The more attentive amongst you will already be aware that I have been away on vacation with my wife and daughter for the last 8 days. Wordpress, in particular the way it easily facilitates the scheduling of posts in advance, made it easy to keep all my blogs updated while I enjoyed a wonderful, and very relaxing, week. Today I hit the ground running with a great recording session, that will be forever remembered by everyone who took part because of an argument caused by this post that I will share here tomorrow, and a not so nice mountain of email that needed to be dealt with.
Email has, for a long time now, been the bane of my online life. Google Apps, configured to work seamlessly with ashley@ashleymorgan.com, is reliable, keeps my inbox spam free and is, probably, one of the greatest things ever to happen to email.
But Google Apps has a flaw. IMAP doesn’t work properly. No matter how hard I try, no matter how many online tutorials I read, I simply cannot get Google Apps IMAP to work effectively across three different platforms and email applications.
My frustration, possibly fueled by the preceding argument, led me to focus on a handful of things that, unnecessarily, make my online life harder than it needs to be. Don’t get me wrong, I have very little to complain about, online or offline, but the following things could so easily be fixed if only the developers, or those responsible for the development decision making, took the time to address them.
First on the list is, obviously, fully functional, fully working, Google Apps IMAP that plays well with Apple Mail and Thunderbird.
Second is a font management application for OSX that works without slowing down the system and generally causing frustration, confusion and delay.
Third, cross platform, cross browser consistency. Designing a blog that looks great on Safari in OSX but like a dog’s breakfast in Windows is very annoying, even when everyone knows it’s inevitable.
That’s it. Is it really too much to ask?
In an effort to grab some room to breath before attacking my email mountain I’ve decided to nuke and refresh my network of machines with fresh installs of OSX Snow Leopard and Ubuntu Karmic Koala. My backups are complete and fully functioning so nothing will be lost.
See you on the other side of the installation river. Hopefully the whole process will be complete in under 24 hours.
