The people that follow my personal tech-blog might already know about Mailplane, but I thought it was time to spread the word about Mailplane to a more mature crowd. Mailplane is a Mac OS X application that has Google Mail (Gmail) meet the desktop. It combines the power of a conventional desktop application (like Mail.app) with the flexibility and quality of an online email client.

Explaining the origin of the idea is best let to Ruben Bakker, the creator of the application:

“I really love Gmail. It is superior to Outlook and MS Exchange I experience at work: The Outlook Webclient is a joke, I get more spam than normal messages and server space is so limited I constantly must delete messages” …. “But I missed quite a few features that Mail.app and other traditional mail clients offer. Gmail with its browser interface just didn’t reach my desktop. For example uploading an attachment involved too many steps: Exporting the image from iPhoto, somehow resizing the picture and then attaching it by using the ‘Choose file’ button.”

So what does Mailplane really offer? For me the features and advantages are simple:

1. Gmail in it’s own application, instead of hanging around in my Safari, in a tab that I never close.
2. Integration with iPhoto, making it possible to simply email a photo from iPhoto, just as you would do with Mail.app. No templates though, so no nice photo emails as you can send from Mail.app.
3. Drag and drop attachments. Just drag and drop any file from your desktop straight into Mailplane as an attachment. Way easier than the web browser method. No support for folders though (would be nice to have it auto-zip folders (especially .app folders).

Mailplane runs on Tiger (no Leopard support yet as I tested yesterday) and even already supports iPhoto ‘08. It currently comes in multiple languages, with a Dutch version being added soon. I took the honor of localizing this app to Dutch, making this my first localization project. I hope it’s not too bad as my Dutch has degraded since my move to the UK.

For now it is free, but there are plans to license the application. I am hoping this price will stay low as I don’t see many people want to pay for something that is normally free. The current version is at 1.51 and is clearly still in Beta, including some bugs and lots of features to be added. That said I expect that Ruben will make future revisions of this app more and more interesting for people who want to use Gmail as a desktop app.

If you want an invite for the Beta, than drop me an email with your details on cbetta[at]gmail.com.

Update: Ruben just announced version 1.51 which comes in 6 more languages, including Dutch.

Switched to MySpace? Started using Jaiku instead of Twitter? As you create an online life and try out all these services you might gather accounts everywhere while most of them might be redundant. I decided to get rid of a few accounts today as I think it is generally a good plan. Here are a couple of reasons why:

1. Speak out: Did you try out a service that you actually thought to be the worst product ever? Than why not unsubscribe to show that you don’t like it. I think that with webservices and social networks using number of registered users as a standard of how successful their business is, it is even more important to let them hear your voice by unsubscribing. 
2. Create less email overhead: I know that it is easy to just mark those newsletters as spam these days, even more if you have an online mail client like Gmail. I personally have gone so far as marking some of my newsletters as spam because I know that unsubscribing is too much work. 
3. Remove your data: When you remove an account, read the use policy of the service and see if they are obliged to remove your data. I think this is important as I don’t want to leave my info lying around everywhere. You actually don’t know for sure what happens to all your data if a webservice stops running. 

I had a nice talk with Amir Amirani today who had some real trouble with Getting Things Done (GTD). As a documentary maker he had a real problem with keeping tack of his contacts, organizing his bills, and simply being productive. In our digital age this is more and more becoming a problem, and the most popular solution (setting aside all the very difficult high-tech solutions) is GTD by David Allen. Amir recently bought Allen’s book and I noticed that his book has much similarity with my obsession with Workflows.

The five basic steps of GTD are Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do, which basically make up the framework for any decent workflow. I personally have quite some workflows in my live, and recently I actually started recognizing and promoting them to others. I really like my snail-mail-workflow (which I actually stole from Reinier) in which I collect the mail, scan them to my pc, organize them by sender, keep the hardcopies that I think I need, and then stash the rest in a box. I have many other workflows for things like blogging, video-podcasting, and life in general and I wonder if other people also have these extensive workflows.

One problem with GTD that I noticed is that although Amir bought the book, he hadn’t read it yet and hadn’t gotten to Getting Things Done. My personal workflow motivated him to get started, and it made me realize that having a workflow is more important than being efficient in the first place. Once you have a workflow, you are doing stuff, analyzing what the problems are, and applying GTD tips like the Hipster PDA. In the end a problem of GTD is that you need to Get The Book Done before you know how to get things done.

PS: Post your own workflow as a comment if you think it makes you getting things done.