optilude

Thunderbird upgraded itself the other day. Ever since, I’ve been rather pleased with it.

I went from Opera (too clunky and non-OSX-like) to Mail.app (too slow and no newsgroup support) to Thunderbird ages ago, and whilst it was pretty decent, it was always a little bit out of place. Now, with 2.0.0.6, it’s more harmoneously styled, snappier and has a few nice features like filtering “recent” and “favourite” folders and really useful “Back” and “Forward” buttons (otherwise known as the “oops, didn’t mean to mark that message as read and move on to the next one, where was it again?” button).

Thunderbird also has decent keyboard shortcuts and works very well as a general mail and news reader. Well done Mozilla.

In an age of YouTube, it seems that every website needs to have a little embedded video player, showing screencasts and interviews and recorded presentations. How neat. However: I just don’t have twenty minutes to watch a video just to get some piece of information I’m looking for. Ever.

Videos can’t be searched for key words. Skipping back and forth is an imprecise means of finding the information you want. I never do just one thing at a time, and videos by their nature demand full sensory attention: watch, listen, sit still.

I can see how screencasts can be useful for people who are new to a technology, say, and don’t have the means to get direct hands-on experience. A good presentation can be good on video too. But please, if there’s actual information to be presented, make it text and images first, and video  as a supplementary extra for those who can be bothered.

It’s not often that I mourn the closure of a chain of shops, but the last decent chain of record stores in the UK just went the way of the dodo. http://fopp.co.uk carries this note:

It is with great regret that we announce the closure of Fopp.

Our store chain is profitable, well regarded and loved by our loyal customers and staff. However we have failed to gain the necessary support from major stakeholders, suppliers and their credit insurers to generate sufficient working capital to run our expanding business.

We would like to thank staff and customers for their support over the past 25 years.

Any outstanding website orders have now been cancelled and will not be fulfilled or charged.

Sob… The Fopp stores had a decent amount of CDs covering a variety of styles, wasn’t outrageously overpriced, had friendly and knowledgeable staff and sold good films, books and other media. I was never able to reist going into a branch when I passed by one, and normally left with five or six CDs. I hope someone comes in to fill the void, but given how many ridiculously over-sized, over-priced Virgin Megastores and HMVs that are popping up, I won’t get my hopes up.