Mac OS X’s Mail application has changed significantly in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). Unfortunately, as is often the case, these changes come at the expense of some new incompatibilities. One such incompatibility is between Mail 2.0 and Spell Catcher X. While most of Spell Catcher X’s features work properly in Mail, there is one […]
Mac rumour site AppleInsider has an article on Mail 2.0, the upcoming version of Mac OS X’s e-mail application that’s expected to be included in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) next year. Of course, Mail will include “smart mailboxes” whose behaviour will take advantage of Tiger’s advanced search functions. This, in itself, is rather promising, […]
The Backup application can be used to run automatic daily backups to an external hard drive. With the improvements made in the latest update (2.0.2), the process now runs smoothly most of the time. (See this article for more on problems with previous versions.) But I still experience a recurrent problem, which seems fairly easy […]
Straight from Bare Bones: Added a “List Display Font” option to the Application preferences. This option determines the size of the font used to display lists (such as message lists and mailbox lists, and pretty much every other list in the application as well). So if you want to use Papyrus 17 now, go right […]
The latest issue of TidBITS has a new review of Bare Bones Software’s email application Mailsmith 2.0, by Matt Neuburg. I agree with many of the points that Matt makes, especially about people’s strange relationship with their email program. But the article has serious flaws, which I am afraid are symptomatic of Matt Neuburg’s own […]
When I wrote about the new problems I was experiencing with Mac OS X’s Mail a few days ago, several readers chimed in to suggest that I try trashing the “Envelope Index” file in the “Mail” folder and force Mail to rebuild it. Long-time readers of this blog might remember that I am in fact […]
There’s one small thing about the real world out there that Apple’s software designers seem to have a hard time understanding: sometimes servers fail. They become temporarily inaccessible. A racoon eats through an optic fibre cable. Lightning strikes. In other words, shit happens. Unfortunately, this means that, when shit does happen, Apple’s software offers, well, […]
Yet another area of the button toolbar in Mail that does not work as expected.
Older bugs are resurfacing in Mail 3.1.
A somewhat scary problem, which then disappears without explanation.
Another one of these pretty basic text editing flaws, still there in Mail 2.x two years after the release of Tiger.
I’ve written about Apple’s Backup application before. It’s one of the things you get as part of the .Mac package. I’ve discussed the reliability problems with version 1.x and version 2.0.0. Most of these problems have been fixed in the latest update (version 2.0.2). Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that using the application is trouble-free. There […]
I’ve discussed the problems that I have been experiencing with Apple’s Backup 2.0.x application before. Version 2.0 was simply unable to perform scheduled backups reliably. At the scheduled time, the application would launch and then quit immediately. That was not exactly what I would call a reliable backup application. Things improved somewhat with the release […]
Ever since I have owned a digital camera, I have felt the need to use a powerful piece of software for managing my thousands of digital pictures. The early versions of Apple’s iPhoto were woefully inadequate in that respect. The performance levels were just unacceptably slow. I hear that things are better in iPhoto 4, […]
Ambrosia have released a new version of their flagship screen capture utility Snapz Pro X. While the interface has been significantly revamped, the only really big new feature is advanced video capture. I am a registered user of Snapz Pro X 1.0, and I use it almost exclusively for static screen shots. The Purchase Options […]