Weiqi Gao's Observations - ui tag

Gmail Gives Me Choices: Ajax, POP3, and IMAP

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:30:08 GMT

Continuing with the "Give me the choice!" theme from 6 days ago, I am happy to discover that Gmail can be used with regular email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird or Windows Live Mail.

That Gmail supports POP3 and IMAP may be old news for some of you. But it's new news to me. I might have heard of the original announcement of Gmail's POP3 and IMAP support along with other computer news items, but it scrolled off my mind pretty quickly.

I most recently rediscovered it a three days ago, when I was setting up my old IBM Thinkpad (you've seen it here 1643 days ago) as my wife's computer. Being able to play CDs, DVDs and online videos, and being able to use email and some websites were the only requirements.

So I removed the Grub bootloader (login with discuss/freely) and the Linux partition, rebuilt Windows XP Pro, applied all patches, installed iTunes, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player, Firefox. and Thunderbird. My plan is to setup the regular email with Thunderbird, and save a couple of bookmarks for Hotmail and Gmail.

When I opened the Thunderbird account setup wizard, it gave me four options:

email
feeds
Gmail
newsgroups

That "Gmail" option grabbed my attention. So I chose it, entered the username and password. At that point, I was informed that I had to turn on POP support in Gmail. When I went to Gmail to turn on POP support, I was informed that what I really want to do is to turn on IMAP. So I did that. And come back and configured a regualr IMAP account for Gmail.

That got me to thinking: can Hotmail be accessed from a regular email client? I vaguely remember that Outlook Express supported Hotmail. So I did a Live search, which lead me to this Microsoft page. It essentially said that I need to upgrade the Hotmail account into a Windows Live account, and that Windows Live Mail is what I want. I downloaded Windows Live Mail and setup the account there.

Just for simplicity, I also set up the other two email accounts in Windows Live Mail. So now my wife can access all three email accounts from the same Windows Live Mail client.

I don't know what she'll think about the new email client. But I've heard enough complaints in the past about both Gmail and Hotmail that I believe Windows Live Mail will provide a better experience than both Hotmail and Gmail's web interfaces.

If you've followed this post to this point, I might as well waste a couple more minutes of your time to address an assertion that I heard uttered by Web fanatics, for example:

Tim Bray: This notion, that the Web GUI is insufficiently interactive and we need something richer, is widely held among developers and almost never among actual users of computers, and it’s entirely wrong.

This seems completely backwards. If by "actual users of computers" he means the non-programmer users of computers, then my experience is completely opposite. They don't usually care whether an application is Ajax or RIA. But they can tell which one is better. At least in the email clients arena, the RIA is always better than their Ajax counterpart.

As far as I can tell, the only people who are touting the merits of Ajax Web UIs are web fanatic developers and vendors who has a big stake in the continued dominance of the inferior Web UI.

Once again: Give us the choices!

Given A Choice Between A Web UI And A RIA UI, ...

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:18:46 GMT

... I would always choose (as a user) the RIA!

Up until a couple of days ago, that was a theoretical assumption. Then something happened that validated my assumption.

It's not from Google or Amazon or eBay. It's from my ISP, the one that was bought by BestBuy some time ago. I have an email account with them that I use everyday from Thunderbird (or Icedove on Debian). They do spam blocking on the server side, and once in a month or so, I would check the spam folder on the server side to examine if there were any false positives.

I do that through a browser based interface. And on my most recent visit, there was a note saying something like "if you use Firefox, you might like our new RIA version of the webmail."

And I clicked on the link, which lead me to a XUL based version of their mail client. And guess what? It's better than the HTML interface. As far as I'm concerned, the XUL interface offers one feature that beats the HTML interface: I can now drag the table column divider to see more of the Subject lines. In the HTML version, here's what I see:

*** [Spam score 20.6] ***: Get...

and I can't make it show more of the subject. With the XUL version, I see:

*** [Spam score 20.6] ***: Get meds from Canada

and I can always make it show more of the subject line if it is longer.

You can't believe how big a usability win it is for XUL.

I would choose a RIA application over HTML any day.

The key to the argument is "given a choice."

Give me the choice!

Safari on Windows Feedback: Fonts Dialog

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 13:18:00 GMT

Dear Apple,

I tried out Safari on Windows and have encountered a problem with the fonts used to display Simplified Chinese web pages. They look awful in Safari on Windows. Here's a side-by-side comparison.

Obviously, Safari on Windows is not using the correct fonts for rendering Simplified Chinese pages. However, when I went to the Preferences page to configure fonts, I couldn't find an option for selecting fonts for Simplified Chinese pages:

Here's the corresponding Options page in Firefox, where I can choose different fonts for differently encoded pages:

Any help you can provide me is appreciated.