Engadget has published the results of its shoot-out between Vista and Leopard. Naturally, Mail.app and iCal win over Windows Mail and Windows Calendar.

In fact, to cut to the chase, Leopard wins the features shoot-out with 46 points to Vista’s 41.

Thinking about this exercise put me in mind of Umberto Eco’s well-known comparison between Macs and PCs, which he published in the Italian news magazine Espresso in 1994.

It is worth quoting at length:

…Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It’s an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ‘ratio studiorum’ of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach–if not the Kingdom of Heaven–the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revellers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions; when it comes down to it, you can decide to allow women and gays to be ministers if you want to…..

And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic…

Which is more whimsical: the attempt to compare the feature sets of Vista and Leopard on the assumption that they rest on some notional level playing field or structuralism gone wild in correlating computers with Christian denominations?

What spirit of prophecy lead Eco to pair Anglicanism’s current troubles so precisely with the ever-increasing torment of Windows users? apple, not apple mail, not mail.app, windows, vista, leopard, catholicism, protestantism, Anglicanism, whimsy, switching, conversion

I’ve been using Leopard for long enough now to collect five tips that save me time and effort. Let me pass them on to you.

Find emails faster in Leopard Mail

Before Leopard it was possible to find emails in the list view of a mailbox faster by using the Mail Type Select plugin. With this installed, Mail.app jumped to the first message that matched your keystrokes, just as Finder does. So typing “Ros” quickly found the first email in the mailbox from Rosemary.

Now this feature is built into Leopard Mail by default. Try it out. It makes a difference.

Do your sums faster

Now that I am a Dean and need to set and manage budgets, I need to do sums more than ever before. A nice new feature in the Spotlight window, does your sums for you.

Just type in an equation, say, “12 * 34″ and Spotlight goes to Calculator and does the sum for you, giving you the answer in the Spotlight results. Nifty.

Edit iCal to-dos and events faster

In Tiger you could edit events and to-dos from the information pane. Now, iCal’s sidebar has gone to God. To edit an iCal item, you need to double-click it, wait for the details pane and then click again on the edit button on the bottom.

These extra clicks add up over time. Especially if, like me, you live in a fluid world in which tasks and meetings are always changing.

Luckily, there is a short cut to get straight to editing an event or a to-do.

Click once on the iCal item to highlight it. Then press ⌘-e (Command + ‘e’) and you launch into an edit dialog straight away.

Create better iCal events in Mail faster

Hovering the mouse over a name or details of an event in Leopard Mail activates Leopard’s Data Detector and produces a drop box with the option to add it to Address Book or iCal.

That’s pretty smart, but there is something even smarter lurking here.

If you block all a contact’s information before you hover over the name, for example, or details of an event for iCal, the data detector pastes all the information into the new contact’s or event’s notes field.

Get more out of iCal’s Dashboard Widget

The iCal Widget in Leopard has a secret up its sleeve. If you click on it once, it displays the monthly calendar we all knew and loved in Tiger.

Click on it once more, and it pulls your events for the day out into a third pane:

I get this information more easily from MenuCalendarClock, but if I didn’t have it, I’d value it here. UPDATE: Thirty seconds after posting this I found a smarter Dashboard solution.

[Via macOSXHints , TUAW , trial and error and poking around]mail.app, apple mail, ical, leopard, productivity, tips, dashboard, events, to-dos, calculator, spotlight, apple, widget

In a post on his web site , Chris Messina wonders why Apple doesn’t extend its Coverflow technology as a way of “browsing people”.

Formerly a member of the development team for Flock (“The Social Browser”), he once toyed with idea himself.

He has mocked up a vision of how this might look in Address Book:

Image shamefacedly nicked without any kind of permission from Chris’ post

The possibilities, he suggests, are enormous:

Imagine this kind of view showing up in Mail.app, Adium, iChat… where your friends, family and the rest get to update their own user pictures on a whim, and set their status and contact preferences in a way that visually makes sense.

This is a terrific idea. One of the best things about Mail is its human face.

Pulling the photos from contacts in Address Book and displaying them in their emails makes my day more personal. It humanises the time I spend emailing and reminds me that I am really dealing with the people behind the emails, not just with text. In fact, this was one of the reasons why I switched from PCs to Macs a few years ago.

For the same reason, I really like the iFaces notification utility, which still worked under Tiger but sadly may not work anymore. It sat on the Desktop and displayed the faces of people who had written newly arrived and unread emails (see screenshot on the right).

It’s another small way to give email a human face.

Of course, Chris is talking about something far more adventurous than that. I’m only imagining how good it would to have that contact information to hand in the results of a “Spotlight: Xxxx Xxxx” search from the Contextual Menu in Mail.app. Chris’ vision is more informed and his horizon wider.

UPDATE: As Aaron Harnly points out in the comments, you can get a rough and ready experience of what this might be like, by browsing your ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/Metadata folder with Coverflow in Finder:

You can even use it to play the “face recognition game” Aaron describes. Hours of funmail.app, address book, contacts, coverflow, spotlight, apple, leopard

François La Roche emails a nice little tip for quickly quitting an open app that was news to me.

As everybody know, you can cycle through your open apps by hitting ⌘-Tab. What you might not know (I didn’t), is the ⌘-Tab feature has another trick up its sleeve.

You can also close open apps by keeping the
⌘ key pressed and then hitting the “Q” key while cycling over the application you want to close:

François reports that it seems to works with all apps, although not if the app needs to do something before closing like saving a file.

Thanks, François!not apple mail, not mail.app, productivity, tips, quit, apple, macosx

According to a rumour on the well-respected Ars Technica web site, Mac 10.5 Leopard will not only be later than expected, but it will not provide support for Input Managers.

Input Manager plugins will no longer be allowed, the article claims. It cites “sources” who say that “Apple isn’t really broken up about it since InputManagers were often used for nefarious purposes anyway.”

I’ve had a number of emails from Hawk Wings readers who are worried about the future of one or another of the many, many plugins available for Mail.app.

The good news is that the vast majority of plugins are not constructed as Input Managers and so will not be affected.

The notification utility iAlert will be though, as well as a number of excellent plugins for other apps, like the Inquisitor search plugin for Safari.

The Input Manager that allows TextMate to be used as an external editor for Mail and many other apps (a “nefarious purpose” if ever there was one!) will also sadly disappear, although I very much hope that Allan Odgaard will reinvent it in another format.

UPDATE: Jon Hicks has written more on the impact of this change on Safari and its various plugins.

[Thanks to Geoff, Dan, David et al.]mail.app, apple mail, input managers, leopard, plugins, textmate, osx, apple

Mark/Space has released SyncTogether , the commercial version of the app formerly known as MySync, which syncs Address Book, iCal, Mail (and more) data between multiple Macs.

It’s quite clever as you can see from one, two, three previous Hawk Wings posts.

SyncTogether will interest two sorts of people; those with more than Mac and members of workgroups and families who need to keep data in sync across multiple Macs, whether they are on the local network or working remotely.

After establishing a main server and workgroup, registering other Macs to sync to and choosing what data to include, its interface allows for easy control of the sync process:

While it was in development MySync was freeware. SyncTogether is not; a licence for up to three Macs costs $49.95.

But make sure you read the list of known issues before parting with your money.

If you are very hardcore or frightened by the price tag, take a look at “Making your own .Mac“.

You can download a 14 day demo it from the Mark/Space web site .

UPDATE: Apologies. I could have sworn that I was rewarded with a screen mentioning a 14 day demo when I clicked “register later”, but I was hallucinating.mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, syncing, dotMac, .Mac, apple

The BBC will shut the “minority of consumers who either do not use Microsoft or do not have an up-to-date Microsoft operating system” out of its new on-line, on-demand services, according to proposals put up for public comment by the British broadcaster.

The restriction is driven by DRM concerns as the BBC outlines in a weighty (652KB) PDF of its new plans. It intends to place all content on the net for seven days after the initial broadcast, so that users can “catch-up” on shows they have missed.

But it won’t be a free-for-all:

In respect of the seven-day catch-up over the internet service, the files would require DRM to ensure that they were appropriately restricted in terms of time and geographic consumption. The only system that currently provides this security is Windows Media 10 and above. Further, the only comprehensively deployed operating system that currently supports Windows Media Player 10 and above is the Windows XP operating system. As a result of these DRM requirements the proposed BBC iPlayer download manager element therefore requires Windows Media Player 10 and Windows XP. This means the service would be unavailable to a minority of consumers who either do not use Microsoft or do not have an up-to-date Microsoft operating system.

Mac users (and others) will take some comfort from hopes of a less proprietary future:

However, over time, technology improvements are likely to enable even more efficient methods of delivery. Further, it is our understanding the BBC Executive are working towards the iPlayer download manager being able to function on other operating systems.

If you have strong views about these things or simply like your media free of proprietary constrictions, the BBC welcomes comments .

[Via Boing-Boing -- Thanks, Conrad]

UPDATE: According to fifthdecade, who posts in the comments below,

Microsoft are getting a 2 year exclusivity deal which they haven’t paid for. It’s a scandal! That alone must be worth millions to Microsoft if next year’s Premier League football TV coverage is worth £600 million!

Read more on his blog.microsoft, DRM, BBC, cross-platform, media player, data security, apple, linux