E-Mail Client Switch/Switchback
Tried going from Thunderbird back to Apple Mail this week…it lasted three days. I had to search through a lot of old mail for a few things and wanted the speed that Spotlight brings to Apple Mail searching and I was getting kinda tired of the sort of drab Thunderbird interface. At first, I was quite happy with the switch (picked up .mac syncing for my accounts, liked the way attached images displayed inline, liked the “new mail count†on my dock icon, and so on).
For some reason, today Apple Mail couldn’t seem to remember when I’d already read a message. Having more mail than I really need is already a problem and having a email client tell me the same message is new more than once was the final straw. Went back to Thunderbird but with a little change.
This time I picked up and installed the Tiger Mail theme, from Toyo Snow. Now I have the speed, stability and standards-lovin’ goodness of Thunderbird but with the Mac-like look of Apple Mail. Yes, I sacrificed the speed of Spotlight’s integration with Apple Mail but the Thunderbird search box is fast enough to live with. Oh, and the little graphic leading off this section is Thunderbird with the Tiger Mail theme, not Apple Mail.
Visibility
I keep telling the folks in Special Collections that adding their items to our MARS digital repository system increases the visibility of their collections thanks to Google/Yahoo crawling, OAI harvesting and the like. Had another example of that just the other day when a note came in from a reader on the net.
Seems he was at the event pictured in a photo from our Ollie Atkins collection and noted that Nixon was leaving the event and doing a sort of curtain-call wave before boarding, not actually exiting the airplane upon arrival as our caption suggests. I forwarded the comment on to our Special Collections office for follow-up.
My point is that photo has probably been in a well-cared-for box in Special Collections for 20 years and just four months after inclusion in MARS it draws out a comment/correction from a reader who was at the event. As a method for cleaning up metadata this probably doesn’t scale but it certainly illustrates the power of the net to increase the visibility and usability of our collections.
Code Search
An LSO colleague pointed out a neat site to me today and I’ll mention it here (just so I don’t forget where I saw it the next time a question arises). O’Reilly Labs offers Code Search—a search service that queries a database of 123,000 code examples from various O’Reilly books.
I could have used this last week when I blanked on the syntax for Perl’s split function. Wonder if I can learn Cocoa programming just by reading the examples?
Information Commons
Speaking of recommended sites, here’s another that got passed to me earlier in the week by a different colleague (don’t I work with some smart people?) 🙂
OK, while not quite as geeky as Code Search, the goals are much more ambitious. From their website:
“the Information Commons unites all the facts and figures of the world into a resource available to everyone”
Yes, it is certainly 100% buzzword compliant…
“Future-proofed design principles and ’emergent intelligence’ potential could make [the Information Commons] the Web’s replacement for the 21st centuryâ€
…but the ideas are still pretty interesting. As a user of a system I consider a sort of massive peer-to-peer virtual database (the network of BitTorrent users), I appreciate the concept and see the potential. This is one I’ll continue to monitor.
http://www.maya.com/infocommons/index.html
Zotero (nee Firefox Scholar)
I just received a message from the Firefox Scholar team, letting me know that the project has a new name—Zotero—and a new beta. I’m guessing we’re close to a rollout and will post info here when it’s ready.
In case you’re as curious as I was, the name Zotero (according to Dan Cohen leader of the Zotero development group) is loosely based on an Albanian term meaning “to acquire, to master.”