The Samsung mail client

Samsung has put their own email client with IMAP/POP3 support on the phone. And I’ve never used an email client with so many fundamental flaws:

• it considers all mail it has not read itself to be unread on IMAP. (Yes, IMAP!)
• you cannot copy text from received emails (!!!)
• it does not support threading
• folders are shown as an horizontal bar at the top. This is not helpful if you have 50+ folders
  • oh, and you cannot move/copy mails to folders anyway
• the “new mail” notification does not show subjects, only number of mails received
• responding to mail does a fullquote and puts the text to the top; and no, there’s no way to do it another way

And I forgot, it looks really ugly.

Fortunately there’s K9Mail on the Android market that does most of these things better. But for an out-of-the-box experience (how many people exactly will be spending time looking for alternative clients) this is really bad. You can do better, Samsung.

Samsung's Mail app

One of the most notable things (a 3rd generation iPod touch being my companion for over a year now) is the less-than-stellar performance of most things on the Samsung. I believe it’s caused more by the software than the hardware, the Samsung Galaxy sports a 1GHz processor and 512 MB of memory.

My most prominent (and hardest to bear) examples (using the unofficial Froyo images found on the web; performance was worse in 2.1):

• clicking buttons often  does not offer any feedback (> 30% of the cases, more like 70% if the phone has been running for some time)., so you’re always wondering if the phone actually recognized your clicks  This makes for a terrible user experience since it often takes 3-10 seconds to launch applications.
• When someone calls you, the phone rings, the screen goes dark and after around 3 seconds the screen lights up again and you see who’s calling. This is pretty ugly for a device that’s dominantly a phone! (This was really bad with 2.1, around 10 sec)
• The clock runs 7 minutes late after a single day of use. The C.L.O.C.K, can you believe it?
  
• battery drain is really bad. Even mild use of 3G (downloading one small app, checking facebook once, twitter twice) means that the battery is down to 25% ofter one day (no phone use). This means you cannot take this device with you (on a trip) if you cannot be sure that you can charge it overnight. This also makes the navigation applications useless because the battery will not survive a trip longer than 2-3 hours.
• applications seem to use blocking updates which makes the system unresponsive (instead of updating in the background in a separate thread). This should be blamed on the applications (since background updates are even advertised as best practice by Google) but the prevalence of applications that present a “wait or force close” screen after updates is high. Even Google’s Listen stalls on me every few minutes. I hope, developer education will solve this one.
• You see the “force close” screen much to often. This is almost certainly caused by generally low quality of apps in the Android market but even apps delivered stock with the phone crash way to often.

These are my top-level frustrations and I think there are conceptual reasons for them:

• The code produced by the Dalvik VM is still much slower than machine-specific code.
• the Android OS gives applications a lot of freedom (which is a good thing), allowing them to do things in a non-optimal way
• there is no review of applications enforcing strong quality standards. This is two-faced. It allows for innovation and crazy ideas but allows for a lot of bad user experience. I guess, even the apps produced by Google, Facebook or twitter might be better if they had to go through an Apple store-like review process.

In the end, it’s still really hard to write good, working software. It’s even harder to write software that has a good user experience. And it’s still a lot harder to do this for smartphone-type devices where functionality is more limited and user experience is the only thing that really counts.

I love that now there i strong competition to the iPhone, but (at least for me) Android does not deliver, yet. But I’m not giving up. The platform does have a lot of interesting concepts (think of Intents, e.g.).

I looked at WordPress while writing my Diploma Thesis and found that WordPress lacks important means for consistent type-checking:

1. There is no centralized definition (regexps and constraints) for all the data ‘types’ WordPress uses
2. There is no general agreement on exactly when and how input and output filtering and sanitation take place. This leads to ad-hoc solutions like the one causing the current vulnerability.

What WordPress really needs is a better architecture that solves the two problems stated above and as such makes vulnerabilities like this recent one very unlikely, not ever more ad-hoc hacks. Unless the WordPress project is willing to spend considerably effort on the architecture, using WordPress for professional means will become an intolerable liability. Software Engineering is about long-term stability and dependability, established in the process, not about “if you update your WordPress every few days, you’re safe” (as Matt Mullenweg suggested).