Noel De Martin @noeldemartin@noeldemartin.social

Two of my favourite bloggers, @dajbelshaw and Abhishek Chakraborty, just wrote on the importance of writing. I should really get started writing those 62 blog ideas I have on my backlog... 🙈

- https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2020/07/21/just-write
- https://coffeeandjunk.com/writing-thinking

After some months of side-project work, here's my new #Solid app. If you don't have a Solid POD, data will be stored locally and you can upgrade to Solid when you're ready! Media Kraken will help you keep track of your media, starting with movies in v0.1. https://noeldemartin.github.io/media-kraken/

Are you attending #MootGlobal20? Do you have a cat? This is your chance to bring your cat to a conference! Come join me at the "cat lovers" table in the Networking Cafe during the 18:20 CET Networking Break! (9 hours from now)

It's been years since I enjoyed a new manga as much as I'm enjoying Chainsawman. The last one was The Promised Neverland, but the last arcs have been quite disappointing.

Starting today, you can reach me at noeldemartin@hey.com. I'm so glad to finally ditch gmail and become a Basecamp customer!

But something important for everyone, not only power users, is who your email provider is. I share a lot of values with Basecamp, and that comes through in the product. I didn't with Google, and that's why I ended up using 3rd party clients.

In summary, my experience has been really good so far. To be fair though, I was already doing fine with my previous setup. Even though this is a big improvement, I feel it's only noticeable for power users. I get ~5 emails a day, so email has never been overwhelming for me.

Being email such a critical service and Basecamp a relatively small company, you may wonder how reliable it is. I cannot say that the application was unresponsive or slow at any point. And it's not that they don't have traffic. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275511173782204416

Still, if there is a company I can trust with vendor lock-in, that's Basecamp. And I don't say this lightly. If worse comes to worse, their policies on what happens after cancelling the account are good. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275503946962857984

IMAP is probably the only qualm I have about it so far. I understand it doesn't make sense for the HEY client, but it'd be nice to manage my email from other clients. And that's not going to happen. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1272599759686000640

Custom domains for individuals? https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1273725369489727490

Email signatures? https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1276311062057369600

It is definitely a solid v1. I stopped using my previous email clients (Thunderbird & K-9 Mail) and I am not missing them. Still, there is a couple of features I am missing. They are coming.

HEY also shipped with a Linux client from day one, and that's what I've been using. There is a client for each platform. https://hey.com/apps

Keyboard shortcuts are awesome. I'm surprised they don't mention it in the features tour, maybe it's only appealing to geeks like me. But you can do almost everything with keyboard shortcuts that are easy to use and memorable.

Something I see differently now is the destination assigned to senders (Imbox, Feed & Paper Trail). Maybe you want something in the Paper Trail but still want to know when it arrives. You can assign it to the Imbox and move it after reading. Which is easy with keyboard shortcuts.

When I started using it, it was a bit uncomfortable. No notifications by default? I won't see all emails in my "Inbox"?, etc. But after the first couple of days, I realized the discomfort came from FOMO and bad habits. It's great now. JOMO, Joy Of Missing Out.

If you don't know anything about HEY, you should check out the features tour. It is a great overview that highlights many of their unique features. https://hey.com/features/the-screener

I have been using HEY for a week now, here's a thread with my first impressions 👇