Now using Google Apps

Up until now I have been accessing my iwankerl.com e-mail through the POP protocol. At work, from Gmail, and on my iPhone, I fetched the messages and read them but still keep a copy on the server. At home, I fetched them and deleted them from the server. Essentially this setup made my home computer the master database of my e-mails. However there were several things I didn't like about this. First, on heavy e-mail days, I would read through fifty or so messages from friends at work and then when I got home, I would download those same messages which showed up as unread. Then I would quickly go through them either deleting or saving as needed. The second pain was reading my e-mails on the iPhone. There is no spam filter on the iPhone and I was relying on Microsoft Entourage's client side Junk Mail filter when at home and work. So every time I checked e-mail on the iPhone, I ended up deleting 80% of the messages which were spam. Third, this meant that if I received an e-mail at home and later needed to access it from the road, I was out of luck. I thought about using IMAP with my e-mail account, but I really wanted to be able to use Gmail for web based access and Google didn't provide IMAP support... until last week.

When I started reading about Google and IMAP, I noticed that also offer a service called Google Apps. If you have your own domain name, then you can setup your e-mail to be hosted on Google's servers for free. With Google's very extensive documentation and help, it was almost painless to switch iwankerl.com over to this setup. Now I can check my e-mail using IMAP from my iPhone, work, home, or use Google's web based client and everything stays in sync with the added bonus of very reliable spam filtering.

MacWorld review in print

My wish did come true. The December 2007 edition of MacWorld has Sharpshooter as the first reviewed item in Dan Frakes' Mac Gems column. Look on page 56 next time you pick up a copy. I didn't find out about this until responding to a user reporting a bug with my app on Leopard. When he said that he read about it in the magazine I ran down the hall to the break room so I could look and see if it was true. There are a few bugs on my plate so I need to hurry up and get the fixes out to all of my new users.

Sharpshooter 0.5

I just released version 0.5 of Sharpshooter, the screenshot renaming helper application for Mac OS X. This version adds a feature which I think is really neat. If you use multiple monitors, taking a full screenshot will result in multiple image files, one for each monitor. Sharpshooter can now recognize this and allow you to work with these related images together in one window. This allows you to give the images related names or even combine them into one large image.

I was hoping that this newest version would be a full featured 1.0 release, but there are still a few more items I would like to add before then. First, I need to include some documentation as a help book. Then there are some feature requests that users have sent in but I'm not certain if I want to add them or not. Some of the requests, even though they pertain to screenshots, aren't really befitting to the purpose of this application. I am still thinking of how I might be able to include them without bloating Sharpshooter with too many features just because I can.

On a related note, MacWorld did not end up publishing the Sharpshooter review in their print edition. You can read the online review but I was really hoping for something I could hang up on the wall. Oh well. I still suspect that it might have been printed and gotten a higher rating if the app was complete.