David Pogue and TidBITS reviews Apple's new OS, Snow Leopard, which like Win7 is a "smoother, not bigger" upgrade.
I'd get Snow Leopard quick, if it was not for one thing: for my work, I am deeply... entrenched in a few old applications not being upgraded anymore, and they are all already running shakily under Leopard. What to do, what to do?
It's notably Eudora 6 (email), Golive 6 (web site editing), and iView MediaPro 1.5 (making thumbnail pages for my sites) (this latter is updated, but much more expensive now, and lord knows if the current version will run with my home-made templates for the pages). In all those apps I have painstakingly created auto-procedures which I use every day. (Well, not in Golive, and it sucks a little, but it keeps automatically track of links and such things...)
Update: Adam Engst mentions Postbox for email. Anybody tried it? (Same for Thunderbird, which Bert mentioned... ?) What I like is good handling of 50,000 mails per year, good filters, and good Search. Oh, and good ability to handle several accounts.
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Update: Lou points to an article about a Flash vulnerability in Snow Leopard, it uses an old version of Flash, so it needs to be upgraded to latest version after installation.
33 comments:
The only good piece of advice I can offer is to bite the bullet and make the leap.
I know what you're saying, though. I dropped Eudora not a year ago, because it was becoming a real pain. But the shift to Thunderbird was much, much easier than I expected and I now have less worries. Not that Thunderbird is perfect, but it is a logical (and apparently the most painless) upgrade path from Eudora. And I still have access to over 10 years of e-mail archives.
Throughout the years, I also had to give up many CAD programs too, the kind of software one has to invest many many hours in learning, and every time it is a pain.
But the sad truth is that you don't really have a choice. The longer you wait, the more obsolete applications will pile up, and that will make the unavoidable only more painful.
You will be assimilated, resistance is futile.
Yeah....
"Not that Thunderbird is perfect, but it is a logical (and apparently the most painless) upgrade path from Eudora. And I still have access to over 10 years of e-mail archives."
Really??? It can read Eudora mail boxes? Search them?
(Have to ask the obvious: you *are* using Mac, yeah?)
Thank you. For some reason I hadn't even heard of Tbird, that I can recall. I was considering Apple Mail, but it's not really a pro app, is it.
As someone who wiped 10.5 off his second partition within days of installing it (I wanted to print, and 10.5 had no drivers for my older printers), ask yourself /why/ you want to upgrade. Is there any one feature that you really, really need? Do you really want to install /any/ of the first several releases of any operating system?
I ran OS 9.2.2 for 4 years after OS X came out, until X became stable (10.4), and am now quite satisfied with 10.4.11, which is stable as a rock.
I bought 10.6 and will install it on a spare partition to test that our software code works correctly on it, but as far as using it for work -- why? Why learn a new interface, a new set of shortcuts? Which programs will no longer work?
So unless you have a lot of spare time, experimenting around to see if the problem is a bug on the new OS or your legacy program using "deprecated" features, cool off and wait for 10.6.4.
"you *are* using Mac, yeah?"
A "Mac"? Wuzzdat?? Thunderbird is Mozilla software, it does run on alien platforms... ;-)
Seriously, Thunderbird has it all and more. Of course, it is different from Eudora, but it was originally built upon Eudora's mailbox structure, so yes, the compatibility is pretty much granted. There are differences, but the importer worked liked a charm for me, and I haven't lost a thing.
The one caveat to this is about attachments. Eudora kept attachments in a separate folder, while Tbird leaves them in the message. Larger boxes, but no more lost links to attachments. Also means that the attachments were lost for the archives from Eudora (but I confess I didn't try very hard to preserve them, that's not what's important for me).
But *is* this on the Mac platform, for you? It might not be the same experience if you use Windows. (Eudora is on Win too.)
Dave, yes, that's the other side of the coin.
I'm considering getting SL only on a new tower. I have a first-generation Intel Mac Pro, which is great (and *quiet*!!), but they must have gotten a bit faster and so on, and then I'm not messing around on my working setup.
"I wanted to print, and 10.5 had no drivers for my older printers"
They were not available somehow? Pogue says it will (or can) download any needed drivers.
... Wait, you said 10.5. That's Leopard, not Snow Leopard. ... Ah yes, you came from 10.4. Lion King or whichever one that was. I can't keep all those cats straight.
There are conversion programs that can convert from one mailbox format to another. Don't ask me for names, though, as I've never had to use one myself. I've been using the same email program since 1987 and have no plans to switch.
But as the need for such conversions is quite common, it has been addressed. So, if you need to switch, there is likely a path, even if your new mail app doesn't support Eudora's mailbox format directly.
For migrating your address books from your old mail program to a new one, here's a great program for helping you do that, and it really works -
http://mysite.verizon.net/zakharin/software/Dawn/
Unless I'm mistaken, Thunderbird in
its options gives you a choice of either including attachments in the message or handling them separately, and I believe you can specify a folder file address for saving them. Check the options pages under Composition and Attachments to make your choices.
No reason to upgrade for me - I stay a few years behind the cutting edge and I not only have stable computing, I save money! And I still use Tiger as it works great and I don't need to upgrade apps to less stable environments. But then, I just moved up to a G5 9 months ago. I expect I'll be getting and Intel Mac in maybe three years or so, barring unexpecyed catastrophe. I still have a useable G4 and my old 9500 as fallbacks should I have the need to use them!
Lou
Yeah, OS upgrades are a tricky issue. I don't mind upgrades that are true improvements, especially in performance and reliability like Snow Leopard appears to be.
Where Apple often screws its customers, though, is forcing the user to upgrade the OS just in order to make the latest version of some app to work. There is no technical reason for such coupling, in a properly designed system that is.
This time, though, the decision is especially easy: Snow Leopard dropped support for the G5 processor, so it wouldn't even run on my puter. Like Lou, I'll stick with Panthera pardus (Leopard to its friends) for a few more years.
Some months ago I have also switched from Eudora 6 to Thunderbird. There was no problem to import all my about 10 years old emails and work with them, and the handling of all my email accounts works also easily.
Furthermore it's easy to integrate OpenPGP for encryption, which was for me one of the main reasons to switch. I think it's very important to protect privacy, and it's of growing importance with all these control freaks around. (With snail mail one also sends documents and private messages as letters, not as postcards which can be read by everybody.)
At least for WinXP I can confirm that, but it should be the same for MacOS, Linux etc.
Of course, all these updates needed frequently are sometimes really bugging ...
"the handling of all my email accounts works also easily."
Nice. Did it also import those? (I get a headache thinking about all those settings.)
The reason why I recommended you take the plunge is based on my own recent personal experience. Up to last December, I had been (happily) running Windows 2000 Pro. Not a great OS, but relatively lightweight and stable, a good vintage for Windows.
I have invoked many reasons for sticking to Win2K, like the fact I hated the Fisher-Price looks of XP from day one (with its over-sized baby-blue title bars, yeech), but it basically came down to exactly what you are describing in your post: "irrrreplaceable" software.
So, I rationalized sticking to my old stuff, using at some point or another all of the arguments brought forth in the other comments. Let the new Windoze become stable. Wait until upgrading the hardware makes sense. Etc.
But then, after a few years, the number of now-obsolete apps had grown to a point where upgrading had become a downright scary proposition. And the odd thing is that this was in part due to the fact that I hadn't upgraded my OS in a while: I could no longer upgrade many programs on my machine, for the new programs required a newer OS version!
So I ended up painted in a corner, if you will. Nothing that couldn't be overcome, one would say, but enough trouble in sight to make me procrastinate forever.
Until my computer died, on January 1st this year. Yup: I woke up only to find that the contraption was kaput. Motherboard and/or memory, can't tell for sure, but since it was built on long gone Rambus architecture, it simply wasn't worth repairing.
Ordered new components and put them together very quickly, no problem there. But obviously, there were no Win2k drivers for the newer hardware (and it didn't make sense to run Win2K on a multi-core CPU anyhow), so I also had to upgrade the OS. But upgrading the OS meant I had to upgrade all the obsolete software too. All at once. [insert long chain of colorful expletives here]
All in all, three weeks in hell. And eight months later, I still discover stuff that doesn't work as expected. I won't get caught again, that's for sure!
So my advice stands: don't wait forever. You have the luxury of upgrading at a more leisurely pace, so do it. One program at a time. Whenever something becomes obsolete, start shopping for a replacement, don't wait. That's my advice to you, the other road is nowhere you want to be.
...Did it also import those?
Ooooh ... even it was not long ago, I don't remember how it was in detail, because it was all quite straightforward and easy.
I'll try to remember ...
Bert, you paint quite the picture.
Sounds like quite a win/win scenario. By which I mean Wintel/Wintel! :-)
(Ah, that wasn't mean as a platform war joke. All platforms have their issues, your story could as well have happened to somebody with a Mac from 2000, running OS 9.)
As for Thunderbird, it's easy to configure, as e-mail programs go. I have more than 10 e-mail accounts, on three or four different server types, and I have yet to encounter something TB won't support.
It also is very flexible in terms of organizing different accounts together (sharing mailboxes, etc.). The anti-spam filter is excellent, on par with the very best. Filters are powerful and flexible, although maybe not the program's strongest asset.
It's best feature: it is open-sourced. Security is top notch, long-term support is as good as it gets, and it's free on top of that.
The one real weakness: it is open-sourced. The documentation mostly sucks (lags behind, incomplete, etc.). No technical support over the phone, if you're that kind of person. But a large, mostly willing community that will definitely provide help. You decide if that's good enough for you...
Right. I hear ya.
I just hope the community support answers are not in the style of "Just redefine the D1x99-2 and recompile your base code."
I've heard those geeks consider messing with code routine, while I run screaming from a room without a very userfriendly GUI.
It's amazing though that an open-source email app has become as friendly and powerful as you describe.
(Though I've yet to establish if the same is true for the Mac version.)
"It's amazing though that an open-source email app has become as friendly and powerful as you describe."
Eudora too started as free, community-driven software. Until Qualcomm tried to capitalize on it, that is, and that was the beginning of the end for Eudora.
Fortunately, the now ubiquitous GPL licenses prevent this from happening again, otherwise bean counters would end up killing many more open-source projects. You see, many, many (if not most) serious open-source efforts are actually driven by software pros employed by major corporations; high quality standards are thus not surprising.
Hmmm, how about that.
What enthusiasm they must have.
I really meant that the software gets developed mostly on company time. Thus you could say that most of the development of Linux, for example, was paid for by IBM, HP, Novell and the like. Oh, and let's not forget academia, which contributes enormously.
But since nobody can claim ownership, thanks to the various GPL licenses, everybody's investment is well protected. A smart way to get giants to share resources without the endless warring.
Oh, while I think of it: if you do opt to try Thunderbird, I would recommend that you import your old mail into an account that you don't plan to use, something called "Archives" for example.
You will be able to easily move or copy whatever currently active threads you have to new mailboxes if you wish, and your archives will be fully searchable, but you won't have to use legacy settings (e.g. separate attachments) for your "new" accounts.
I find that keeping the attachments inside the message bodies is a vastly superior strategy, especially in regards to archiving old mail!
I can understand that.
Only "aber dabei" is that my business being buying photographs, I get dozens or hundreds of attachments every day, and I think the mail box size would just...
"I get dozens or hundreds of attachments every day, and I think the mail box size would just..."
I hear you, didn't think of that. You know what's best for your situation, and either option is available.
It's only that the main beef I had with Eudora was precisely that it was easy to lose the link between messages and attachments (I tend to move mail around a lot, depending on the status of the addressed issue, e.g. pending, current, resolved, etc.).
Amazingly, for me, Eudora keeps track of attachments no matter how I move them, or the messages. It only loses them if I delete them or rename them.
(Much to consider. Brave new world.)
Is not fair that only you can correct typos in your comments! :c
Can't you do what I do? Copy/paste into a new comment, correct, post, and then delete the old one?
Import from Eudora into Thunderbird is very easy - just click in the menu: Extras/Importieren (German version), then a dialog box pops up asking you what you want to import - again in German:
- Adressbücher (= address books)
- Nachrichten (= emails)
- Einstellungen (= preferences)
For example if you choose now "Nachrichten", then another dialogbox pops up asking you:
- Communicator
- Eudora
- Outlook
- Outlook Express
If you now choose Eudora, then all your emails will be imported into a new email directory called Eudora import. After that you may build up your own structure of email directories ... it's all very easy.
I don't remember what will be imported if you choose to import preferences from Eudora, maybe it's at least your main email account, but I really don't remember.
To create a new email account is also very easy, guided straightforward by dialogboxes: Click in the menu "Extras/Konten...", then a box pops up showing all your actual accounts with all their data. Furthermore you may click there on "add new account" or "remove account" ...
At least for the German version there is a lot of help to be found in the internet, e.g. a wiki, FAQ, forum ... should be the same for the English version.
During my switching I didn't deinstall Eudora, in case I need it as a last resort to jump back, but there was no need. I've never used Eudora since then. (In fact I have forgotten it totally, even to deinstall it, but being reminded I do it now.)
This is how it is in WinXP, but it should be very similar or the same for MacOS, Linux ...
I forgot to mention: You get all help directly by clicking at the menu "Hilfe" and there "Mozilla Thunderbird Hilfe" (again German version, but should be the same in the English version) ...
All right, thanks.
I installed Snow Leopard onto an external USB drive, and it booted up. However, the external drive MUST be Partitioned with GUID, whatever that is. It is found under Disk Utilities/Partition/Options, the last of which the installation directions omit.
It installed just fine, and even offered to move Applications from a previous hard drive!! Those it moved worked flawlessly. We spot tested our own software and it worked without a problem. I'll stick with 10.4.11, but 10.6.0 is a huge improvement over 10.5.0.
Regarding email, I have used Thunderbird successfully for about 4 years. It handles multiple email accounts easily, has user definable spam filters by account, and imports from other email programs. It is awkward to move from one drive/partition to another, but once you figure out how, it works fine. I recommend it.
Thanks, dudeski.
So there was an option to migrate to the new disk, transferring only the apps, not all the data? This would be an important improvement over the other great migration technology of recent OS X installers.
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