It's been a quite few weeks here at hyperlands, but that's mainly because it's been a manic few weeks at markland!
At work that major new release that we had been working up to since last October when live and this has to be the smoothest release we have ever done. That was the week before last.
This week I've been tidying up some minor issues that have turned up since the release. Yesterday (Friday) I finished the final build with the minor fixes in with minus 5 minutes to spare! Which means I left 5 minutes late last night (shock, horror!)
The wind-down at work has given me the chance to try some changes to my set up.
As a mac user I defaulted to using Mail App as my mail client. Once I'd added MailTags and Mail Act-On Mail is actually a very good mail client. But it's not with out it's (fairly major) problems! Last year, I switched from traditional folder based method for arranging mail to the more modern (and better) tag based method. The problem here is that Mail isn't really happy with the 5600 mails in my inbox!
It was not really Mails fault I guess, since my mac at work had only (!) 512 megs of ram and I normally have lots of other applications open, but Mail was beginning to slow right down and was taking everything else with it! Also some of the rules to automatically tag incoming mail's where just not working, which meant I had to do it manually (not too much of a problem with Mail Act-On), so I was on the look out for a better way.
I'd tried thunderbird in the past (and version 2 was released this week!) and while it's very good, it is very resource heavy and just not 'mac like' enough for me. Then I came across Opera in my Apps folder.
Now I used opera on the PC back in the prehistoric days of versions 3, 4 and 5. In those days you had to pay to get the full version. Yes pay for a web browser! Those where strange days the early days of the web.
Anyway, I had installed opera some time ago and played with, but hadn't used it for a long time. Opera as well as being a browser has a email and IRC client built in (these are the two main ways we communicate at work), so if this worked I could take two applications off my dock. So I gave it a go.
Now I had tried operas mail client once before on the PC, but didn't get along with it because at that time I'd not switched from folders to tags and opera's mail client (which is called m2 for some reason!) is very tag orientated.
So I set up opera on my machine at work one night and expected it to take forever to set up all my folders and tags, but no, opera whipped through my 5600 mails. The largest saved serach I've got (the emailed subversion differences for all the check in's on our major product) took about 2 minutes to find all 3800 odd emails. Mail App had never managed complete that search and had given up and only found the most recient 2000 odd mails! So plus points there for m2. Also the tagging support is built in and while not being as powerful as MailTags works really well for me (I never used most of MailTags features).
There are down sides to this. Firstly when composing a mail the return key doesn't insert a new line as you would expect, oh no, it takes you to the first tab in that window. What! That is really stupid. Am I the only person that likes to format my emails with paragraphs? Okay maybe I am.
Anyway there is a quick solution to this, shift return inserts the new line. Thats going to take some getting used to!
Secondly a few of our internal systems which have web front ends are stuck in the mid 90's and break quite badly on opera. Mind you they did that on my old browser too, but at least I could use most of them just about! But on opera they just don't work at all. I do have a terminal server I can use for those so it's not a show stopper.
Finally the chat client isn't great. Okay I'm being unfair there, I've been spoilt because by previous client, Colloquy, is with out doubt the best ever! So opera's client had a lot to live up to, and not unexpectedly it couldn't. It's not actually bad, it's just that it's doesn't have Colloquy's huge range of options for notifying of conversations. I'd configured Colloquy so that I didn't need to keep my eye on it. If my name or one of the projects I was working on was mentioned it notified me. Opera can't do that, so I have to keep my eye on the chat window now, but I can do that and keep the mail plane on the screen at the same time, so it's not to bad.
One of the main things I've gained by this set up so far is free memory. Before I quit the apps (Mail, Colloquy and Comino) I checked on there memory usage. In total there where using something like 275 megs of real memory and lots more swap (I don't have the figures here now!). Opera with the same pages open, logged in to our chat server and conntected to the mail server only took 150 megs of real ram. Now this is not a truly fair test since at that time the previous three apps had been running for over a week. But on Monday morning I'll have a better idea of the memory usage.
It's been a big change for me as I'l also gone back to using Terminal app (from using iTerm) and screen to handle multiple terminal sessions, but so it seems to be working and while I'm sure if it's speeding me up, I don't think it's slowing me down at all.
As ever time will tell.