Two and a half years ago Microsoft executives were privately green with envy over the features soon to be released in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger.

According to a report on UK web site PCPro , Microsoft’s envy was revealed in a series of emails, submitted as evidence in the Iowa antitrust lawsuit.

Mail.app and Spotlight particularly impressed Lenn Pryor, former Director of Platform Evangelism:

Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and … my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was fucking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.

Top Microsoft executive Jim Allchin was also impressed: “I don’t believe we will have search this fast,” he wrote.

The most recent batch of emails are available as a PDF file online:

In a nice tribute to Apple, the emails also reveal that Microsoft’s top executives were so taken with Tiger that they refused to share their installation discs for fear they might never get them back.

Previous emails from Allchin in the same case told how he would buy a Mac if he didn’t work for Microsoft and that Microsoft’s attempts in 2003 to come up with an iPod rival were very, very depressing.

All of this and more is available on the Comes vs Microsoft lawsuit web site. apple, microsoft, allchin, windows, searching ,spotlight, mail.appm apple mail, green eyed monster

Hawk Wings reader and iLounge writer Jesse David Hollington got to play with an iPhone briefly at MWSF and to ask Apple a few direct questions about the email client on the iPhone.

He emails to say that it was a brief encounter (five minutes with the people from Apple and a 45 second play with the device), but still:

I had noticed your entry on Hawk Wings about 30 minutes before we went in, so we were able to pose the question to Apple specifically as to whether rich-text e-mail was supported, and the answer I posted was basically their answer. When asked whether the Mail application on the iPhone was a “pared-down” version of Apple Mail, they basically responded in somewhat non-committal PR-speak.

Apple confirmed that composing in true HTML is not possible. It looks more and more like “Mail.app Mobile” to me.

You read the full write-up of the iLounge team’s impressions on the iLounge site .mail.app, apple mail, iphone, apple, rich html, html, mobile, cell phone, PR spin

The launch of the iPhone was not the biggest news yesterday.

The big story was tucked away towards the end of the Keynote, underlining a shift of which the iPhone is only a part. Apple Computer, Inc became Apple, Inc.

I don’t know how I feel about this; my heart and mind are pulled in two different directions. One the one hand, I have always been wary of iPods and the whole “digital lifestyle” thing. It seems instinctively an enormous distraction from what is really important about Apple (for me)–innovative, beautiful computers that are simply streets ahead of anything else on offer.

So, as you can imagine, I was already feeling grumpy that there was nothing about Leopard or new computer hardware or anything that I fondly imagine to be Apple’s core business in the Keynote. Then this came up, feeding all my worst fears.

On the other hand, I understand the argument that iPods, TV and iPhones are all good for Apple’s bottom line, garner it extra market share and clout and end up benefiting the part of Apple’s product line that I really care about. A kind of “trickle up” effect.

How did you feel when you saw this?

Image nicked from Engadget without permission but with thanks

I was speaking to a couple of Apple gurus via iChat today who both told me not to worry so much. The computer side of the business is ticking along nicely, the engineers are churning out the same amount of great software at the same rate and so forth. Just because Steve Jobs is so energised by the digital gadgets doesn’t mean that he is not interested in hard-core computing.

I know they must be right. But it’s so hard not to worry… apple, computers, apple inc, name change, digital lifestyle, steve jobs

It’s probably very uncool to admit this in writing, but I am an undying fan of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball .

Every now and then, he pulls a post out of his hat that sets the standard to which all other Mac bloggers can only aspire. For analysis, for insight and for clarity, he is rarely matched.

This time, he nails the recent MacHeist promotion to the floor. Completely.

Last week (in a post I missed), he set out the economics underlying the promotion.

Deconstructing the publicity material from MacHeist, he noted:

If you didn’t know any better, judging only from MacHeist’s promotional copy and statements such as Ryu’s, you might think that most of the profits from the bundle were going to the developers of the bundled applications. Not so. Most of the proceeds are going to MacHeist, and the more bundles they sell, the more disproportionate MacHeist’s share of the profit will get.

Today, he totals up the final break-down of money going to charity (US$200,000), to MacHeist and to the developers. It’s not pretty reading:

– MacHeist’s percentage share of the total profit: 87.5

– Average percentage share of the total profit for each individual developer: 1.3

MacHeist clears US$463,500; the developers share a total pool of US$66,500, with most getting a flat fee of US$5-6,000.

To see this episode as “one of the biggest successes in the history of Mac shareware” is only part of the story. It was a great deal for users. It was a fantastic deal for MacHeist. But it shafted the developers.

A deal in which two parties have a great time and one party gets (willingly?) exploited isn’t a recipe for a Mac community that flourishes in the long term. It’s just a heist.

Or as John more elegantly puts it:

MacHeist’s organizers and defenders are arguing that no one forced the participating developers to agree to their terms, and that these developers are in fact happy with how the promotion is going, and that the users who’ve purchased the bundle are delighted with the price. But none of these things are in dispute.

What’s in dispute is whether the money is being distributed equitably. Just because someone is satisfied with a bad deal doesn’t mean it isn’t a bad deal.

Developers? Let them eat cake!gruber, developers, macheist, software, apple, not apple mail, seeing the whole picture

A poster in the realmac software forum, perhaps sitting rather loosely to whatever NDA he might have signed, offers a glimpse (UPDATE: The link is dead. The post is pulled) of continued development in Leopard.

He writes:

Just installed the newest release of Leopard. Nothing major just some bug fixes around the new mail app and other minor issues. There are some new firewall settings which seem to a very nice addition.

Since this is my first year as a developer and the first time I have been able to load pre-release software I can’t say at this point that it was a very good or bad decision. Per my previous posts Leopard is an evolution of Tiger and there really are not that many things, I feel, to get excited about for most users. The integration of the calendar with mail and to do is really nice and should give users of Entourage a run for their money.

I thought that stamping out bugs before a product’s release was a dying art, so that bit sounds good.

I don’t know any more. If you do, you had better keep it to yourself.

Sadly. mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, bugs, apple, NDA, tease

Remember a few months ago there was an apparent stampede of people, headed by Mark Pilgrim, who were abandoning Macs for Ubuntu? (Although some later came back.)

Java podcaster Tim Shadel is going the other way , dumping Ubuntu after using Linux for years and stretching his legs into Mac OS X.

Since Mail.app was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Mark Pilgrim, it’s extra interesting to read Tim’s experience with Mail, compared to Evolution, his Linux mail client:

Mail.app is great. Evolution almost works. I have to use exchange at work (I have Ubuntu installed there, too). Evolution has a module to integrate with Exchange, and it sorta thinks about working. It’s slow, and frequently it hangs. So much so that I got sick of typing

ps -ef | grep evolu | grep -v grep | awk ‘{ print $2 }’ | xargs kill

that I put it in a batch file shell script. I ran it no less than twice a day, sometimes more. Calendaring almost worked, except when it didn’t. Frequently I’d send out an appointment only to figure out that my colleagues version of the appointment didn’t repeat over the right interval. I don’t blame anyone for having trouble integrating with a Microsoft product. But at the end of the day, it was still annoyingly brittle. On Mac, there’s Entourage — an M$ product to work with the M$ server. As it is, Mail.app rocks for processing my personal email really efficiently. Oh, and it can export your mail to mbox. Duh. On Ubuntu, mail almost works.

He goes on to list many more ways in which Mac OS X simply provides a superior user experience—searching, wireless, GUI, audio effects, bluetooth and more.

In the end, it’s all about an OS that (wait for it…) “just works”:

My reasons for choosing to dump Ubuntu for a Mac are almost entirely about the experience. After years of Linux work, I’m tired of fiddling. I’m tired of things that almost work. I’m ready for a change. I’m sick of the war to get things to work. I’m ready to simply Get Things Done.

mail.app, apple mail, switching, Mac osx, linux, ubuntu, apple, open-source

TUAW has launched its annual “Mail.app is terrible” post.

Last year (26 October 2005) it was What’s wrong with Apple Mail and how it needs to be fixed. Twenty TUAW got into the spirit of things and listed their gripes which were interesting to read.

This year it’s How Apple doesn’t really understand email either on the Desktop or webmail.

The general sense is that Apple hasn’t performed well:

Don’t get me started on how it’s taken our favorite fruit half a decade just to build an almost-usable email client application (certainly won’t be business-class anytime this decade). I mean, waiting until 2007 just to have a proper email client? Super. Anyone else not really digging Apple’s lame attempts to manage email?

The name of the perfect email client against which Mail.app is judged so harshly is not revealed, nor are we told what will make Leopard Mail “proper”.

Still, it’s a good place to vent frustrations or to watch other people vent theirs (if you are into that sort of thing).mail.app, apple mail, bugs, apple, webmail, dotmac, leopard Mail