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.

I’m really missing GTDinbox and Remember the Milk for Gmail. Those are really my lifeline, and I’ve used them daily for a long while now. Productivity sure isn’t what it was when I had Gmail.

Read my thoughts from day one, two three, four, five, six or seven.