Alignment on the Mac: WTF? The checkbox and star line up, but past that, things are off kilter.

This is annoying, to me.

The new version is completely rewritten using Google’s new Gmail API, but still contains the old [very ugly, in retrospect] code to support any users who haven’t been so fortunate to get the new version rolled out to them (many Google Apps For My Domain users, namely).

The features are about the same, with one addition. Option/Alt-clicking the one-click icon performs a domain search.

Even with Gmail’s unlimited storage, I have emails I never want to revisit again (like myspace’s some-shitty-band-wants-to-be-your-friend requests). These usually pile up for a while, and then one day when I feel ambitious I go through and clear them out. This new feature makes this process dead easy; option/alt click the icon next to a guilty message, and delete all the returned results.

One Click Conversations is available for Gmail on Firefox through the use of Greasemonkey. This script should be included in the Better Gmail 2 plugin sometime soon.

But what I do miss, in some ways, is how I used to enjoy my music. I used to like browsing used music stores, and if I happened to stumble upon something I’d been looking for, I’d buy it, take it home, put it in the CD player, and enjoy it while admiring the cover of the album, and reading the liner notes.

When just casually wanting to put on some music, I used to open up my CD cabinet, and scan my collection until something caught my eye. If I filled my 5 disc CD player, I’d get around 5 or 6 hours of music, without any repeated songs.

On one hand, I don’t miss driving around town trying to find obscure albums, and love the fact that now I can go from thinking about how I want to hear a song to owning that song in less than 30 seconds, without ever leaving my chair.

On the other hand, I sorely miss the once-clear definition between an album and a mix tape. Listening to albums used to the norm for me, while listening to a mix tape was more of an unusual occurrence. When I thought about listening to music, I didn’t think “I want to hear this song“, I thought “I want to hear this album“. iTunes Party Shuffle completely reversed my thinking, and I guess I just sat back and let it.

And I’m a little bitter about it.

Party Shuffle is easy. It seems like a great idea to just select my top rated songs smart playlist, and shuffle away. There are problems with this, though. First, shuffle is surprisingly poor at really shuffling songs, and as a result is very good at making you sick to death of a few songs, or artists. Tragically, I had to unrate the Who because of this. As much as I love them, I need to take a long break before I can really enjoy them again.

This burn-out shuffle problem can be alieviated somewhat by creating a smart playlist with the much needed “has not been played in the last week”, I found out, but really, this shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

I really wanted to start listening to Albums again, but when browsing through a Library of 706 artists, and “1129 Albums”, it was hard to scan through my choices, as I used to with my CD collection. Maybe it’s just me, but if I don’t see the cover of Tonight’s The Night, I sometimes forget it exists and will go months without ever considering it as a listening choice.

What would be great is if iTunes would actually comphrend the fact that music is not just a library of singles, but rather a library of complete and incomplete albums, with some singles thrown in. Albums should be considered their own entity, if specified, meaning Albums could have ratings, play counts, and all the rest of the data songs have.

On that same path of thought, ratings need to be much much smarter. I want the ability to find all the albums that contain at least 4 songs I’ve rated higher than 3 stars, that I haven’t listened to in the last 2 months. I want to be able to find the songs whose ratings have increased in the last week, which would be extremely useful for figuring out what my current favorites are. Give me something I can work with, Apple. I’ve been wanting to write a better ratings plugin for a long time now, but the hurdle of figuring out how to do that is a little daunting. It’s on the list, though.

I made a small step in returning to my previous listening style last week, when I spent some time going through my library and adding “[Album]” to the “Grouping” field of all songs that were part of a full album. I then made a smart playlist showing only those songs, and also made sure that every album in that list had Album art (which is much easier than making sure my entire library, with lots of singles and incomplete albums has album art). Now, using CoverFlow, or List view, I can browse my albums with an ease I never experienced before in iTunes.

It’s a long way from ideal, but it’s a start.

The short demos Steve gave at WWDC and at MacWorld were impressive, but what really won me over was the guided tour of the phone I watched yesterday. Since when has a cell phone been really intuitive to use?

Horrible cell phone user interfaces have become so common it’s always a surprise to discover a phone that’s “not as horrible”, and downright shocking when I see one that really is easy to use. I’ve berated Motorola’s awful interfaces to Motorola employees (well, my brother), and I still marvel at some companies’ blatant disregard for anyone who actually wants to use their products. Can you honestly imagine a similar “guided tour” of Motorola’s RAZR?

“It’s thin.”

Do you think they’d point out the fact that some menu options on the home screen are in all caps, and some aren’t? Or that the font-size is too large, so that “ADDRESS BOOK” is truncated? How about the seemingly random shortening of menu options, like “SpkrPhone”, when screen space is clearly available? And that’s just aesthetics.

As I recall from a harrowing experience of trying to set up my wife’s old Motorola phone, the process of adding contacts seemed to be designed using some sort of reverse polish logic, because I had to lower my intelligence level to that of an advanced cave-man in order to successfully complete this simple task. It made me wonder if anyone actually tried using the phone before launching it out into the world? Or perhaps, did they know full well that the UI was horrible, but also knew that the general public’s expectations of cell phones were so low, that they would still wait in line for it, simply because it was thin?

Well, for once someone is changing the game. With the iPhone, Apple’s engineers appear to have actually thought about how people will use the phone, and designed their interface around that. And now other companies are going to have to follow suit.

Some companies have been better than others — Sony Ericsson, and LG, for instance — but I don’t think they’ve done it well enough and aren’t main stream enough for consumers to really take notice. Apple has, and Apple is, though.

For instance, I’ve been wishing for a way to separate my phone book into the people I call often and the people I don’t ever since I got a cell phone. I have numbers of people who I haven’t talked to in years, and although I don’t want to delete them, I also don’t want to scroll by them to get to the number I really want to call. “Favorite contacts” on the iPhone allows you to do just that. And it’s about time.

This Friday’s launch of the iPhone will usher in a new era of cell phone standards. I hope that it straightens out what type of experience phone manufacturers put into their products, and more importantly, what consumers demand of their phones. Because honestly, how many clicks should it take to add your friend to your address book? Don’t you have better ways to waste your time?

My requirements:

• Only emails that I deem worthy to arrive in my inbox buzz my blackberry.
• I have access to the other emails, if need-be.
• When I send or reply to a message, it shows in GMail, keeping conversations intact, and providing an archive for all sent mail.

Achieving #2 is easy — you get the GMail application. While I’d prefer not to use it alone, it serves this purpose quite well. I can search all of my messages, and dig around my auto-filtered mail, if I should choose.

#1 and #3 seem straight forward, but require a few key tricks.

First, set up a blackberry email address. You know, something like yourname@mycingular.blackberry.net. In it, put your reply-to address as something you’d like to actually be contacted at. Either your plain ol’ gmail account, or an alias that forwards to it. For me, I chose the latter. Now set Auto BCC to your gmail account. This is key for keeping your conversations in tact. So it should look like:

Email Account: Blackberry
Your Name: Joe Mama
Email: joemama@mycingular.blackberry.net
Reply To: joe@joemama.com
AutoBC.C: joemama@gmail.com

Now we need GMail to forward you all mail that gets to your inbox, unless it’s from you. You can do this by creating a filter, like so:

“Matches: in:inbox -{from:joe@joemama.com}”
Do this: Forward to joemama@mycingular.blackberry.net

Now we need to make sure any email that is from you gets archived and doesn’t arrive in your inbox. We can make this happen by creating one more filter, like so:

Matches: from:(joe@joemama.com) in:inbox
Do this: Skip Inbox

And that’s it! This setup works perfectly for me. It took lots of experimenting to finally figure out a really good solution, but this seems to be it. I hope the next version of BIS allows you to choose one email account to send all email through, which would eliminate the need for the AutoBCC trick.