After a few days of obsessive countdown checks, I finally got access to the iOS app-du-jour, Mailbox. Now that I’ve had a chance to put the app through its paces, I have a few first impressions.

Overall, the app feels polished and very well done. The interface responds quickly and smoothly. The overall theme includes very light gray textures and subtle embossing effects. There are a few nice touches in there as well – when your inbox is empty, Mailbox shows a cutout of its logo with a scenic photo in the background. Tapping on the photo shows a bigger version, and there’s even an option to see more information about the photo by viewing it in Instagram.

There’s a drawer that can slide in from the left of the main screen, which allows you to move between different folders, as well as access help and settings. The drawer is a bit of an odd outlier in terms of visual design, with brightly colored icons in an otherwise subdued app. I find the effect a little cartoonish, and they’d probably be better off with grayscale icons.

Since it’s unable to run in the background like Apple’s built-in Mail app, Mailbox uses iOS push notifications in order to deliver new message alerts. I wondered if the notifications might be slow to arrive compared with the native Mail app, but I found that the two were quite comparable. Unfortunately, push notifications can only do so much. Even after receiving a notification, Mailbox still has to connect to the server and download your new messages once you launch it. It’s a frustrating contrast to Mail.app, in which messages are downloaded in the background and waiting for you. The problem is especially acute if you’re in an area of limited service, like a subway, where you might receive a notification, only to open the app and find yourself unable to reconnect to download your messages. Hopefully, Apple will allow apps like Mailbox to do some limited background downloading in iOS 7.

By default, Mailbox displays an alert on the lock screen when new messages arrive, which felt like overkill pretty quickly. I disabled the banner alerts in favor of the simple icon badge after just a few minutes.

Conceptually, Mailbox is centered around keeping your email clutter-free. The app encourages you to clear your inbox by archiving, deleting, or “snoozing” messages. It even offers to go through your inbox and archive everything for you, with an option to leave unread or starred messages where they are. When you’re done with a message, you can archive it with a swipe or delete it with a longer swipe. (There’s a quick and handy walkthrough that explains the gestures.) You can also “snooze” a message until a later time. Mailbox provides a variety of options, including “later today,” “this evening,” “this weekend,” or even “someday.” You can also pick a specific date. Once you snooze a message, it disappears from your inbox until the selected time, when it returns. You can view snoozed or archived messages by selecting tabs at the top of the screen, or by searching.

Snooze is really the killer feature in Mailbox, and I’ve found it to be quite useful so far. It’s an adjustment from my normal workflow, which involved starring messages or leaving them unread in the inbox when I needed to act on them. So far, I’ve found snooze to be a good way to dismiss messages that I need to act on, but can or should wait until later. It helps that Mailbox gives you a lot of control over the snooze timings, with a settings pane where you can customize the start and end of your day, as well as define lengths of time for options like “later today.” If you’re looking for your snoozed messages in another client, you’ll find them in a simple Gmail label. Mailbox’s servers handle moving them back to the inbox, so snoozed messages reappear even if you’re not accessing your mail from the app. The feature works well enough that I find myself wishing for it on my desktop, and shifting more of my email management to my phone.

So far, I’ve dropped Mailbox into my iPhone dock, replacing Apple’s Mail.app. I’m uncertain whether I’ll leave it there, as the inability to download messages in the background is frustrating, but features like snooze make Mailbox hard to resist.

Farhad Manjoo on one of my biggest pet peeves: two spaces after a period.

Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It’s one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men’s shirt buttons on the right and women’s on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren’t for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine’s shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do.

The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.

This week two prepaid phone carriers, Virgin Mobile and Cricket Wireless, announced they’ll begin selling iPhones this month. Although you’ll pay much more for the phone up front, the monthly service fees can be considerably less than traditional carriers. The folks at PC world compiled a handy chart that shows a savings of $300-500 over a two-year period.
Of course, there are some down sides. Both Virgin and Cricket seem to have smaller coverage areas than AT&T or Verizon. Plus, we don’t know whether they’ll have the next iPhone when it’s released. I’d wager that sales of a new iPhone will be mostly restricted to AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint at the outset, which could eliminate most early adopters. Still, all other things equal, it’d be nice to save a few hundred bucks on service!

The Atlantic has a great overview of guidebooks written for tourists visiting the United States, ranging from the philosophical:

Politics get heavy treatment in the books, as do the subtleties of discussing them, maybe more so than in any other guidebook I’ve read (what can I say, it’s an addiction). Lonely Planet urges caution when discussing immigration. “This is the issue that makes Americans edgy, especially when it gets politicized,” they write, subtly suggesting that some Americans might approach the issue differently than others. “Age has a lot to do with Americans’ multicultural tolerance.”

To the mundane:

You might say that global food cultures tend to fall into one of two categories: utensil cultures and finger cultures. The U.S., somewhat unusually, has both: the appropriate delivery method can vary between cuisines, and even between dishes, and it’s far from obvious which is which. Baked chicken is a fork food, but fried chicken a finger food, depending on how it’s fried. If you get fried pieces of potato, it’s a finger food, unless the potato retains some circular shape, in which case use your fork. And so on. Confused yet?

On the whole, the advice is pretty good, and ranges from the hilarious (don’t bring toiletries as gifts to a dinner party) to the depressing (gays and lesbians are encouraged to avoid rural areas). Kinda makes me want to go out and buy a USA guide book!

Rogue Amoeba:

If nothing else, we’re gratified to at least have come to an understanding that we didn’t violate the guidelines – Apple simply doesn’t want us providing this functionality in the App Store. Ultimately, if Apple doesn’t want it, we can’t provide it and users can’t have it.

You may be asking why Apple would want to prevent users from having this functionality. Only Apple can provide a full answer here. We do know that Airfoil Speakers Touch’s ability to receive audio directly from iTunes and iOS enabled some users to forgo purchasing expensive AirPlay hardware, hardware which Apple licenses. It seems Apple has chosen to use their gatekeeper powers to simply prevent competition.

While I sympathize with their plight, I don’t agree with Rogue Amoeba’s conclusion regarding Apple’s motives. I can’t imagine that AirPlay hardware licensing is a big-money business, and a thriving app ecosystem is certainly more important to the long-term success of iOS than AirPlay speakers. All other things equal, I’d usually expect Apple to prioritize third-party apps over third-party hardware.

So, why block Rogue Amoeba’s use of audio streaming? I suspect the reason is contractual. Perhaps the contracts for AirPlay hardware licensing include a clause in which Apple agrees not to implement a “stream to iOS” feature that would make “made for AirPlay” speakers unnecessary. Moreover, it’s reasonable to suggest that Apple might agree to prevent app developers from doing the same thing. In so doing, speaker manufacturers would get a little bit of protection for their investments.

Unfortunately, the folks who aren’t protected are app developers like Rogue Amoeba. If I’m right, then Apple knew all along that it was obligated to keep “stream to iOS” features out of the App Store, and could have made that clear in the App Store Review Guidelines. Doing so would have allowed responsible developers to avoid wasting time building a feature that could never be released. Just like hardware manufacturers, app developers deserve a little clarity and protection as well. Of course, clarity isn’t always possible, but when Apple’s contracts dictate the implementation of a rule, developers deserve to know what that rule is.

Disappointing, but not all that surprising:

Today’s not a good day to be a LinkedIn user—doubly so if you use LinkedIn’s iPhone app. Researchers have discovered that the app scrapes users’ Calendar items and sends the data back up to its servers, even when those Calendar items were created outside of the LinkedIn app. The scraped data includes participant lists, subject of the entry, time of the meeting, and any attached meeting notes (such as dial-in details and passcodes).

Is anyone still surprised that social networks are not always good citizens when it comes to privacy?

Cult of Mac:

Then we realized that WWDC 2012 wasn’t the first app to adopt Apple’s new look — iPhoto has it, too. Furthermore, almost all of the iPad’s built-in apps — like YouTube, Maps, Mail and more — have sported silver user interfaces since the day they were born.

It seems likely, then, that iOS 6 will move towards making iPhone apps look more like their iPad counterparts. We are expecting to see almost all of Apple’s built-in apps adopting a new look for this summer’s update.

This feels right to me. It’s been almost five years since original iPhone shipped with what was then known as iPhone OS 1.0. That’s a pretty long time in design, and Apple has never been shy about tweaking it’s UI to follow new trends. As a developer, I can’t imagine shipping an app on the App Store using the default blue UIKit elements in 2012. At minimum, I’d tweak the colors, and probably add some texture to make things feel a little more current. Let’s just hope the changes in iOS 6 don’t include brushed metal or (shudder) stitched leather.

MacRumors:

Following news from late last week that the Nest thermostat from iPod creator Tony Fadell would be coming to Apple’s retail stores, the device has just been added to the company’s online store. While currently not available for pickup in retail store locations, it should be making its way to the brick-and-mortar locations shortly.

The Nest sounds like an awesome thermostat, and it’s great that they’re becoming more widely available. It also makes perfect sense for Apple to sell them. The Nest mirrors Apple’s focus on simplicity and great design, and interacts well with iOS devices. I look forward to buying one when I have a heating/cooling system I can customize a bit.

Rumors that Apple is developing its own TV set, distinct from the Apple TV set-top box, have been persistent for the last couple of years. Over the past few days, some commentators not prone to hype or hyperbole have indicated that they also believe Apple is getting ready to release their own stand-alone TV within the next year or so. I’m not convinced, but I also enjoy speculating about what Apple might include if they were to build a TV.
Primarily, I’m skeptical because of how Apple does business. Generally, Apple will enter a market if it can make substantial improvements over current technology or service. The iPhone represented a total shift in how we think about phones and portable electronics, and the iPad created an entirely new product category. iTunes revoluntionized how people buy music. The Mac has been innovative both in hardware and software for decades.

There’s a lot of room for improvement in the current state of TV technology, but a lot of it is out of Apple’s hands. Most of what’s terrible about TV today has to do with getting content into the TV and the companies that provide that content. Specifically, I’m thinking about cable companies. Most people get TV service from a cable company, and that usually means using a cable company’s set-top box and the crappy software that comes with it. Barring some kind of far-reaching deal with cable companies, which strikes me as wildly unlikely, Apple isn’t in a position to change how TV programming is delivered, and without that, their ability to change the game is very limited.

There’s also the screen to consider. In the past couple of years, Apple has vastly improved display technology by introducing high-density Retina displays on the iPhone and iPad, and they seem poised to do the same on Macs. Though it would be challenging to produce at such large sizes, I’m sure a Retina display will eventually be feasible on a TV as well. The problem is that none of the content people watch on TV exists at such high resolutions. We’ve only just completed a transition to HD screens, and Retina displays would be yet another huge step up in resolution. It strikes me as very unlikely that anbody is going to shoot movies or TV at Retina-level resolution any time soon. Compounding the problem, current movies and TV shows would look worse on a Retina TV, because the high-resolution screen would show all their flaws. It’s safe to say we won’t be seeing a Retina TV in the near future, from Apple or anyone else.

Of course, there are some areas in which the experience could be improved, but they’ve already addressed a lot of those with the Apple TV set-top box. Movies and TV shows are available through Apple TV, as well as a growing number of services like Netflix. Of course, there’s room for growth: the video content library on iTunes could be much larger, and at present there’s no way to watch most live programming like news or sports. But all of that is something Apple could address through software updates to the existing Apple TV and new contracts with media companies. With the current Apple TV selling well, there just doesn’t seem to be enough to gain for Apple to build it’s own stand-alone TV set.

If Apple were to build a TV, however, there are two technologies I imagine they’d highlight. The first is FaceTime, using an integrated camera built into the TV. Almost all of Apple’s devices now support FaceTime, and it’s easy to imagine a marketing campaign centered on making video calls from the couch in your living room. The second technology is Siri. Imagine being able to ask your TV a quick question like “Is there a new episode of Mad Men this week?” It’s not hard to see the appeal. Both ideas sound useful and practical, but I don’t think they’re enough to push Apple over the line from tinkering with a TV set to actually shipping one.

To my mind, the more likely scenario is that Apple will unveil a new version of the OS behind the Apple TV set-top box (which itself is just a modified version of iOS) that allows more involved and open app development. There have already been some rumors on this point, and the number of “apps” on Apple TV has steadily increased over time. Rather than deal with the hornet’s nest that is the cable industry, apps could enable content providers to start bypassing cable companies altogether. It wouldn’t be a revolutionary change right away, but it could be the start of one.

One way or another, it seems likely we’ll know more after the WWDC keynote on June 11.