I never did post my thoughts on eBooks, but I sure did write a lot of words about them. Maybe I'll figure out how to digest those words into something more manageable later.
In any rate, I continue to think about what really makes an eBook different from, say, a web page or even a site. They're linear, sure, but the current environment makes so many more things matter, simply because of the display technology.
Though it occurs to me, the same thing happened with the mobile web. It used to be that mobile web browsers were very limited, had little to no javascript or css support, came with many varying but always tiny resolutions. Eventually, the technology got to the point where that no longer mattered. Phones became full-fledged computers with full browsers. Screen size issues were solved by real-time scaling. Nowadays, it's almost always annoying when a website detects you're on a mobile device and shows you a stripped-down version of the website.
We're probably only a generation or two of readers away from the same thing happening in the eBook space. Unfortunately, we're waiting on both display and battery technology to catch up to our ambitions. And that still doesn't answer the question of what an eBook format should be like.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
More wacky observations on Gmail's labels
Google recently launched the ability to disable the "Conversation" feature in Gmail. Mostly, this is a nod to people who just can't wrap their heads around it.
I enabled it briefly... very briefly... just to see if it would be a good solution for certain kinds of email messages I receive that don't work quite right with conversations (automated emails with identical subject lines collapsing together, needing to highlight a single message in the middle of a conversation as a To-Do, etc).
I still don't know if changing that setting would help those issues because of one major problem that was immediately exposed: Not every message necessarily has the same labels that the conversation as a whole does.
It's a weird concept, but it makes sense if you know how Gmail exposes its labels via IMAP. Let's say you have a conversation with 3 messages in it; a quick back-and-forth. You Move it to the appropriate label, both applying the label to the conversation (and, I would assume, each of the messages) and removing it from the Inbox. So far, so good.
Now, someone else responds to the message, pulling the conversation back to the inbox. Maybe there's several more messages before the conversation dies again. The label is already on the conversation, so you just Archive it.
Oops, all those new messages do not have the label attached to them unless you explicitly re-applied the label to the conversation.
When Gmail pulls up a conversation, it'll show you all the labels that all the individual messages have, but messages don't automatically have all the labels that the conversation does.
What that means... if you have a bunch of labels and have been using Conversations for a while, turning the feature off will probably leave you with a good number of messages that are suddenly unlabeled.
I enabled it briefly... very briefly... just to see if it would be a good solution for certain kinds of email messages I receive that don't work quite right with conversations (automated emails with identical subject lines collapsing together, needing to highlight a single message in the middle of a conversation as a To-Do, etc).
I still don't know if changing that setting would help those issues because of one major problem that was immediately exposed: Not every message necessarily has the same labels that the conversation as a whole does.
It's a weird concept, but it makes sense if you know how Gmail exposes its labels via IMAP. Let's say you have a conversation with 3 messages in it; a quick back-and-forth. You Move it to the appropriate label, both applying the label to the conversation (and, I would assume, each of the messages) and removing it from the Inbox. So far, so good.
Now, someone else responds to the message, pulling the conversation back to the inbox. Maybe there's several more messages before the conversation dies again. The label is already on the conversation, so you just Archive it.
Oops, all those new messages do not have the label attached to them unless you explicitly re-applied the label to the conversation.
When Gmail pulls up a conversation, it'll show you all the labels that all the individual messages have, but messages don't automatically have all the labels that the conversation does.
What that means... if you have a bunch of labels and have been using Conversations for a while, turning the feature off will probably leave you with a good number of messages that are suddenly unlabeled.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)