Thursday, June 27, 2002

Found this advertisement for MacOS X. Really cool, I haven't seen it before! I wonder why Apple doesn't put these ads online, as well as in newspapers. I for one, and I'm sure many other professionals, don't read the press very much nowadays. There's just too much stuff on the Internet to read daily. 12:48:58 AM

Tuesday, June 25, 2002

It's been a month since I'm on MacOS X. The consumer part is really nicely done. I love the integration with iPod for example, it's really easy to update this little device with the MP3 you just ripped by plugging in the music CD in the laptop. I guess any user of any operating system, gets into habits which are hard to accomodate on the other operating system he/she would really like to run. At least this is my case migrating to MacOS X from Linux. After more than 5 years on Linux, I really miss few things on MacOS X. I miss the freedom I have to hook into almost every application, by cracking it open and extending it to fit my needs. This is the case for example with the mail application: I used Exmh for a long time on Linux. I modified it to add various customizations I needed. I also used procmail quite a bit to sort out all the email I'm receiving daily. As I mention in an earlier post, I found MacOS X's Mail application to be quite a poor replacement to the above setup. There is no way, at least in 10.1.5 to specify multiple criterias to filter on, specify multiple actions to be taken on a message, and to filter junk mail. The last one is getting even more important nowadays with the number of junk emails reaching 100 in some bad days. Surprisingly I found Microsoft Entourage to be quite good at the above tasks. The only thing missing is the ability to remove duplicate emails, which are messages posted across multiple mailing lists. I believe it can be fixed through the use of an AppleScript action, but I still need to learn that. Unfortunately Entourage comes with Office v. X, which is quite pricey (over $400 last time I checked). In fact this is one of the first things you notice when you change a free software operating system, and move to a proprietary one, regardless of how nice it is: you have to pay for good programs, because the free software ones are not yet ported. At least not the good GUI programs. Another program I badly miss on MacOS X is XEmacs. More on this topic in my Emacs log. 2:54:47 PM

Sunday, June 9, 2002

This is the second week since I bought my PowerBook 800Mhz, a really nice machine. There are some crude things about its hardware, like the lack of a track point, delete and function keys that work without having to press the "fn" key. The software is very nice, as it reminds me of the old days of NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. However I found some programs to be really crap, especially Mail.app, which is really surprising, given the state of Mail.app in NeXTSTEP (but then this was written using the old APIs, and Apple couldn't probably convert the application easily). Its filtering capabilities need a lot of improvement. I read they're fixing this for the next Jaguar release, I can't wait for it. Since I receive about 2000 messages a day from various mailing lists, adequate filtering is essential. My procmail rules have grown so much in the past five years, I cannot manage my email without them. Unfortunately I couldn't figure a way to hook up procmail with Mail.app. In the old NeXT days, there was a command line tool, appnmail to append a new message to a mailbox. This doesn't seem to be available anymore... 12:00:09 AM

© Copyright 2002 Ovidiu Predescu.