For instance:

• You can’t rename a domain in Google Apps. You have to delete the domain and start over with the new name.
• You can’t rename an admin user in Google Apps. You have to create a new user account and start over. (If the user was the initial user in the domain, it won’t even work to demote the admin user and then rename him.)
• GMail likes to add a “Sender” header anytime you send a message from an alternate email address. You can prevent this (setup instructions) but it’s a bit clunky and requires you to have an external SMTP server.
• GMail IMAP is wonky, making me reluctant to use my GMail account with a desktop email client.
• You can’t use a Google Apps account with Google Plus.
• On a more general note, Google Plus is overly dramatic in its requirement that people to use real names and not pseudonyms.

All of these things add up to give me a general feeling of using a half-baked product from a company that doesn’t sweat the details. And I don’t like it.

There are a lot of things that I do like about GMail.

1. I can host multiple personal domains.
2. I can have e-mail addresses setup at my domain (for family members) that either deliver mail to a GMail account or else deliver mail to an outside account (so that I can provide a “forwarding address”).
3. I get generous email quotas.
4. The service is free.
5. I get mobile push email.
6. Google provides a very good, nearly instantaneous, email search.
7. There is a great conversation view, in the web interface.
8. I really like the entire Inbox / everything else paradigm that Gmail created and I like being able to one-click Archive my messages.
9. I can create unlimited message filters to automatically file messages and mark them as read or starred, even when my computer isn’t running.
10. Robust spam filtering.

But, given that I no longer trust Google to provide a high quality product, I’m looking to move to a new email provider. I’m willing to pay for my service. Here’s the baseline feature set I’m looking for.

1. Let me host email for multiple domains.
2. Let me create multiple aliases either for a mailbox at the host or to forward to an outside mailbox.
3. Robust spam filtering.
4. Generous email quotas.
5. Server side message filters, to sort and file my email.

Here’s the features that I’d like to see.

1. A good, web-based, email search.
2. A web-based conversation view.
3. Push email, for mobile clients.

I’ll be looking around to see who can sell me that, at a price that’s reasonable for just 2-3 mailboxes.

I’m really only interested in the eInk Kindles. I like the book-like readability of the screens and I’m really not interested in reading from an LCD screen for a long period of time. I’ve owned every Kindle so far (each iteration of the 9” model) and I’m pretty pleased with how the hardware has developed. In general, in day to day use, I don’t have any complaints about my Kindle. But I do have a small wish list, for the upcoming 4th generation eInk Kindle.

I’ll probably upgrade even if Amazon doesn’t implement these features but I’d sure love if it they did implement some (or all) of them.

Easy Hardware Transitions

Apple has a very easy process for moving from an old iPod touch to a new iPod touch. Plug the new iPod touch into your computer, go into iTunes and choose the “Restore from Backup” option. That will move over all of your applications, settings, music, books, movies, TV shows, etc. In a few minutes (or a few hours, if you have a lot of media loaded) your new iPod touch will be setup identically to your old iPod touch.

Amazon has nothing remotely comparable to this, to make it easy to upgrade from an old Kindle to a new Kindle. There are two things going on here.

1. DRM books. If you’ve purchased books from Amazon, the Digital Rights Management locks those books to your specific piece of hardware. You can copy the digital files from the old Kindle to the new Kindle, but you won’t be able to open or read the books once they’re on the new Kindle.

   The only way to get the books onto the new Kindle is to download them, one at a time, from Amazon. For digital pack rats, this is a colossal pain. The only saving grace is that the Kindle will remember which Collection the book was in and what your bookmark was, so you won’t have to reorganize it once it is downloaded.

2. Non-DRM books (personal files). These books aren’t locked to your specific piece of hardware, so you can copy them from one Kindle to another. However, the Kindle doesn’t remember anything about them, so you lose both your current bookmarks and your organization. After copying the books over, you can read them but you have to spend an hour or so putting everything back into the proper Collections.

Unique Screensavers

My wife and I each have a Kindle. They look physically identical and, in the beginning, it was easy to pick up the wrong Kindle when I was ready to read. Then I discovered the Kindle screensaver hack and we each loaded a single, custom, screensaver that differentiates our Kindles. Mine reflects my book personality.

This is something that shouldn’t require a hack to do. I’d like to see Amazon create an easy tool, even a web based one, to pick a photo and convert it into personalized Kindle screensaver.

I’ve heard that the Kobo eReader will default to showing the cover of whichever book you’re currently reading. I think this is a great idea too and it would really give each Kindle its own personality.

Better Magazine Management

I like reading magazines on my Kindle. I have a lot of back issues of Jim Baen’s Universe Clarkesworld, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Instapaper. Unfortunately, magazines live in their own little world and can’t be added to any of your existing Collections. That’s a real pity, since I have a “Currently Reading” Collection that I use to organize everything that I’m, well, currently reading and it’s impossible to add my current (or past) magazine issues to that Collection.

Here’s an idea I’d love to see implemented: associate a magazine subscription to a Collection. Any new issues for that magazine should automatically be added to that Collection, ready for reading. But I should also be free to move back issues to a different Collection.

Fast Book Switching

This is another area where Amazon should take a cue from Apple. iOS allows you to double-tap the home button to get to a list of recently used applications. That allows you to quickly switch from one application to another, without having to go all the way out to the home screen.

I’m generally reading 4-6 books at any one time and they’re not always next to each other on the home screen. Right now, to switch between books, I have to press the “Home” button, look for the book on a specific page of the home screen or navigate to a specific collection, and then open the book.

It’d be nice if the Kindle supported some form of fast switching (a pop-up menu? a list at the bottom of the window) that would allow me to quickly toggle between various recently read books or magazines. The current system isn’t bad, exactly, but I think it could be improved upon.

Easier Collection Management

This is yet another area where Amazon could take a page from Apple’s playbook. I really like using iTunes to manage my iPod touch. (iTunes itself could use some work but that’s a topic for another post.) iTunes makes it easy to create playlists, organize media, load and unload applications, etc.

The Kindle has nothing comparable. The only way to manage your books, magazines, and documents is to do the management on the Kindle itself. It works but it’s exceedingly clunky and slow. It’s hard to manage multiple items at once and the screen refresh delays makes the experience an exercise in patience.

Amazon should provide some way to organize your content using a desktop or web application that can push your changes out to the Kindle itself.

Another option, maybe a better one, is to provide something for existing applications (perhaps Calibre) to hook into. Calibre is already a suberb application for organizing eBooks and its limited only by the fact that it can’t manage Kindle Collections. If Amazon provided a way for it to manage Collections, Calibre could easily become the iTunes of the Kindle ecosystem.

More Customized Books

Kindle books are too uniform. Amazon should provide a way for publishers to customize font faces, margins, line spacing, etc so that publishers can provide books with a unique look and feel. One of the joys of physical books is the look that each book can have. With the current Kindles, that joy is sadly missing.

Additionally, the Kindle needs to support more formatting features. For example, the Kindle doesn’t provide any way for a book to support block quoting. In many non-fiction books, it’s very difficult to separate out the block-quoted content from the author’s commentary. I think that needs to change in order for eBooks to reach their full potential.

ePub Support

Finally, I’d really like to see Amazon support the ePub file format. It’s the de-facto standard for every other eReader on the market. Right now, I have to keep all of my books in both ePub and MOBI/Kindle formats, to maintain compatibility with all readers. I don’t necessarily expect Amazon to distribute their own books as ePub files but it’d be nice to be able to load my other non-Amazon books as ePub files, without needing to convert them first.

WhisperSync Plus

I buy a lot of my eBooks directly from the publishers: Baen Books and Pyr, among others. I can load those books onto my Kindle and my iPod touch (running the Kindle app) but I can’t synchronize my last-read position between the devices. That only works for books that were purchased through the Amazon Kindle store.

I realize that WhisperSync is a big advantage for Amazon’s store and that they’re not likely to give it up just for my convenience. But what if Amazon created a “WhisperSync Plus” service, available as an annual subscription ($25 a year? $50 a year? part of an Amazon Prime account?) that would allow members to use WhisperSync for personal documents? I would gladly pay for that service and I’d like to think that other people would too.

1. Detect the video quality of the files
2. Generate a stub post for the file, with appropriate height / width values, and links to both the high and low quality files.
3. Generate separate RSS feeds for the high and low quality videos.
4. Generate the VideoJS embed code for the video, to include in the post.
5. Geneate a VideoJS embed file, suitable for embedding in an iFrame, so that the videos can be embedded on Those Martins or other sites.

I think I can do all of that with Jekyll but I need to learn it and figure out which pieces do what.

I think that each individual post should have some YML Front Matter to detail the metadata for each video. It may look something like this:

Video Data:

• Name
• Height
• Width
• High Quality File
• Low Quality File
• Preview Image

From that data I need to generate several files:

• An embed file, including the HTML/JS code necessary to show the video in a browser. It should be suitable both the actual video posts as well as being used from an iframe, to embed the video on a different site.
• The actual video post file
• The low quality RSS feed
• The high quality RSS feed

I can then edit the post, to add a description / narrative for the video. After that, I generate the static site and let rsync take care of pushing it to the server.

The Video Tag and Embed

Through Liquid Extensions, Jekyll has support for including fragments into a larger page. So, the embed files could be generated into _includes/video.html. Then, the post file could include it and the file for the actual embed page could also include it.

{% include video.html %}

Getting the Video Data

I’ve been looking at Jekyll plugins but I’m not sure that they’re right for scanning my video directory, looking for new videos, getting the video’s metadata and then generating the embed fragments. I might be able to make it work but it also seems more natural to just write a standalone program that will do all of that work and then let Jekyll handle the actual site generation.

Generating the RSS Feeds

It doesn’t look like Jekyll has a built-in method for generating RSS feeds. I found an example RSS template, courtesy of recursive. I’m thinking that I should just create two RSS templates: one to pull the low quality data from the posts and one to pull the high quality data from the posts.

Other Things

To make it easy to move the video files around, I need to have a global host / path prefix, for where the videos live. I should be able to define that in a site-wide configuration file, so that all of my URLs generate automatically.

So, YouTube has always presented me with a bit of a conundrum. It’s very convenient but if I were to use it extensively and it were to change or go down, all of my hosted videos would disappear.

Several years, I created a site I called VideoHub to get around this problem. It was designed to do two things:

1. Show a new post for each family movie I created, allowing me to post them and allowing others to view them. It is, of course, RSS enabled so that you can subscribe to new videos.
2. Generate a podcast/vodcast compatible RSS feed, so that you could subscribe to the videos in iTunes and auto download them. For geographically remote family members, this is an absolute necessity.
3. Serve both a high quality and low quality vodcast feed. For geographically remote family members with poor internet connections, this is also an absolute necessity.

The site still works well for all of these goals. But it’s gotten a bit long in the tooth and needs both maintenance and enhancement. It needs maintenance because it doesn’t work well in a world of iPads and iPhones and is still heavily dependent on flash. It needs enhancement because it’s still too much of a pain to add new videos to the site.

I’m leaning towards rewriting the site in Jekyll. Because Jekyll creates static HTML pages, I can speed up the site eliminate a PHP dependency. I can code the site’s logic in Ruby, without having to actually run Ruby on my server.

I think can code scripts that will do much of the work of generating a new Jekyll post and then upload everything to the server. That will make creating a new post a much more fire and forget experience.

I’ll also switch to using VideoJS, or something like it, to embed the video files. This will give me direct MP4 playback for Safari, Chrome, and IE9+. I have no intention of creating, uploading, and hosting OGM versions of my videos, which creates a problem for users of Firefox and Opera. VideoJS will give me a Flash fallback for these browsers.

Now, I just need to find the time to make it happen.

If you like reading about our family life (and why wouldn’t you?), you’ll need to update your bookmarks. We’re moving to Those Martins.

All new family posts will be at Those Martins. desertflood.com will stick around but I’ll be changing the content entirely, to be technology focused and not family focused.

So change your bookmarks (or feed readers) to point to thosemartins.us.