Thunderbird Beta for Android and other Tech Notes
Thunderbird
It was announced October 2nd that Thunderbird for Android was officially available, something that as I understand it started when the Thunderbird people (Mozilla, I think?) got involved with rebranding K9 Mail into Thunderbird. I'm not 100% sure of the arrangement, that's just my understanding of it. I could be totally wrong.
I decided to give it a try. I've tried many other different email apps over the years, none giving me the satisfaction that Inbox by Gmail did, so I keep going back to the official Gmail app. To Google's credit, they have brought some of the Inbox features to the Gmail app, but it's nowhere near the functionality that Inbox had. I think what I liked the most was that it had deep integration with Gmail, so organizing things worked much better than any other email app can.
When Thunderbird was announced I thought I'd give it a try. It's an open source client, and doesn't require an account to set up - and you can use multiple email addresses with it. I installed it, and immediately attached my Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo email addresses1. My primary use for it is Gmail.
The look and feel of the app are customizable to a point. You can choose from light/dark/system modes for display, change font sizes, enable/disable animations, and change your inbox density to either Compact or Relaxed (there's also "Default" but to be honest I'm not sure which one is the default).
The biggest option to select for me, which defaults to de-selected, is Change colour when read2. Without this option selected every message looks the same and it's impossible to differentiate between a read and unread message. Maybe this is fine for some people? But I'd like to see which emails I've left unread.
Other than that there isn't much customization. I think I'd like to see a little bit more, because the display is very utilitarian. I like it, but I'd like a bit more pizazz sometimes.
Based on the above, right now I would rate it 3.5 stars. I'm not going to give it an official rating until it's out of Beta.
As far as how I'm using it - I decided to treat my inbox as a to-do list going forward. Technically this is how email was meant to be used by the creator3. After I read an email, I either take action on it right away, at which point I'll file it (either to a label or just plain old Archive). If I'm not ready to deal with it, I'll mark it as unread.
Thankfully this method clears any notification so I don't get triggered by seeing an unread email count on the icon or in my notification tray. So far it's working - I was already practicing this a little bit, but now it's even more pronounced. For context, my email inbox is down to 3 items: two bills, and another bill-related email that I haven't dealt with yet. I left them as read, because I noted down when the bills need to be paid and how much they are; the other I intended to deal with last night but forgot. I'll get to it.
Overall I like the app. It's not for power users (yet) but I don't consider myself a power user. I also downloaded the desktop versions on my Windows PC, and will probably put it on my Mac; it is installed by default on Linux Mint so I've already got that working on my Linux box.
Android Keyboards
I've been testing out ways to make my typing less error-prone. For who knows how long now I've been frustrated with Gboard, my typing suffering from "fat fingers". Most times Gboard understands what I want to type and autocorrect fixes it for me, but there are other times where I type something so wildly wrong I have to delete the word and start over. Because I'm very careful about hitting the send button before I type anything, I haven't sent very many unintelligible messages.
My first try was eliminating the number row, which makes the letters a little bit bigger. You can still long-press on the top row to get at numbers without having to switch to the numbers & symbols screen so it's not a big "sacrifice". This mostly worked, but I wanted to see what else I could do.
I decided to switch to Samsung's keyboard for a little bit. A lot of people seem to like it, but I've always shied away from it for...reasons I can't remember? I've found myself really enjoying it. It has all the features of Gboard, but with fewer frustrations. It is seemingly more geared to power users, and unlike email, this is the feature set that I feel I need when it comes to a keyboard.
One of the features that is missing that I get with Gboard is the ability to swipe the delete/backspace key to replace words, so occasionally I still try to do this before remembering that I can't. But I think this is the one feature that is missing, so I can live with it (and like switching from swiping to switch apps back to dedicated buttons, I'll get used to it).
I briefly installed Microsoft's SwiftKey to see how I liked that. As far as the typing experience goes, I find SwiftKey to be vastly superior to both Gboard and Samsung's keyboard. But one of the things missing was Bitmoji integration. I don't use Bitmoji a lot, but the solution to inserting a Bitmoji when typing is to switch keyboards to the "Bitmoji" keyboard, enter your Bitmoji, and switch back. This is clunky and cumbersome, and not worth the better keyboard for me.
I'm going to keep trying out Samsung's keyboard, but I may switch back to Gboard as a comparison and see whether or not my typing suffers. Samsung's autocorrect isn't as aggressive as Gboard, but in some cases it refuses to let you use the word you wanted because it is 100% sure that no, you really meant to type this word. So that might determine how long I stick with the keyboard.
Anyway, that's it! That's my post about technology on Android today.
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Yes, I have too many addresses. But they do serve different purposes - except maybe Yahoo, but I don't have to get rid of it, so I don't.↩
Kudos for the Thunderbird team using Canadian/UK spelling - I wonder if my location was in the US if it would give me American spelling.↩
I can't find the source for this, but I swear I remember reading it somewhere. But many other people use email this way, it's not just a "me" thing.↩