After a week in which the blogosphere dissected the keynote from every angle, frantically hunted for new hidden features in Leopard and evaluated how much of it is really new and/or useful, it’s time for a round up of the “general view” on Leopard Mail.

HTML Templates suck

The new HTML templates were never going to be a big hit in the blogosphere. MacSlash writer acaben speaks for many :

…they’ve now made it EASIER to send out craptastic HTML email. Apparently, mail.app didn’t suck hard enough as it was, so they had to spend all of their engineering dollars making it as annoying as possible, instead of, you know, making it work well. WTF.

Pierre Igot at Betalogue has a similar view :

Real Mail users in the real world are just hoping to get decent performance and a proper interface for managing tens of thousands of archived emails. Instead, we get “30 professionally designed stationery templates.” Yet more crappy HTML email! Grrrrreat.

I share the same dislike of HTML in email, but I think it is time for bloggers to pause and take a collective deep breath. We are not like other people. Other people like HTML email a lot. Jim Puls attempts a defence of the new templates and HTML in email:

HTML e-mail exists so that you might be able to communicate with people better by more richly expressing yourself.

Productivity enhancements

Notes, to-dos and the inclusion of RSS feeds for extra information-processing focus were greeted more positively. Although these features are not new and are (partially) available to Mail users now through the work of third-party developers, Apple will present them in a more polished form. When Apple eats its children, it always makes a good job of the meal (remember Konfabulator? RIP).

Overall, restrained praise is the general tone. These things are welcome but not overwhelming.

Chris Clark at decaffeinated represents the tone of many blog posts I’ve read in the last week:

The system-wide ToDo server is a very cool idea, but everything else about the Mail preview perturbs me. Stationery? Great, more (no doubt standards-ignorant) HTML email. Thank god for hidden preferences that force plain text display by default. A notes mailbox is pretty cool, so long as it plays nice with IMAP servers (I worry that it won’t), and RSS is a gimme. Next.

Paul Thurrott seems conflicted . On the one hand he says the new features are welcome; on the other:

Apple’s Mail application (often called Mail.app in reference to its beginnings on the NeXT platform) is being updated with some truly lame features: Stationary, notes, to-do notes, and RSS. Ugh. These aren’t major features, and they’re certainly not worthy of the time Jobs gave them during the keynote.

Macworld presents an extended evaluation of Leopard Mail. It likes the new features but remains unimpressed in general:

New bells and whistles, such as Notes, To Dos, RSS support, and stationery templates, expand the program’s reach and make it more of a multitasking tool. However, if you’re using a third-party e-mail application because you need powerful management features not offered by Mail, these additions alone aren’t likely to change your mind.

Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, HTML, keynote, Leopard, mail.app, Notes, preview, to dos, views