Today I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.04. At reboot I wanted to start my apps in the usual workspaces : 1 for the browser and mail, 3 for xchat… but OMG! CTRL-Alt-DOWN doesn’t work… Quick search first to learn what the heck those things are called then the sad truth: workspaces are disabled! What a moronic choice to disable them by default. Guys, come on! I understand making things simple, but dumbing down on Mac and Windows on their limitations is a stupid choice.

To enable them again there is a settings in the panel as described on Ask Ubuntu. I feel like my respect for Ubuntu’s team is at its lowest point ever and this makes me unhappy.

I think removing the workspaces is the dumbest idea ever, on par with grouping windows from the same app in the Alt-Tab cycle. Please somebody explains why. Is this because Microsoft doesn’t have workspaces, so we should copy them, right? Wrong! What’s next? Disable paste with middle-click? I might as well go buy a Mac then or learn how to live with Windows if I have to learn and live with moronic systems.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2013. | Permalink | 8 comments
Post tags: design, mac, ubuntu, usability, windows, workspace

• Must use email messages as primary mean of communication
• Must allow tagging/topics for easy inbox filtering
• Must be easy to manage (dealing with spam, delivery, moderation, etc)
• Must have good looking archives, skinnable, with search capabilities and SEO friendly
• Must allow measuring activity, natively or with tools like mlstats
• Nice to have:

• SSO integration with OpenID and more
• Post new message (reply or start a new thread) via web
• Offer archive via RSS

With these in mind I started looking into Mailman, the typical answer for mailing list management. The software is known and solid although the latest stable release is old.  Mailman 2 has the advantage of familiarity: we know how it works and its limitations. Mainly I know the limitations: the web UI is scary and I can’t find a way to teach Firefox’s password manager to save the passwords for each list (it associates the password to the domain, not the full url, so I can only have one password associated to lists.openstack.org –am I doing something wrong?), the default archives are also ugly and primitive forcing us to use other archivers, like Markmail.

Mailman 3, the upcoming release, is … not there yet. I could only see mockups for the new web management UI  (called Postorius, is a django app, a client of the new Mailman REST API) and it seems that Mailman 3.0 will be shipped without an official archiver.

I looked at Sympa as an alternative to Mailman, since Rackspace uses it internally. It has most of the features we need, including the nice-to-have but it seems to be lacking the Topics (although, we should say that we’re not using the Mailman topics feature at the moment anyway). I don’t think that mlstats supports Sympa and I’m not sure about its tracking capabilities (but it stores lots of metadata in a SQL database so it shouldn’t be too hard to get information from it).

Since the mailing list archives I know all look too ugly, I expanded my search to forum software hoping that in the past years there was some progress in it. The only new thing I found is Vanilla Forums, a GPLv2 forum engine. It mixes features of the old bulletin boards format with the newer question/answer concept, embracing tags and categories. The first page of Vanilla has more meaningful content than the silly topics seen in most bulletin boards and in general I found Vanilla having a better UI than most forum software. The hosted version of Vanillaforums sports also a nice integration with email but there are no plans to release such feature under the GPLv2. The view of a thread with many responses is not exciting though: it has no hierarchy, failing at readability like all bb/forum software … and I think it’s a crucial feature that enables following long discussions. This deserves more thoughts: I know Twitter gave up trying to represent threaded discussions in a single page (but Twitter was never meant for discussions), identi.ca used to have the conversation view with grades of colors but got rid of it, Gmail doesn’t bother either and shows conversations as flat, time based sequence of messages: is it just too difficult to thread discussions like any email client used to do or what else is going on?

To me it seems that Mailman is still the best we can do at the moment even if it leaves me in a pretty sad state, stuck in 2001. I would start looking into Mailman 3 and expand the search to an archiver that we can host (like CSLA) but Mailman 2 is probably the best we have at the moment. Other thoughts?

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments
Post tags: conversations, forums, mailing list, online discussions, openstack, software, usability

This morning I played around with The Email Game, a web app that expands Google’s Gmail client with a couple of interesting features. I like the concept of ‘Boomerang‘ and the countdown for each email-related action. If you have a Gmail account I suggest you to give it a try. I won’t be using it (my gmail account is for spam only and a few mailing list) but I hope that some of these ideas end up in one of the email clients I use on my GNU/Linux desktop.

The Email Game – Conquer your Email from Baydin Inc. on Vimeo.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2011. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: client, email, inbox, innovation, usability

Search and indexing: Thunderbird 3 indexing is fast and very good. The interface for searching and drilling your mailbox is fantastic, very well done and fast. Check the screenshot.

Tabs: I like to be able to read messages in different tabs. Lightning calendar and tasks conveniently open in a tab and it’s also possible to run Google Wave in one. This shows the power under the hood of this client: it has the potential to become a messaging hub for all services.  It’s annoying that Addressbook and compose new mail open in a new window instead of tab though.

Add-ons: just like Firefox, there are many ways to add functionalities to Thunderbird. The first add-on I installed is Funambol in order to test it and help its development. Then ThunderBrowse, in order to avoid opening Firefox only to check a link in an email and EnigMail to add GPG/PGP support. Nothing mind-blowing yet, but I hope somebody will develop a replacement of the Addressbook with more ‘social’ features. A topic for another post

Bonus reason: finally! There is an “Archive” button: once you’re done with a message or a thread, and you don’t want to delete it, you hit a button and the message goes into the archives (archiving criteria can be specified). A neat solution for Capo’s problem

The Addressbook, on the other hand, is pretty lame. It doesn’t contain enough fields, it still has space of a ‘pager number’ (anybody  still using them?), it opens in a window and not in a tab. I hope it’ll improve in next version.

I’m still using Evolution as my main source of data, especially address book and calendar. Even if Funambol add-on for Thunderbird 3 works decently, it’s still unstable and it has other small issues (if you want to help, Funambol offers Code Sniper grants).

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2010. | Permalink | One comment
Post tags: codesniper, evolution, funambol, gnome, gui, messaging, mozilla, thunderbird, usability

iPod powered by Free Software

You gotta love the Free Software community, you have to.’  The crowds of the Rockbox project make the Archos Jukebox and other common mp3/ogg players (including iPods) “the only “off the shelf” hard drive based MP3 player that offers accessibility to the vast majority of its features to the blind”. There is an audio file that describes how to use Rockbox on the iPod Video. I happen to know somebody that will surely like to hear that.

You can grab the latest release Rockbox 3.0, with a new multiplatform installer.’  I have to put this on my wife’s old iPod so that I can use it to listen to my collection of OGG files, since my Apple laptop is still defective (Apple’s fault), refusing to collaborate with my Samsung OGG player.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2008. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: accessibility, blind, free software, freedom, ipod, rockbox, usability