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Odysseus 0.8.2 Eudora-Style Email Client - First Look
Odysseus 0.8.2 Eudora-Style Email Client And Eudora On Leopard Woes
Re: Odysseus 0.8.2 Eudora-Style Email Client - First Look
Apple's "Free" Word Processor May Be All You Need
Rogers Telecom Announces Deal To Bring iPhone To Canada
AppleWorks outliner and TextEdit
RE: Musings on Lost Data
Some Musings On Lost Data - OS X Odyssey 919
iSkysoft iPod movie converter for Mac
Odysseus 0.8.2 Eudora-Style Email Client - First Look
From CubaMark
Hi Charles, how on earth did you get that 8-meg download via your dialup link?
I grabbed the Odysseus beta as soon as the link appeared - and I concur. It's the "prettiest" Eudora yet.
The BIG question for me will be, I think, the most important one of all: Will Odysseus seamlessly (and I mean *seamlessly*) read our existing Eudora mailboxes, attachment relationship and all?
I signed up for the advanced registration - not sure if it's still available - that gives you Odysseus for half-price (while also demonstrating to IDS that we're committed to buying the commercial product).
Cheers from (too darn hot) Mexico,
M.
Hi Mark;
Good to hear from you. Not hot here in Nova Scotia. We actually had several hours of wet snow on May 11, to a degree that it built up a bit on the ground. Some places in Cape Breton got 10-20 cm. Pretty late for snow, even by our standards. Lots of pack ice this year keeping temperatures down.
As for Odysseus, 8 MB download? Piece of cake. Only took about an hour and a half. :-b I also downloaded the latest 1.2 build of Pixelmator last evening - 54.1 MB. Now THAT was a challenge! Took all night, but it's amazing what you can do on dialup if you're determined.
The utterly superb interruptible download manager in Opera helps a lot.
Matt says they are working on getting Eudora mailbox import right, and I catch myself referring to it as "Eudora" myself, which I guess is a good sign.
Charles
Odysseus 0.8.2 Eudora-Style Email Client And Eudora On Leopard Woes
From Christo
Thank you Charles for the comprehensive review. I didn't realize people were making Eudora replacements.
A tech recently did me the 'favor' of upgrading my MacBook Pro from Tiger to Leopard when he replaced a fan and the HD. Needless to say, Eudora is not working so well now. I was assuming I might have to switch to Mail.
I can't wait for a full featured replacement. Will check out pre-purchase.
Christo
Hi Christo;
Glad you enjoyed the review.
Yes, Eudora is not a happy camper under Leopard, although Leopard has enough cool things about it that I haven't seriously considered going back to OS 10.4 Tiger, which I easily could since I still have Tiger installed on a separate partition of my hard drive.
I don't know what your setup is, but even on my middle aged 1.33 GHz 17" PowerBook, I've found that Eudora 6.2.4 is still more tolerable than Mail or Thunderbird.
f you haven't already done this, Qualcomm has posted a compatibility note for Eudora wiyh OS X 10.5.2 Leopard.
In order for Macintosh Eudora to work well under OS X 10.5.x 'Leopard', you need to turn off the use of specific sounds in Eudora. These are the sounds Eudora plays when you get new mail or Eudora needs your attention, or are played by Filters. The sounds that are problematic are the ones that contain 'Eudora' in their name as they were created using a sound synthesizer that Leopard does not support. To disable or change the sounds used in Eudora, do the following:
Turn off or change the 'New Mail' and "Attention" sounds:
• Open Eudora->Preferences and select the 'Getting Attention' panel
• In the 'Sounds' section, for both 'New mail sound' and 'Attention sound', select a sound OTHER than one that has 'Eudora' in its name (ie. NOT 'Eudora Attention', 'Eudora New Mail' nor 'Eudora Short Warning')
• Click OK to the close the Preferences
Turn off sounds triggered by filters:
• Open Window->Filters
• Look through all your filters for filters that have a 'Play Sound' action.
• Select a sound that does NOT have 'Eudora' in its name, or disable sounds all together by selecting 'None' from the action popup menu.
I've done this, and it does seem to improve Eudora performance in Leopard a bit while I wait for Odysseus.
Charles
Re: Odysseus 0.8.2 Eudora-Style Email Client - First Look
From Dave
Thanks for the very thorough review. You saved me the time of looking at this beta myself.
Dave
Thanks, Dave, glad you liked the review.
Charles
Apple's "Free" Word Processor May Be All You Need
From Scott
The inclusion of a good word processor brings back memories of the original Macs. MacWrite was included free of charge with all Macs from 1984-1986 and was a pretty decent word processor for its day. Sure, it had a limit of eight pages and no built-in spell checker, but for 1984 the WYSIWYG concept was revolutionary. Plus, who could forget the classic Apple fonts?
Once MacWrite became a retail product, we had to put up with TeachText, probably the most limited word processor in Mac history, and then SimpleText, which was about as powerful as the original MacWrite (minus the page limit). TextEdit has always impressed me, even its original version (the one that came with OS X 10.0 back in 2001).
I use the Leopard version of TextEdit whenever I need to take notes on my MacBook simply because it's faster and less resource-consuming than Pages, although if it comes to making documents look nice, I prefer Pages mostly for its ease of use and interface (which has always reminded me somewhat of MacWrite Pro).
I haven't seen what Vista has to offer in terms of basic word processor, but the XP version of WordPad is far inferior to TextEdit. It doesn't have a spell checker, for example (which I consider to be a key feature of a word processor). However, Microsoft does have a one-up on Apple right now in that Paint is bundled with Windows. We used to have MacPaint a long time ago. Where is our free paint program???
(BTW: The open-source Paintbrush program works pretty well if you need basic painting tools on the Mac).
Hi Scott;
Thanks for the nostalgic reverie. Brings back some memories. I missed out on the original version of MacWrite. My first Mac, a used Plus, came with Word 4 installed, so I cut my Mac word processing teeth on it and soon upgraded to Word 5.1, which is a great program and ironically, given my disdain for most Microsoft software, was in my estimation probably the best Mac word processor I've ever used.
What I used TeachText for mainly on the Plus was peace and quiet. The Plus, as you MacBook Pro recall, had no internal cooling fan, and I could shut down the external hard drive, boot from a floppy (800k max) with a barebones operating system installed and still just enough room for the TeachText app, and some document storage, which rendered blissfully silent computing save for the keyboard, which was noisy, and ocasional grunts from the floppy drive.
I like small, quick and nimble applications too, so I'm definitely with you on the TextEdit vs. Pages comparo. I find that my 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook struggles a bit with Pages, but TextEdit (and Tex Edit Plus) fly, and yes, Pages reminds me a lot of MacWrite Pro a lot too.
Yup; Apple really does need a bundled basic bitmap graphics program. ClarisWorks/AppleWorks filled that role quite well (on consumer Macs) before it was killed off. I like Text Edit better than the AppleWorks word processor, but the Paint module was quite good. PaintBrish does a decent job for freeware, although the best free bitmap graphic editors I've tried are Seashore and ImagJ. Both are quite powerful, and Seashore especially reminds me a lot of MacPaint and thw AppleWorks Paint module.
Charles
Rogers Telecom Announces Deal To Bring iPhone To Canada
From Terry
Hello Applelinks:
For the last year I've had the pleasure of 'sticking it to the man'. Ted Rogers. As many Canadians, I took the quick trip to Buffalo NY last June and bought an iPhone (yes at the full 6 big). I quickly unlocked it and used my existing Rogers $20 per month rate to use everything but the smart voicemail. My internet access was via wifi, because Roger's does not have, God forbid, an unlimited usage plan.
When the new iPhone comes out (late June 08), I'll buy it at the local Canada Apple store (if available, probably not) or make the trip to Buffalo (your gas is still way cheaper!).
Since, contrary to recent erroneous media reports, Rogers does not offer unlimited internet plans, it will be interesting to see how much 'gouging' Rogers user fees will be. Regrettably, Canadian consumers have a long history of non-competitive, restraint of trade business practices (and Ted Rogers is one of the best). Pure Enronomics (see Note)!
I'm sure the new iPhone will be unlocked. I may even continue to use my current $20 per month Rogers account. And continue 'sticking it to the man' as, I'm sure many other educated Canadian's will. But more likely I'll use Voip over wifi.
Terry
Note: The Rogers press release didn't bother to mention that the usual Canadian media suspects (Rogers, Bell and Shaw) partition Canada (restraint of trade!), severely 'traffic shape' and routinely 'package drop' any encrypted (bit-torrent) data traffic. All with the full cooperation of the CRTC (the equivalent of your FCC).
AppleWorks outliner and TextEdit
From Eric Matthieu
Although I don't have Leopard installed on my Macs, I would echo Brettcamp's comments re: TextEdit, Bean, and NeoOffice. Bean 1.1 launches much, much quicker than NeoOffice — that alone makes it my first choice. Bean is just a slick little program all-around without bloat.
There was some question of whether AppleWorks had basic outlining. I don't use it but it seems to be there, with its very own menu too (if the dubbed "Outline" is to be believed, wink-wink). A quick check of AW Help revealed some helpful hints/tutorials on creating, using, and changing outlines too.
Cheers,
Eric
Thanks for the info, Eric.
I'm going to revisit Bean soon.
Charles
RE: Musings on Lost Data
From Mike;
Such things do happen sometimes.
Another option might be SpellCatcher X by
http://www.rainmakerinc.com
This really is an interactive global (and batch checking too) spelling checker for OS X. I have used it for years.
SpellCatcherX has an additional feature called Ghostwriter which does the same thing, recording keystrokes typed in other programs (including parts of the OS X system like System Preferences) and stores them for specified (configurable) time periods on your hard disk sorted by dates and the program in which the keystrokes were entered.
As you mentioned in commenting on KeyStrokes Recorder, SpellCatcher's Ghostwriter would suffer the same problems in attempting to completely recover your lost work, as it records keystrokes actually entered or typed. This includes typos, all changes, modifications etc and would not be in a clean slate and most likely made a mess of copy & pasted items as well.
But it is another alternative.
As usual, greatly enjoy your Applelinks.com articles.
Best Regards
Mike
Hi Mike;
Thanks for the comment. I used to use SpellCatcher back in the day with the Classic OS as a freestanding spellchecker with Tex Edit Plus, but have never had the opportunity to sample the OS X version.
The OS X version of TE+ supports the built-in OS X spell checker, which I find adequate, so there has been no incentive to look farther for that function.
As I noted, I'm not sure that in this instance a keystroke recorder would have been much help, but thanks for the suggestions.
Charles
Some Musings On Lost Data - OS X Odyssey 919
From David
Other solutions to prevent or minimize data loss are to use Time Machine (which backs up on the hour), auto-save, or, for those worried about saving over a good copy, Software like Pages that keeps a backup of your prior save. For the truly paranoid, BBEdit can keep every save as a time stamped version of the file, which permits easy rollback to any prior version.
Hi David;
I use Time Machine for periodic backups on my main workstation computer, but the machine I was working with at the time of the incident I mentioned is an old Pismo PowerBook running OS 10.4.
The Pages "belt-and-suspenders" redundant save feature sounds like it could be great insurance, and BBEdit even more so.
However, this sort of thing hasn't been a big problem for me. I can't remember exactly when the last time I lost a significant amount of unsaved data.
Of course, this data had been saved and then was overwritten due to human error (mine) and the somewaht novel circumstance of having the same document open in two applications simultaneously.
Thanks for the tips.
Charles
iSkysoft iPod movie converter for Mac
From Fliuhui
Hi Applelinks News Team:
I came across a software site and found an excellent FREEware named iskysoft iPod movie converter for mac, I downloaded and tried, it's free(to my disappointment, it has a limit of 50 free conversions),but very powerful !
I hope more Mac users know that via your great website...
The product is here <http://www.iskysoft.com/ipod-movieconverter-mac.html>http://www.iskysoft.com/ipod-movieconverter-mac.html
Thanks for your time.
best wishes.
Fliuhui
***
Charles W. Moore
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