What I Learnt Today

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The hotel room I stayed in last night was on the ground floor right next to the lift shaft. It did have a nice bed.

It did not, however, make the Lonely Planet‘s list of the Top 10 most extraordinary places to stay in 2014.

Perhaps next time I’ll get off the ground floor and stay in one of the Free Spirit Spheres, suspended above the forest in Vancouver. I can be one with the squirrels and the birds, instead of the motor of the lift.

Or I could aim even higher, and climb to the top of the 900 year old Torre Prendiparte B&B in Bologna.

But I think I’ll get even more out of town and stay in my very own sandcastle. The Mihir Garh sits all by itself in the middle of the Thar Desert near Jodhpur.

What about you?

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How are you going with your New Year resolutions?

’59 seconds’ is new book and YouTube Channel from psychologist, quirkologist and magician Richard Wiseman. Just in the nick of time!

 

 

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MailPilot is a brand spanking new email client for Mac, and it is being launched today.

This is a limited release – if you would like to test it out you really need to act fast.

A Brief History of Mac Email clients.

For many years there was no good replacement on OSX for Apple Mail. Messages were acted upon and then either deleted to sorted into folders based on their subject matter. Inboxes grew huge and the amount of stored mail kept threatening the capacity of hard drives. Half your time was spent managing spam and spam filters. The other half was spent categorising mail into different folders. If you worked on a computer at home and work and also used an iPhone and iPad it was impossible to keep everything in sync – which messages have I replied to and what did I say?

Are you using Gmail to consolidate all your email accounts? If not, you should be. That is the first step in getting everything in sync.

Gmail has such a huge storage capacity that there is no need to delete old emails. You can access your account from anywhere and it remains all ‘joined up’. You can keep all your old email addresses, while still storing the mail on the gmail server.

Sparrow was the first mail client that took full advantage of gmails cloud-based features. It had a very different approach to managing email. Sparrow is a light client, in that most of the mail was stored on the Gmail server, but the experience of the user is as if it is all stored locally.

The interface of Sparrow encouraged you to pursue ‘Inbox Zero’. Achieve an empty Inbox by archiving each message as you act upon them. Don’t worry about deleting, categorising and folders – the messages are all stored on the gmail server and the gmail search engine is so good you can alway find what you want.

Sparrow was also available on iPhone and iPad. Their products were so good that last year they were bought out by Google and the Sparrow Apps went out of development. Many of the best Sparrow features are starting to appear in Gmails own apps.

In January this year, the app Mailbox was launched on iPhone and then on iPad. Mailbox understands that people use their Inbox as a giant todo list. It takes a ‘task orientated’ approach to your gmail. Each message is actioned – ‘completed’, ‘remind me tomorrow’, ‘remind me on a certain date’, ‘add to a list’. The Mailbox server takes care of moving messages back to your Inbox on the day you have specified.

The Mailbox launch was so huge that they had to ration access. I remember being 500,000th in the waiting list.

Mailbox has not yet launched a Mac desktop app.

Since Sparrow, I have been using the app Airmail as my preferred email client on the desktop. I really like it. It is fast, has good search functions, and has customisable themes. However, it doesn’t have some of the cool ‘task orientated’ features found in Mailbox.

Today there is a new contender in the Mac desktop email client market. MailPilot has been available on the iPhone and iPad for a few months. I’ve had the chance to test it out the desktop version for the last few days.

MailPilot also takes a ‘task orientated’ approach to your email.

It looks really good. The messages load quickly. The interface and keyboard shortcuts make it easier to get to the nirvana state of ‘Inbox Zero’.

The current beta release has some quirks, but I notice that each ‘build’ of the program is improving. In fact, a new build is downloading right now. Hopefully it will soon allow the use of ‘aliases’.

If you want to test it out, you should apply for a beta preview version today. I’d hate to see a loyal WILT reader be 500,000th in the queue.

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”I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.” Douglas Adams

TIm Minchin is a leading composer, lyricist, actor, writer and comedian. He is ‘spectacularly’ not a Nobel laureate, yet has been chosen to write the forward to the collection of ‘The Best Australian Science Writing 2013’.

He rejects the view that there is a conflict between art and science.

“I’ve only been to Portland once, but it’s a great city – its population a paragon of liberalism and artiness, sporting more tattoos than you could point a regretful laser at, and boasting perhaps a higher collective dye-to-hair ratio than anywhere on earth. Great music, great art, wonderful coffee … it’s my kind of town. Except, the residents recently voted – for the fourth time since the 1950s – against adding fluoride to the water supply. It’s as if a mermaid on one’s lower back is an impediment to sensible interpretation of data, or perhaps unkempt pink hair acts as a sort of dream catcher for conspiracy theories.”

“This apparent inverse correlation between artistic interest and scientific literacy seems to play out all over the world. Go to Byron Bay and you’ll find more painters and musos per capita than anywhere in the country, and – inevitably – a parallel glut of aura readers, homeopaths and anti-vaccination campaigners. There’s clearly no such thing as a free lunch: you want to listen to good blues, you have to have your palm read – and maybe get measles in the process.”

“Great science writing is the art of communicating that ”awe of understanding”, so that we readers can revel in the beauty of a deeper knowledge of our world.

If the entire volume is as good as the foreword, it will be a great read.

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