I’ve not nailed this down right yet. It hadn’t been an issue until recently but now it really gets on my nerves. Mail.app seems to have a mind of its own with formatting. I set it to only send plain text emails, because then I can guarantee how it’ll appear in the other persons window (subject to whatever font they use). Simple. Until you start adding attachments and this is where Mail.app appears to go mental. Adding an image will instantly convert your message to HTML. Even if you select to put the file at the end of the message and have windows friendly attachments. Enable the settings to put the image in as an icon only and when sending you get icon sized images in Gmail and Outlook Online (I assume it’s the same in Outlook but I’m not opening it to try… Urgh!) Overall, Mail.app really sucks here.

I been sending HTML emails for years with no issues but would always get annoyed when emails would come back with writing to small to read due to a mess up in settings between different applications and settings. Sparrow seemed to reduce the number of emails I got like this and made it nice and simple to send emails and for a while I used it (until I moved my email to iCloud and then Sparrow initially had problems with it – all sorted now though) but its time had passed – it’s lack of various options annoyed me and it was never clear if I was sending plain text email, no support for mail certificates etc. Mail’s handling of converting any file with an attachment to HTML just made it worse – I never had problems with people reading emails in Outlook but when you viewed the emails in a webmail client, things looked ugly (what’s this ATT00001.htm file that got sent with it?) Things weren’t good so I tried Postbox and then Thunderbird which led to the next few niggles that I didn’t realise I had at the time!

The use of Postbox managed to get me around some of the formatting niggles – it seems to obey my commands in terms of sending text emails with attachments etc. however, it doesn’t seem to also obey my settings in displaying emails sent from others. I can overall this and force all emails to be displayed in plain text only but that’s a bit ugly for newsletters and emails with pictures. Say what you like about Facebook and Twitter but at least the styling is consistent and that your words and images will look the same on their screen as yours, providing they’ve not overwritten the default CSS layout of those sites (so non geeks probably won’t!).

Signatures

Signatures are a basic part of email. But why, oh why, will Mail and Sparrow continue to send them in replies? Often replies can be simple yes/no answer and I don’t want to manually remove an email signature that’s longer than the email body itself! The signature is helpful to those people you’re emailing who might not know your full details. If they’re emailing you, at least they know your email and have a point of contact! Thunderbird and Postbox seem to handle these well and let you turn signatures off in replies but I’ve no idea why Mail and Sparrow can’t do this.

I quite like having random signatures for my personal accounts. Mail manages this, the only app I’ve found that does! I assume Thunderbird might should I find a plugin for it but then I have to hope its a cross platform one.

OS X Integration

Mail and Sparrow manage this fairly well (Sparrow probably better than Mail!) Postbox makes a valiant attempt but Thunderbird falls flat. I know it’s cross platform but so is Postbox and they manage it quite well! I’m on about Growl notifications, contact pictures and contact emails etc etc. The latest version of Mail doesn’t work with the latest Growl (without a plugin) so gets somewhat annoying. Postbox is good but it wouldn’t hurt to display the senders image in the notification, rather than the Postbox icon. Thunderbird is just nasty – doesn’t even show the contact pictures in the app.

Ease of Setup

Sparrow and Mail win out here – incredibly easy to setup. Mail just worked, Sparrow I had to change a few folders for access when accessing an IMAP server but it was straight forward. Postbox and Thunderbird required some considerable effort to send deleted emails to the right trash folder, the right archived messages to the right archive – this being on IMAP, iCloud AND Gmail. Once done, it seems ok but it was just hassle. Sparrow, however is hit from a lack of settings. As a minimal email client, I can see why it does it but it’s a bit of a pain.

Overall

Overall at the minute, I seem to be enjoying using iOS for email! On the iPad the layout is quite nice, the fonts always seem to be the right size, it all seems to work incredibly nicely. iOS even supports S/MIME email certificates which makes it better than Sparrow (which doesn’t). I know certificates aren’t widely supported but I like to use a program that does so that they might become widely known about and used.

At the minute, Postbox has replaced my default email software of Mail. Mail works but it’s such a pain now in terms of formatting that I can’t attempt to use it – I don’t know how my emails are appearing on iOS devices (something I have to consider as my supervisor does a lot of work from his phone).

As far as I’m concerned, there currently isn’t a Mac email software that meets my needs exactly. Sparrow seems to be trying to bring iOS email to OS X but it’s lack of some of the more complex iOS bits means its lacking a bit where I’d like. However, both Sparrow and Postbox seem to be improving so it’ll be good to follow further developments on both.

So the Mac has managed to blow me away again today, almost as much as when I first started using it, about this time last year. How you might ask?

Well I found out today that you can create custom keyboard shortcuts.

As a self confessed keyboard lover (I love shortcuts and desktop launchers, like Alfred ), I really missed some of the keyboard shortcuts in Mail that others such as Sparrow and Postbox have, such as the ⌘ + Enter shortcut key to send email. This was a complete pain to me (turns out the default Mail one is Shift + ⌘ + D which to me doesn’t seem right). Anyhow, it appears that with Mac, you can create shortcut keys for any application or remap them to whatever you want!

It’s all done in System Preferences, using the Keyboard option. On opening, select the Keyboard Shortcuts option and select Application Shortcuts. Clicking the + sign lets you choose what you want to add as shown below.

This lets you add whatever you want just by putting in the name of the menu item you want to change/add a shortcut for, so I added the ⌘ + Enter key that I wanted and when I restarted Mail.app, it was there ready for me to use (it looks like if the application was running, the application needs to be restarted for it to be picked up properly).

The fact that you can do this for any app blows me away somewhat – I don’t think Windows has anything like this (or at least, not so eaisly accessed and changed) which means that this is another of those features that Mac has that make it better for the user than Windows!

I’ve reviewed Texpad once before here. I said it was a good, native, Mac LaTeX editor that had a lot going for it.

Well the version I reviewed was v1.0 and now it’s on v1.26 so I thought it was about time to review it again to see how it’s improved.

Improvements

The biggest one that the developers pushed was the code completion feature. This means it’ll complete any code that you start typing and will auto type the finish (for example, LaTeX codes are inserted as \begin{} and end with \end{} and Texpad will automatically create the \end command of whatever you inserted as the beginning command.)

Not only that, but if you’re using Bibtex for your referencing and have already added the Bibtex file location to the file, Texpad will automatically search it for the reference as you type. For example, if the Bibtex key for the item I want is Salter2011, I can type \cite{S and Texpad will display a dropdown list showing all the names in the Bibtex file with Bibtex key that begins with S. This easily allows me to then find the reference I need without opening my Bibtex manager.

Open to All

Texpad, unlike some other text editors for the Mac, doesn’t allow for any font to be used in the editor. It’s list of fonts, whilst decent, doesn’t allow the use of personal fonts. However, after emailing the developers and asking if this could be enabled (so I could use the fantastic Mono Dyslexic font ), they sent me the following email.

Hi Chris,

Texpad 1.2.6 is in the AppStore now. Among other fixes and new features, there’s a hidden feature being delivered on your request, which I’m sure will be useful to many other users. Texpad now searches for installed fonts with the string ‘dyslexic’ in their name and lists them in the menu. I do not have the font you mentioned on my machine, but have tested the functionality with other fonts. I’d appreciate if you gave it a quick try at some point and let us know if Texpad correctly lists the fonts you need in the menu.

Merry xmas.

Jawad

And indeed, Jawad is right. The changes appear perfectly.

As can be seen, the font list shows the font and selecting it works perfectly. So the editor is now in a much better position to allow anyone and everyone access to LaTeX.

Overall

Overall the improvements have added to Texpad immensely. It’s now a very functional LaTeX editor that is constantly being updated and works perfectly well, with an active development team that are rapidly adding features and improvements to the software. Hopefully, 2012 will see the software improve considerably on it’s already fantastic base.

Texpad can be found on the Mac App Store .

I think everyone get’s it at some point – you need to concentrate on something important but you cant stop checking Facebook, Twitter or another website. There’s where the excellent Self Control app comes in.

Simple and Easy to Use

The principle between Self Control is easy – it blocks access to time wasting websites. It works by blocking access to websites in any browser you have installed. It’s initial screen pops up with the following window.

Clicking the edit blacklist lets you choose what sites you want to block. Sites are blocked completely but you might need to play about (i.e. I blocked micromart.co.uk but it didn’t block the sub domain forum.micromart.co.uk)

Set the slider to the time that you want and off it goes – Self Control asks for an admin password and then displays a timer, counting down to when access will be allowed again. Be warned, once started, Self Control cannot be stopped, even by restarting!

Downsides

The main downside is the inability to import or export website lists on different PC’s but that might also prove a benefit – you can block different sites on Mac’s at home and work for example.

Also, for some reason, some apps aren’t blocked. The Mac Twitter app isn’t blocked by the app and therefore can still be used to browse/keep up with Twitter. However, for me, this isn’t a huge issue – it means I just shut down the Twitter app and leave it closed during the stint.

Conclusion

Overall, Self Control performs really well considering the free price point. It’s worth checking out if you find yourself wasting time during the day on various sites.

So the Mac App Store has been about for a while now and I’ve seen plenty of talk on what it means for the developers and Apple. We’ve seen arguments on the cost of using it (Apple taking 30%) and on it requiring sandboxing and what this means for the consumer.

However, I’ve not seen any posts on how we feel, the consumer, using the store.

Why the App Store?

I’ll start of by saying I’m a big fan of Linux. Why? The repository system. Not only do my updates for my computer come from this, so do my program updates. Updating my system is as simple as running the commands

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This will update my system fully. How simple is that in comparison to Windows where each individual program has to look for updates each time it boots up?

I originally saw the Mac App Store as the Mac equivalent of the synaptic repository of Linux but with more detail and prettier looking. And it is, similar.

I love the fact when I open the App Store, it automatically looks for updates for all the apps I’ve installed and purchased. One app lets me download and update all the installed software from it and that for me, is the main plus side to the app store. Alright, it’s not as polished as the Linux method, as system update is a separate program but it would be nice for each to run at the same time and both update at once if needed.

Advantages

It’s main advantage is as above. But also as a consumer, having access to a central repository of apps is great for flicking through and finding new apps. The Staff Picks and featured apps means I very often find programs I might never have considered or even found had it not been for the feature.

The reviews feature is extremely helpful, even if most of the reviews aren’t. Perhaps Apple should police them a bit more than they do.

Downsides

However, the app store is hard to navigate – well, it’s easy to navigate but to find the decent apps, it’s a struggle. I still find myself relying on external websites such as Mac Appstorm to find myself new, quality programs. This is a flaw but at least the Staff Picks and Featured try to combat this problem.

It would be nice for the App Store to check daily/weekly/customisable time to check for updates – I guess it might already do this having seen the icon on peoples docks with notification numbers on it but I don’t have it in my dock and manually run it (mainly because I try and find new software at least once a week). Would be nice if it ran alongside Software Update as I mentioned above.

Also, where’s our Genius feature? iTunes has it for music and iOS have it for apps on iPhones/iPods, why isn’t there a feature for that in the App Store? Or a “Customers who purchased this also purchased these” feature similar to Amazon? That would be very handy!

Conclusion

Overall,I think the App Store will be here to stay. As the image above shows, I have a considerable number of programs from the App Store and this list is likely to get far longer as time goes on. I’ll be interested to see how major software upgrades plan out – ideally I’d like to see them progress similar to Smultron – two versions are on the App Store and both can be purchased though the developer is focussing on the newer version.

Overall I think the app store is a really good step towards emulating the Linux behaviour of package management. It just needs a few tweaks.

I’ve written before on part of my thesis writing workflow here. I was testing out Mou, Pandoc and LaTeX and whilst it’s good for getting ideas down into cyberspace, it begins to fall down when you start introducing more complex LaTeX code into the documents. For example in my thesis, I’m using acronyms so I’m using the acronyms package and I also need to reference scientific data (as you’d expect!). But what editor to use on my Mac?

Past

In the past, I used to use the cross platform Texmaker but after using the Mac for a while, I found it ugly (ok, so that’s not a huge reason to hate it) and cluttered and I was looking for alternatives that fitted in more nicely with the Mac theme.

That’s when I found Texpad and decided to give it a try (it’s a paid for app on the Mac App store but there is a free demo on the Texpad website). It seemed to fit the bill but in what way and how?

Basically, when looking for a TeX editor, I want the following:–

• Syntax highlighting – hugely important to me so I can see the difference between text and commands
• Easy to see log output – should something go wrong with the LaTeX typesetting, I want to know about it and how to fix it.
• Commands – Easy to inset custom commands (though not as important now I’ve found Codebox .
• Navigation – allow me to jump to any point on the document where there are headers so I can start typing in the right section.

Texpad Interface

The Texpad interface fits nicely with the Mac OS X theme as it’s a native client. Plus points in it’s favour but not hugely important – however, it does support Lion’s full screen app feature and this makes it invaluable for long, distraction free writing sessions.

Plus Points

As you can see in the picture above, the interface is highlighted with the plus points – it’s a clean interface that allows you to input your work easily and with little fuss. The default display (if a PDF has been generated) is to display your code and the output PDF on the right. It’s a simple shortcut of ⌘+2, ⌘+3 or ⌘+4 to change between just the code, the view in the picture or just the PDF output (⌘+1 hides the navigation bar). Being able to easily view the output is a major plus point to me – Texmaker has it there but it’s not the Preview render view and so I often saw errors in the PDF output until I opened the PDF in Preview.

A major plus point I’ve found is that it hides all the temporary files such as the .aux files etc – these are stored in the same folder as the Tex file but in a folder called .textmp so are hidden by default in Finder – I like this as it keeps them there in case I need them but hides them from view as I don’t want to see them unless I have to.

Drawbacks

It’s main drawbacks are that it doesn’t support keyboard shortcuts for inserting code – by this I mean that ⌘+B does not insert the code for bold text like Texmaker does. However, in my mind, this is a fairly minor issue (⌘+B in this case runs Bibtex on the file). It’s other main drawback I can see is that it doesn’t follow the usual pattern of Mac applications and have ⌘+, open it’s preferences – instead the preferences are in the menu bar, however as there aren’t to many, this isn’t really an issue though does add some confusion. Finally, it doesn’t support Lion’s autosave feature. However, you can set it so that it autosaves on typeset which is what I have and I’m guilty of fairly often typesetting to see my changes so this saves it slightly though it might be a nice feature to bring in at a later date.

Conclusion

Overall, the cost is worth it for a native, good looking LaTeX editor that holds it’s own against it’s rivals. Try the demo out and see what you think. For me, it’s worth it as it fits my work flow in a nicer way than Texmaker does. However, I’d be interested to know what other solutions other people are using.

Ok, so Sparrow has been released on the App Store today and features iCloud support.

Having now tried it, I can safely say it sucks. Don’t get me wrong, Sparrow is a fantastic email client. It very quickly replaced Mail for me as it was nice and simple, uncluttered and allowed me to send email quickly and it worked great with my Gmail, Gmail App account and my Work Exchange Server (accessed via IMAP).

But with the release of iCloud, I decided to ditch Google pretty much – partly because I’m a privacy nut and I think they have enough of my data, what with my search engine results so I gradually started moving everything to iCloud (incidentally, this advice at Reddit made moving everything bar email to iCloud easy).

However, I was lacking desktop email reading. It wasn’t a problem initially but as I’ve slowly begun to move more and more of my website subscriptions and personal email etc over to iCloud, I’ve begun to need to read my email on a desktop, rather than web based or on my iPhone. So the release of Sparrow’s update was a great relief.

That was until I used it.

Adding the iCloud account was simple – just put in your name, email and iCloud password and all is added automatically which was a good start – I’d tried to add iCloud as IMAP following Apple’s guide , but this hadn’t worked. The problems arose when it downloaded the mail. My Inbox contained 1 email according to Mail, iCloud online and my iPhone. Sparrow was showing me at least 5 emails, most of which I’d deleted from my inbox – iCloud had them in it’s trash but Sparrow was showing them in the Inbox. After deleting them, I’d change to see if they were in the trash but on moving back to the inbox, they had magically reappeared (but not on the server). I could find no way of correcting this and so in the mean time, I’m forced back to use Mail.

Not that Mail is bad, it’s just that Sparrow is simple, easy, intuitive and is a great example of why I love Mac software. Mail is a bit more bloated than Sparrow.

All I can do is hope that this is just a temporary hiccup and Sparrow will work well with iCloud in the near future! Please?