My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends” - Christopher Hitchens
1 month ago
Sparrow for Mac, my default client for over six months now, got a huge update today. Dropbox now joins CloudApp as an option for uploading attachments, you can (finally!) block remote images¹ but opt to show them from specific senders (and you get ‘once’ or ‘always’ options, unlike Mail), and you can now use Gmail-like search tools to focus your queries.
I became a Mail user and fan almost immediately after switching to the Mac in 2003. But Mail has been lagging the last few years when it comes to all the little details, which frustrates me as an Apple user. For example: Gmail has been out since 2004, and despite Mail finally gaining Archive support in Lion this summer, it still creates a top-level /Archive folder when you archive Gmail messages. Yes, even under 10.7.2. Yes, Apple’s name is still on the product.
Sparrow does an incredible job of keeping its default options and interface simple, yet allowing more advanced users to pull some levers to get serious work done. It’s some of the best $10 I’ve spent on software.
If anything, this Sparrow promo video is really slick. Also: inspiring. Great style and polish, and it reminds me of Realmac Software’s promos for Analog](http://www.realmacsoftware.com/blog/something-new).
We used to speak with one another, but now through the convenience of electronics, we can enable a service to do that for us. Or, in the alternative, we may opt out. The point where “sharing” drifts away from pure communication, and toward Aldous Huxley’s searingly prescient vision of thousands of couples simultaneously fornicating in glass houses under spotlights, is what blogger Robert Scoble calls “the Freaky Line.” The ability for Facebook to strategically relocate this line, as it is appearing to do once again with “frictionless sharing,” is described by Scoble as “Zuckerberg’s brilliance.
Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.
Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think
