Leander Kahney loves the way that Apple Mail reformats the date 
of an email on the fly as you resize the Date column in the List Viewer.
Other clients display an ellipsis or just chop the date off, but Mail is in a class of its own:
…only Apple’s Mail actually changes the format. When I first discovered this, I sat there delighted, making the column wide and then narrow, beaming as the date format switched smoothly and seamlessly between numbers and text to perfectly fit the space allocated.
Part of the magic of this discovery was the serendipity. If it had been a “feature” — a behavior purposely brought to my attention by Apple — I would have shrugged and said, “so what?” But because I discovered it by accident, it struck me as artisan touch; a craftsman’s attention to detail.
For him it is a reminder of the repeated way in which “Apple delights with its focus on the user experience”.
Surely it is just coincidence, but it is nice to read Leander’s epiphany after a month in which Mail.app gave Mark Pilgrim an excuse to switch away from OS X altogether.
Tim, that last paragraph should read:
“Surely it is just coincidence, but it is nice to read Leander’s epiphany after a month in which Mail.app gave Mark Pilgrim an excuse to switch away from OS X altogether.”
Thanks, Jeff. That is more elegant.
Apple Mail has a few of these treats waiting to be discovered.
I use threads which, more often than not, conveniently group emails together to form a good bird’s eye view of a conversation. At times, however, many disparate emails are bound together due to similar subject lines such as “hello” or “just checking in.” In all cases, there is a summary in the preview pane which includes a summarization of attachments: 1 item, 2 items, 5 items, etc.
I recently discovered a large thread with the number of attachments summarized thusly: “lots”
Tears were shed, I was laughing so hard. Kudos to the developer for knowing when the mundane details ceased to be important.
Hi,
another thing about the dates I noticed: It changes in real time: Keep the application open during midnight and you’ll notice all “Today”s change to “Yesterday” while the application is open and without any user interaction.
I doubt any other mail program does that.
Philip
Oh, my goodness, if the fanboys can’t cope with someone’s preferring to switch, they’re even worse than I imagined. Mark had reasons not “excuses”, boys, and the real or imagined deficiencies of Apple’s Mail did not loom large in them.
As it happens, I think Mark was mistaken in his understanding of the export facility in Mail. It seems very similar to that in other clients I’ve looked at on several platforms.
However, I think he is right on the button in pointing to the need for open formats. And even if others are not concerned by that matter, that must be regarded as an irrelevance to him, since he is.
Nick, I agree with you that someone preferring to switch is no big deal.
However, Mark put it on the record that the deficiencies in Mail.app were precisely the reason he switched, or at the very least, “the last straw”.
I try to be relaxed and laid back about most things, but I can’t help being a little niggled when Mail.app is dragged through the mud for the wrong reasons. There are good reasons to drag Mail.app through the mud; why not choose one of those?
I try not to be a zealot. I have a love/hate relationship with apple, so the only reason i’m ever mistaken for a zealot is my hate/hate relationships with most other software companies.
I use Mail, after rejecting many alternatives. I do appreciate the nice throughtful touches in Mail … but I’m annoyed by some of the bigger picture problems it has. Mail wins not because it’s great, but because in my experience the alternatives also had big-picture problems, but lacked Mail’s niceties.
I praise Apple’s achievements. But in my perfect world, their fanatical (but oh so uneven) attention to detail would represent the floor, not the ceiling, of what we’d all expect from software.
Has Leander never used the Finder before? Mail took the collapsing-date idea from the Finder, which has had this feature since Mac OS 8.0. Go ahead, switch your Finder window to list view and resize the date columns.
We looked forward to using all of the Mac software that came bundled with our new eMac at our small business.
We have never gotten Apple’s Mail program to work on our eMac running OSX 10.3.9. Even a “genius” at the Victoria Gardens Apple store could fix what we think is probably a configuration problem. It continually asks us to enter a password but it does not like it. How about if it were possible to just not use a password? We would like that a lot.
So we think it’s a worthless app. for us We gave up on the frustrating thing and use online email, yahoo.
That’s a terribly depressing story, vanax. I’m not a genius, but if you dropped me an email I would be willing to see if there is a way to get Mail to work for you.
A lifetime condemned to Yahoo! seems very unfair.