I first wrote about what I thought was an interesting e-mail program that showed promise around 1997. It was version 1.0 of The Bat from Moldova. Since then, The Bat (the developers call it "The Bat!" with an exclamation mark) has continued to advance. It has a substantial following in Europe, but it's not well known in the US. That's too bad because it's the best e-mail program available.
The just-released version 7 has only 3 new big features, but one of them is a blockbuster. The Bat now supports the Exchange Web Service (EWS) protocol, which means that it can be used to connect to Microsoft Exchange Server Web services. You still can't hook The Bat directly into an Exchange Server, but support for EWS makes it possible for business users to connect to their company's EWS server with The Bat instead of using a browser.
The other new features in version 7 are a new dialog for setting up accounts and better support for automatic configuration. That feature could help new users set up their accounts, something that is perennially a problem because setting up an e-mail program involves dealing with protocols and ports. These aren't complex things, but the terminology scares people away. And there's now support for the CardDAV protocol that makes it easier to synchronize address books.
Users who maintain information about contacts on various devices (and these days who doesn't!) will appreciate the new address book synchronization feature. CardDAV technology allows syncing The Bat’s address book contacts with Google and Icloud contacts as well as with other servers that support the protocol. Make a change on any CardDAV device and it will be reflected on all others.
There are various other smaller improvements and bug fixes, too.
You might think that Google is all you need because it offers a Web interface. I've never liked Web interfaces for e-mail. So although I have a G-Mail address, I've set up IMAP access and use The Bat to collect mail sent to that account. (Learn how from Lifehacker.)
But why? Three words: Ease of use. Yes, the G-Mail interface is pretty, but working with messages requires an inordinate amount of clicking. An application running on the local computer seems to me a far superior way to deal with messages. If you deal with dozens (or hundreds) of messages every day, webmail client will be even more cumbersome.
My preference is to avoid services such as G-Mail, Yahoo, AOL, and others by registering a domain name (blinn.com and techbyter.com) and setting up e-mail accounts that are unique to me and aren't tied to any service provider. As long as I pay the annual registration fee for the domain name ($10-$20) and pay for the hosting service (around $150), I have an address that will not change. If you need just a domain name and some e-mail accounts, the cost for both the domain and the accounts will be around $50 per year. If you're running a business from AOL, G-Mail, or Yahoo, your clients might wonder how serious you are.
Not three words this time, just one: Versatility.
In more than 15 years of working with The Bat, I've never encountered a something that I wished The Bat could to that it couldn't. In 2000, I wrote "If you're looking for an e-mail program that can easily work with any number of e-mail accounts (POP or IMAP) and can be customized to work the way you want it to, take a look at The Bat. It doesn't hurt that this is the fastest e-mail program I've ever seen or that the program takes less than 4MB." It takes about 15MB these days in its 32-bit version. I haven't installed the 64-bit version because I'm not convinced that it would be any better. I'll probably give it a try, though, and will let you know what I find.
Setup is astonishingly easy now. Here's what's involved in setting up a G-Mail account for use with The Bat. I filled in my name, my G-Mail address, and my G-Mail password. Then I set the protocol type to automatic (meaning The Bat will try to figure it out) and clicked Finish. Later, I returned to the settings panel to rename the account and to modify some of the automatic settings, but none of that was necessary.
Click any of the smaller images for a full-size view.
Press Esc to dismiss the larger image.
The Bat supports secure connections for both sending and receiving messages. Here I've set up my website provider's account to send and receive using TLS. The other options are STARTTLS and plain text. STARTTLS is an extension to plain text communication protocols that offers a way to upgrade a plain text connection to an encrypted (TLS or SSL) connection instead of using a separate port for encrypted communication. Most services support either STARTTLS or TLS connections these days and that's what you should use.
One of the most useful functions The Bat offers is the ability to examine incoming our outgoing messages to determine what should happen to the message. For example, you might want to consider any message that sets text to white on a white background as spam. That's what the rule shown here does.
Users can define any number of rules and the rules can be simple (such as the one I've shown) or involve groups of conditions combined with "AND" or "OR" rules.
Another of my favorite functions is the ability to define templates for new messages, replies, forwarded messages, and reading confirmations. The template can specify literal text, text that is inserted based on what the developers call "macros", graphics, and text formatting.
There are dozens of macros and all of them are described in a comprehensive help file that has been substantially improved over the years.
If you send or receive e-mail messages, you need The Bat. Yes, it really is that simple.I've never understood why The Bat's market penetration in the United States is so low. It's simply the most versatile e-mail client available and regardless of what e-mail provider you use, this is the application that will let you take control of every aspect of sending, receiving, and storing messages.
Additional details are available on the RIT Labs website.
Heat is the enemy. The hotter your computer's CPUs and disk drives are, the shorter their life span. Disk drives should generally operate in the 40-50°C range and the CPU should rarely exceed 60°C. But how do you know? There are several utility programs that can keep track of temperatures for you. Today we'll look at two of them.
Too much heat is bad news anywhere in the computer. The CPU and disk drives are two locations worth checking regularly. Just like like an Olympic sprinter, both get much hotter when they're called on to run faster. DiskInfo and RealTemp are both "portable" applications, meaning that they don't come with installers.
Just unpack the zip file and run the application. DiskInfo has both 32- and 64-bit versions.
When you run DiskInfo, you'll obtain more than just the temperature of the disk. Most disks today include SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology). If so, you'll get a general health status report in addition to the temperature.
The computer running DiskInfo has a solid-state drive (C) that doesn't display a temperature. SSDs have no moving parts and so their temperatures remain more or less constant. The drives with moving parts are all around 45 degrees Celsius, which is about 113 in Fahrenheit. High-RPM drives run warmer.
DiskInfo also provides information about how many service hours the drive has (13,945), its rotational speed (7200 RPM), what logical drives (D and I) are associated with the physical drive, the model number, serial number, and size, too.
The utility provides charts, historical information, and stress tests, too. You can download it from Crystal Dew World.
RealTemp monitors the temperature at the computer's CPU. Multi-core CPUs can have significantly different temperatures and processors are particularly sensitive to workload.
In the top image, the CPUs range from 46 to 59 degrees Celsius or about 115 to 138 degrees Fahrenheit. Under a relatively heavy load, the CPUs heated to a range of 69 to 76 degrees Celsius or about 156 to 169 degrees Fahrenheit. I become nervous when CPUs consistently run around 80 degrees (176) even though that's still considerably below what's referred to as TJ Max.
Not a clothing store, TJ Max is the temperature at which the CPU will throttle back its performance to avoid damage. The larger the distance to that number, the better. TJ in this case stands for "thermal junction".
So in the case where the CPU is working relatively hard, the hottest cores are at 76 degrees and are still 29 degrees Celsius away from meltdown. Although I would be most uncomfortable at 76 degreed Celsius, the CPUs are reasonably happy in the sauna.
As with DiskInfo, RealTemp provides a considerable amount of additional information and has the ability to run some tests. Older Intel CPUs (any non-Core CPU such as Pentium 4 or earlier) and all AMD processors are not supported.
Download RealTemp from TechPowerUp.
Both of the utilities are free.
One of the primary advantages of the concept behind Adobe's Creative Cloud for both clients and developers is the ability for clients to see some of the features the developers are working on and to provide feedback that the developers can use during development. This is one of the main concepts behind Agile development. One of the goals is to avoid large failures by creating small failures.
Adobe's developers and product managers know what they're doing. For anyone to say otherwise would be to admit a utter lack of understanding about how software is developed. Even so, the product managers and developers can make good use of feedback they receive from people who use the features they're creating while the development is still in progress.
If you'd like a short introduction to Agile development, see the Wikipedia Agile article.
One possible use for the ability to publish on-line from InDesign might be to allow a designer's clients to see a work in progress. Currently the system publishes to an Adobe.com website and the user receives a URL that ends with a globally unique identifier (GUID). The designer can then share that link and it should be usable on any device from a desktop computer with a gigantic monitor to a smart phone with a tiny screen.
The option is in the same section of the File menu with Adobe PDF Presets and Export. After selecting Publish Online, you'll be able to give the item an name and fill out some information about the publication. After that, the publishing process begins.
When the process ends, you'll see the URL and a Copy button will place the URL on the Clipboard.
Then you can send the URL to anyone who should have access to it. For example, here's the one I created to test the process.
The ability goes far beyond just being able to share work in process. Print documents could be repurposed for use on-line with a minimal amount of effort and viewers won't need to install any kind of plug-in. If the InDesign document includes interactive features such as buttons, slide shows, animations, audio, and video, those will be included, too.
So even in its unfinished state, it's an impressive feature.
Windows 10 has been released, but that didn't mark the end of preview builds. Although I maintain only the current production build on computers that I depend on for daily work use, I still have one computer that's enrolled in the program on the Fast Ring. This week Microsoft pushed Preview Build 10532 and it was a big one.
I've described the "rings" that Microsoft uses previously: Fast Ring users are the first people outside of Microsoft to see a new build and, as such, they also can see bugs, sometimes ugly ones that don't show up until they encounter a particular combination of hardware and software on a user's computer. Slow Ring participants see a later version once Fast Ring users have identified problems and Microsoft has fixed them.
Build 10532 is the second build since Windows 10 was released commercially. It includes bug fixes and a few improvements. Observant users may notice a few small changes to the context menus, too. The context menus are now dark like the Start menu.
If you're interested in participating in the Insider program so that you can provide feedback to Microsoft, go to Settings and then select Update and Security, Advanced Options, and Get Insider Builds. You can then choose Fast Ring or Slow Ring. Or, if you want out of the program, you can also unenroll there.
