Chatter Email no more
So, I just learned that Chatter Email is no longer under active development for my treo. Marc Blank has been hired from Palm and it seems unclear what the true longer term fate of Chatter will be. To be clear, chatter is the single reason my Treo is so awesome, without it the device would be much less good. Much. Chatter’s site is now down, I don’t know if that’s down for the count or not, apparently the app will still be supported but not by Marc.
Let’s take for a moment that Palm is not dead (which you may or may not need to suspend disbelief in order to take) and look at these things that Palm has been doing. First they hired a new interface guy with some chops. Now they hire a developer who single handedly developed and maintained one of the greatest treo apps there is. I think these are interesting moves - some say too little too late, that may well be the case and if so I will resent Palm all the more for killing an app so central to my phone.
On the other hand, if this a move to bring in new blood with people who actually develop and use software that is good and these people are given some power to get things done and Palm can pull out of its nose dive, this could be a good sign of things to come. Hiring Marc is great if they can really make use not only of his software skills, but his perspective on Palm as an outsider. Not to mention making VersaMail not suck, or even replacing Versa with Chatter. And if the new ex-apple guy can work some magic on the OS and the interface, it could really use some magic. Magic would definitely be the word.
We’ll see. And can you really question the greatness of Marc Blank when you realize that he was one of the guys that created Zork?? I didn’t think so.
March 11th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Sounds to me like your beloved ChatterMail will be reincarnated into something even better that will be built-into future PalmOS devices (if there ever are any — and if there are ever any worth buying again!).
March 11th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
All that you say is true and I hope that Palm gets a decent default mail app and that there are worthwhile phones to use that app from in the future. I guess we’ll find out.
March 11th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
I’ve always loved snappermail. But to be sure, an inbuilt mail application (a la Apple’s Mail.app) would be undeniably great. Maybe even coupled with a hosted component.