Brainstorm first; define 1.0 later

[Jim Puls]

On Jan 16, 2010, at 2:16 PM, Michael Ströck wrote:

> First, I'd like to throw something out there: The baseline for me, is NOT any current standard desktop application. The mail solution to beat is GMail run in Mailplane.app. For me personally, nothing else comes close to the power and ease of use of that combination. 

Is this true for most people around here? I would guess that, given the background, most of the people on this list — self included — are (Apple) Mail users. I think the question of "what doesn't Mail do that you'd like" is a very pertinent one for this list in particular.

Of course, I think it's clear that Gmail is the only interface that's really doing anything fundamentally innovative in the space, and there's something to look at there, too.

> - Plugins: I think it is essential to make plugins as simple to write as possible, and preferably in a language that is more expressive than Objective-C when doing text manipulation. Pyhton/Ruby/JavaScript are all very simple to integrate into Objective-C applications.

Some are better than others. Ruby, in particular, has a closer-to-toll-free bridge than the others.

> - Underlying text system: This should be abstract, robust and international. (Something like what Allan Oodgard seems to going for in the mythical beast known as TextMate 2.0 :-)
> 
> - IDNA: My actual domain name is ströck.com (yes with an umlaut). Nuff said.

This should only come in to play in the underlying network libraries, right?

> - Data Storage: This needs to be standard enough to be read with ease by somebody who has never seen the rest of the code, but still support Spotlight and be very fast... Not exactly easy. And I agree that ideally, I should be able to write into it from another application while the main application is running, but that may be a bit much to ask.


Qmail's Maildir[++] format, maybe? I mean, the obvious choice is to do a Core Data thing with SQLite, but that requires a redundant many-file metadata store to be Spotlight-compatible, anyway. I might question how many people would actually benefit from this, but there's no good reason not to use a standard format, either.

-> jp
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