Announcing Better Mail

wmeddie2 Comments

http://www.appbrain.com/api/api.nocache.js

About a year ago I bought the first Android phone available in Japan for the sole reason of making apps. Unfortunately I’ve had very few itches that needed scratching.

About a month ago that changed, because the built-in Gmail app has a fatal flaw.

The Problem

If you temporarily lose connectivity while sending an e-mail, the e-mail gets stuck in a “Sending…” limbo.  There’s no way to re-send the message.  It’s not even possible to edit the message.  It’s not in the outbox, and not in the sent folder.

When OhLife first started I spent 30 minutes writing my first journal entry.  Unfortunately I’ll never get to read that post again because it never finished sending.

Also the native app doesn’t support Japanese emoji.  Which means that sometimes I get what looks like blank e-mail from my wife or my friends which were actually just full of emoji.

I decided to do something about it.  So I started using the Gmail mobile web app which doesn’t have this problem. Pretty soon however I started to miss the integrated experience of the native app.

My Solution

Better Mail is a native android app with a WebView hardcoded to mail.google.com.  But that isn’t all, it also listens to the same new e-mail broadcast as the Gmail app.  It will notify you of new e-mail without a constantly running background process.  It also includes a native menu so that you can navigate without having to scroll all the way to the top. Also, since Better Gmail is a separate application it stays in memory longer than a web-page would which makes it much less painful to use.  I also took the time to fix some of my pet-peeves with Gmail’s notification style. For example, I added a “Quiet Mode” feature that automatically turns off sounds and vibrations when you get new e-mail at 2 in the morning.

The Price

A buck.  Making this application wasn’t trivial, since I had to do some reverse-engineering.  While the die-hard Free Software nut inside me has some reservations about using DRM, it does improve performance a bit.  And performance is the biggest problem.

I have a lot of ideas in the pipeline that I could work on if there’s enough interest.  Eventually I would like to try injecting my own javascript code into the page to provide an even deeper level of integration.

Update:

I’ve decided to work on bigger and better things.  The code is now Open-Source (GPL) and available for free!

The Future

This app is definitely a minimum value product, there’s plenty of room to expand.  If anyone has a feature request let me know via e-mail or in the comments.

How To Get etags Working in Emacs

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You’ve been using Emacs for how long and you haven’t figured this out yet?

Yup.  Up until now I’ve never really needed to actually get etags working in Emacs.  I remember trying to figure it out long ago as a newbie and giving up.  It’s initially difficult because it’s not as simple as just saying “etags my-src-dir”, though once you have a couple of UNIX tools on your utility belt though, it’s practically as simple as “etags my-src-dir”.

Just show me the code.

Although there might be other more correct ways to do this, the following works fine for PHP:

    cd ~/src-code-top
    find . -name '*.php' -print | xargs etags

Woah find and xargs?

etags (unfortunately) only works on files and not directories.  Those files also have to be arguments and not stdin.  So we need to use find to give us a list of file names and xargs to convert each filename into an argument for etags.

Explain find.

find is a swiss army knife of file search but mostly you can just memorize “find . -name ‘*.filetype‘ -print”.  find needs 3 arguments, the directory to start looking in, some condition, and some action. The “.” tells it to look starting from the current directory. The “-name” part means find matching filenames (We use the single-quotes to keep bash from expanding). Finally -print tells it to print what it found one line at a time.

Explain xargs.

xargs takes lines from stdin and supplies it as the arguments to some other program.  Just what we need for etags. Although xargs is as versitile as find we don’t need to supply it with anything, the default behavior is fine.

Ok, now how do I use it in Emacs?

Just use M-x visit-tags-file and point it to your newly minted TAGS file.  After that you can easily find out where the hell that class/function is hiding just by doing “M-.” (You can also return to the file you came from by pressing M-*).  Of course “M-.” and “M-*” work in a stack like manner so you can keep “M-.”ing to dig as deep as you need to and easy get back by pressing “M-*” and equal number of times.

No more user submitted link sites

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Hacker News was and still is pretty much a great source of interesting articles on the internet, but I’m starting to see a cycle. I think I’ve learned most of what HN has to offer.

So from this second forward I vow to no longer use HN, Digg, Reddit, nor Slashdot. When I’m bored I will waste my time doing something more useful like write articles in this blog, replying to emails, or programming.

Wish me luck.

Eclipse CTRL-3

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I’m using Eclipse a lot in my new job and it took me a month to discover CTRL-3 (Quick Access).  It’s the closest thing it has to Emacs’s M-x.  So I’ve binded Quick Access to Alt-x.  Eclipse is much easier to use now.

Visiting files using SSH in EmacsW32

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After much searching I discovered that the way to use ssh-based remote file visiting in emacs with TRAMP is by using the plink: method instead of ssh: while having your putty install directory in your PATH environment variable.

So I’m writing that here in hopes that it might be easier for other people to find it.

Brushing

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I wonder if TV shows/movies influence our daily routines. Could that be the reason we brush our teeth so quickly compared to Asians? Or should I change that “we” into a me…