Gabor hits Send

The iPhone has just 58 MB of RAM

2009-10-30T19:23:00.003+01:00

I went to Apple's iPhone Developer Event in San Jose yesterday. The best talk, in my opinion, was "Maximizing iPhone Application Performance" by Michael Jurewitz. App performance is something I really care about.

Here's the most shocking fact from the presentation: the iPhone only has 58 MB of RAM for your application

The original and the 3G iPhones only have 128 MB of RAM. The first two generations of iPods also have 128 MB. Together, these devices make up 62% of reMail's userbase, so it's good practice to design with their restrictions in mind.

The iPhone has virtual memory for memory mapping, but it has no swap file. The 128 MB is all you have to work with. Once that runs out, you get memory warnings, and then your application gets shut down. Bye-bye!

Out of the 128 MB, 70 MB are in use by the system at any given time. So only 58 MB are available for your application to work with.

Here's how it breaks down:

12 MB are immediately reserved for Graphics
32 MB are wired for use by the Kernel
12 MB are Various Daemons, e.g. SMS, mediaserverd, etc.
10 MB for SpringBoard (this is essentially the app launcher and UI manager)
4 MB for Phone process (receiving calls)

58 MB is not a whole lot. Better be memory efficient!

reMail now has Multi-Account Support

2009-10-28T07:38:00.002+01:00

Read all about it on VentureBeat and at the reMail Blog. The paid version ($4.99) now has a great new UI as well:

Million Dollar Apps

2009-10-23T21:14:00.003+02:00

Check out Business Week's list of million dollar apps. [1]

My goal is to have reMail join this list in the next 12 months.

[1] Found via marissac

7 Points on “The End of the Email Era”

2009-10-20T01:56:00.004+02:00

"The End of the Email Era", a Wall Street Journal article by Jessica Vascellaro ignited, somewhat ironically, a flurry of "have you read this?" emails in my inbox. I'm a bit late to the party of dissecting Vascellaro's piece. All of last week, I was cranking on a new version of reMail. Yet I felt I'd write about it, since I feel pretty qualified to comment on email-related topics.

WSJ's 4 Points

In case you haven't read it, here are the points that the WSJ article makes:

IM is better than email because it gets you faster responses.

Twitter and Facebook updates are better than email because they're informal and fun.

All these updates will cause even more overload and filtering needs to improve.

Facebook gives you context about people's location, mood, and current activity. You need to coordinate less than if you were using only email.

Gabor's 7 Points

Most people misread the WSJ piece as "email is dying". But email isn't dying, it's being complemented by new modes of communication. And despite Paul Graham's warning about "lists of N things", here's my list of 7 things to contribute to the social network updates vs. email debate.

Twitter and Facebook updates are orthogonal to email. Looking through the last 200 tweets on my Twitter feed, I didn't find a single update that I would have sent as an email had Twitter not existed. The use cases are too different. Thus, Twitter is a parallel world to email.

This HuffPo article puts it best:
If you're like us, you still send text messages on the weekends, check voicemail at work, post photos to Facebook, watch viral videos on YouTube, and Tweet your favorite news.

In other words, we haven't "killed off" our previous tools: we're actually adding, not abandoning, platforms. And when we do ditch, it's because of forces more complex than seasonal trends (or the news cycle).
Email is private, Twitter is public. Twitter and Facebook can't replace email because they're public or semi-public communications channels. Direct messages in Twitter and Facebook messages are bad, low-fidelity clones of email functionality. You shouldn't use them.

Your work email belongs to your employer. You can't use Facebook for work. The messages and the intellectual property you create while at work belong to your employer. If you leave the company, you shouldn't be able to take them with you.

Email is about task management. The reason why your inbox is a source of stress and your Twitter feed is not is because email is a task manager. Twitter and Facebook are entertainment. Your boss wouldn't assign a task to you via a Facebook update. But if your boss sends you an email, you better read it and get that work item done.

The unread messages counter. Unlike Twitter, email has an unread message counter. If it didn't have that counter, email would make you far less anxious. But it would lose its work value as a task manager.

The future of email is not to become IM. Part of the value of email is that it's asynchronous: While you're getting actual work done, new messages pile up. You don't want to give everyone the chance to interrupt your work flow. You wouldn't get things done. And that's exactly the problem with turning email into IM, whether it's with push notifications or Google Wave: Yes it will get you answers instantly, but it would make everyone less productive.

The lack of innovation in email is because the underlying protocols suck. If you have a great idea about how to use or display the data in Twitter, all you need to read is the Twitter API docs. If you have a great idea in email, you need to know MIME (the encoder), SMTP (the message protocol), IMAP or Exchange (the access layer), and your email client (the viewer). The email technology stack is huge, wobbly, and antiquated.

Take IMAP: a hugely inefficient, stateful protocol with an ugly message format. State-of-the art in the late 1990s, yes, but if you were to reinvent it today, you could do a much better job.

We need to make it easier to innovate around the mail client. We could rip out everything (maybe save for SMTP) and build a great new stack that allows fast iteration. Make it easier to move the needle in email, and the needle will move.

"A Never-Ending Spiral of Needless Messages"

2009-10-16T19:19:00.002+02:00

From the Telegraph's 50 most annoying things about the Internet:

3) Messages alerting you to messages
Email inboxes are becoming clogged with non-urgent alerts from Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites. How long before someone invents an app to alert Twitter and Facebook users when they receive an email, creating a never-ending spiral of needless messages?

Reminds me of my post on Facebook's dream vs. reality.

A Flashback to 2006

2009-10-12T00:06:00.002+02:00

I just re-discovered this blog post I wrote in 2006 talking about how amazing it would be to all your maps, mail, or Wikipedia on your mobile phone.

I had completely forgotten about this until one of this blog's readers pointed out that reMail is just the incarnation of an idea I had many years ago. Whoops.

What Makes an Email Important?

2009-10-04T22:40:00.004+02:00

In my last post, I said it would be good if email clients only notified you of important emails, rather than popping up a toast for each email that arrives. One of the commenters asked me to point to some research about this topic.

What makes an email important? In this Microsoft Research report [1], the authors have conducted surveys of email usage inside Microsoft. One of the questions they asked was "When is an email particularly important?". Here are the responses:

Note that 5 out of the 10 factors are directly related to who sent the email. (This would indicate that filtering or auto-classifying emails by sender could be very effective.)

I have a bunch of other interesting research results to point to when I have a little more time. If you've read anything interesting recently, please point me to it in the comments.

[1] Gina Danielle Venolia, Laura Dabbish, JJ Cadiz, and Anoop Gupta. Supporting email workflow. Technical report, Microsoft Research - Collaboration and Multimedia Group, September 2001.

If you find this interesting, you should also read HappyMail.

reMail 2.4.1 Released

2009-10-04T22:38:00.002+02:00

Read about the new features here. And don't forget to update!

Do You Keep Gmail Open in Your Browser?

2009-09-30T06:31:00.004+02:00

Everyone who uses Gmail knows this: You keep Gmail open in your browser all day so you can check your email, send off messages, and search your email archives.

Why This is Unacceptable

Yes, I believe that Gmail is the future of email (I'm a little biased).

But this is far from the optimum. Keeping Gmail and Google Calendar open in your browser should not be how we'll do email in 10 years.

Why?

It gets lost: Gmail being just an open tab in your browser means that it will get lost among many other tabs and browser windows that are open. As I'm writing this blog entry, I have 11 tabs open in Firefox.

No notifications: Unless you install separate tools, Gmail can't notify you of new important messages that come in. I'm not a fan of push email as it increases hyperactivity, but some level of notification, especially for meetings approaching in Google Calendar would be useful.

No integration into your workflow. Clicking mailto links doesn't work. There's no spot on your screen that says "email". There's no right-click send for documents.

Should Gmail Become Outlook?

Should the Gmail become a desktop client Outlook? No. I think that would be a step back, not forward. I imagine the ideal setup to be like Tweetie's desktop client. An icon sits in your desktop bar and gently lights up when new things arrive. (Update: Mailplane and Fluid have similar functionality, but only for the Mac).

Here's how I imagine the optimal desktop webmail experience:

Always on: It's not a tab you launch in your browser. It starts when your computer starts and it's on while you're working.

Smart notifications: Rather than showing a toast notification or playing a chime sound for each email that arrives, it would know about the relative importance of messages and infer from your behavior if it's OK to interrupt you. There's plenty of research about both importance and notifications that still needs to make it into the real world.

Keeps a copy of all your messages: I think reMail demonstrates how powerful it is to have all your mail on your phone. If you have your mail on your phone, why can't you have it on your desktop? Offline Gmail is headed the right way. In my ideal client, its features would become standard.

Making real progress in email clients is hard. It's easy to add new widgets, helper utilities, notifiers, and spam bots. But it's hard to move the needle on the fundamental paradigms - how do we read, check, search, and organize. Moving Gmail away from the browser into an always-on background app seems comparatively easy. The things I mentioned could probably be done by a third party - it doesn't need to be Google. Please, let's get this done.

Email and Webmail Statistics

2009-09-29T22:26:00.003+02:00

I just found this page which compiles some usage stats for webmail providers. Roughly:

Hotmail: 256.2 million
Yahoo: 254.6 million
Gmail: 91.6 million
AOL: 48.9 million

These number seem a bit off (Gmail is probably too low, Hotmail too high). The article goes into more detail on sources and estimates - I suggest you check it out.

Some Unconventional Ideas

2009-09-24T17:02:00.000+02:00

There should be an X-Prize for high speed rail. I read recently that an ICE 3 train set costs 35 million dollars, but the tracks on which it runs costs billions (depending on distance). It's fun to talk and worry about the train sets - there's plenty of coverage of decisions between Alstom's TGV and Siemens' ICE sets. But no one writes about that we need cheaper tracks that are fast to build. There should be an X Prize for people to build the cheapest, safest, high-speed train tracks. Whoever gets 1 km of track to cost less than $100k total wins.

Cities should set immigration quotas and criteria. Immigrants always move to a specific city, not a country. It's more likely that someone will move from San Francisco to London (8645 kilometers) than from San Francisco to Merced (212 kilometers). Cities should be able to compete for the best talent directly, and set their own criteria. For example, London should be able to decide that it will allow 5000 non-EU foreigners to move to it this year, and all of them need to have a bachelor's degree. These choices would be made by the people who are actually affected (Londoners), not the whole population (UK != London). The UK/EU would still do the background and security checks.

Record Stores should sell digital songs. Remember the nineties where you'd have to go to a store to buy songs? With iTunes, that's over. In the physical world, discovering new music was fun. On iTunes, I barely ever buy from artists I don't already know. That's why the record stores that still exist should kick out all the CDs and offer a great, comfortable, physical environment to discover new music.

Ultracompact Web Product Guidelines

2009-09-24T01:34:00.000+02:00

I just discovered this list of web product guidelines by Leah Culver. Not sure if I understand all of them ("a medium is not a grande"?). But I love how spot-on and compact some of these insights are ("one important item per page", "nobody changes the defaults", "use it yourself").

Culver's original blog post is here.

More Time for Your Breakthrough

2009-09-20T10:48:00.001+02:00

"Over the last century and a half, the average age of a Nobel Prize winner at the moment of his great breakthrough has risen more than five years, from 34 to almost 39 years old." (read more)

reMail V2.3

2009-09-18T09:32:00.001+02:00

Please update to reMail V2.3. Here's the list of new features and bugfixes.

Yummy New reMail Videos!

2009-08-31T08:07:00.006+02:00

I put together reMail's launch video in a haste a few days before launch. With the help of a video pro, we reshot the whole thing. We also added some real-life shots of reMail to show off how fast it really is. Here's the result:

Then I got a haircut (as you will see in a minute) and shot another video. In this one, I talk about how to set up reMail with your Gmail or IMAP account:

A lot of people have asked about how to do advanced searches in reMail. Our full-text search engine is pretty powerful. To illustrate its power, I put together this video that talks you through reMail's advanced search options.

Enjoy!

Seven Qualities of Successful iPhone Apps

2009-08-29T23:54:00.003+02:00

If you're a mobile developer, I highly recommend this blog post and video about the seven qualities of great iPhone apps: Delightful, innovative, well designed, integrated, optimized, connected, localized.

Most of these seem pretty obvious, and somewhat soft and mushy, but I think the video gives some good examples. Also, the lessons apply to non-iPhone platforms as well.

Unfortunately, you need an ADC login to get to the blog post, but that's free and you don't need to pay the $99 toll.

With reMail, we're aiming to check all the boxes. Our next stop is being localized (I'm still looking for volunteers to do our Spanish and Italian translations.)

reMail V2.2 is Out!

2009-08-28T22:18:00.001+02:00

Here's how to update.

How Long Does It Take To Build A Technology Empire?

2009-08-28T19:34:00.002+02:00

Here's an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal contrasting the relative revenue growth rates of technology startups. They're classified into rocketships, hot startups, and slow burners. Found via Rob Go.

Do you speak French, Spanish, Italian, or Dutch?

2009-08-27T23:21:00.008+02:00

I think reMail is especially valuable for Europeans. In Europe, you're never more than a few hundred kilometers away from a different country. Having your emails on your phone becomes crucial - European carriers charge a lot for data roaming.

We're looking for volunteers translate reMail into:

French
Spanish
Italian
Dutch

We can't really promise you more than our gratitude and an entry on this page.

The process entails is translating two text files with a total of 189 strings, plus the text for the App Store entry (300 words). I can give you the German and English equivalents. Ideally, you'd be a native speaker with an iPhone set to the language you're translating to.

If you're interested, contact me. My email is here.

Update: Looks like I've found several French speakers willing to help out! reMail seems to be popular in France. :-) Spanish, anyone?

Introducing the New reMail

2009-08-13T11:00:00.003+02:00

Today, we're launching the new reMail for the iPhone! It's a completely new product.

reMail downloads all your email to your phone and lets you search full-text at light speed.

All My Email On My Phone? Really?

Yes, reMail downloads all your email to your phone. It will let you read and search all your email when you're offline. Just let reMail run overnight to complete the download. reMail needs less space than you think: 100,000 emails take only 500 MB on your phone - only 6% of the capacity of an 8 GB iPhone (the smallest iPhone you can buy).

This Will Save You Money

My family lives in Switzerland and I live in San Francisco. One thing I've found very frustrating whenever I travel to see my parents are the insane fees that AT&T charges for data roaming: For Switzerland, AT&T charges $19.97 per Megabyte. Check out this SMS I get the moment I turn my phone on the tarmac in Switzerland.

Now, with reMail, I don't have to think twice about searching for meeting times or flight reservations. When I'm abroad, I just download all my email over Wifi and have data roaming turned off.

We put together this page that contrasts data roaming prices with AT&T and T-Mobile Germany with the cost of reMail.

reMail Searches Full-Text

Another crucial difference between iPhone 3.0 Mail and reMail is that reMail searches full-text.

The built-in header-only search is frustrating, because so many times, the words I'm searching for don't appear in the To, From, and Subject lines. If the words you search for aren't in the headers, reMail will find the email, iPhone Mail will not. reMail is email search you can trust.

What happened to reMail Search Beta?

We launched reMail Search a few months back, it was a server-based product. Searches were being done on the server, and you had to give us your email password. It turns out people are very opposed to sharing their email and password with third parties, especially a small startup.

So we built the new reMail. Now, everything happens on the phone. reMail downloads your emails directly via IMAP. No more reMail server.

What reMail Users Are Saying

We have beta tested the app with a lot of users, and they are loving it:

“This app is awesome! I use reMail constantly all day. It's so fast!”
— Sachin Agarwal, Co-Founder, Posterous
“I am loving reMail!”
— Richard Price, CEO, Academia.edu
“Complete Berlin trip organized via emails found by reMail. No printed reservations and tickets needed!”
— Bernhard Heinzel, Beta User
“reMail is a super useful app and search speed is incredible.”
— Dan Veltri, Co-Founder, Weebly

Get it Now

We hope you'll love it too. Get it now. It's $4.99 on the App Store until Sep 1, and $9.99 thereafter.

Update: Coverage here and here.

10 Levels of Communication Intimacy

2009-08-13T09:35:00.004+02:00

Via Buzzfeed and @marissac.

Email seems to be exactly at the intersection of private and public.

Dear Facebook, Please Let Me Reply to Your Message Notifications

2009-08-11T20:33:00.005+02:00

Do you know this problem? Someone sends you a Facebook message. You want to reply, but instead of being able to just hit reply on the message, you have to perform a multi-step choreographed dance:

Click on the link in the email
Log into Facebook
Navigate Facebook's messaging interface to reply
Repeat this procedure when new messages roll in

This is hugely annoying. Instead of sending emails with a nonsensical address such as notification+pd=edfz@facebookmail.com and a Reply-To of noreply@facebookmail.com, can't Facebook just implement an email-reply-to-Facebook-message bridge? This is pretty simple to do - many Support systems (e.g. Kayako) already do this.

I've written (well, sketched) about Facebook vs. email before. When I have some time, I need to sit down and write my rant about how closed (Facebook, Twitter, Skype) and proprietary (Google Wave) systems are replacing email when they shouldn't. I think the underlying reason is that email's systems and protocols (SMTP, IMAP, MIME/RFC822, MS Exchange) are so hugely sucky, outdated, insecure, spammy, bug-prone, and stupidly designed. We need to engineer ourselves out of this mess.

Update: Wow, this post was just in time for Facebook's Message API, which makes the whole problem worse, not better: From the TC article: "The biggest addition — the Mailbox API — is also disappointing because it only lets users receive messages, not send them."

Nvidia's CEO on Entrepreneurship

2009-08-11T19:48:00.002+02:00

This is a great (audio-only) talk by Jensen Huang, Co-Founder and CEO of NVidia: Vision Matters.

He talks about the importance of having a big vision when starting a company and shares some fun anecdotes on raising money and setting price points. Some of the stuff he says ("Favoring Moore's Law over Customer Feedback") is diametrically opposed to the currently favored worldview (the Eric Ries / Steve Blank style of customer demand based iteration), which I found refreshing.

Congrats, FriendFeed!

2009-08-11T19:43:00.003+02:00

Congrats to Paul and Sanjeev on Facebook's FriendFeed acquisition!

I like these pics with Mark Zuckerberg.

Jeff Bezos on Everything he Knows

2009-07-24T21:42:00.002+02:00

This is a great video: "Everything I Know - the List is Short"