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.mail.app, apple mail, user interface, usability, happy users, apple, mac osx

For the third time in as many weeks, someone whose opinion is worth listening to has given .Mac a proper spanking.

At Tao of Mac, Rui Carmo takes the hatchet to Apple’s online service, and he doesn’t leave much standing after he is finished going through its features one-by-one.

Like previous recent critics (first wave and second wave), Rui is bewildered both by .Mac’s poor value for money and its lack of innovation:

My main point is that .Mac isn’t the benefit it’s touted to be, and that I can come up with a number of enhancements and added features that would make it worthwhile for me to keep my .Mac subscription and push Apple’s online services ahead of the pack where it regards mobility.

It’s not satisfying the geeky end of the Mac user market. It’s not doing too well at the other end either:

On the other hand, if Apple thinks their target market for .Mac is the I-don’t-want-to-understand-computers folk, they may be falling quite short of the mark – because it doesn’t work consistently right even for those people (if you’ve never had issues with .Mac, you’re very lucky).

Rui’s writing is dense and value-packed. I sometimes come away with my head spinning but I’m always glad I took the trouble. Try it yourself. mail.app, apple mail, .Mac, dotmac, idisk, sync, ichat, apple, usability, innovation, ouch!

Gabor Cselle has posted some examples of innovative email client design which break the three-pane “Folder -> Email list -> Selected Message” design straight-jacket, popularised by Outlook (and now also available in Mail.app).

The central problem with email clients, he suggests, is not getting rid of Junk emails; it’s learning how to deal more cleverly and efficiently with what’s left:

Today, we seem to be at a point where it seems like we might be able to solve the spam problem. But the problem of figuring out which of the non-spam emails is important, and what it relates to, still exists.

He presents three creative attempts to solve that problem.

TaskMaster , developed by XEROX at PARC in 2003, puts your tasks at the top of the hierarchy, with emails and attachments related to that task grouped underneath:

Click image for a full-sized view

Bifrost from Lotus Research organises email on the basis of who sent it, rather like Microsoft’s SNARF project. It relies on you to nominate important contacts and organise contacts by their various relationships to you. After that, email is orgnaised for you in a “social” or relationship-based hierarchy.

Lastly he considers “cool features” like contact maps and thread arcs in ReMail from IBM , both of which structure your emails or contacts in more useful ways than the folder-email-selected email model:

Your mind does stop for a minute when you read something like this.

You suddenly realise how much time you spend making the three-tiered model work for your needs. You get to imagine for a moment what it would be like if the email client worked for you rather than you for it.email client, deisgn, three-pane, outlook, mail.app, apple mail, email, UI design, usability, productivity

Matt Haughey (his wikipedia entry kewl!) has written a great piece on the frustrations of trying to set up and use encryption in Mail.app.

He suggests that,

Encryption seems to lie somewhere between privacy, security, and a mountain of engineering acronyms and standards. Unfortunately for regular people, most of these systems are overbuilt and the process is so painful that I would argue it barely even functions.

He describes his experience of following Joar Winfor’s excellent tutorial on setting up encryption in Apple Mail, drawing attention to the frustrations of the whole process.

He also makes a few suggestions on how some usability could be introduced. A great read.encryption, mail.app, Apple Mail, usability, user friendly, certificates, Thawte, just too bloody difficult