photo credit: phauly

When it has come to operating systems, I have always had a hard time making up my mind. Windows, for me, has been a good choice for my gaming consoles and a reasonable one for work as well. Mac has become my default office system, having used it now for nearly two years as my primary “getting things done” machine.

However, Linux has always been my secret love affair. It is a relationship that has stretched over half a decade. It began with some spare hard drive space and a desire to to see what Linux was all about. Now, it is a relationship on life support.

You see, I’ve come to notice something. After seven years of using Linux, seven different distros, countless versions and six computers, I’ve finally hit a point where I have to admit something. That every computer I’ve had both Linux and Windows XP on has worked far better with Windows than Linux.

There’s a lot of reasons for this, but none of them bode well for penguin.

A Bit of History

Real fast, I want to explain where I am coming from and why I am not some random Linux-hater. I have been using Linux for about seven years. I started in 2002 with Mandrake Linux. I was curious to see what Linux was about and wanted to see if it would work well for me. I first installed the OS in the free space of my Windows hard drive but that went afoul after a few weeks when Windows was nice enough to “fix” my hard drive by removing the partition divide and then erasing my Linux setup.

Still, it didn’t take me long to get back to Linux (I was kind of mad at Windows at this point). When I bought a new system a few months later, I wiped the hard drive and made my former machine Linux-only, giving the new computer to my significant other. I had my Linux comp and, if I wanted to use Windows to play a game I could borrow hers.

Ever since then, I’ve had a constant relationship with Linux. At no point between then and now have I not owned at least one machine with Linux. In the time that’s passed, I’ve had Linux on four different desktops and two laptops. I put it on old machines, I put it on new ones.

I’ve also tried a wide variety of distros too. I started with Mandrake, but I’ve also tried Red Hat, Xandros (both desktop and Eee PC version), Debian, PCLinuxOS, gOS and, of course, four different flavors Ubuntu (Ubuntu, Kubntu, Xubuntu and Easy Peasy).

Though this relationship has been constant and exciting, it’s also been a love/hate one. On systems where I was dual-booting with Windows, it was always a struggle to resist the urge to boot back into Windows. Between problems with the OS, missing programs and inelegant solutions to common problems, Linux always felt like a sacrifice, something that I was giving up to appease the open source Gods.

To quickly explain why, I’m going to break it down into three parts.

1. Major Issues

I was aware that, especially early on, that Linux was an OS for “tinkerers”. I liked playing with computers and learning, so I didn’t mind and even relished some of the fiddling, but there comes a point where I want to get down to work and Linux, at times, seemed dead set against that idea.

Consider the following things that happened to me over the years:

Could any of these things happen on Windows or Mac? Sure. Some people have had similar or worse problems with both. But here’s the deal. Neither have happened to me and no one I know has spent a Saturday with a can of compressed air trying to keep a CPU cool so they can fiddle with Windows options.

Either I have the worst possible luck with Linux, am doing something so obviously wrong that I should hurt myself (like flipping the magic “make Linux suck” switch) or something is wrong.

2. General Laggardness

One of the sales pitches for Linux is that it is supposed to bring old systems back to life, run better on old hardware and move faster, more reliably than Windows.

Bull.

I have to give Linux its credit. It doesn’t hang up, hour glass, pinwheel or do any of the things you see from time to time on Windows or Mac, instead though, every action feels slow. Every time I’ve put Linux on a system that had Windows previously (or even still does) it has moved slower. Every click felt less responsive, every keyboard press a little more delayed. Any gain I got by not being hourglassed every hour was lost by the million or so micro-delays throughout the day.

Applications, for me, load slower. Pages come up with less speed. Clicks take a split-second to respond and my typing often gets more than a bit ahead of the screen. I don’t have these issues with Windows so how is Linux making things faster?

The worst (for Linux) is my current dual boot machine. Here we have a true apples-to-apples comparison as Windows and Linux both run on the same hardware, each have their separate hard drive (of the same size/kind) and I can trivially reboot between the two and try each out in similar situations. Linux boots faster and is ready to work a bit more quickly, but once Windows XP gets up fully, it starts running laps around the penguin.

It’s sad, but entirely true in my experience.

3. App Backwards

Finally, though most major applications have decent Linux counterparts (Firefox is on Linux, OpenOffice is pretty good, etc.) there are some apps that have nothing. What if you want a version of Windows Live Writer or Ecto for Linux? Last time I checked you were out of luck. Most Linux blog editors are like using crayons to do high art.

Even the apps that do seem to have Linux ports don’t seem to work as well in Linux. The last time I tried playing online games on Kongregate in Linux I nearly threw my monitor. Flash, despite being almost almost version-equal, runs like garbage.

The bottom line is that there is almost always some sacrifice when switching to Linux. There is some program that you’re going to have to give up, one that won’t work nearly as well or some other problem that you don’t have to put up with on Windows or Mac.

Excuses, Excuses

Linux supporters and developers are quick to point out that the problems I describe are pretty well-known and are also not their fault. They are quick to blame hardware manufacturers for not release adequate specs and open source drivers. They say they could get more speed and better effeciency if hardware manufacturers would just work with them.

I am almost certain that is true, but that isn’t a problem Windows has. Microsoft is powerful enough to strong arm the hardware companies into doing their bidding. Mac, on the other hand, just controls which hardware they allow their OS to run on, eliminating the problem completely.

Is it fair? No. But consumers don’t care about fair, they want a system that works. Consumers don’t like “evil” and if all else is equal they’ll choose one that is “good”. But if given a choice between an evil system that works and a good one with flaws, they’ll choose the evil one almost every time.

The reason is that open source, though a great buzzword, is no a feature. It doesn’t, by itself, make the computer go faster, crash less or be more productive. Better programming and design do those things. When open source has been able to make better programs, as with Firefox, users have adopted it. When it hasn’t, as with desktop Linux, they won’t.

The major benefit of open source favors programmers and hardcore tinkerers. People who want to buy a CPU and do work on it don’t to choose new windows managers nor do they want to be forced to make such a choice. A computer, to them, should be a like a toaster, fast, efficient, rarely breaking and getting its job done. Free as in freedom, doesn’t matter and free as in free beer only goes so far.

If there is such a serious issue with hardware drivers and support from 3rd parties, and I believe that there is, then perhaps we need fewer Linux-heads coding the kernel and more pressing the flesh and working with these companies. Maybe we need more lawyers working to combat Microsoft’s behavior and maybe we need businessmen bringing in companies to the fold.

A lot more than code goes into making a great OS. Microsoft and Apple both have business partnerships, legal teams and countless other non-programmers helping to build every next OS. Linux can not grow on programmers and fanboys alone.

Yet, it seems like that is exactly what they are trying to do.

The Good News

In all of this I have discovered something. Going back to the “controlling the hardware” issue, in cases where Linux is built around a specific computer, it does seem to work very well. Take my review of Easy Peasy. Though others on different versions of the Eee have had some serious problems, as indicated by the comments, for my laptop it worked swimmingly. I’m sure that, if I installed XP on the same machine, I would be in for a world of frustration.

The Eee PC is an excellent example of what happens when manufacturers use Linux well. They built a laptop around Linux, it works out of the box and it does what it is supposed to do. End of story. Linux CAN work and work very well but it takes more than blindly slapping CDs into drives and rebooting.

Rather than encouraging end users and the uninitiated to download and burn Linux distros, thus putting them on PCs built with Windows in mind, perhaps we should be focusing on getting manufacturers to sell Linux. There has been a lot of push on that front and some mixed success, but it makes more sense than letting install problems, broken drivers and slower computers sour potential customers on Linux before they’ve had the chance to really see it work.

Conclusions

In the end, what Linux needs may not be a kick in the rear, but a change in strategy. I may be done installing Linux on computers that weren’t built with Linux in mind, but that doesn’t mean I won’t buy a Linux desktop if the price is right and my needs are met.

As long as Mac and Windows get to cheat and have assurances the hardware they’re on will work great for them, Linux will always look like a slow, problem-riddled OS. Sure, the open source nature of it may convince the die hard, but the people who are just punching a clock online don’t care enough to make the needed sacrifices.

I know that this is going to get me some hatemail and possibly worse, but at some point I have to face up to reality. Every computer I’ve put Linux on ran better with XP. It may not be Linux’s fault, but the fact remains.

Until that fact changes, Linux will remain the third place desktop OS by a longshot.

Shortly after penning that review and opening up my Eee PC to use the version 2.0.0.20 Firefox that was inside (there was no means to update to 3.x) I realized I had to change something. With all of the system software hopelessly out of date, the OS wasn’t merely annoying, but dangerous.

So, I did a little bit of research, learned how to install Linux distros using UNetbootin and raced to download an ISO of the latest Ubuntu version.

The experience, however, was less than rewarding. Though the install worked perfectly, requiring only a free 1 GB pen drive, which they now give out in cereal boxes, Ubuntu was a poor fit for the Eee.

The wifi didn’t work properly, the OS gladly ate up much of my precious screen real estate and it required some brutal hacking to get everything running.

Then I read about Easy Peasy, formerly known as Ubuntu Eee (I’m forced to assume the name was dropped fr trademark reasons). I gave it a whirl and it was a like a breath of fresh air. Not only did everything work out of the box, but the system was up to date, shiny and new.

It was what my computer should have been when I first plucked it from the box.

Need more reasons to try Easy Peasy on your Eee? I’ll give you nine, especially if you’re stuck with their version of Xandros. If you want to make it ten, leave a comment and make a suggestion.

9. Working Sound

The 701 model of the Eee PC had a strange issue where the sound would sometimes be barely audible. This was caused by Also turning down the output volume to an almost nothing. This required going into the terminal and using alsamixer to turn up the volume as the GUI volume interface didn’t make enough of a difference.

Easy Peasy fixes this problem. The volume is loud and crisp, even loud enough to the point I have a hard time listening to it on full volume.

8. New Interface

I admit that I am a sucker for a new interface, but Easy Peasy really takes it to the next level. Easy Peasy takes the simple interface from the default install, adds a slew of new features to it, and makes it pretty.

Many out there believe that the Eee PC can’t do attractive graphics and speed at the same time. Easy Peasy proves them wrong while also using innovative task management system navigation to put everything you need at your fingertips, something the default OS failed to do.

7. New Software

Forgetting the updated applications (more on that in a moment), Easy Peasy makes it, well, easy, to install new apps. In fact, it comes with new applications, including GIMP, Evolution, Transmission, Ekiga, a slew of new games and even a remote desktop viewer. Best of all, you have a real package manager that lets you install new applications without any hacking.

6. Battery Life

One of my initial gripes was that my battery life seemed to have dwindled to nearly nothing after about six months of usage, however, installing Easy Peasy seemed to be a shot in the arm for the system in that area. I won’t say that it has brought it back to where it was when I opened the box nor have I done a full test from a full charge to dead, but estimates by the OS indicate that I’m getting about 2 hours per charge, even with wifi on, and my rough math seems to jive with those numbers.

5. No Unnecessary Features

The Eee PC’s crowded keyboard is rough on any typist, but when added to taskbar app that lets you change to Chinese, even on accident, it becomes a nightmare. If you need that functionality, there is a way to add it, but if you don’t it doesn’t come by default. In fact, other than the usual caps and num lock indicator, nothing on the desktop alters your keyboard input.

Likewise, there’s no forced anti-virus application installed on the desktop and that helps to speed up boot times and keep the system running smoothly. After all, forcing an anti-virus on Linux is a bit like immunizing against the black plague. Sure, it might be a good idea, but is it really necessary?

4. Working Wifi

Out of the box, the default OS’ wifi didn’t support WPA, requiring a patch to fix the problem. Even after patched, I had to log into my wireless network every time I wanted to surf the Web, even though my password was supposedly stored. Even with vanilla Ubuntu, the wifi didn’t work correctly, requiring non-standard drivers.

With Easy Peasy, the wireless works out of the box and it remembers your passwords, logging you on every time you fire it up. It is that simple. You forget you even have an encrypted network.

3. A Better Distro

Though it sounds like a broad statement, Ubuntu is a better distro than the version of Xandros the Eee uses by default. It is better supported, has a much larger following, a bigger development community, more frequent updates and better financial backing. Though Easy Peasy itself is a somewhat backwater hack modification, the fact that it is built upon Ubuntu gives me piece of mind.

It’s at least better than being a backwater hack of Xandros.

2. Up To Date Software

If you have one of the old Xandros-based 701s, there’s a good chance you still have old versions of all your applications. New ones were painfully slow to come down the pipe from Asus and the system update software was a pain to use. Sure, there was a real package manager hidden away, but its repositories were limited so that, without installing unofficial apps, you would never have up to date software. This is both inconvenient and insecure.

Easy Peasy fixes that with regular updates, a real package management system and the latest software constantly available. No more using outdated versions of Firefox.

1. Faster

Computer speed is a very subjective thing and appearances can easily be deceiving. It is hard to do an A/B comparison without a second Eee PC of the same model and, even with such a comparison, it would meaningless without some heavy duty benchmarks. Still, Easy Peasy feels faster than the default install, especially when running the default OS in desktop mode.

There are many potential explanations for this, a newer, more refined distro, less stuff running in the background (no forced anti-virus, input modifier, etc.) or applications that are fully patched, but the OS seems to be faster running the various apps including both Firefox and OpenOffice.org.

Even running it with Pidgin IMing away in the background didn’t seem to slow it down. Easy Peasy is light on its toes, slightly edging out the default OS and beating the heck out of the regular install of Ubuntu.

Conclusions

The bottom line is pretty simple. THIS is how the Eee PC should have been shipped. With this OS, nearly all of my gripes and complaints about it would have been done away with. My only regret is that I didn’t do this on day one. Instead, I went to two countries and nearly a dozen conferences with the old OS and I am beating myself up.

I feel so stupid.

Since Easy Peasy is, obviously, GPL, I would really appreciate it if Asus would just make this the default OS for future Linux-based Eee PCs. Though the install isn’t bad, not to someone who’s familiar with installing Linux distros, I see no reason why I should spend hours downloading and installing an OS that could just come pre-packaged.

It’s time to right this wrong Asus and, if you’re an Eee PC user that is still on the default OS, it is time to take action. Every second with the default OS is a second wasted with an inferior laptop.

Don’t let another day go by without Easy Peasy on your Eee PC. I don’t usually do wholesale endorsements of products and I’ll admit that there are a few problems with it (microphone issues seem do be at the top of the chart and I also seem some graphical glitches) but when you compare the drawbacks to what is gained, there is no contest.

Easy Peasy is an truly lives up to it’s name, being one “easy peasy” choice to make.

Apparently, they had been listening and working on many of the problems for quite some time, just very quietly (perhaps they were also hunting rabbits).

But is it everything that I had hoped for? Well, not quite. However, it shows a great deal of promise and has a lot to offer for us Opera outcasts that have been pushed to using Firefox, Safari or Chrome because of how incomplete the Opera offering has been.

So what’s new and how well does it work? Here’s my breakdown of the latest features and how well they perform.

Inline Spell Checking

When I read that the new version of Opera FINALLY introduced inline spell checking, I literally jumped for joy. I had been dying for this feature for some time and have been enjoying testing it. For the first time, Opera is finally a browser capable of handling my email, blog posting and other work-related tasks that take place in the browser itself.

However, the early iterations of spell checking are a bit disappointing. In fact, as I type through this post in Opera, it doesn’t catch words that I misspell as I type them. Rather, it seems to catch them some time later, often times after I hit “save” on the post. This is unlike Firefox or Safari, which check the words right after I hit space.

While that isn’t bad per se, it is annoying and it forces me to go back through everything I write a second time to make sure I didn’t miss any squiggly lines. It is not terrible by any stretch and it is much better than what Opera did have, but it still doesn’t bring it up to parity with Firefox and Safari.

Still, it makes it at least usable as a browser for work-related tasks and that is the main goal for me right now.

Improved Performance

According to Opera, their new browser is 30% faster on the “real Web” (as opposed that darn fake Web the other browsers routinely surf). With it’s new Presto 2.2 engine it is indeed much faster than 9.62. It’s smooth, renders everything that I use regularly well and seemed to handle most complicated sites with ease.

That being said, according to download.com, it is still not the fastest browser, at least on JavaScript. Though the improvement in JavaScript performance is remarkable, it doesn’t quite tip it past the latest builds of Firefox.

Still though, the speed improvement is very noticeable and it works remarkably well. Even though the benchmarks put it behind other browsers, I can’t notice any extreme difference between the three, something I could before.

In short, it may not beat Firefox, but it at least is a viable alternative now, something it wasn’t before.

Mail Client Improvements

The email client also underwent some minor improvements. Though I lamented the state of the client and am glad to see it get some love, this really wasn’t what I had in mind.

The addition of HTML email is… ok. It is debatable whether this qualifies as a feature though. It had always been able to view HTML email and sending it doesn’t really add that much to me. Granted, I don’t send much email that even asks for HTML formatting, but I really don’t think most users need or want this feature. I just turn my Gmail formatting off and use text exclusively.

Though I am glad to see them thinking about the mail client some more, the fact is that the client is still kludgy, especially with account set up, and doesn’t feel robust enough for daily use. Still, I am going to try it out for a few days and see how it works, that is something that takes longer than just browsing around to really get the feel of.

Standards Compliance

I said it before that I don’t care what your score on the ACIDX test is, I just want my sites to work. Being standards compliant is great, but it is more important to be forgiving and able to work with sites that might not be perfect.

The new version of Opera seems to do that a bit better. Errors that I saw in previous versions are gone and even high-intensity sites work well. It’s hard for me to really hammer this point home without a few more days of trial, but it seems to me that they’ve finally figured out how to be both tough and forgiving on standards issues.

Other Items

I’ve noticed a few other odds and ends that, at the very least, I didn’t see on the previous versions of Opera.

• Memory Usage: On my Mac, the new Opera seems to be neither stingy nor bloated in the area of memory usage. After being up most of the day with many dozens of tabs opened and closed, the browser is currently using about 300 megs of memory. That puts it on about par with Firefox or Safari on their good days.
• The Phantom Bar: I’m noticing that, (sometimes) when I do a fast scroll, a faint grey bar appears on the screen to mark the previous location I scrolled from. I can’t get a screen shot of it as it disappears quickly, nor can I make it come up reliably, but it is there. Not sure if I like it or not.
• Issues While Loading Pages: If the reload button has been turned into the stop button, meaning that the browser is loading elements of the page, Opera is almost useless. The scroll wheel does not work, hovering over a link does not produce the hand icon and the browser seems to shut down until the last bits are downloaded. Frustrating at times, but made worse by the fact that it seems to keep trying to load elements long after it is clear to rational people it isn’t coming.

All in all though, these are issues and bugs that one might expect from an early alpha release. Still, despite it’s status as a test build, it has remained remarkably stable, not crashing on me even once after two full days of use. In short I’m impressed.

Conclusions

Many will point out the obvious about this Opera release, that the new features are just designed to bring the browser up to parity with Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The new features, for the most part, are just catch up releases and don’t really add anything new.

This is true. It is also true that Opera is still behind in other areas including extensions, speed and privacy.

However, Opera has always had something of an upper hand in other areas. A secure browser with a built-in mail client, good theme support (no need for a restart) and a robust user experience without the aid of extensions.

Opera’s desktop browser may not be as popular as Firefox or even Opera’s mobile cousins, but it is a solid browser with a lot of good cause to check it out.

It isn’t for everyone, it never has been, but it is now my default browser. That is, until I decide I’m tired of it and switch back to something else…

Opera is the almost forgotten brother of the browser war. Though Internet Explorer seems to be the “successful for no good reason” sibling that the others despise and direct their anger toward, Opera is the one sitting in the corner, reading a book and struggling to make friends.

But Opera’s lack of social skills is to be expected. Though the browser has done reasonably well in both the embeddable and the mobile market its desktop application has faltered, unable to gain any real momentum.

The reason is that, much like myself in high school, the browser has spent too much time hitting the books and not enough time learning how to deal with people. The Internet has moved forward and left Opera behind and, if it is going to catch up, it needs to start studying a very different book, the book of real life.

In the meantime, here are five things that, if Opera were to fix, I would seriously consider using their browser full-time.

5. Extensions

I’m not a terribly big fan of extensions in general. It seems that allowing users to install poorly-written code along side with a clean browser is a recipe for failure. However, as Firefox has shown, while the majority of extensions are a wash, there are a few that you just can’t live without.

Sure, many of my favorite extensions are already in Opera as core features, but I would miss my bookmarking and other extensions if I made the switch.

On that note, don’t try to convince anyone that Widgets are the same thing. They are not. Sure, you can do cool things with them, but you can’t do the kinds of things that Extensions do. Extensions, not widgets, get it?

4. Fix the Mail Client

Opera Mail used to be the pinnacle of mail design and form. It developed the idea of using tags instead of folders and was a huge precursor to Gmail. The problem is that it has suffered from a bad case of neglect.

Search, for example, is behind the times, account setup is a bit of a kludge and the entire email client moves slugglishly and it seems to be rather buggy. Mail downloads don’t work reliably (especially on IMAP) and it seems to not like my Gmail IMAP account.

The idea of a mail client/browser still makes sense. Though Firefox got away from that, mostly because Thunderbird is such a bloated mess on its own, if one can get the two to share resources well and keep the mail client reasonable in size and weight, it can work and it could be a big selling point over Safari and Firefox.

3. Standards Dictator

It’s all cool to be standards compliant, I get that. But Safari doesn’t break sites and Firefox stops with the standards compliance issues when it is no longer to the benefit of users. As important as standards are, they are not more important than the Web working.

Though the number of popular sites that have been borked by Opera has gone down drastically in recent versions, I still occasionally see pages that load fine on every other browser but not Opera. The fault tolerance is clearly still not up to par.

The ACID tests are great, but the more important one is how many problems I notice when surfing. A clear example of hitting the books a bit too hard.

2. Better JavaScript Performance

This used to be Opera’s bread and butter. Opera moved fast where the other struggled. But now, Opera’s JavaScript speed is languishing behind. With Firefox, Safari and Chrome all upping the ante on performance, Opera just seems clunky in this area.

The result is that Gmail feels slow to me and sites like Diigo, which are very JavaScript intense, are almost unusable. I have to keep other browsers around if for no other reason than to do the show notes for my podcast.

1. Spell Checking… For Real

Let’s go over this. Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Chrome all have spell checking and by that I means the “Check as you type” kind, not the “Check after you’re done” kind. I spend most of my day writing blog posts, answering emails in Gmail and leaving comments on blogs, not having those red lines is murder.

I have been spoiled for too long on the magic of check as you type and, when I try Opera out, I always forget to spell check when I am done. It is not second nature and it gets left behind.

It is especially shameful on the Mac version of Opera as all they have to do is hook into the spell check system that is running the entire time in the operating system, no need to code anything new. That would at least work for me, tough luck for those on Windows.

Still, there is no excuse for this and, even though it has been one of the most requested features for Opera, it remains unfulfilled.

Thanks a bunch.

Conclusions

I like Opera, I really do. It reminds me of myself when I was younger. However, there came a time where I had to come out of my shell and step into the big bad world. It’s past that time for Opera.

At version 9.62, you’d think the browser would be a little further along than it is. But when Firefox 3 and Chrome pre-version-one-beta is able to best it in critical areas, there is a problem.

I know that Opera Mini is you cash cow, but how about a little love for brower-based-buddies, we wouldn’t forget you.

Oh wait, new Beta of Firefox. Can’t talk now…

However, one program I recently started to use, or rather, am starting to use again, has put me in a bit of a bind.

You see, even though Mailplane is a great program that does exactly what it advertises and is very polite with my system resources, I simply cannot justify the expense.

However, I’m not some cheapskate that refuses to buy software. I am a happy customer that just dropped $100 for Screenflow, and $20 for Gyazmail (though I have since stopped using it full-time). I’m the type of customer Mac software vendors love, a small business admin with a decent-sized PayPal account and lots of discretion to buy software I need.

Still, I can’t see myself spending $25 for Mailplane. The reason is that the price point is horribly wrong and $25, though reasonable for other applications, is far too high for this app.

What Mailplane Does

Fundamentally, Mailplane is a standalone Web browser, much like one that you would create with Fluid, that only works with your Gmail account. It pulls up your Gmail account in a new window, letting you interact with it just as if you were using it in Firefox or Safari.

That alone is actually a pretty neat idea. Keeping Gmail in my browser tabs has been dangerous in the past. I can’t count the number of times I’ve accidentally navigated away from my inbox or closed the tab I was using.

But Mailplane does go a good deal beyond that, including adding the following features:

• Drag and drop file attachment
• iPhoto intergration
• Integrated screenshot function that attaches the images to your email
• On the fly image resizing
• Use email links (mailto:) with Gmail
• Download management
• Growl integration
• Address book integration

In short, Mailplane tries to take your Gmail account and turn it into a full-fledged Mac email client on par with Mail.app. It is pretty neat and it works very well for the most part (I’ve observed a minor bug with the check spelling as you type feature, but nothing serious).

In fact, as a solution, it is so elegant that it almost doesn’t seem to belong on this site. Still, whenever I consider buying a license, part of me cringes.

Mailplane, as cool as it is, can’t convince me to wire over $25.

Where Mailplane Fails

My problem with spending the money on Mailplane is pretty simple, I don’t know if I get $25 worth of features out of it. For all that Mailplane does, there are many things that it does not do or you already have without the application installed. Consider the following:

• Gmail Does All of the Work: Despite the new additions, 90% of the interface and almost all of the functionality is Gmail-driven. Gmail is free and can be access from a browser. Seems odd to pay for something you pretty much have already.
• I Don’t Send Many Attachments: Email attachments, especially image attachments, are not as common as they once were. I rarely send any images, including screenshots via Gmail so the file attachment and image features are almost completely unused.
• Official (and Free) Alternatives: Growl integration is pretty neat, but if you use Google Notifier you get Growl-like notifications for free. Also, Google Notifier can let you use mailto links with Gmail, once again for free. Likewise, the interaction with your Mac address book is strange since you can import and export contacts to and from Gmail freely.

Worse still, there are actually a few drawbacks to using this application over just accessing Gmail in your browser.

• Extra Computer Resources: Even though the program is pretty light and doesn’t leak memory, it still takes more RAM and CPU power to run two programs than one. It is that simple.
• No Ad Blocking: If you use Adblockplus or even Privoxy, you won’t be able to block the Gmail ads. Not very annoying to most Gmail users, but certainly could catch some off guard.
• Minor Bugs: Though even the new version 2 beta has fewer bugs than most “finished” projects, there are still added hiccups and problems, no matter how minor. It comes from having the extra layer on top of Gmail and interacting through it.

So, when it is all said and done, you have only a few compelling features that aren’t available for free elsewhere, minor bugs that don’t exist when using Gmail normally and a $25 price tag.

The question remains, is Mailplane really worth $25?

Comparison Software

Consider the following applications that provide similar functionality to Mailplane:

• Gyazmail is a full email client with POP and IMAP support for only $20. It is also done by a small Mac development shop.
• Thunderbird is also a full email client available for free.
• Opera is a browser that works with Gmail and has a full mail client, for free.
• Fluid is an application that can create site-specific browsers, much like what MailPlane is, for free. It can even be used to add Growl notifications and badges.
• Prism works like Fluid for Firefox and is also free.
• GMDesk is an Adobe Air-based application that allows users to maintain Gmail, Google Calendar and more. It is also free.

In short, every application that does something comparable to what Mailplane does is either free or priced much less than it. In fact, when a similar Mac developer can build an entire standalone email client, no leaning on GMail, and price it five dollars cheaper than Mailplane, clearly something is up.

Mailplane may have some great features. But not enough to justify buying it, at least for me.

Conclusions

Mailplane is a great app. There is not much debate about that. If you like Gmail now, you’ll probably like Mailplane and you’ll probably prefer using it over using Gmail in a browser tab.

I really like this application and wish that I could continue using it. But, I can’t.

By the time you read this, my Mailplane demo will have expired and I’ll have moved on to either using my Fluid App or just running it in a tab again.

It is very frustrating for me though. The developers seem to have done a great job building the app, but have completely overshot the price point. Whether they think the app is worth more than it is or they have some kind of marketing strategy behind it, I don’t know.

Normally, I would just wait for the app to go on sale or become part of a bundle. However, over the next few weeks, I’m going to get very used to not using Mailplane. Meaning my desire to plunk down any cash will fade very fast.

Perhaps I am the only one that feels this way, but I just don’t see how the features of Mailplane add up for me.