I was hoping the discovery I’d made yesterday (using the Bubbles SSB as a MobileMe Mail container) would make things easier for day-to-day use, but it really hasn’t. With Gmail, I never had a problem just keeping a tab open for email, and using GTalk for mail notifications. In fact, it worked splendidly! MobileMe continually freezes Firefox 3 on all my machines, making the option of keeping it open in a tab impossible, and won’t work with the Gecko-based Prism SSB. What’s worse, I have no way of getting email notifications unless I run a desktop email client like Outlook, which I loathe doing with every fiber of my being.
Another problem I’ve noticed is that MobileMe doesn’t even try to set itself as the default email handler in Windows. It’s as if the Apple team tried to do the least amount of work possible on the Windows client. One solution I considered was using Firefox 3′s new web protocol handlers interface to set MobileMe as the default mail handler in the browser. It obviously wouldn’t work in Windows itself, but this would be the next best thing. Taking a demonstration I found on Lifehacker, I created this:
javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","http://www.me.com/wo/WebObjects/Webmail2.woa/wa/DirectAction/emptyPage?action=compose&to=%s","MobileMe")
Don’t bother using it; it doesn’t work. It opens a MobileMe tab, but it doesn’t load the Mail Composer UI; just a blank page with the Mail toolbar. Herein lies the problem with web developers wielding AJAX without giving it some proper thought. Read my lips people, AJAX should be used to enhance a functional user experience, not to create it.
Shit has to function on the assumption that the AJAX will fail. Sites like Brightkite do a fantastic job of this; when they make an AJAX call, they have a timeout function attached to it. If the site takes too long to respond, or the AJAX errors for some other reason, the user’s browser is redirecting to manually push the request as we all would have done before AJAX became the hip thing to slather our sites with. The result of this? It frickin’ works. The user experiences still works even when the pretty stuff fails. This is good web app design. MobileMe should take note.
I bring this up because I can only assume that the reason my mailto handler doesn’t work is because clicking an email link within an active MobileMe page toggles some back-end code using AJAX to load the composer UI. I’m using precisely the same URL you’d see if you clicked someone’s email address in your Contacts to send them a new mail. One would expect that URL to work anywhere, whether I clicked a link in MobileMe or loaded it from a bookmark in my browser. It doesn’t, and there’s no reason for it. It’s lazy, it’s broken, and it makes MobileMe borderline worthless to me.
Read my thoughts from day one, two three, four, five, six or seven.
Tags: apple, experiment, mobileme, one week
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