Category Archives: OS X

I Guess I’ll Have to Find Another Email App

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About a year and a half ago, I bought Airmail to replace Apple’s standard Mail app as my primary OS X email client. Not only was it miles above what Apple could offer, it was a bargain at $1.99. It was a no-brainer; I would gladly have paid more, considering its great feature set.

Lately, though, the Airmail updates have done little to fix the bugs I’ve encountered, from unread post counts not matching the actual numbers and poor threading of mailing list posts to annoyingly slow performance with large inboxes, etc. These annoyances haven’t been enough for me to bother looking up another email client just yet, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy and keep hoping that an update will eventually fix the problems.

So imagine how pleased I was earlier today, when I noticed that a version 2.0 of Airmail is available from the App Store. Finally!

Except then I spotted the price tag. The upgrade costs $19.99, and yes, that applies for customers both new and old. Although, for a limited time, you can get it at a special introductory price of $9.99.

WTF?

I feel cheated. It’s not the money – a year and a half ago, I would have considered $19.99 to be more than reasonable – it’s that they want to make me pay twice to get what essentially is an upgrade, the first more major upgrade since I bought version 1.0. See, they’ve reworked the app “from the ground up” and there’s now a “faster engine”, that is, they’ve finally addressed the performance issues and maybe more, but apparently they think they didn’t charge their customers enough the first time around.

And what happens the next time they plan a bigger upgrade? What happens when they move to version 3.0? Do they expect me to pay for the damned thing again, a third time?

So, sorry but no; not only will I not be buying the 2.0, I will also uninstall the 1.0 and replace it with an email client developed by someone who isn’t planning to rip me off.

OS X Upgrade

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I upgraded my MacBook Pro to the new OS X version, Yosemite, yesterday. Some observations:

  • The new system font looks great. I’m really glad they finally realised how crappy the old one was.
  • As expected, the upgraded zapped my rEFInd bootloader. I can no longer dual boot, so no more Ubuntu until I’ve rerun the rEFInd script. Unfortunately the word on the web is that the bootloader becomes awfully slow, so I think I’ll wait.
  • The new dock is sort of ugly and sort of old-fashioned. Didn’t it use to look like this, a couple of versions ago?
  • And speaking of looks, it all feels to me as something that might have happened if Apple had merged with ToysRus. Which isn’t the case, as far as I know, so it probably means that the iOS camp at Apple is winning.
  • I’m feeling a bit cheated because the Handoff features require a newer computer than my mid-2010 model. I would have loved to test them out.

I’m pretty sure I’ll have more to say in a few days. For now, though, I’ll just hit Publish.

New Distro, Part Two

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After a couple of days of Kubuntu, my curiosity took the upper hand and I decided to install the Unity desktop along KDE.

It’s an interesting GUI, I have to admit, but I remain unconvinced. The search-oriented task bar thingy to the left is an odd bird, for example. It is as if Canonical were mixing their desktop metaphors. There must be a task bar because everyone’s got one, but it seems as if they’ve gone out of their way to ensure it is different. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing yet.

Worse is that the global menus do not work–as many others have pointed out, on a large screen the menus will simply be too far off from the programme window itself. I know, OS X does this also, but the difference, the crucial difference, is that the menus and their behaviour are consistent on a Mac, something they can never be on Linux.

Version 14.0 allows you to move the global menus to their respective windows, which solves the problem but also highlight a less serious one: the top bar, now mostly empty sans a few icons to the right, still takes up space but now provides no real benefit.

On the whole, though, the GUI looks nice, with better graphics than I remember from past Ubuntu versions. It looks like a finished product, something that, say, Debian Testing, doesn’t–the XFCE desktop I briefly tried when deciding ona new distro looks ghastly. I know it’s not supposed to have the bells and whistles of a Plasma desktop, Windows 7 or even Gnome, but my god, the damned thing put me off to an extent I didn’t think possible.