Walt Mossberg (WSJ) loves Xobni | Hacker News Reader

Walt Mossberg (WSJ) loves Xobni

online.wsj.com

34 pointsbrezina15 comments

I love it as well but I had to ditch it. I'm anxiously awaiting the words "dramatically improved Outlook start up time" on their blog.

really? It's not noticeably slower for me.

The older beta was fine for me as well. Over time it slowly got slower and eventually got to the point where I had to wait two minutes for Outlook to open. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I have five accounts in Outlook? PC is decent enough at 3ghz with 2gb of ram. I miss xobni but it had to go.

Why do you close outlook...?

To save resources?

Wrong question.

Yeah, it gets really bad for me, too. I had to uninstall it. I have like 6 gigs of historical emails, though. Maybe I'm atypical, but it just slowed down Outlook to a crawl after a while.

RE startup time, we know it's an issue and we continue to work on it.

RE slow during normal Outlook usage, please email me if you'd like to try it again with level 3 support. I'd love to figure out what's going on in your case. adam dot smith at startup-name.com. Thanks.

If I had to guess, it's because overnight, maybe, it does a lot of indexing that forces pretty much everything to swap out to disk? And maybe with everything paged-out, the whole machine is slow when I need it the most? It just doesn't seem to ever really recover, though.

Google's old desktop search product (haven't used it in a while) had that kind of problem which made it really painful to use since it did background indexing frequently back then.

I'll reinstall and drop you an email if I see the problem return. It happened twice, once before you launched publicly and again after. Now, though, I have a laptop with >1GB of memory so maybe it won't be quite as bad?

Thanks a lot for responding.

That's very possible. We should try halving the heavy sync frequency and see if that affects our uninstall rates.

If so there are various ways to fix it, from win32 stuff to more intelligent sync'ing to using new sync APIs in certain cases.

We've been working on this kind of stuff for two years, and still have a ways to go. : ) Looking forward to hearing how it goes!!

Best, Adam

Congratulations guys! Incredible review from a tough critic...

Forgive me if this question has been asked countless times already, but is Xobni going to be available for anything besides Outlook?

Does anything else suck as badly as outlook?

Congrats to Xobni on the great publicity. Was this in the print version as well?

It comes out in print tomorrow in the WSJ

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