Smarterware

I like the new design a lot. You and your designers have done great job. I’m looking forward to continuing to read your posts.

HTC Dream and Magic hit Canada (start of July, if I remember right). I haven’t been hands-on with the Magic, and haven’t owned either one, but just perusing the official materials on HTC’s site, it looks like the Magic (which doesn’t have the physical Qwerty keyboard) has a slightly longer battery life, and specifically claims stereo audio via Bluetooth. No mention of a standard headphone jack, looks like the same extUSB port at the Dream. To be honest, I think I’d be hard-pressed to give up the physical keyboard for any enhancements the Magic appears to (maybe) offer. That’s a matter of personal taste, granted.

I works pretty well. I like the interface, it’s clean and intuitive. I had a little glitch with the “No Results Found” message persisting when I did another search that did return results (below the message), but I think it’s an excellent start.

Is that an old Apple SE/30 by the mouse statue? Also ditto on the whiteboard.

I’ve seen a lot of cool projects abandoned because the person working on it got tired of getting aggressively complainy emails about project progress and updates (or delays thereof). This issue really bothers me, so I’ll make this fairly concise.

1. The delay was perfectly reasonable in response to a significant change in the Gmail markup, it was still a perfectly reasonable timeframe for a fix, even if a) you weren’t away, and b) this extension was a paid product.

2. I don’t need to tell you that you don’t need anybody’s permission to put family/personal needs ahead of pet projects. It’s a given, and an important one.

3. You have a whole community here, and you give so much time in sharing your projects and sharing a lot of useful information. Don’t ever hesitate to lean on that same community if we can do anything to help.

4. I’m sorry to hear about the loss in your family, and wish you happier times ahead.

Eek…sorry about the massively long formatting. I mean to copy & paste the condensed version, not the readability version…just wasn’t paying attention.

Alright, here are the various bits I got.

Unfortunately, granular access to the header is difficult through CSS since its classes and hierarchy are identical to the other panes (Labels and Invite-a-friend), and almost none of these elements have id attributes.

Also, I think I’ve got this right but I’m not perfect yet. The style previously used in Better Gmail 2 used the !Important marker in the styles, that might need to be added. Each definition below does something different, I’ve put in comments above each.

/* This one will take out the whole pane (no other styles required) */
.nH.s
{
display:none;
}

/*The contact list*/
.vB
{
display:none;
}
/*The Status area*/
.uk
{
display:none;
}
/* The ‘Search, add, or invite’ input box */
.dH
{
display:none;
}

/*The footer, with the Options dropdown and Add Contact.*/
.ow
{
display:none;
}

/*This is just the Options dropdown button*/
.oG
{
display:none;
}

/*This will remove the titles from ALL the panes*/
.py
{
display:none;
}

I’ve got the CSS for Hide Chat worked out. I haven’t used Better Gmail 2 or developed FF extensions, so I don’t know how much use it will be, but I could give you a set of styles to apply to Hide the Chat pane (or individual parts of it) easily enough. (looks like emailtoid.net already got Row Highlights and Hide Invites). Drop a not or an email if there’s anything I can do.

I’m not disagreeing on the point of how unproductive it can be to try to stay on the latest tech (and since I relate to programming language example, I’m addressing it from that angle), but I think it’s important to know when to stop implementing a specific technology in new solutions, and when to make it a priority to phase it out. I spent half of my learning in College on mainframe Cobol, JCL, and CICS. That’s more time than I spent with Java, .Net, PHP or any other language(s) (it’s how my school was geared). I’m certain that there were some newer technologies that we didn’t cover, and I’m fine with that. But after 2 years of intensively working with Cobol my professional opinion is that it should not be used in new development. To say that you don’t have to be using the latest/greatest is fine, but to imply that you can use whatever you want as long as you’re good at it has some seriously negative implications. If I build your solution in Cobol instead of Java, you will have a much harder time finding another programmer to maintain it when I’m gone, and you very well might have to pay them 25% more. If I use ancient non-normalized formats for data storage it will probably cost you a lot more if you want to migrate it later. So really, “new and shiny” doesn’t get more done, but it’s probably wise to know when to replace your worn-out tools.