More Mac Experience Braindumping

Couple people seemed to like the first round, so here we go again.

After being so harsh on Mail.app I decided it was time to give it another shot. For the first time in three years I have two email accounts that need constant attention, making webmail impractical without lots of forwarding. Both of those accounts are on Gmail (well, one’s on Gmail Hosted) but the Google Notifier doesn’t support multiple accounts.

I decided to take a step back in protocol-evolution terms and have Mail.app grab email over POP from Gmail, where it will then be archived. This is nowhere near as proper as IMAP but it works far better: Gmail is a perpetual remote archive, searchable when I need to go way back, and Mail.app gives me client-side niceties. It’d been a while since I had drag-n-dropped anything into a composition, and I realized that my previously meticulously-groomed Address Book was a bit out of date.

Using Letterbox gives Mail a more professional feel. I’m sticking with this setup for a while, at least until Google offers a way to consolidate multiple Gmail addresses and the notification thereof.

Still using Safari, though I couldn’t help but go back to the previously deadly Saft + PithHelmet combination. Try switching PithHelmet’s block mode to "faster"—if anything, it seems to crash less than “safer” mode.

I don’t need much in the way of PDA-ish personal organization but lately I’ve been craving an outboard brain type application. I settled on VoodooPad after evaluating a gazillion other PIMS. I’d used VP a couple of years ago but it’s come a long way since then, particularly in terms of scripting and integration with just about every hook OS X gives to developers. Looking forward to seeing the software’s author, Gus Mueller speak on integrating Lua into Mac apps at C4.

I’m starting to run short on physical memory after long days of work + browsing + torrenting. It’s probably time to slap another GB in there, but I’ve disabled Dashboard as a temporary measure. I wasn’t using Dashboard for much: weather, a calendar, a quick random password generator, keeping tabs on my NAS, system stats. I gave up on both of the Basecamp widgets, neither of which keep visual state appropriately.

Even on the MacBook’s ample hardware Dashboard performs miserably when competing for system resources. What’s the point of being able to take a quick glance at my weather when I’m running out the door if it takes Dashboard three times as long to load new data as it would for me to open up a weather site in Safari? Dashlag.

I liked the iStat Pro system monitor widget a great deal, but it suffers from Dashlag worth than anything. Once again, this ruins the point of having quick access to information. If my system is slow and I need to know why, having Dashboard churn and spin its wheels for thirty seconds before iStat will update again isn’t helpful.

Most of the system monitors for Mac OS X date to 2005. Like Roben, I can’t work without one. I’ve gone back to lovely iPulse. It’s a drag that you have to make iPulse setuid root in order to get a process listing and it would be nice if its CPU temperature sensor worked with my MacBook. Those issues aside, it looks and works better than anything else out there and makes a great desktop conversation piece.

I wish Dashboard was more of an experiment in ambient information. If I need a detailed forecast for the next week, a widget fails next to a web browser. But if I just need to know today’s weather, maybe my Mac could show me the forecast subtly, say with a tint of sunny yellow or a curse of fog on my desktop. I don’t know if such ambient displays are on the horizon or even practical, but the universe of widgets and gadgets cluttering up our screens is going to look clumsy three years from now.