Just caught this on Slashdot:

Free IMAP on Gmail

We use Google Apps at Concrete Websites, so I thought I’d check, and – lo and behold – we have it! You have to check your account’s settings tab, and if you’re lucky, you’ll see Forwarding and POP/IMAP (it used to just be POP.)

Once I confirmed that this option was available, it was a matter of five seconds before I retrieved my iPhone, and attempted to get my Google Apps email account integrated into it – hoping that IMAP access would end all manner of painful interaction between the phone the Gmail account (much of which has been recounted elsewhere.) Fortunately, Google has a helpful page that lists connection information for a variety of platforms – including, yes, the iPhone .

So far I’m pretty impressed. Deleting messages in the iPhone deletes them nearly immediately in Gmail. Your various labels are reflected as IMAP folders (including All Mail, allowing you to keep your mail nicely archived while still using your iPhone.) I’m looking forward to being able to go back to using Apple’s Mail client, which I’d abandoned due to the difficult nature of sharing multiple POP clients with one POP mail account.

Thanks, Google!

My firm, Concrete Websites, officially launched the website for Lemonade.com, a startup with whom we’ve been working for months. I say “officially” launched because, while the site was actually like most of last week, an article about the site appeared in the New York Times today. Ooh…pressure!

What’s lemonade.com? Lemonade let’s you “add your favorite stuff to a Lemonade stand and put it on your personal profile, website, blog, wherever” (from the site.)

You can learn more here. And in the spirit of Web 2.0ishness, I present to you my first non-testing Lemonade Stand:

Yes, there are kinks to work out, and more retailers to get on bored (I really wanted to include the MOTU 8pre in the stand above, but it was nowhere to be found) but for now I’ll just settle for catching my breath…

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Two stories caught my eye this morning. The first, linked here, mentions that an OS X-based, touch-screen iPod is coming soon. The second, from Appleinsider, indicates that there are going to be a number of OS X-based iPods released in a matter of weeks (!)

You’d think this would make people happy. Why is it going to result in another Great Apple Fan Implosion? Expectations. Simply put, they’re sky-high with a rumor like this. A casual glance at MacRumors forums shows the following features (and more) being actively advocated for this full-screen iPod:

WiFi
Mail/Safari support
Touch-screen games
GPS
160 GB capacity
The return of Firewire support (!)
Complete OS X application support (including Keynote, Pages)

I hate to burst the proverbial bubble, but there will almost certainly be no iPhone-specific features in this touch-screen iPod. What do I mean? I mean no phone (obviously), but also no IM, no WiFi, and no internet. You will likely have very nice interfaces for managing all of the same information you already had on an iPod (i.e: contacts, videos, photos), but items that are internet-based or made their debut in the iPhone will likely stay that way. The iPhone is a cash cow, and even if they priced a high-capacity touch-screen iPod at $499 – never mind that such a device cries out for a more natural $399 or $349 price point – it would still eat into the iPhone sales.

Secondly, just because these devices are now touted to run OS X, doesn’t really mean much to the end user. Yes, it matters to developers (should Apple ever choose to get off its ass and properly support development in such an environment), but otherwise it’s mostly just semantics. It’s simply a nice modification to the bottom line, if Apple can do all software development in-house with the same people who already work for them.

And finally – and I can’t stress this enough – a touch-screen iPod is not a panacea! I have an iPhone. I love it. But as an iPod, it’s not perfect. It has some irritating playback bugs. It’s a bit large to easily navigate one-handed. Its lack of tactile feedback is occasionally annoying. It’s impossible to use while attempting to focus on something else. Are these deal-breakers? Absolutely not; the iPhone is a sexy beast, and a touch-screen iPod would be a similar animal. There will be those who love the idea of a touch-screen iPod, but when they actually use them, will find them somewhat clumsy and a little bit sluggish.

I’m not worried for Apple: it seems to do best in such situations – witness the introduction of the iPod, the iPod Mini and the Apple TV. I am, however, worried about the future of civil discussions around the Mac Web. Oh well – maybe I’ll just hang out in the iPod Shuffle forums for awhile…

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I am laying in bed, blogging from an iphone … And loving every second of it. It is a revolution. That is all.

I have yet to see this mentioned around the Mac web, but along with session saving, draggable tabs, very sexy inline find, resizable text fields, some enhanced privacy options and bookmark/history searching, the Safari 3 beta for OS X (and likely Windows as well) presents a long overdo fix for a very annoying rendering bug:

In Safari 3, DHTML content displayed over Flash content no longer disappears or displays erratically!

Thanks, Apple. Now fix that memory usage, and get me Flash on the iPhone. Pretty please?