I have spent months finding the perfect Mail client, I tried: Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Postbox, MailPlane, etc. Yet I always would come back to the web based interface for Gmail. My biggest issue though – as with any web app – is the fact I have to keep it contained within my browser of choice. I am the type of person who needs visual cues of what is going on – icon badges, Growl notification, and the ability to “tab” through my applications and see their respective icons.

Then I came across one of those “Must Have Apps for OSX“. It had the usual : QuickSilver, Cyberduck, VLC, etc. . . but what got me was #2 : Fluid Browser. Now this wasn’t the first time I had heard of Fluid Browser, I have seen it posted on random site before, but this time this mention had a little screenshot along with it – Gmail as a Dock Icon with an Unread Message Badge.

I was in Web App Nirvana.

I quickly downloaded Fluid Browser, and the setup was incredibly easy: put in URL, name for the App, and an Icon. For the icon, I wouldn’t use the favicon – instead I would recommend a nice set of Google Icons – I used the 256px PNGs. This makes them scale nicely in the Dock and in Finder.

So it was in a matter of minutes all my Email App woes were put to rest. For a free solution you cannot beat Fluid Browser, it does its job perfectly with out complicating the whole situation. I now happily read my email from an interface I quite like, all the while Safari does what it is meant to do – surf the Internet.

I attended a training for iPhone App Development, where I was introduced to the kinda complex world of CoreData – which was recently added to iPhone OS 3.0. I was hooked the moment the incredibly smart and local Cocoa Genius Dave Delong mentioned that CoreData is a better way to store data – heck – even Evernote was using it in their next app update!

So I found myself late last night tinkering with writing basic data to CoreData, and for the life of me couldn’t figure out where it was hiding or how to get to it from XCode. Finally I tracked it down hiding inside of a SQLite Database :

/Users//Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/User/Applications//Documents

Now before Dave Delong has a fit – finding this data comes with a disclaimer: CoreData *is* not SQLite! SQLite is merely the underpinnings of it all . . . but it is *not* SQLite. Phew, all the CocoaHeads can sleep peacefully tonight!

With the proper tools you too can see where the hell your data is going! Personally, I like the Adobe Air App Lita, but I know there are literally dozens of other apps that do this.

I must note . . . sadly . . . that I am not yet a CoreData Expert – it is a trial by fire kinda thing. But I figure I’d leave my notes along the way. Maybe someone will correct my mistakes or drop a tip in the comments *wink* *wink* . . . that way we all win.

The most annoying part about being a web developer is having to cater to the needs of outdated browsers and their awful quirks – I am looking at you IE ( specifically IE6 ).  The whole situation becomes woeful when you install IE7 and it wipes IE6 out, and then if you install IE8 it wipes out IE7.

Fortunately there are people who realized this was a problem, and have made easy solutions for us poor web developers.

My method is as follows:

IE7 and IE8 can be found here : http://finalbuilds.edskes.net/iecollection.htm

I installed those first, I don’t think order of install will effect everything – I just figured if I got those two in first, they wouldn’t overwrite IE6. Sweet logic.

IE6 can be found here : http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

There is nothing complex about those installs – they are very straight forward and shouldn’t cause any problems. Lucky for us we can now all blissfully test layouts and javascript in the incredible well built browser called IE . . . *sigh*.