uberchet

I remember reading this article when it came out. It's pretty terrifying.

I dunno.

I think it's a continuum, for one thing.

Phone calls are clearly sync. But IM on the desktop is, in my working life, much closer to sync than email.

I think of phone texts as attempts at unobtrusive but still mostly synchronous communication.

I can only speak to my experience, but email is very very much a part of our world in our software company. It's WAY better than Slack or other IM/group chat tool for search and archiving later -- and, let's be honest, a WHOLE LOT of stuff gets decided in email, so that's pretty important.

With a distributed team, it's even moreso. Plus, since we're distributed, the idea of email-as-document (with rich formatting and inline images) is just that much more normal.

Where? My inbox and outbox.

Obviously, people use email in different ways. This thread seems to have attracted a large number of people who exist in a text-only email world, but nearly every email I send or receive includes at least some rich formatting, and it's very common for us to include inline images of screenshots or other graphics as part of these emails.

And we're not web designers. We make project management software.

So: for me, mostly work email, though I certainly get no small number of personal mails with photos attached.

Again, that YOUR experience with email doesn't include rich text or inline images outside your spam folder doesn't mean those features are valuable and useful to other people.

I'd argue, in turn, that your experience, regardless of how many people were involved, is divergent from the way in which email itself is moving in the broader market of users.

Images as links to something else, that require an additional step, are an inferior substitute to inline images. Here in 2017, it's possible to build an email that includes tables or screenshots or other rich media that exist as part of the email itself.

This is commonly viewed as a benefit. 20 years ago, I, too, was resistant to the idea that email should be something other than plain text, but I was wrong. That ship has saild. Email today is a rich document, and rich documents often include meaningful inline images that should be stored with the document.

Again, that YOU don't like this doesn't mean it's not useful or widely used by other people.

"Literally zero reason?" Seriously?

I submit your understanding of how email works for most people in 2017 is outdated.

Email with inline images is common, useful, and not going anywhere.

Sure they should. It depends on the tools available and the culture of the organization.

You don't get to dictate what features of email people should or shouldn't use.

Apple's Mail.app has a great feature that allows inline markup of images, which is a huge boon for interface discussions and tech support emails at my company.

The extra step and use of an external program is pretty inelegant, IMO, when there exist clients that will just show you the damn image in the mail window.

Normal people don't put images in emails

This is absolutely not true. Generally speaking, people whose experience leads them to think this are in weird isolated silos where highly technical folks are overrepresented.

I would argue that for most people who actually still use email for communication with peers, images and attachments are an afterthought.

Are you actually convinced of that, or are you being inflammatory? Because, in 2017, it's hilariously far afield of most folks' email use patterns both at work and at home. Do you only ever communicate using text -- and plain text at that?

I work for a small software company - ie, full of nerds. We use screencaps marked up in email ALL THE TIME to communicate about changes and whatnot. Sure, I guess we could put it in a Word doc or HTML doc, but why bother when we can do it in the email client?

I use emacs, but exclusively for orgmode. I thought about mutt years ago, and realized I get and receive too much mail with rich content for that to work.

How does an emacs window, even with mu4e, represent emails with meaningful formatting, inline graphics, etc? I'm guessing by launching an external viewer, but even that would slow me down quite a bit.

I don't think it's a thing we can blame one side or the other for.

In the last 2-3 generations, the US has experienced a pretty huge shift from rural to urban. The difference in life experience between those two environments is pretty stark.

Someone whose family has always (let's say 2-3 generations) lived in, say, rural or suburban Mississippi is going to have exposure to and basic knowledge of firearms. Someone whose family has always lived in LA, or New York, or Chicago, probably won't.

As with many things, group A has little interest in the lives of group B, and vice versa, and so you get enormous gulfs of understanding. Firearms isn't the only one.

This is good advice. I grew up hunting and shooting, but in adulthood have come to agree that reasonable gun control is really something we have to do. However, the gun vs. anti-gun divide in the US is as pure a split as exists on any policy position. Few on one side know or understand the thinking or positions of any on the other.

People who don't shoot often don't know even the most basic things, like what differentiates a rifle from a shotgun, or what happens when a modern pistol runs out of bullets. They don't get the vast difference between a .22 and a 9mm on any level (size of projectile, powder load, etc.). And they certainly don't understand why pursuing something like a quote-unquote assault weapon ban is legislatively and logically difficult.

Um.

In what way is Dropbox more guilty of this than any other tool/service provided by a third party?

Oh, definitely. I wouldn't expect that.

But you can get pretty far down the road. That's my point.

The examples I'd hold up as useful here keep the markup simple, so that the files are still usable when viewed directly, but provide lots of other functions by being clever.

Again, Orgmode is a great example. I can (and sometimes do) use my org files outside of emacs.

Just for clarity: do you mean it sucks politically, e.g. for privacy reasons? I'm familiar with those objections for sure, but if you're saying it sucks at some other level I'd love to hear why.

Sure, they have a work-alike, but the original comment seemed to suggest that this sort of thing should just be built in at an OS level without a "product" or add-in being required to support it. I think, but can't quite articulate why, that building a competitor to Dropbox (which both Apple and MSFT have done) isn't quite the same thing.

Obviously your experience is your own, but I have yet to have a Dropbox sharing event fail for reasons other than user error (typically by unsophisticated relatives or coworkers, so I'm not suggesting at all that this was the root of your problem).

We should probably both be cautious of overgeneralizing from our own experiences with Dropbox, but the general presence of "it's easy and it works" even among the nontechnical suggests that your experience is atypical for some reason. Did you ever figure out the cause?

I could be flip and say "because Microsoft," but there's probably some truth there. Lots of very technical people reject MSFT out of hand, and for a long time it was pretty easy to understand why, but Word has always been very, very capable.

The first time I used semantic style structure in a Word doc was in Word for DOS in about 1992.

Thanks for this.

Well, it kinda depends on what you mean by "plain text" and what you mean by "support." You can get a lot of these things through text-markup systems like Markdown.

There's a growing class of editors that strive to provide a richer document experience while still relying on plain text as the file format. I don't usually suggest normal people adopt it, but an example of this kind of hybrid approach is Orgmode in emacs. I can do ALL SORTS OF THINGS with my org files, but the actual data is still just plaintext with minimal and human-readable markup. The editor does the rest of the work.

I find that promising.

It still shocks me how many folks absolutely ignore the features of Word that make it powerful. A huge one is styles.

Before we had semantic markup on the Web, Word was doing something similar with meaningful styles that could drive document structure and whatnot. It's astonishing how often I see people either manually format headings (like, referencing a postit that says "heading: bold, 14pt") or use unstructured styles instead of the actual heading options.

Word will give you a document outline in a "slide out" window that populates based on your headings. It can be HUGELY USEFUL when you're building a longer, more intricate document, and yet it's rarely used properly. It's baffling.

That's interesting, but I think the author misses the fact that lots of writing is still done with the page in mind.

That said, I absolutely do composition in tools other than Word most of the time unless I know I'm writing for print or a print-analogue (we deliver lots of work product as PDF, which may as well be printed).

What I care more about than print or nonprint, though, is file format longevity, which is why most of what I do is in plain text. That's an orthogonal concern to the issues of the piece, but it still bears discussion given how much data over time has been lost in orphaned formats.

I think you're being a little naive about what really drives features from an OS vendor here. That $vendor_A could enable seamless sync with $vendor_B is absolutely true, but the realities of competition and the market mean that technical feasibility isn't the driving factor.

I can't imagine Apple or MSFT ever offering something that would truly replace it - anything either does is likely to privilege their own OS over any other, and Dropbox has no reason to do that.

The other reason that services like Dropbox shine, at least for me, is that by providing a cloud-mediated sync solution, you don't have to coordinate a synchronous conversation between the devices in question. That's valuable, especially since it enables easy sync with > 2 devices (which also opens the door to selective sharing).

That always-there aspect is also how Dropbox became the de facto mobile file system for iOS (and Android, maybe? I'm guessing -- I'm an iOS user). It's also the default mechanism for sharing files too big or numerous for email (e.g., Aunt Sally's holiday pictures).

My tl;dr is that while Dropbox's initial value prop might not be earthshaking, it's done what it set out to do very, very well for me since I started using it 8 years ago, and I'm very glad to pay them for their service.