iPhone

Update

As of iOS 4.2, Apple Mail has native support for archive in Gmail and MobileMe.

The Problem

Like many folks, I consume email using a GTD-ish approach of an Inbox and an Everything Else box. I’ve disabled autocheck on my Mac, and cranked the polling time on my iPhone to an hour.

My personal email is hosted on Google Apps, which provides the great Gmail web experience along with an excellent IMAP implementation. Likewise for my previous and current company mail. The Gmail Inbox / All Mail paradigm maps neatly to the aforementioned GTD approach.

On the desktop, I use Mail.app. I prefer it over the Gmail interface for a number of reasons including offline search and its ability to aggregate a number of accounts with the “magic” folders Inbox, Sent and Junk.

One place where Gmail’s interface punks Apple Mail is one-button archiving. It even has a keyboard shortcut! Wham. Hit one key, and that email disappears from the Inbox forever.

With Apple Mail, archiving a message requires a click, drag and a prayer, exacerbated by every additional email account. You could drive a truck through the hole Fitts left in your otherwise optimized process.

The Solution: Archive via Delete

It’s possible to bend Gmail, IMAP and Apple Mail to your will. The following steps describe how to configure things so that Delete acts like Archive: one click (or keypress) archives messages in Apple mail on the desktop and the iPhone.

Step 1. Enable advanced IMAP controls. You’ll find this under the Labs tab in Gmail settings.

Step 2. Enable auto-expunge. This is found under the IMAP/Pop tab in Gmail settings. This sounds scary, but isn’t. Gmail keeps a copy of each message in All Mail, regardless if it’s in the Inbox or not.

Step 3. Configure Apple Mail. Uncheck “Move deleted messages to The Trash mailbox” and set the IMAP prefix to “[Gmail]”.

Step 4. Use “All Mail” for sent messages. Since Gmail already stores every message, sent or received in All Mail, this step just instructs Apple Mail to work that way too. If you have multiple accounts, Sent is aggregated just like Inbox.

Step 5. Configure your iPhone.

Presto! Faster email consumption.

In Apple mail you’ll see something like this:

On an iPhone, the Delete icon will remove messages from the Inbox, but leave them in All Mail. Note: Be careful not to tap Delete when viewing messages in All Mail—they’ll be permanently deleted!

TL;DR

• Use Gmail, IMAP, and Apple Mail tricks to read & process email faster.
• Uses fun terms like “auto expunge” and training yourself that hitting Delete is okay.
• Vader.

Postscript

I’ve been using this to manage my email for 2 years. It works great, is fast, and frankly hitting Delete when I’m done with an email is really satisfying.

Putting Big Words to work at Julie & Trammel’s:

A few months ago, I was helping a friend troubleshoot an odd iPhone-related visual error on Hunch. The right side of the buttons weren’t lining up vertically with the top or bottom of the rest of the button. Oddly, the problem only manifested itself when viewing the site at certain zoom levels (non-quantized, to be specific). Pinching in/out or zooming into specific parts of the page made the buttons render correctly.

We’d used a similar technique on Domainr, so were curious to see if there was a way to address it cleanly.

It appeared that WebKit for iPhone uses mipmaps to render minimized background images. This makes sense—it has fast texturemapping hardware, and OS X / Quartz has been using OpenGL to render 2D graphics for some time.

The combination of hardware texture filtering of mipmapped background images with (then) imprecise texture coordinates were causing the artifacts we’d been seeing (recent related changes in WebKit).

Domainr’s buttons are styled using a sliding-door technique with a single CSS sprite background image. By this time we were starting to test against Safari 4.0 and Firefox 3.5, which also demonstrated similar visual errors when using their full-page zoom features.

The solution ended up being simple:

Vertically align the left and right background images for the button in the sprite.

It’s a palliative fix, but works. We were able to keep the single sprite image, and not introduce iPhone-specific CSS or hack WebKit. In the end, there were other benefits to the fix. Despite redundant image data, aligning the background slices eased the process of updating the sprite image for new button variations.

Earlier this month, my iPhone had a life-altering experience. The gist: it fell off my bed, bouncing off the railing before falling a few meters to an abrupt landing, face down on the concrete floor below. As of now, it still works—so I haven’t bothered replacing it. The reactions from people when they see it range from horror to dismay to incredulousness: “is that wallpaper?”

I think of it like an Advent calendar: Every day, a chunk of glass glass comes off to reveal a bit more iPhone underneath.

Now, you too can have the post-apocalyptic 3G on your desktop.

Inspired by Khoi Vinh’s excellent New York City subway map, I made a similar version for Berlin’s U-Bahn and S-Bahn system.

To Use

Unzip and add the contents to iPhoto. Then create a photo album (named “Berlin Subway Map”) and fill it with the images in numeric order. To do this in one step, unzip and drag the folder onto the albums sidebar area in iPhoto. Then in iTunes, ensure the new photo album is synced to your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Disclaimers

The Berlin transit system is incredibly large and complex. The type in this map is as small as possible, at the limits of legibility. Second, because of the legibility constraint there is no page overlap. I needed as many unique pixels as possible to cram the map in. I’d consider doing a version of just Berlin’s core A transit zone if there is desire. Also, use at your own risk. This is based on the latest map (as of December 2007) I could find. Stations change, remember to do a reality check!

Download

Download Berlin Subway Map for iPhone / iPod Touch (368KB ZIP)

London tube map formatted for the iPhone. <3

Updated August 7, 2008

London Tube applications for the iPhone (iTunes Store links):

• TubeStatus from Malcom Barclay (open source)
• London Tube from tewks
• myTube from Dominion Web

I went looking for an iPhone Subway Map, after having failed to assemble my own (in both PDF and 4K raster) and found this useful bit of kit from Khoi Vinh.

I also found a very pretty, well-designed, legible and enjoyable blog. I suppose you’d expect that from the design director of NYTimes.com. Did I mention the design is great? (Also eerily familiar. He also posted about The Wire this week.)