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New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

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Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, my thoughts exactly. Gmail has a different philosophy of working with data (search instead of sort) and I've noticed more than once that some people refuse to make that mental switch.

Ever wondered why sorting is an option at all? Search requires you to know something explicit about what you're looking for (without a search term you have nothing). How about sorting by subject, email size or whether an attachment exists or not? Search is great, but only brings you to the item you want. After that you might want to explore related items (such as a mail from x that contained attachment y you can't re…

So you're saying that when you don't have a suitable search term, you can sort a really long list of messages in such a way that scrolling through the whole thing is an efficient use of your time? Or is that even when you do have a suitable search term?

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#223
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps than they should give the masses their interface and give us a standards-based/compliant JSON interface. We're headed that way already.

That's IMAP, CalDAV, SMTP isn't it? Where does JSON even need to come into it?

Because I could then build the entire interface client-side in a browser?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a webdev guy. I have no front end/fullstack experience. I'm a longterm sysadmin/DevOps person. But if you're a power user, you want control over your mail interface/workflow. In that case, all your mailserver should be doing is accepting email for you, storing and indexing it, and serving it via API to clients you're using. I like IMAP, but it doesn't easily support some Gmail conventions (multiple labels per message).

IMAP and SMTP could easily be condensed into an XML/JSON API that could be done over HTTPS; I'm not familiar enough with CalDAV to say that though.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#224
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried it? You select N rows, it then says Insert > N Rows Above and Insert > N Rows Below. I've never had any problems inserting rows, but perhaps I'm not using the product the way others do.

Yes, evidently I have. The idea of selecting existing content in order to get the option to add space for new content is very, very odd. Did you really discover how to do this without looking it up?

I didn't look it up at all. Took me a few seconds initially to acclimate to the UI, find the "Insert" menu and try a couple things. I don't feel like their methods for inserting make perfect sense, but I've never had a problem with it.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever wondered why sorting is an option at all? Search requires you to know something explicit about what you're looking for (without a search term you have nothing). How about sorting by subject, email size or whether an attachment exists or not? Search is great, but only brings you to the item you want. After that you might want to explore related items (such as a mail from x that contained attachment y you can't re…

So you're saying that when you don't have a suitable search term, you can sort a really long list of messages in such a way that scrolling through the whole thing is an efficient use of your time? Or is that even when you do have a suitable search term?

I'm saying that others' reality isn't always like mine. That there are many ways to skin a cat. That every point has a counterpoint and when I get an email from someone called Diue Donne or something which I always misspell that it's easier to soft by sender, hit D and scroll for a bit.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#226
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which JSON-based email standard would that be, exactly?

I believe ops point was that any stable api would be preferable to: "Yeah, there's an api, but we refuse to document it, and we'll randomly depricate stuff if you try to use it to build something that isn't gmail". The team behind gmail is probably one of the best qualified to hammer out a working api for email of json (what we have + a bit of what we want + stability and versioning). No reason why they couldn't publ…

Thank you. This is what I was getting at. I hope we get closer to this with https://www.mailpile.is/

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#227
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you have users editing Office documents and committing changes to SVN and you don't get conflicts? Or if you do, they are able to resolve them?

Yes you do get and can resolve the conflicts. Despite common knowledge you can diff and merge office documents with TortoiseSVN. All it does is fire up their built in review/diff tools.

For normal office workers, this contraption really works better than collaboration (and change tracking if you need it) via Google Docs? Wow.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps than they should give the masses their interface and give us a standards-based/compliant JSON interface. We're headed that way already.

Which JSON-based email standard would that be, exactly?

Not a standard yet, but this just made it to HackerNews: https://nvlope.com/

"nvlope gives you full control over your mail with a full-blown JSON API. You can build an email client with just 3 API calls - threading included!"

http://developer.nvlope.com/

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