This whole OS X upgrade thing is still consuming way too much of my time. I need to go for a bike ride.
Installing the update from 10.1 to 10.1.3 was a huge pain in the ass, since I had had the audacity to move some apps around. The updater couldn’t find them, and so installed “stubs” containing the modified resources (but not necessarily a complete app) where it did expect them. I wound up moving the new resources into the old apps, very carefully (yes, this is possible). Then I had to delete the old stuff, which turned out not to be very easy. Seems that there was an invisible file that really didn’t want to be deleted. I wound up breaking into Terminal and using sudo rm .recalcitrant_file to take care of it. There’s probably an easier way, but I’m not sure what.
Mail clients for OS X are also a pain in the ass. Capsule reviews of the apps I’ve tried:
- Eudora
- The OS X version of this, for me, is a step backwards because I can’t seem to make it support Japanese, and Steve Dorner’s team hasn’t gotten the internationalization message. Plus the fact that it’s still beta. How long has OS X been out now?
- Mulberry
- Ugly. Weird. I’m not a UI queen, but sheesh, I spend a lot of time in my mail client, and I don’t want to have to look at that.
- Entourage
- Slow and gimmicky (it’s from Microsoft, so this is not a surprise). I’ve also read that it starts going haywire when you have a really big mail database. Mine isn’t really big, but why risk it.
- Sweetmail
- This now has a beta version for OS X, but it won’t boot to my machine. Probably checking for a Japanese OS or something.
- Powermail
- In theory this does handle Japanese, but it failed to import my old Japanese messages from Eudora correctly, which is a problem. Perhaps it would have better luck extracting them by way of Mail.app.
- Mailsmith
- I love BBEdit, especially now that it has Japanese capability, but Mailsmith still doesn’t. It has lots of other virtues, but no Japanese=no good for me. I read some criticism somewhere that it’s too expensive. Get real. How much time do we spend on e-mail? Lots. If a product can make your life easier, it’s worth a few bucks.
So that leaves us with Mail.app, which is included. That’s what I’m currently using. It has embarrassingly weak filtering (“rules”) capabilities, and a distinct paucity of keyboard commands. But it seems to be fast and reliable. I’ll switch if I find something better though.