2023
Mimestream is a Mac Gmail client that’s worth paying for
Mimestream is a native Mac app for accessing Gmail. It gives you Gmail’s advanced capabilities, including Priority Inbox, categories, and labels, in an app that looks and works like a native Mac app.
The alternatives to Mimestream are Gmail’s web interface, which I find cluttered, or native Mac mail apps, which look and work like Mac apps should but don’t give you all of Gmail’s capabilities.
Mimestream has been in beta and free to use for years. I’ve been using Mimestream for most of that time. Now, Mimestream exits beta and gets a few juicy new features for organizing multiple accounts, muting some accounts at scheduled times (for example, if you’d like to mute your work account during personal time), configuring filters and more. Templates with variables will be useful for people who repeatedly send versions of the same email, such as customer support. And a menu bar extra lets you check to see what’s new without opening the app.
Other features of Mimestream: Support for Markdown formatting, Google calendar responses, Google Contacts integration, mentioning colleagues to bring them into the conversation, and syncing with Gmail signatures. More here.
Mimestream is a fast app. With it, I can fly through my email quickly, with minimal hassle. I’ve been using Gmail for more than 15 years, and there are still aspects of that interface I find confusing. That’s not a problem with Mimestream.
I’ve liked using Mimestream and will gladly pay for it. Pricing is US$49.99/year or $4.99/mo. Beta users, like me get 50% off for the first year. $25 is a reasonable price for a year of an app I use all day, every workday.
People who are only occasional Gmail users looking for an alternative to the Gmail Web interface might be happy just sticking with built-in Apple Mail, which is free with your (expensive) Mac. In the past, Apple Mail was unreliable with Gmail, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem lately.
Mimestream was founded by Neil Jhaveri, a software engineer who worked at Apple 7½ years, leading and managing engineering teams working on Mail and Notes. According to the product roadmap, the company is working on expanding Mimestream beyond Gmail to support other mail services, including Microsoft Outlook. They're also working on iPad and iPhone versions of Mimestream.
Daring Fireball notes that the first version of many Apple products is historically overpriced and underfeatured. That’s how Apple works. They grab the affluent early adopters first, and then over the years the price goes down and capabilities improve. Example: The Apple Watch.
So if the Apple headset is overpriced and underfeatured, that’s no reason to declare it dead on arrival.
I’m looking forward to listening to the State of Micro.blog presentation with @jean @manton and @vincent on my walk this afternoon.
Pizza
Pizza is my favorite food. We have pizza once a week. There have been times in my life when I have had it more often than that. I have had great pizza and I have had good pizza. I love the pizza they served on Fridays in the school cafeteria when I was a little kid. I loved riding my bike up Larkfield Road with my friends, and getting a slice of pizza at the place on that road. I love going back to New York and getting pizza from places with formica counters that serve you slices on paper plates. I love Chicago deep dish pizza, but I’m told it is not the pizza that Chicagoans eat. I love the pizza that we have when we go back to Ohio to visit Julie‘s family. Ohio pizza is covered edge to edge with pepperoni, cut into strips, and baked with a coating of cornmeal on the bottom to keep it from burning in the oven. Even frozen pizza, bar pizza and cafeteria pizza is delicious. Of all the thousands and thousands of pizza meals I have eaten in my life, only one was bad.
Walking with the dog the other day, I saw a big snake on the path. 5-7 feet long and fat. This was a couple of days after seeing a coyote walking down the street. I guess we live in Jumanji now.
What if we had a political party that represented working people? All working people. Everybody. All races, ethnicities, genders, sexes, and religions. White, Christian, Black, Jewish, Muslim, agnostics, atheists, men, women, trans, and nonbinary.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled on the Trump transformation of the GOP, but Dems’ transformation from a party representing labor to a party representing McKinsey consultants is less well understood.
— Cory
Banger link roundup today: Medieval people didn’t drown cats; they LOVED cats. AI hype is a scam to allow bosses to “fire all our asses and replace us with shell-scripts.” And more.
Supreme Court Leaves 230 Alone For Now, But Justice Thomas Gives A Pretty Good Explanation For Why It Exists In The First Place.
Thomas, of all people, wrote a nuanced defense of the principles underlying Section 230.
Mike Masnick at Techdirt:
… there was nothing specific to the social media sites that was deliberately designed to aid terrorists.
“It makes you really appreciate how free we are as a country when you’re hiding under a desk with bullets flying over your head.” The Onion: Americans Describe What It’s Like Surviving A Mass Shooting.
Jamelle Bouie: There is a reason Ron DeSantis wants history told a certain way. DeSantis is continuing a long tradition. Lawmakers in the antebellum South censored textbooks to remove criticism of slavery.
The Four Freedoms, According to Republicans
Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times:
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
It amazes me when I see someone has worked at the same company for 20+ years. I respect that stability.
De-nerding on coffee
A few years ago, I nerded out on coffee-making methods and eventually settled on using an Aeropress for my daily work-juice. Then I went down a rabbit-hole of looking up Aeropress coffee formulas.
There’s an entire nerd subculture of Aeropress enthusiasts, who measure their beans and water to the gram, use a thermometer to measure the weater temperature, and time their brew to the second. They even count the number of strokes they use to stir the coffee before serving.
While I was going through all this, and posting about it on social media, a couple of friends staged an intervention. They are themselves coffee enthusiasts, but they told me I needed to relax.
And I learned that the Aeropress is indeed a very forgiving method of making coffee. Use good beans, grind them at home, measure using a scoop without worrying about the precise weight, use water at about the right temperature, and you’ll be fine. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few years.
In the last few days I let go of the last remnant of my coffee obsessive-compulsiveness. Until a few days ago, I measured the amount of water I used to make coffee. But now I’m just doing it by eye. I have a little Hario insulated coffee server, and I just fill that up with hot water until it looks like it’s pretty close to the top. And it’s fine.
Don’t tell the gang at reddit.com/r/coffee; they’ll ban me for sure.