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For the past few years, I’ve been going back and forth on what to do about an email client. I’ve tried mutt, Thunderbird, straight up Gmail and webmail for my domain emails, Mail.app with IMAP, and I find myself coming back to one solution, which I think is what I’m going to stick with, which is Gmail + Fluid. First, mostly everyone knows what Gmail is: Google’s webmail. Fluid is a Mac application along the lines of Mozilla’s Prism, in that it allows you to create an “application” from a web page. I’ve used this functionality to create a Gmail app. Added bonus? The dock icon will show an unread count if you have any new email, which is a nice little bonus feature. As far as the mail itself goes, Gmail collects my (obviously) gmail.com email, and I also have it collecting my endperform.org mail and adding a tag to it for sorting purposes. Gmail allows you to send as an email address you own, so no one would really know I’m using Gmail for my domain mail unless they are looking at headers.

Fluid is free, and is available at fluidapp.com.

DragonCon 2009
I had the chance to finally attend DragonCon for the first time, if only for a day. Saturday was the chosen day, because it was the weekend, and because that was the day of the Adam Savage panel, which is the main reason I wanted to go this year. The biggest thing that sticks out in my mind is the lines. It took about two and a half hours to get a badge due to essentially a cluster of a registration area. There were two sections, cash and credit, but these were not broken out until near the front of the line. On top of that, there were only a total of three cashiers and about 7 to 10 registration staff. In my mind, there should have been more cashiers to balance things out, but that’s just my observation. The other line was the line for the Adam Savage panel, which ended up outside and stretching down the block. Thankfully the weather wasn’t full-blown hot, but it was warm enough to be uncomfortable. About an hour later we were let inside to sit and wait longer. The wait was worth it, and I ended up in the third row. Adam shared 100 of his wishes and explained a bit about them, then went on to take questions from the audience. In person he’s great to listen to, and I really enjoyed it. Other enjoyable parts of the con were seeing friends, checking out the vendor areas and of course the costumes. We had caught the end of the parade, thanks to the evilly long registration lines, but it was still a decent site. Everything from Star Trek to Ghostbusters was represented.

As the Apple Ripens…
Snow Leopard is performing quite well on my Macbook. The upgrade process itself took about an hour, and after that it’s been smooth sailing. The only issue I had was due to my own fault. I moved some applications from their default locations, so when the upgrade occurred, I ended up with two copies of some programs (I like keeping things somewhat organized). Performance-wise, there is a definite difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard. Finder is much more responsive, startup and shutdown are a lot quicker, and overall the OS is running fine.

iTunes and iPhone OS 3.1 are out as of yesterday and I’ve performed upgrades to these latest versions. So far, so good, but I haven’t used them enough to really dig deep into them and see what happens.