The Zenbe mail interface

After weeks of waiting, Zenbe.com finally sent me a confirmation for an account request. Was it worth the wait? Sort of. It’s nice, but if your primary email is Gmail like mine is, it’s just different. Which is good, I suppose.

Design

Clearly, a lot of thought and work went into the design of Zenbe. It feels fresh and well put-together. Things are intuitively arranged, cool colours, rounded corners etc. There are, however, some bits that can be confusing. For example, the “Settings” dialog is just for your email accounts. Other settings are done through the Gear icon, which changes function based on context. In the calendar, it gives you options for the calendar. Logical, but it took me a while to figure out. Another minor niggle I found was that buttons are just text-based on top of the message view. I’m sort of used to having a trashcan icon around to delete things.

The sidebar is a plus. I say this because it is not something I immediately want to get rid of, as I do in most other apps. It holds your calendar, contact list, to-dos, twitter, facebook and google chat tabs. I’m not super-excited about the whole “social” angle, but I suspect with more use, I’ll begin to appreciate having everything in a single browser window.

Conversation view is also nice, in an iChat sort of way. Gmail has done this forever, but the presentation in Zenbe is more literal.

Features

Zenbe has lots of features. Conceivably, it could grow to become a complete PIM solution. I’m not organised enough to know the difference between two online calendars, but Zenbe includes one, and it works fine. It also shows up in your sidebar, so that’s convenient. I haven’t explored the system enough to know whether it has any neat tricks like creating meetings out of emails, but if it isn’t already there, it probably will be eventually.

An interesting feature is “ZenPages”, which are collations of events, discussions, email, files and to-dos. ZenPages can be shared with anyone, even people without Zenbe accounts. A bit like the “Sites” feature in Google Apps, but much more accessible, since it’s available on a tab right in your email view. I’ve begun using it to track things about a couple of projects. Just having shared email on a ZenPage is reason enough to try it.

Attachments get special treatment in Zenbe, with a dedicated “Files” tab in the main view. This shows you all the recent attachments you may have received in your email. A nice touch. I routinely rifle through email to find and refer to documents. The files tab saves a few steps in search. File previews are available on hover (at least for images) and documents open in a pop-up window that uses Scribd to display the attachment. It works well, if slightly slowly. I would think that files would have links back to the email, but this is not the case. A glaring omission, I thought. This would essentially make the “Files” tab a list of email sorted by attachment, but not being able to find the email containing an attachment just seems counterintuitive.

Like Gmail, Zenbe uses tags to organise your email. This was familiar and comfortable for me, and I was pleased with the implementation. To tag a message, you can do it the Gmail way, or simply click on the tag on the left sidebar. A tag can even be set to automatically archive, which is what I like to do with press releases. Select, click, gone. This alone is a good enough reason for me to use Zenbe as my mail front-end.

Technical

Mail front-end is probably a good way to describe Zenbe, since it doesn’t require you to switch to a new email account (though you get that by default). Zenbe polls your other POP3 accounts and brings them into your Inbox, letting you keep your “From:” header. It does this smartly—like Gmail—so I can poll my personal and work email and reply to it without any extra steps. This will work fine for most people, but it doesn’t for my slightly elongated chain of email (personal gmail forwards to google apps polled by Zenbe).

POP3 implies timed polling. Zenbe polls fast enough for my email needs, but I’m sure there’s a delay somewhere in the chain. I didn’t notice, so I don’t care. I did notice that Zenbe is able to pull in my Sent items as well—I don’t know how it does this over POP3. This is very useful with the conversation view, since I can continue using my gmail/google apps/work email on my iPhone as separate accounts, and get a nice consolidated view in Zenbe.

The system also provides POP3 and limited IMAP access to your Zenbe mail. I briefly considered getting rid of the multiple accounts on my iPhone and just accessing Zenbe through IMAP, but even though Zenbe can intelligently manage multiple accounts, the iPhone can’t. I’d have to stick with one “Reply-to”, which is unacceptable. Under the circumstances, Zenbe must remain solely my desktop front-end.

Wishlist and conclusions

I like Zenbe so far. I’d like to continue using it. It makes keeping your inbox empty quite easy. I hope it extends to mobile handsets soon—a simpler web interface perhaps? SyncML would be nice too. Better, consistent keyboard shortcuts would help (ESC doesn’t always work as expected).

Link

It’s out and I have downloaded it. I sort of expected the zoomed-out, full-page preview mode. If Nokia, Apple and Microsoft are doing it, I don’t see why Opera shouldn’t. The difference is that while Opera Mobile 9, when launched, will have this functionality, Mini has it now and will work on most any current phone on the planet.

My initial impression is very positive. The beta feels a lot less like a Java application, a lot more ‘native’. The nifty zooming effect is nice, and I’ve always liked the slide-in/out of pages in Mini. Recently, I’ve been using the Nokia browser a lot because of the smooth fonts and the ability to view without compromise. Opera Mini is now on a level playing field, with improved fonts as well. All this in less than 100kb. You have to see it to believe it.

Friends and I have spent years pondering mobile panacea. Often while spending good money looking for it. Michael has had two palm organisers. I have had a Psion Revo+, a couple of S60 phones with an S40 in the middle. My current E61 is the best compromise I’ve used. But it is a compromise.

Back when I used the Revo+, I marveled at just how friendly and sorted it was. Despite being an aged device, it would recognize my IR Nokia, sync phonebooks and send SMS. It had a usable keyboard and even had Opera, albeit unusably slow. Still, it did connect via IR and EDGE to the internet and if only it had a colour screen, a bit more juice, Bluetooth and an SD slot, I’d be set.

The Revo+ died, and with it died the only (IMO) usable pda/handheld I had ever used. It still starts up with some charging, but doesn’t hold charge reliably enough to use. It was a 33mhz device with apps that ran snappier and more usably than my QVGA, 200 mhz, WiFi-enabled smartphone. Before we bought the MacBook, we tried very hard to find a subnotebook-type device that would do word processing and email for a decent price, but there was nothing around.

By now it should be clear that I like the Folēo. It is an idea whose time has come and gone, but a good idea it is. I can’t think of very many mobile use-cases that would not be satisfied with a Folēo and a 3G phone. Instant on, full (mostly) web, email and documents. With Google Docs, i dont even need local storage! I wrote about being disconnected from data earlier. This is a combination that I think would make disconnection work. It remains to be seen if the Folēo has enough horsepower to be a PMP-like device, but I probably wouldn’t use a 10-inch MP3 player anyway.

So you can have your E61, Blackberry, Dash, TyTn, whatever. Everything phone-sized will always be a compromise of screen and keyboard. Just split your devices and you don’t have to deal. At $500 the Folēo isn’t cheap, but compared to the near-$400 phone I typed this on, it compares OK for what it is. You can probably have a Folēo and a 3G phone for under $700 — a lot of money, but it would fit so well in my bag.

Now I will go massage my wrists and thumbs.

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Link: Google Web Toolkit – Build AJAX apps in the Java language

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The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That's a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.I don't store anything anymore, really. I use a lot of e-mail and the Web, and with both of those I don't have to ever manage storage. As a matter of fact, my favorite way of reminding myself to do something is to send myself e-mail. That's my storage.

The minute that I don't have to manage my own storage, and the minute I live primarily in a connected versus a stand-alone world, there are new options for metaphors.

Link

Google buys Writely

There’s nothing sardonic I can say that wouldn’t be a hackneyed stating of the obvious. Also, Writely was pretty nice when I tried it. So who’s next? I suggest 30boxes.com. The name, interface and approach is so Web 2.0, it hurts.

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Bhatia made an attempt at another business with Arzoo.com, which, as far as I can recall, was something of a marketplace for customers and professionals to trade services. That bombed, but is pending a relaunch “on the lines of Expedia”. His new projects are even more pedestrian:

A Skype wannabe with built-in games. I quote,

“Entertainment has a great opportunity in the country, and this is what is going to be the differentiator considering there are a number of other VoIP providers like Skype, Yahoo, MSN and GoogleTalk,”

Umm… don’t the competitors, barring Skype and Google, also have games and links to gaming content built-in? SkypeOut also does POTS calls plenty cheap, so I’m not sure how much impact the one rupee rate will have.

Another Bhatia project aims to speed up Hotmail, because users are complaining. Can you say Greasemonkey with spyware? Still another project aims to “increase the capacity of Hotmail”, and the article mentions the discrepancy between the email storage space available to Indian and US-resident Hotmail users.

And the icing:

“My services are always free, and I make my money from the advertisement revenue,”

Sweet. Why didn’t I think of that? Sabeer, a word of advice chief: put some of that $400m into a fixed-deposit and get some of that Section 80C loving. I think mutual funds are probably beyond your level of sophistication right now.

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I could probably find a use for this; for things that don’t quite fit in WordPress.com’s templates.

Link: Google Page Creator

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