Although I still truly believe desktop email clients are slowly becoming a dying breed, oddly I have been enamored with Postbox ever since it was released a few short years ago. Postbox offers a unique feature set not seen in any other desktop email clients, making it almost worthwhile. This uniqueness has its price as Postbox retails for US$40.
If you have been interested in playing around with Postbox long-term rather than through the mere 15-day trial period then look no further than Postbox Express.
Postbox Express 1.0 is a simple, yet powerful, new email application for Windows and Mac. It’s based on the same platform as our premium version of Postbox, but contains a lighter-weight feature set that’s perfect for home use.
Best of all… Postbox Express is completely FREE!
The majority of the important Postbox features remain included in Postbox Express but to a smaller degree. Check out the feature comparison for more details on what is and is not included in Postbox Express.
There are quite a few features missing from Postbox Express but the whole point of the product is to whet your appetite just enough so you are willing to spend the mere US$40 on the premium version. I played with Postbox and enjoyed the client but ultimately opted against spending the cash because I did not think I would use it enough to warrant the expenditure.
Personally, I am quite pleased with Mailplane, even though I definitely see exceptional utility in Postbox. The latter offers both a Windows and OS X client whereas Mailplane is only available on OS X, so if you are a Windows user then Postbox may be your email client of choice.
If you are asking yourself why Postbox over Mozilla Thunderbird then check out the page explaining why Postbox definitely blows away Thunderbird!
A few months ago the programmer behind the minimal OS X text editor Smultron opted to stop development of the application. If you, like me, adored Smultron and used it as your text editor of choice this was sure to be worrisome; no updates to the many minor idiosyncrasies and no true Snow Leopard support.
Look no further as Fraise has taken over where Smultron left.
Fraise is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.6 which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to neither confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced users. It should work perfectly for a whole variety of needs – like web programming, script editing, making a to do list and so on..
Fraise has all open documents in a list with beautiful Quick Look icons to your left just like e.g. iTunes so you can easily switch between many documents – you can also choose to display them as tabs if you prefer it that way.
It appears Fraise took the source code for Smultron, which was open source, forked it and developed a new product worthy of being considered a replacement. One of the long-standing Smultron bugs – the lack of ability to make the “line wrap text” option sticky – has finally been fixed!
I loved Smultron and have made the transition to Fraise – a beautiful and exceptional successor.
It’s said and done now, but really, shame on Twitter. These are just some painfully obvious and blatant information assurance mistakes. And to consider these security errors occurred on a massive lifestreaming site such as Twitter. Unthinkable.
The FTC:
According to the FTC’s complaint, Twitter was vulnerable to these attacks because it failed to take reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized administrative control of its system, including:
requiring employees to use hard-to-guess administrative passwords that are not used for other programs, websites, or networks;
prohibiting employees from storing administrative passwords in plain text within their personal e-mail accounts;
suspending or disabling administrative passwords after a reasonable number of unsuccessful login attempts;
providing an administrative login webpage that is made known only to authorized persons and is separate from the login page for users;
enforcing periodic changes of administrative passwords by, for example, setting them to expire every 90 days;
restricting access to administrative controls to employees whose jobs required it; and
imposing other reasonable restrictions on administrative access, such as by restricting access to specified IP addresses.
It’s easy to overlook information security basics such as what the FTC found Twitter had done. But seriously, these steps listed above are not that painstaking to take care of. This should be a lesson-learned for all folks attached to the IT industry.
Google Voice, known previously as GrandCentral, has finally gone live and is accepting sign-ups, but with one caveat: Google Voice is still limited to folks in the USA.
Google Voice Product Managers, Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet:
Over the past year, we’ve introduced a mobile web app, an integrated voicemail player in Gmail, the ability to use Google Voice with your existing number and more. Over a million of you are now actively using Google Voice, and many of the features released over the past year (like SMS to email and our Chrome extension) came as a result of your suggestions, so thanks!
Google Voice is just a great straightforward move by Google that plugs in yet another valuable piece to their unified communications suite. It’s interesting as well to note that in Google’s infographic , Google Voice shows up as a milestone separate from and ‘following’ a VoIP milestone. What’s the message there?
In a pleasant surprised, federal Judge Louis Stanton ruled in favor of Google in the landmark $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit Viacom had brought against the company.
The judge granted Google’s motion for summary judgment, saying that the company was shielded from Viacom’s copyright claims by “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law generally protects user-generated sites from liability for copyrighted material uploaded by users as long as the operator of the site takes down the material when notified by its rightful owner that it was uploaded without permission.
The ruling dismisses the 3 year old case, awarding summary judgement to Google. In his ruling, Judge Stanton stated the YouTube owner performed the required actions Congress had intended when enacting the DMCA. The “safe harbor” provisions were included in the law specifically for situations like this.
TechDirt has one of the more comprehensive write-ups about the ruling, so if you are itching for more details then head on over to their coverage. Bottom line: this is good news and a huge victory for fair use and the DMCA safe harbor provisions. I do not feel for Viacom whatsoever and believe they were doomed from the start, deserving to lose this lawsuit.
Henry Blodget of Business Insider on the problems Microsoft is currently facing, potentially leading to their collapse:
The world has changed radically in the past few years. The Internet has continued to free app-makers from dependency on Windows or any other desktop platform (and, thus, from dependency on Microsoft). Apple’s iPhone has revolutionized the mobile business, unleashing a whole new wave of personal computing devices. Apple’s iPad seems on its way to supplanting the low-end PC business
Importantly, none of these trends depend in any way on Microsoft’s original monopoly and cash cow, Windows. None of these trends generate so much as a dollar of revenue or profit for Microsoft. (Microsoft is nowhere in mobile. Or tablets. And it is reasonable to think that, in these two huge growth businesses, nowhere is where Microsoft will always be).
Google and Apple are revolutionizing the computing industry, taking away our reliance on Microsoft as the gatekeeper to the PC. The internet has allowed both of these companies to prosper, causing a transformation right before our very eyes. Microsoft, largely monolithic and nowhere near as nimble as their competition, has been unable to adapt to changing times and may suffer the ultimate consequences – irrelevance.
It was a good run Microsoft. Time for watch turnover – the changing of the guard if you will – to a company better equipped to handle the future of personal computing.
A number of extremely wild claims about the battery life of the iPhone 4 were made earlier today by a few tech journalists. Zee from The Next Web compiled a list of such statements, where Engadget reported they sucked about 38 hours out of an iPhone 4:
Engadget reports that – on heavy use – the battery lasted 38 hours. Mossberg claims that his battery didn’t even reach the red zone in his single day of tests (which means he must have been using it a fair amount.) Finally, Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing reports that with “3G data and WiFi turned on the whole time, she got a full 4 days of battery life!??
If true, this could be the killer iPhone 4 feature. While a speedy processor, more RAM, sick 720p full-motion video and other features are all quite nice, increased battery life is really what most iPhone owners will tell you they really need.
To not have to recharge the iPhone every single day – sometimes multiple times in a single day – would be a godsend!
If you, like me, are still rocking an iPhone 3G and completed the upgrade to iOS 4 today then you are probably feeling slightly left out. A good portion of the major new features, such as fast app switching, are not available on the 3G due to memory limitations. Engadget was kind enough to put together a comprehensive list on what is missing for 3G owners:
While iOS 4 is delivering on every promise for the iPhone 3GS users out there, as we were all told up front, the iPhone 3G would be missing some of those touted new features. Granted, we knew such disparities would exist but were never given the finer details. Now that the final build is percolating through the internet, we decided to take a look at what features are and aren’t working on the earlier year’s model.
There are no real show stoppers. Of those missing features listed, most were already known; their lack of appearance should not be a surprise.
While multitasking, aka fast app switching, would be a godsend on the 3G the hardware will just not support the feature. If you think your 3G runs slow now, with its measly 128MB of RAM, imagine how much more sluggish it would perform and how much quicker battery drainage would be.
The iPhone 4, with its sexy Apple A4 chip and 512MB of RAM, cannot arrive fast enough.
Jay Hathaway from DOWNLOADSQUAD:
Google Docs continues to make the case for dumping your desktop work apps, this time with a useful new text recognition feature that converts PDFs or images into plain, editable text. This new OCR feature — that’s optical character recognition — is quite accurate, and worked pretty well on some old college textbooks scans I had laying around on my hard drive.
Google just simply will not relent in their pursuit of taking over office productivity via the web. This new OCR gem is not just another nice-to-have option you might find lurking around the Google Labs. This is nothing shy of a must-have office productivity power tool. How about Scanning, forwarding, storing and manipulating all that paper in your filing cabinets? Or those office policy documents from pre-Commodore 64 era that you are looking to upgrade the letterhead on?
Well now is your chance.
Following in the footsteps of the NY Times, the well respected LA Times newspaper has finally unleashed an iPhone app.
The app is broken down into several main sections, including the latest headlines, photos, Tweets from The Times and a constantly updated feed of local news from the L.A. Now blog.
Users can browse through The Times’ individual sections — including each section’s blogs — and save stories and photos under the Favorites section for later viewing. There are built-in functions to share stories on Facebook, Twitter and via e-mail.
The LA Times app costs $1.99 unlike the free NY Times app. However, it appears the LA Times app will be much more interactive, providing almost live content whereas the former merely allows for offline reading of current content – not necessarily up-to-the-minute news.
Sounds like a fairly useful app, especially if you live in LA or are interested in the articles the LA Times produces. The price is not too bad either, and should not scare too many folks away. If you happen to download and use the app please let us know your thoughts.
