I was nailed by the internationalization bug when Jaguar came out. Eudora was doing things the way they always had, and Apple pulled the rug out from underneath them. Apple admitted the problem, but took months to fix it.

I wrote Qualcomm and expressed my dissatisfaction with the developer's lack of what I consider simple professionalism. To actually write "OS SUX" in the release notes, in my mind, is not being candid. Now I'm glad I stopped using Eudora when I switched to OS X.

Gee, it sounds precisely candid to me.

I mean, I like OS X just fine. But are you sure "candid" is the word you're reaching for?

I used Eudora Pro for many years, but I quit with OS X because I really hate the way its window handling works. I was using Entourage for a while but with Jaguar I switched to Mail.app.

Eudora is still the best thing for archiving email, since it can handle a huge amount of mail without slowing down and since it uses plain text files the database never gets corrupted. It can also search faster than anything else.

I work in the College of Engineering for a major southeast research University. One problem that kicked our tails for 6 months was that Eudora 5 on Windows would produce mime boundaries with "Plain and Styled" mail that there own software would misinterpret trying to pull from IMAP servers. Qualcomm gave us the poorest customer service I have ever experienced (and we deal with a lot of Engineering software manufacturers not exactly known for their customer support).

I really think that Apple OS choices, even given Apple's imperfections, is the least of Qualcomm's problems. We are definitely down the path of migrating our users away from the software - probably to some like Mulberry.

I definitely didn't intend to start a Qualcomm/Eudora bashing session. I've heard similar complaints about OS X from at least one prominent Mac shareware developer.

I can't speak for the other comments but: "[A]pple no longer believes in colored [menu] text" - they never did actually support this. A lot of pre-X menu modifications developers did were hacks to menu calls. I think it might be more appropriate to say "Apple no longer lets us hack the underlying control structure like we used to." IMO this a Good Thing(tm).

Edited by author 03-16-2003 01:43 AM
<disclaimer>I work for Microsoft, so feel free to ingest whatever chemical compound you require with my comments.</disclaimer>

The comments in the release notes are certainly candid, but they are also certainly childish, particularly coming from someone who's making their living in part because of Apple's work. Seeing comments like that included in a list of stupid little bugs in the programmer's own product are particularly annoying.

Frankly, if you're making software for the Mac platform, get committed or get out. In this case, I recommend the latter option.

I wonder if the Qualcomm animosity toward OS X is fueled by Apple's inclusion of the "Mail" program...

I haven't used Eudora since Entourage came out, and I'm thinking about ditching that for Mail now that iCal is out...

You wrote to complain about a product you don't use?

If anyone has migrated from Eudora-Win to OSX, I'd love you to send me an email to share with me how you did it (gkanai at earthlink dot net.) My current thought is to go Eudora-Win -> Netscape-Win -> Netscape OSX -> Mail-OSX or Eudora-OSX or whatever.

It's my impression that the guy who first wrote Eudora, is the *the* guy who is writing the Mac version. I don't remember his name... but wait maybe it was in TidBITS... Oh yes, way back in "All about Eudora" in a series of articles: http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1035 and the guy is Steve Dorner. Eudora for Mac has always been his Baby.

Having supported Eudora on both Windows and OS X, I'm inclined to take any attempts to shift the blame to other parties with extreme skepticism. The impression I have is of an old, ugly codebase which dates back to the 16-bit dark ages and isn't abstracted much at all, leaving legacy hacks and deprecated API calls all over the place. Modern features like IMAP really feel like they were crudely hacked into a model which wasn't designed to handle them.

This really sounds like sour grapes from a developer who for one reason or another doesn't like OS X and is looking for points in favor of his position.

Gen: you can import Eudora's mailboxes directly as they're just the usual Unix mbox format. Alternately, if you have access to an IMAP server you can sidestep the issue by storing your mail there - I recommend this approach as it allows you to use both clients simultaneously instead of having to commit to one.

In Macintosh developer circles, Steve Dorner's attitude is viewed affectionately as a cultural treasure. His "unprofessional" (brutally honest) commentary is considered a breath of fresh air. Sometimes it creeps into the software itself. A check-box in one version bears the legend "Waste cycles drawing trendy 3D junk". I wouldn't get too excited about this. It only means all is well.

Incidentally, there was never a 16-bit Macintosh. :-)