This article is addressed to anybody who has a FileMaker Pro database that they want to access on an iOS device (iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad). Although everything I say applies equally to the smaller devices, I’m going to speak only about the iPad. (None of my databases have at present been optimized for viewing on the iPhone’s much smaller screen.) I am mainly writing this for my own clients: my private consulting clients and also prospective users of CMAExpress 7. I’ve been sending clients personal letters with this info and it finally occurred to me I should write it up and make it more generally available.

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Hardware

To access your FileMaker database on an iPad, you will first need to buy an iPad. This isn’t as obvious as it sounds, because you have at several options. Should you buy the basic wifi iPad? Or should you pay extra to get the iPad with 3G capability, so you can access a remote database while you’re out driving around the city? And iPads come with different storage capability. What size internal storage should you get: 16GB? 32GB? 64GB?

If you wish to access the database both from your desktop computer while you’re in the office and from your iPad while you’re out and driving around, then you probably need to get an iPad with 3G capability. This allows you to use the iPad almost like a mobile phone, at least for data access. If you get the 3G iPad and you configure the database for external access properly, then you’ll be able to host the database at your office, access it from your desktop or laptop computer over the office wifi network (or ethernet, if you’re old school), and when you leave the office and get out into the city, you’ll be able to turn 3G access on in the iPad’s Settings panel and then get to the database on the iPad. Very cool.

If you do not need to access the database while you’re away from a wifi connection, then you can get any iPad, because they all come with wifi capability. For example, say you want to be able to move around the office but keep using the database on your iPad; or say you want to be able to do a little work on your iPad from home and you have a wifi network at home. In these scenarios you could do without 3G capability.

Finally, if you wish simply to put the database on the iPad and carry it around with you everywhere, then just about any iPad will do, because you won’t be using either wifi or 3G.

Even if you decide you don’t need a 3G iPad for your database use, you should still consider getting a 3G iPad, because you might discover that there are other things you want to do that require it. For example, I gave up my cell phone last year and have switched to (a) an old fashioned “dumb” cell phone for making phone calls and (b) a 3G capable iPad 2 for all of the “smart” stuff, like having my daughter get directions from Google Maps while we’re driving, checking email if I’m at the park, etc.

The other choice you have when you buy an iPad is how much internal storage you need. I can’t really help you there. 16GB is way more than you’ll need to handle any of my databases. If the database is stored remotely, then the iPad’s internal storage doesn’t really get involved much at all. But even if you put the database on the iPad, 16GB is more than enough storage. The problem isn’t with the databases: it’s with all the other stuff you might want to do with your iPad. If you plan to buy tons of apps, or storage all 90,000 songs you have in your iTunes collection, or your a photographer and you expect to load 10,000 raw image files on to the iPad every month, well, you will want to factor those needs into your purchase decision. General advice: More is always better. But cheaper is also better, and you can’t have both. You’re on your own here.

Anyway, be sure to check out the hardware specs for the latest version of FileMaker Go, on FileMaker Inc’s web site. As of December 2011, any iPad 2 would do great.

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FileMaker Go

After you buy the iPad and get it set up, you’ll need to go to the App Store and purchase FileMaker Go. It costs about one-tenth what FileMaker Pro costs, so it’s a great bargain.

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Your 3G data plan

If you decide to get a 3G-capable iPad, you’ll have to activate a data plan with AT&T, Verizon or Sprint. Remember, although there is no long-term contract, you do have to pay by the month if you use the data plan.

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Configuring database server for remote access

Finally, you’ll need to configure your database server to allow remote connections. This involves opening up a port (creating a special “hole” in your firewall). You can read about that in an earlier post, here. This is easier and also safer than you might think.

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Costs?

As of December 2011, expect to spend about $600-$700 for a 3G-ready iPad 2, less for an iPad 2 with wifi capability only. You’ll also have to spend $20 for a copy of FileMaker Go to run on that iPad 2. Those are the basic costs. If you get a 3G iPad, the data plans from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint vary in price but you should budget about $20 a month for a data plan.

For the very best results with remote access, I strongly recommend that you use FileMaker Server 11 running on a dedicated computer, but that’s expensive ($1000 for FileMaker Server 11 alone, plus the cost of the computer). It is possible to host the database on a computer running FileMaker Pro instead of FileMaker Server and save about $700. If you have only one or two database files to share, it may also be possible to host your database at a hosting service like Point in Space for around $35 a month.

One final consideration which may or may not apply to you. You’ll want your database server/host to have as fast a connection to the Internet as possible, upstream as well as downstream. (Upstream from the server’s point of view = downstream from the view of your iPad when you’re out of the office.) An old-fashioned DSL line will probably make you cry while a fast cable or T1 or FIOS connection will make you smile.

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Well, I gave Apple Mail a good solid month, on my iMac and on my iPad 2. I read and reread Joe Kissell’s outstanding Tidbits article on achieving email bliss with Apple Mail accessing Google’s IMAP servers and I followed his instructions for configuring both Gmail and Apple Mail to the letter. It did help. During this same month or more, I’ve also been trying my best to return whole-heartedly to the Apple fold, by using Safari instead of Chrome, Pages instead of Google Docs, Apple’s Address Book and Contacts apps on my iMac and iPad 2 respectively (why do they have different names?), and by trying to persuade myself that Apple Knows Best.

But I said it first many years ago and I’ll say it again: Gmail isn’t simply the best web-based email service, it’s the best email client anywhere, pure and simple. Of course, different people have different needs and there’s no question that Gmail isn’t the right solution for everybody. I don’t care if you prefer Outlook, or Mail, or Eudora. More power to you. But me, I’m going back to Gmail. Yet again.

In the last week or two of my attempted reconciliation with Apple, I began to realize I wasn’t happy and I started making notes. Here’s what I have come up with. The notes are in no particular order.

Apple Mail’s Cons (compared to Gmail)

• Mail has no undo-send feature. This is one of the best things about Gmail!
• No missing attachment check.
• It is actually harder to add an attachment in Mail, at least if you aren’t going to drag and drop.
• Mail marks messages read instantly. Gmail offers you the option of requiring that the message be selected for 3 seconds before being marked read. I find the Gmail option useful. If I simply click by accident on a message it isn’t marked as read immediately.
• Note that the previous option found in Gmail and missing in Mail (3 seconds before a message is considered read) only matters if you use Gmail’s two-pane view, which is similar to Mail’s. If you use Gmail’s one-pane view, this option isn’t necessary, because you can view messages in a list without seeing the message content at all until you want to. In Mail, you can set the preferences to Classic View, which shows a list of messages with or without a preview; but this isn’t a serious option in my opinion, because, well, Classic View is downright ugly, and one of the most compelling things about Mail is that the latest version of the UI is quite attractive.
• I can’t insert a picture by reference (URL) in a message composed in Apple Mail.
• I have come to like very much Google’s prioritized inboxes, which put important messages first. Mail can’t do this.
• It’s harder in Mail to select a whole bunch of messages, for deletion, archiving, labeling/filing, etc. In the Mac OS, you have to command-click to select multiple messages. (And before you command-click, you have to figure out for yourself that this is the thing to do; it isn’t obvious.) Anyway, selecting multiple messages is easier in Gmail. On the iPad, you have to click Edit before you can select multiple messages.
• While I’m talking about deleting: on the iPad, it’s a pain to delete a single message in Mail because, inexplicably, there is no delete button. You have to click the Move button, and then click the Trash folder.
• Harder to work from the keyboard in Mail. Gmail provides keyboard shortcuts for practically everything — moving from this mailbox to that, moving from one message to another, selecting messages, deleting selected messages, etc. You can do a lot in Mail with keyboard shortcuts, but not as much as in Gmail. I might add that there’s a particularly odd and dangerous problem with keyboard shortcuts in Mail. The delete key has its normal function while you’re editing a message, but if “focus” is in the message listing rather than inside the message editing window, then the delete key will delete an entire message. In Gmail, the del key is only for deleting characters in the editing window. There’s a different shortcut for deleting a message.
• Apple’s IMAP implementation uses folders and this seems to be responsible for certain confusions. Sent messages for example do not automatically appear in conversations in Inbox. Labels are better than folders, by a lot.
• In Mail, if I start a reply but don’t complete it and save it as a draft, it doesn’t appear as part of the thread or conversation in the inbox. So when I return to Mail later, there is no visual cue to let me know that I had already started a reply. In Gmail, a reply saved as a draft appears in the inbox as part of the conversation.
• In Mail, when I reply to a message that I sent, Mail assumes I want to send a message to myself. Gmail is smarter: it knows that I probably want to send another message to the person I wrote to last time and it addresses message accordingly. (Yesterday this caused me a serious problem with a client. I sent them an important message, except that it didn’t go to them at all, it went to me. And I didn’t realize the mistake until late in the day.)
• In Mail, I keep sending messages from the wrong account. Working with a single inbox — which I thought was the big advantage of using Mail — robs me of context, leaves me unaware of which account I am “in” because I am not in any account. NOTE: This matters to me only because I have four main accounts that I use actively. If you use only a single email account, this wouldn’t matter to you.
• Searching in Mail is not as good as searching in Gmail.

Apple Mail’s Pros (compared to Gmail)

• On my iPad, Gmail Mobile doesn’t allow me to format messages at all — no bold, etc. Mail on the iPad does now let me apply simple formats although the process is somewhat awkward. This is almost a wash. On my computer, on the other hand, Gmail (whether using the desktop UI or the Mobile UI) supports a very full range of formatting options.
• I can’t get my iCloud/me.com mail in Gmail. I don’t think I can get my me.com mail in Safari for iPad. So if this account mattered to me I would have to use Mail at least for it. Fortunately I don’t care about my @me.com address. All I get there are ads from Apple.
• Mail for iPad works better in portrait orientation than Gmail. In Mail, the message list disappears, so the messages are easier to read.
• Spotlight (and the search feature on the iPad, whatever it’s called) can search your Mail messages. I find this a non-issue because if I want to search email messages, I go to my mail client. What if I don’t know where it will be? Theoretically possible, but as a practical matter, I don’t think it has ever happened to me.

I have omitted some advantages that don’t seem to me to be real advantages at all. For example, you’d think that Mail would integrate better with other apps on the Mac OS or iOS, and in a few cases that might be true, but I haven’t personally figured out what those cases might be. I could also have mentioned that Apple Mail is attractive, but so is Gmail, especially the new Mobile app (used also by Gmail Offline in Chrome on my iMac). Apple Mail can provide notifications via Growl; but when I use Gmail in Chrome, I also get notifications. Mail integrates well with iCal (and the differently named Calendar app on the iPad) but Gmail works beautifully with Google’s Calendar service, which I like even better than iCal. What’s with that faux leather look, anyway?

Email bliss isn’t free

I want to add a note about Joe Kissell’s remarkable article, which I mentioned at the top of this article and to which I have referred before. Like me, Kissell isn’t selling anything. He doesn’t recommend his approach. But if you choose to use Mail to access a Gmail account via IMAP, Kissell tells you how to do it right and he explains the why, as well, if you’re interested. He knows what he’s talking about better than anybody else I’ve found on the Web. However, following his instructions is a pretty big hassle. It may be beyond the ability (and/or patience) of many non-technical users. And there’s a big downside if you’re not really sure you’re going to stick with Apple Mail and that is that the changes Kissell describes really mess up your Gmail account, if you decide to return to Gmail in a web browser. Not Kissell’s fault. He warns you. I’m just sayin’….

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/the-pc-era-is-just-beginning/4507?tag=nl.e539

He argues that the PC era is not only not coming to an end, but is in fact just beginning. He does this by observing that mobile devices like the iPad are the most personal kinds of computers ever. I think he’s got a good point.

Google, in an effort (apparently) to make life easier for users, wrecked this earlier in 2011. Google’s apparently now regards any one of the three URLs that I used to go to as pointing to a sort of integrated Google master account, and I now have to log into each account separately. I can, with a little luck, still have each of the accounts in its own tab, but for some reason that doesn’t always work for me. And switching from one account to the other, if I don’t have them in separate tabs, is a minor pain. Not a big deal, but enough to annoy me. Moreover, this approach meant that only one account at a time could be the default active account for that browser, and that was causing me problems occasionally when I wanted to get to Picasa Web Albums or Google+ or my calendar or Google Docs, web apps that belong to different Google accounts.

Around the same time, a couple of months ago, Apple released Lion (Mac OS X.7) with a new and much-improved version of Mail. I tried it out. I was pleased, no, impressed, at how easy it was to configure Mail to get to my Gmail accounts via IMAP. And I liked being able to get all my mail in a single inbox, which I can’t do in Gmail, at least not without consolidating all my accounts into a single account. Moreover, using Mail meant that I was now storing a backup copy of my email on my computer. I actually trust Google pretty thoroughly, but I suppose it’s not a bad idea for me to have my own copy of my mail somewhere.

So after at first thinking I’d tough it out with Gmail, despite the changes, I decided to try Apple Mail. Another factor in this decision was the fact that I also do email on my iPad, and dealing with multiple Google accounts on an iPad is even more trouble than dealing with multiple Google accounts on my computer. So I was using the Mail app on my iPad, as well. It seemed to work, for a little while.

Then I started noticing that I was getting a lot of duplicate messages. I’d download a new message for the first time — and there might be 3 copies of it in my Mail inbox. Weird.

So I did a little research and discovered that, while it’s possible to get Mail to work as an IMAP client for Gmail, it isn’t easy, and it involves fighting against Google to some extent. Joe Kissell wrote an excellent and fairly enthusiastic piece for Tidbits explaining how he had achieved email bliss with Mail as an IMAP client for Gmail. I read his article carefully, started to implement some of his suggestions — and then came to the conclusion that this was (for me anyway) just crazy. Way, way too much trouble, and I didn’t like the way it involved workarounds to fit Gmail’s square peg into Apple Mail’s round hole.

So I’ve given up that experiment, with just a little regret. Having a single inbox really is a strong advantage for Mail, and it’s possible that I will change my Gmail accounts so that email from two of the accounts is automatically forwarded to the third account, allowing me to access all three from the same, single account. Haven’t decided yet, but I may do it. Would make life easier for me. If I do that, I will also for sure take advantage of Google’s new two-factor authentication, because if I put all my email eggs into the same basket, well, I would like to know that nobody’s going to steal that basket. I’ve already had one Gmail account stolen from me (in summer 2010) so I know that it can happen.

To make things a wee bit easier in the meantime, I’ve bitten the bullet and purchased Mailplane, the OS X app that provides an interface for your Gmail accounts. Mailplane doesn’t give me a single inbox, but it does make accessing my three Gmail accounts a little easier. In many other respects, using Mailplane is very much like accessing Gmail in my web browser, which for the most part is a plus. And using Mailplane allows me to assign a keyboard shortcut (I used F2) to open my email quickly, and there’s some small advantage there too.

I’m still stuck dealing with the problem on my iPad. Don’t want to use the Mail app any more, but alas, there’s no counterpart to Mailplane for the iPad, at least not one that seems to have a really strong reputation. So I’m struggling with using the apps in the browser. The recent release of the Dolphin browser for iPad may help, as Dolphin provides a tabbed UI that’s much easier to navigate than Safari’s multiwindow UI.

Email shouldn’t be so difficult.

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Congratulations! You’ve got an iOS device like an iPad or an iPhone, and you have the appropriate version of FileMaker Go installed on it. Naturally, what you want to do now is connect to a FileMaker database like CMAX.7 or GOODBOOKS2.fp7 while you’re away from your office. If you are the only person who uses the database and you don’t mind accessing it only on your iPad, you can just transfer the database to the iPad and be done with it. You can now open it anywhere you’ve got the iPad, whether you have network access of any sort or not.

But let’s say you’ve got a database hosted on a server back in the office. Other users in the office connect to it from their computers using FileMaker Pro. You probably do the same thing when you’re in the office. But when you’re away, you want to connect with FileMaker Go. This article explains how.

Before you can connect to your database using FileMaker Go from outside your office’s local area network, you’re going to need to do three things:

• configure the database host machine so it has a fixed address in your internal network;
• configure the router to open up ports (little doors in your firewall) for FileMaker to use; and
• learn the IP address of your router.

IP addresses, public and private

But first, just in case you’re new to networking, let me explain IP addresses and how they are used.

All of the “places” that you can visit on the Internet are identified by “IP” (Internet Protocol) addresses. By “places”, I mean web sites, FTP servers, the server where you get your email, and many other services. An IP address is a string of four short numbers separated by dots, like this: “123.456.7.8“. IP addresses are used to identify devices — computers, printers, routers — on an IP network.

The biggest IP network is, of course, the Internet itself. When you connect to a web site by name (say “http://polytrope.com”) or to your mail server (say “pop.youremaildomain.com”), what you’re actually doing is asking a domain name server to look up that name in a kind of Internet phone book and get that domain’s IP address (a kind of public phone number) and then connect to that address. The internet comes to your office and connects initially to a router. The router has an IP address that identifies it on the Internet; this IP address is something like your office’s main phone number.

Now, inside your office, you probably have multiple computers on an internal or private network. These computers also have IP addresses, but they are internal IP addresses. Usually these begin with “192.168″ (or sometimes, “10.10″). The full address for a particular machine inside your office might be 192.168.1.12. An internal network IP address is kind of like an intraoffice phone extension. Normally, the firewall settings in your router prevent people outside your office from seeing or accessing the machines on your internal network.

Giving the host machine a fixed address

The “host machine” is the computer in your office (or possibly somewhere else, like a hosting service such as Point in Space or Digital Forest) that is running FileMaker Server and hosting your database.

If you are using a hosting service like Point in Space, the host machine is already configured for you. You just need to get the IP address of the machine.

On the other hand, if you are using your own host machine to serve your database, you should configure that machine so that it has a static IP address on your internal network. On a Mac, you’d do this in the Network panel of the System Preferences utility. Many if not most internal networks these days use a system called “DHCP” to assign temporary IP addresses to machines as needed. When a machine boots up in the morning, it gets an IP address for the day from the router; when it shuts down, it surrenders that IP address, which can now be assigned, if necessary, to a different machine.

Technically, the host machine doesn’t need a static IP address for you to connect to it using FileMaker Go. But if the host machine is getting a different IP address assigned every day (say, 192.168.1.2 on Monday and 192.168.1.7 on Tuesday), you won’t easily know what IP address to connect to. You would have to call the office and ask somebody to tell you what the host’s current IP address is or guess until you get it right. Configuring the host to have a fixed or static IP address makes it possible for you to connect to your database again and again with confidence.

Configuring the router for remote access

I’m going to go through this part — the hard part — rather quickly because there are a number of variables here, depending on the type of router you’re using, the operating system of the host computer (the one running FileMaker Server) and the design of your network. I’m going to try to explain the basic ideas but you will have to sort the details out for yourself.

First, you must configure “port forwarding” on your office router. The router is the device that is the gateway to the Internet from your office. Port forwarding is kind of like call forwarding on a telephone. Somebody calls you at 555-555-1234 and, because you’re set your phone up to forward calls, the call rings your phone at 555-555-6789. Port forwarding allows people outside your office network to connect to your router and ask for a particular port, and then get connected to a particular computer inside your network. The port number (say “5003″) is sort of like a phone extension.

For info on how to configure port forwarding for FileMaker Server, go here:

How to setup a router for FileMaker Remote Access

Let me note that there may be some variation in how you get to your router’s configuration screens. On most of the wireless routers that I’ve used in the past 10 years, I access the router’s configuration pages through the web browser on my desktop computer. I have to know the router’s IP address (say, 192.168.1.1) and I have to know the admin username and password. But I think some other routers can be accessed differently, perhaps through a utility program that you run on a computer. You’ll have to look at your router’s documentation, if you don’t know.

Once you are “in”, to configure the router, you’re going to open up two “ports” in the router and have them point to the host machine. You must know the host machine’s IP address to do this. The article I linked to above tells you how to find the host IP address if the host machine is a Mac. To get the server machine’s IP address if it’s not a Mac, you can do either of two things. If FileMaker Pro can “see” the server from a client machine inside your office — say, your desktop computer — then open FileMaker Pro, go to File > Open Remote… and select the host name in the hosts list on the right side of the hosts dialog. When you select the host by name, you’ll see its IP address appear in the “Network File Path” down below. Alternatively, if the server is running Windows XP, sit down in front of the server machine and do this:

1. Go to Start menu and select Run…
2. Type “cmd” (without the quotes) and hit Enter/Return
3. Type “ipconfig /all” (without the quotes and with a space before the slash) and hit Enter/Return

That should display a screen that will reveal the computer’s IP address. Once you know that, follow the rest of the directions in the article I linked to, to set up port forwarding. As shown in the screen shot in the article, you will want to set up TCP/UDP port 5009 for FileMaker, and set up TCP/UDP port 5003 for VNC. It’s not important that you understand these terms or know where the port numbers come from.

When you have configured the router, the hard part is over, and it’s time to connect to your database.

Connecting to the database on your iOS device

Go to your iPad (or other iOS device) and launch or open FileMaker Go. The first time you try to connect, in the list of Remote Files and Hosts on the right side of the startup screen, click the server icon that has a plus sign (+). Then type your server’s IP address. This will be the IP address of the router followed by a colon and the port number for FileMaker Server (5003). It should look like this:

123.456.78.9:5003

As far as I know that’s not a real IP address. The first part of the IP address, before the colon, is the public address of your router. In my example, this is 123.456.78.9 but it will of course be something different for your router. The part after the colon is the port you opened up for FileMaker Go; it will always be 5003. You should give the server a descriptive name for future reference and save it.

Once you click Save, if everything has been configured properly, you should see a listing of the databases being hosted under FileMaker Server on your office’s host or database server machine. Select a database and open it! To reconnect to the same server later, you should be able simply to select it from the list of Favorite Hosts.

Two final notes about speed, and security

Be aware that 3G networks don’t transfer data as fast as your office’s ethernet or wifi network does. Depending on the design of the database you are accessing and the speed of your cellular data service from AT&T or Verizon, it’s possible that your experience using the database could be a bit frustrating at times.

It is also very important that you understand that, once you’ve opened up that port and made your database accessible to the outside world, the database is, um, accessible to the outside world — meaning anybody in the world can see it. Every database on your network should require that anyone trying to open it provide a good account name and a strong password.

Apple apparently justifies this behavior in part by comparison to the way things work on the iOS, the operating system running on your iPhone or iPad. On these iOS devices, you don’t use a remote pointing device like a mouse or trackpad, indeed, you can’t use a mouse or trackpad with an iOS device because the operating system apparently doesn’t support them. (By contrast, you can add a bluetooth keyboard for typing.) These devices have touch screens, and when you put your finger on the screen, it’s as if you are grabbing the content on screen directly and moving it. On an iOS device, this makes sense. I’ve been using a mouse and a trackpad for a quarter of century and during that entire time, scrolling up moved content up and scrolling down moved content down, where on the iPad, to go down on a page, you grab the page and pull up, and to go up, you grab the page and pull down; even so, when I got my iPad, I never had a single second’s hesitation about knowing how to scroll, or rather, how to move the content on screen (since “scrolling” on an iPad doesn’t seem like quite the right term). It was a non-issue. And for seven or eight months I lived very happily with a contradiction that I was never even aware of: on my iMac where I use a Magic Trackpad, I was pulling down to go down on a page, while on the iPad I was pulling up. I never noticed that my fingers were moving in opposite directions on the two machines.

Until I installed Lion.

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Which way is up?

In his terrific review of Mac OS X.7, Ars Technica’s John Siracusa comments briefly that one problem with the change in scrolling direction is that it makes us use our hands in an unnatural way. He says that we scroll down much more often than we scroll up (because we read web pages from top to bottom, not vice versa) and says that our fingers find it easier to bend inward (pull down) than pushing out. That seems intuitively right, but I’ve been pushing my fingers up to scroll down now for many weeks and it ain’t all that hard. I haven’t gotten sore fingers from doing it, and I sit at my computer all day long.

I think the problem lies elsewhere.

As I see it, the problem is that the new movement introduces a serious contradiction into the way our pointing devices work on the Mac OS. It’s not a contradiction with the iOS: as I said at the start, that contradiction — well, that difference — between the iOS and the Mac OS has never been a problem. The contradiction I’m talking about is within the Mac OS. The contradiction becomes apparent when you ask, what does the pointing device do? Most of the time it controls the on screen pointer — the arrow or insertion point. And if you want to move the arrow or insertion point up, you push your fingers up. That is intuitive and natural. The content on screen stays put, and you move the pointer. But with this scrolling change in Mac OS X.7, the pointing device now gives you the ability to move the content on screen. Note that when you scroll, the pointer doesn’t move. Anyway, now, when you use one finger to control the pointer on screen, you pull down for down and up for up, but when you use two fingers to control content, you pull down to go up and push up to go down. And while you control content, the on-screen pointer (arrow or insertion point) just sits there.

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What does “scrolling down” mean?

By the way, I want to note that there is a little confusion here caused by language, but I think it’s not the real problem. We have for a very long time used the terms “scrolling down” and “scrolling up” incorrectly, or at least in a way that is at variance with their use in the world of concrete things. If the web page were really a piece of paper suspended between two sticks and wrapped around one or both of them the way old-fashioned camera film is connected to its reels, then to read the end of a long page, we would scroll up, that is, we’d move the paper so that more paper is wrapped around the upper stick. The paper needs to be moved up so that we can see what’s down below. It’s interesting that on the computer we don’t talk about it that way. If we want to get to the last paragraph on a long page, we “scroll down.”

Anyway, I want to emphasize that, while the language problem makes it a little harder to talk about this issue, the problem is not fundamentally one of language.

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Tertium quid

Note that there are a couple of behaviors on the Mac OS that brings the two behaviors just mentioned (moving the pointer and moving the content) into a kind of conflict.

Consider, for example, what happens when you grab something and want to move it to another part of whatever context it’s in. For example, say you’re in the Finder looking at a folder in list view and the folder has a lot of documents in it as well as other folders, more than can be seen at once given the current height of the window. You grab a folder or document at the top of the list and want to move it to some position later in the list, below what you can see right now. On the pointing device, do you pull down or push up? The answer is, here you pull down. When you get to the bottom of the visible part of the list, the window will automatically start to scroll to show you more content. Viewed very technically, this makes sense, because dragging and dropping is a one-finger action, not a two-finger action, so if what really mattered was making sure that things work consistently for N fingers, then this is okay. But of course our brains don’t think like that at all. We don’t think to ourselves, if I let go of the feather in my right hand, it’s going to fall down, but if I release it from my left hand it will float up, because the laws of nature work differently when I change hands. You could get used to that sort of contradiction, I suppose, if you had to. But it would still be a contradiction.

An even more striking example of conflict, I think, occurs when you work with a drop-down menu. Working here in WordPress.com’s editor, I use a paragraph style menu to format my section headers. To get the menu to appear, I have to click on it; then I move the pointer down (pulling down with one finger on the trackpad) to move the pointer — that is, the hot spot that I control with the trackpad — into the menu listing. Now, since the paragraph style I want (say, “H5″) isn’t visible in the short menu at first, I have to change the direction my fingers are moving on the trackpad to make the list show me the items at the end of the list. I switch to two fingers to scroll the listing, and for some reason that doesn’t bother me; what bothers me is having to change directions.

Now, notwithstanding the attempt to make the Mac OS work like the iOS, note that they aren’t alike at all in a very important sense. There is no pointer on the iOS, no remotely controlled “hot spot”. You never see an arrow on screen. Instead of an arrow, you have the tip of your finger. This is part of what makes the iOS so easy to use: you experience the touch screen in a very direct way. There is no intermediate pointing device. Alas, Apple seems to have forgotten that that is still not the case when you’re working on a Mac.

If (or when) Apple releases Macs with touch screens, then everything changes. But the problem now is that a pointing device is not a touch screen. Using the pointing device used to seem natural. Now, at least when you’re controlling content (with two finger gestures), it’s unnatural, like trying to use a mechanical grabber arm to pick up a toy, while looking at what you’re doing in a mirror. John Gruber and others have observed that Apple is trying to make things less abstract in the Mac OS. I agree and I would add that Apple has been trying to do this since the Mac was first released. But to paraphrase Einstein, things should be made as concrete as possible—but not more so. The pointing device is necessarily and inevitably an abstraction. It’s a remote control arm. Trying to pretend otherwise is, well, crazy.

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Mouse vs trackpad, and the on-screen pointer

I want to comment on two other small items.

First, my completely unscientific sense of things is that the new behavior is a little less disconcerting if you use a Magic Trackpad (as I do most of the time) than if you use a mouse. To put it simply, the trackpad provides a more tactile, less abstract experience than the mouse.

Second, I wonder how I’d perceive this problem if Apple simply made the on-screen pointer disappear when I use two fingers to move content around. I’m not sure, but I think it would help. The on-screen pointer is a control point. But there is no reason for it to be visible when I’m moving content around with two fingers. It’s a distraction, a reminder that, if I were using just one finger, I’d be pushing instead of pulling or vice versa.

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What do I do now?

It’s a strange mistake for Apple to have made. The way things work now “fixes” something that wasn’t broken. Even so, I thought I’d get used to it fairly quickly. I haven’t. Now I am struggling with the question of whether to use the System Prefs panel to restore the old behavior, or stick with the new behavior and simply learn to think backwards. I am sure I can get used to the new behavior, eventually. When I’m taking photos, I don’t have to think at all about asking people to move a few inches to their right (meaning to my left). And I’ve been writing upside down all my adult life. But this might be a little harder because of the contradiction within the Mac OS that I just pointed out: you pull down with one finger to move the pointer down, but to move content down with two fingers, you push up. I may get used to it, but I don’t know that I’ll ever learn to like it.

Why My Mom Bought an Android, Returned It, and Got an iPhone

I  bought into Android when it first appeared: I had a T-Mobile G1. I rather liked it, partly because I am pretty committed to Google as a user of Gmail and Google Documents. When we moved from T-Mobile to Verizon (for dubiously better connectivity) I upgraded to a Droid Incredible, and I got a Droid Eris for my wife. Nice hardware.

But I deeply disliked the fact that the stuff on my Incredible was not the same as the stuff on my wife’s Eris—and neither was like the stuff I had on the G1 originally. I think that the G1 may have reflected Google’s intentions, that is, it may have been a fairly undiluted version of Android. But the makers of the Incredible and the Eris (companies whose names I am not even going to take the trouble to remember), apparently thinking that they know more about software than Google, screwed things up. The contacts app-cum-dialer on the Incredible was awful, made me angry every time I used it. And it was difficult for me to help my wife with occasional problems if I wasn’t right there with her, because her phone’s preinstalled apps were different enough from mine that I wasn’t really sure what she was seeing.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, having used the Incredible long enough to qualify for an upgrade, I traded it in (not technically the same as returning it). But unlike the mother in the article I linked to, I didn’t switch to an iPhone. Instead, I got some kind of basic LG ordinary “dumb” cell phone. I’m pretty happy with it.

I didn’t get an iPhone mainly because I wanted to cancel my data plan and cut my monthly bill from Verizon. But there are other reasons. The new LG phone’s battery lasts forever; the Droid Incredible’s was good for a day, maybe, if I didn’t use it much. I get better reception on the LG phone than I did on the Incredible. (I can use the phone in my house, for starters.)

And there are a couple reasons that have to do with Apple’s products. I didn’t want to upgrade to an iPhone 4 when the iPhone 5 seems to be just a few months away. And besides, I’m not sure I want an iPhone at all. If I decide I need portable connectivity, I won’t want it for my phone with its teeny display, I will want it for my iPad. So I’m enjoying the LG while I see how long I can go without adding 3G capability to my iPad. Everything I would want 3G capability for — maps, email, blogging — will be better on the iPad than the iPhone. The salesman at Verizon assured me that it won’t be long before the only phones available are smart phones. But until then I’m thinking I may stick with my “smarterer” phone.

When I try to log in using my Apple ID (my email address), I get a totally unhelpful response that says “Unable to verify me@mydomain.com because it is already in use by another Apple ID.”

What the heck does that mean? How can an Apple ID be “in use by” another Apple ID?

Looking through Apple’s support forums for help, I gather there are lots of problems with Facetime. It’s almost as if it had been programmed by Microsoft.

At one time or another in the last fifteen years, I’ve reviewed, if not every email client ever released for the Mac, at least a pretty good portion of them. Every client has some special advantages, and to be honest, I seem to have an urge for new user interfaces now and then that causes me to switch email clients somewhat promiscuously. At one time or another I’ve been a fan (and user) of Eudora, PowerMail, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Mailsmith, Gyaz Mail, Sweet Mail, Apple’s Mail (a.k.a. “Mail.app”), and a couple that I’m probably forgetting.

But as it happens, I think I was one of the first people on the planet to get an invite to use Gmail, back before anybody had heard of it. I didn’t think much of it for a long time. But several years ago I decided that Gmail has two decisive advantages. First, it’s web based. That means I can get my email from any device or any computer that I have access to. If my main computer dies suddenly, I’m not locked out of my mail — I just switch to a different computer and log in. And second, as it turns out, Gmail happens to have just about the best user interface of any email client I’ve ever used. By “best”, I don’t mean “prettiest.” I mean the most usable, the one with the features I need most, implemented in a way that makes them easy to use. And so, for the last many years — I think it must be about four years or more — I’ve been using Gmail for all of my mail. For me, that’s a long time to use the same application!

But now, with the new and, in my opinion, much improved version of Mail in Lion, I’m reconsidering my options.

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Mail’s advantages

Here are the new Mail’s relative advantages, as I see them:

1) With Mail, I’m able to get all incoming messages to land in a single universal inbox. This completely eliminates the need to switch from one account to another. I use four different email accounts on a daily basis, for different purposes, and I need to stay on top of all four of them pretty closely. Working with Gmail, I have to keep switching from one tab to another in my web browser, and with some of the changes Gmail has made recently to the management of accounts, I actually have to switch accounts in the same tab. Mail eliminates that, which is a big plus.

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Gmail’s advantages

On the other hand, Gmail has some serious advantages, too.

1) Gmail integrates perfectly with its own additional services like my calendar, Google documents, etc. This integration is possible with Mail and iCal, too, but it’s not as easy. Addendum: If I used iCal and relied on the Mac Address Book more than I do, then Mail would win this point. But I don’t.

2) I am completely in agreement with Gmail’s no-folders approach. There is no point to putting things in folders whatsoever. What matters is that you can find stuff when you need it. And if Google can’t find it, it can’t be found; well, what I mean is, Google’s find feature is tops. Gmail does support labels, and labels are much more useful than folders, because you can attach multiple labels to the same message. I find the folder hierarchy in the drawer on the left in Mail rather confusing by comparison, especially since it combines all my accounts into a single view.

3) Gmail supports a large number of add-ons that have proved to be very useful. The most useful one is probably the ability to change my mind after I hit the send button — at least for a few seconds. This one has helped me out many times. Second, I like the fact that Gmail can (usually) recognize that I wrote something like “See the attached file” but in fact forgot to attach the file. A third utility I use only occasionally but really like when I need it is Baydin’s Boomerang, which lets me ask to be reminded about an email in N days.

I won’t mention Google’s alternate mailbox views, including Priority Mail view, because, although I’m intrigued by these options, I haven’t quite gotten used to them and generally I have stuck with the classic inbox, where the last message to arrive is shown at the top of the listing.

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Neither pro nor con

There are a couple features that could be considered a pro for one client over the other, but which aren’t so important to me.

First, there’s the ability to access my mail from any computer, which I mentioned near the start of this article. That isn’t really an advantage for Gmail over Apple Mail, because I’m using Apple Mail as an IMAP client to access my Gmail accounts. So my mail is still stored on Google’s servers — everything except drafts. If I were to decide to use Mail as my main client on my iMac, and (heaven forfend!) if my iMac were to die, I could still go to my iPad, or even open a Windows laptop and get to my email using Google’s browser UI. I will never use an old-fashioned POP mail account again, if I can help it. But this just isn’t an issue any more.

Second, there’s the fact that Mail downloads my messages to my computer and Gmail doesn’t. If I was paranoid about Google losing my mail, this would matter to me. I know some people really are concerned about this and I don’t say it’s not a valid concern. But my view is, Google is much likelier to keep my mail backed up than I am (although I do backup routinely). And having all that mail on my computer takes up a fair bit of disk space. So this is a wash.

Third, with a desktop mail client (whatever it might be), URLs in other applications that are designed to send email (“mailto” URLs) work properly, opening the desktop app (Mail, say) and creating a new message. If I was clicking a lot of mailto URLs in, say, word processing documents or PDFs that I’m reading in Preview or in FileMaker Pro, well, then it might matter. But as it happens, this just is not a problem for me more than, oh, once a month, if that often. And if this really mattered to me, I could eat my cake and have it too by using Mailplane, which turns Gmail into a desktop application that you can set as your default mail client.

Finally, there’s the esthetic factor. This, I think, is a wash, or nearly so. To my eyes, the new Mail is nicer to look at. There’s very little “eye candy,” rather, it’s just got a nice clean UI. It’s easy on the eyes in the more or less literal sense, and that’s important, given how much time I spend every day doing email. Gmail has recently updated its user interface, too, and the new UI is certainly less cluttered than the one before it. So while Gmail still isn’t quite as pretty on my iMac as Mail is, it’s pretty enough. By the way, the mobile UI for Gmail that I see when I access Gmail in Safari on my iPad is nicer than the UI on my iMac. I wish they were the same, because I rather like the UI on the iPad. It’s very similar to the UI of Mail.

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Mailplane

Speaking of Mailplane, I’ve given it a serious trial. Mailplane is basically a web browser that is dedicated simply to displaying your Gmail accounts. That means you get all of the advantages of Gmail, but you get them in an independent application. Mailplane has a number of other features not found in Gmail (for example, drag and drop attachments, ability to take screenshots, support for Growl notifications) that someone else might think are terrific but that I myself don’t find compelling.

There seem to be three opinions about Mailplane. A number of people I respect (folks who write for Tidbits) think it’s great. A second group of people think Mailplane is nice, but a bit pricey. And then there are those who don’t quite see the point. I’m afraid I’m in the third category. It certainly is very nice, I guess, and if I saw the point, I wouldn’t think $25 was too much to pay. But I just don’t find it that difficult to manage a couple tabs in Safari or Chrome for my different email accounts; and Mailplane does not give me a universal inbox, as Mail does. When I want to switch from my Polytrope personal account to my Polytrope support account (or my personal @gmail.com account, or my photography practice account), I have to double-click that account in the accounts drawer and let the new account load. This is slower than clicking on a different tab in my browser. Used to be that Google wouldn’t let you have more than one Gmail account open at a time. That’s kind of still true, but now there’s a fairly easy “switch accounts” UI in Gmail that I find as easy and quick to use as switching accounts in Mailplane.

Mailplane shares one advantage with mail: you can configure it to handle mailto URLs. But as I said above, that’s just not a big deal for me.

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So?

Well, now that I put it down in writing, it’s looking like, as much as I’m tempted by that universal inbox in Mail, I’m going to have to stick with Gmail. On the other hand, I’m very fickle, so a week from now, who knows, I could have switched to Sparrow (which is actually quite nice, sort of Mail Lite).

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Addendum a day later…

Well, I thought this decision was going to be easy, after I’d cleared my head on the matter by writing this article. Wrong. Turns out that Apple Mail’s one advantage — the universal inbox — is a really compelling advantage. So I’m still going back and forth!

Addendum 7/21/11 16:50 (Texas time): Looks like mail’s working again, hallelujah! The moral here is, while computer’s are definitely getting easier, they’re still not easy. At least dealing with the internet isn’t. I have my domain (polytrope.com) registered through Godaddy; my web site (http://polytrope.com) hosted here at wordpress.com, which also manages the rest of my domain-name server (DNS) records; and my mail hosted by Google. It doesn’t break very often and I no longer do this sort of thing for clients, so about once a year I have to figure this out from the ground up and it gives me a fresh headache every time. Anyway, it looks like it’s working now. If you wrote me earlier today and didn’t get a response, please resend your message. Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience. – WP