Evan Sims

A Week with MobileMe: Day Five

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.

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Step Brothers

My family and I went to see Step Brothers this afternoon. I knew it was going to probably be a bad idea to see an R-rated Farrell movie with my parents, but I threw caution to the wind and went anyway. Woo, not a good choice. Very raunchy, but also hilarious.

I don’t think it requires much of a step up if you’ve seen the trailer, but here it goes anyway. Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen meet, and instantly fall for each other. Gettin’ it on, they both tell the other things about themselves. They discover they both have 40 year old children still living at home. Oh, the hilarious irony! Flash forward, the two marry, and Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly meet. They instantly hate each others guts, and proceed to do everything in their power to piss the other one off. In the end, the two become best friends when Reilly punches Ferrell’s younger brother (played by Adam Scott) in the face for being a dick. Shenanigans ensue.

Directed by Judd Apatow (Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Talladega Nights, Knocked Up, Superbad, Walk Hard, …) and Farrell, Step Brothers feels like a really, really long clip from Farrell’s funnyordie.com project, and I can’t say I have any complaints in that regard. The one-liners the guys pull off, along with some truly hilarious scenes (Farrell burying Reilly alive, the two getting beat up by a gang of ill mannered elementary school kids, etc.) make for a really enjoyable film. I think my only complaint was the vulgarity; that isn’t to say it wasn’t funny, but when virtually every line of the film contains fuck, dick, vagina or fart, it starts to get dry. Honestly I found the banter between Farrell and Reilly more entertaining when they didn’t turn every line into an excuse to get an R rating.

So, how was it overall? Not a family movie by any means (not that the R rating shouldn’t be enough to tell you that), but if you dig Farrell’s crazy, off the wall humor, you’ll love it. If you aren’t sure, watch some of the top clips from funnyordie.com first and see how they strike you.

I give it a 3/5 —

A Week with MobileMe: Day Four

Once again much of my day was consumed with class. I’ve had a few emails trickle through that required attention, but most of the day I haven’t touched things.

I discovered a site-specific browser (SSB) app for Windows today called Bubbles. Just as Fluid does for Mac users, Bubbles allows you to create instanced browsers devoted to specific web pages. They sit on your desktop or system tray, and look and behave much like a standard desktop application. Their guts are your web services, though. Bubble’s site has scripts for Facebook, Gmail, Google Reader, and others, but I decided to give it a try with MobileMe as a workaround to the issues I face with Mail locking up Firefox. It works, though you will get a few nag notifications that you shouldn’t be using Internet Explorer with the service (which is a bit absurd, honestly), as Bubbles uses an embedded version of IE rather than Gecko or WebKit, as Prism and Fluid do. This works great, and allows me to keep an open instance of Mail in my system tray at all times.

Honestly, the two big usability issues I’m facing with Mail’s web UI right now are these: no new mail notifications, and no mailto: link integration with the OS. Apple already has the MobileMe control panel and background service running on my machine, so why not do this? It’s extremely simple to do, and would add so much value to the software.

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The X-Files: I Want to Believe

Stopped by the theater this afternoon and caught the second X-Files film, “I Want to Believe.” I was really excited for this one. I was a big X-Files fan back in the day, so the thought of a second stab at a big screen X-Files adaption was thrilling. The first movie, as you may remember, received universally bad reviews; it kind of summarized everything that went wrong with the show in the last 2 or 3 seasons.

I Want to Believe takes a step back from the “epicness” of the previous film, and instead presents us with a more down to earth (literally), enjoyable story very much along the lines of a traditional X-Files episode. This film centers around three factors: an organ-snatching Russian and his husband (yes, they’re gay), a pedophile physic priest (say that 3 times fast) and, most shockingly of all, the relationship between Mulder and Scully.

First, let’s discus the story. It was very creepy, but not in a supernatural sense, which was a nice change. It boils down to this: an FBI agent is abducted, and a priest claiming to have psychic visions of the event approaches the Bureau, telling them that he can help them track her down. The lead in charge of the investigation isn’t particularly comfortable with the idea of psychics, so they ask Mulder to come in and consult for them. By this time Mulder and Scully have long been out of the FBI game; Scully is a Doctor at Our Lady of Sorrows hospital, and Mulder has been hiding out at their home, dodging the FBI. Yeah, they live together. Even shows them in bed together. Weird, given the incredibly ambiguous relationship the two had throughout the TV series. A nice change, though.

Mulder gets right back into the swing of the things and becomes obsessed with the case, while Scully finds herself unwilling to get completely involved. In fact, a good deal of the film deals with the lovers quarrel that arises from Mulder’s devotion to the case. It’s nice to see the writers giving the relationship some real depth here.

The acting was pretty great, with one exception. Callum Rennie (you might recognize him as Number Two on Battlestar Galactica) does a fantastic and pretty frightening job of his role, and Gillian Anderson has really come a long way from the actress we were introduced to in the early days of the X-Files. Billy Connolly, who has long been one of my favorite performers, does a unnervingly good job of making you feel bad for the child molesting, eye-bleeding psychic priest. David Duchovny was… well, David Duchovny. I’ve never found his acting to be anything to write home about, but he’s the Fox Mulder we’ve all grown to love. My only complaint was with Amanda Peet. Her dialog felt dry, as it always does. Not sure how she keeps landing jobs, but I guess some people can get by on looks alone.

So, how did I feel about the film overall? I liked it, more or less. The story was interesting, and they didn’t try to go over the top like they did before. They stayed true to the traditional X-Files formula and it worked well. I do feel the whole thing was drawn out a bit too long, and they could easily have shaved a good 20-30 minutes off for my taste, but beyond that I didn’t have any major complaints.

I give it a 3.5/5 —

A Week with MobileMe: Day Three

Day three of using MobileMe was fairy unexciting, as much of my day revolved around Calculus homework and running out to do errands.

I was hoping I might be able to use Mozilla Prism to place MobileMe Mail into a seperate Gecko instance, and thus have a workaround to the lockup issues I’m experiencing with the service under Firefox 3. Unfortunately, Apple has chosen to use browser sniffing and a broken JavaScript redirect method that makes this impossible, at least in my experiments. Unfortunately using more robust SSBs like Fluid is not an option in this experiment, as it is Mac-only. Hey Todd, I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a Windows port, eh? ;)

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