Blog | mechdrew

If anything has bugged me more about the iPad announcement than the iPad itself, it would be the constant moaning and groaning from the blogosphere and its commenters (Download Squad article, I’m pointing to the comments section primarily) about the general lack of Adobe’s Flash Player on any iPhone OS device, including the iPhone (duh), iPod touch (I just barely got one of these about a month ago) and the aforementioned iPad. Adobe has been after blood ever since the iPad announcement, and even went so far in their smear campaign to “accidentally” include pornography in one of its screenshots to try to justify the need of Flash on iPhone OS.

Are we being serious, folks? You want Flash, the bane of Internet design and functionality for over a decade, and you want it on your mobile device that badly? Granted, Flash provided features that were not commonly available in most browsers or media players in the beginning, but it has been superseded now by much better browsers and programs (dare I drop the word “apps”?) that perform those functions much faster and much better. And let’s not forget that the primary use for Flash on most websites today are those hideous, annoying advertisements that get in your way, make your page load slower, and require me to use tools like Adblock Plus in both Firefox and Thunderbird (for RSS feeds) just to save my sanity. You’ve got to come up with much better reasons than games and video sites like Hulu to convince me. May I point out a few flaws in this reasoning? Continue reading

Back in the good old days of Yahoo! I used to have an e-mail account with the privilege of POP3 access. Instead of needing to login via webmail and keep my browser window open, I could just open a POP3-capable program and let it fetch my mail for me, with the benefit of offline access for when the dial-up was disconnected. When Yahoo! quit their free POP access, I kept the account but looked for a different provider because I was hooked on that POP thing. Out of all the programs I have used for POP mail over the years, ranging from Microsoft’s Outlook to Eudora Lite, none has served me better than Mozilla’s Thunderbird.

Today saw the release of Thunderbird 3.0. It’s been a long wait for a number change, and perhaps there isn’t much to show for it. But it’s still nice to see progress made in the software. I’ve noticed on my end that it does seem faster than before, albeit by not much. The look is really nice, with all of the inboxes for my multiple accounts being combined into one smart folder, and I can always separate them back out with the click of a mouse. And of course, you can’t really beat free, not even with a stick.

The only major flaw I’ve found so far is my upgrade from an old 2.0.x version has somehow messed up my RSS feed settings, but I don’t think too many actually use Thunderbird as an RSS reader; I’m kind of in the minority there. Overall I’m satisfied with the new version, even if there isn’t much to brag about. If you are as into POP mail as I am, it would be worthwhile to check out Thunderbird.

[via Download Squad]