Random list of updates today:
- LAM/MPI version 7.1 has finally hit beta!. It’s about time. :-)
- Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis are now two shows into the new season. Tracy and I are both enjoying them. Ok, yes, we’re geeks. We’ve known this for a long time.
- More and more people are getting Mac’s. I think I mentioned in a previous entry that Darrell K. got a powerbook. Just the other day, Weikuan Y. got an ibook. Woo hoo!
- I bought a subscription to Wired magazine the other day from a door-to-door salesman (some kid). I’m such a sucker.
- Tracy is very much into the Tour de France. Go Lance go (like there’s any doubt).
I’ve switched to the native Mail.app client for OS X. This is a huge switch for me because I’ve been a die-hard pine user for many, many years. Pine is a very, very good mailer with one significant disadvantage: it can’t [yet] do offline e-mail (e.g., see the last known state of your inbox while you’re not connected to a network). The OS X Mail client can, and it has rockin’ search features — although pine’s search features also rock, Mail.app can search multiple folders at once, which pine cannot.
The straw that broke my back and caused me to switch was the realization that I am using my powerbook for 100% of my computer usage. So I always have Mail.app. More specifically, my Big Reasons for not switching away from pine were two fantastic features that pine supports and no one else does (although I don’t know why — they’re killer features): a) the ability to store your pine settings on the server, and b) the ability to store your addressbook on the server. Both of these are tremendously useful when you access your mail from a variety of different machines (like I used to do). However, now that I do everything on my powerbook, I don’t need this portability. So I switched to Mail.app.
It’s my first GUI mail client, well, ever. I was forced into using Outlook while I was at Ft. Huachuca, but I don’t really count that. It’s taking some getting used to — I’m not used to having to move a mouse to read mail and perform common mail actions; my fingers still type out the familiar-from-years-of-use pine keystrokes. But it’s going well. With Mail.app’s rockin’ search capabilities, I’m really re-thinking my use of folders on the server — I have ditched a lot of them, and may actually end up with very few folders. We’ll see how this plays out.
One thing that I really like about Mail.app is that now my IM clients (yes Adium too!), e-mail client, and calendaring now all share a common addressbook. Now if only I would get a bluetooth-enabled cell phone, it would be uniform there, too…
Brian tried a beta version of Tiger (the next version of OS X), and it had some really neat features (newer version of iChat, incredible searchability that Windows/Longhorn has been promising literally for years, etc.), but it was still too buggy. I’m sure it’ll stabalize up before it’s final release (IIRC, later this year?). I’ll definitely buy it when it comes out. :-)