Given that Symphony was discontinued last year, the solution is presumably to install an up-to-date version of OpenOffice…
OS X Mavericks mail client spews INFINITE SPAM
Apple’s update to OS X, Mavericks, has gone rather better than Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 upgrade. Except if you try to use its email client, the prosaically-named “Mail”. One complainant is cloud email outfit FastMail, a company that offers hosted email. One can point any client at its service, or use webmail. The former …
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Sunday 27th October 2013 23:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
As anyone who's upgraded an iPhone or iPad to iOS 7 will tell you, Apple has clearly spent the last six months of development time cramming as many stupid design decisions and shitty, irritating bugs into their email clients as possible.
Apple email clients are in a woeful state at the moment; by comparison, even Lotus Notes is starting to look refreshingly speedy and functional.
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Monday 28th October 2013 10:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Apple email clients
"Apple email clients are in a woeful state at the moment"
I think you can leave off the "at the moment" bit, I have yet to see anything remotely approaching usefulness in them. I wish there was a Thunderbird for iOS.
Apple in their wisdom decided that having access to the "Read" flag was only of possible use to programmers so they got rid of it in the client, and their sandboxed the thing so badly that a GPG plugin doesn't work either, removing two bits of functionality that could have convinced me to hang on to the damn thing. So, out it went in favour of Thunderbird, but that leaves iOS which also doesn't have a very hot email client. Ditto for calendar and contacts, but those apps are at least still reasonably useful on iOS. Maybe there's a Mail app that works, must check (no, not interested in Gmail or GMX, I need a decent "I speak IMAP" sort of client).
For a company that made good UIs, the triumvirate Mail - Calendar - Contacts is without explanation. It sucks, big time. Not enough to make me spend money on Outlook, but it sucks. Badly.
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Monday 28th October 2013 15:00 GMT Robert Grant
Re: Apple email clients
I generally will bash Apple if it comes to it, but in all seriousness - do people really think they make good UIs? I know they make simple, clear workflows through programs, which is definitely part of good UI design, and Windows/Linux programs often don't do that, but if you look at OS X, doesn't it look really weird?
Cartoony, floating icons at the bottom (some of which are running programs; some aren't), big high res picture in the background and almost 1980s Unix looking menu bar and icons. Beautiful hardware aside, the look of OSX just puts me off it.
Also, the alt-tab behaviour in OSX pretty much kills me. What is up with that?
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Monday 28th October 2013 00:20 GMT ThomH
Mail's always been dodgy
... though it's working well for me at the minute. The last update appears finally to have resolved the bug whereby new emails sometimes display as empty until you restart the client, and even the iOS version no longer occasionally decides someone is trying to email me from 1969*.
So far I've had no issues whatsoever with any part of 10.9. But why do I feel like I'm tempting fate?
(* the UNIX epoch versus the PST time zone, I assume)
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Monday 28th October 2013 00:40 GMT P. Lee
Re: Mail's always been dodgy
No problems with Mail here, including google interaction. Oh wait... Snow Leopard.
Please excuse my smugness as a peer around the side of my imac screen and pop in a DVD to watch.
Look Ma! No messy cables - I've got an all-in-one computer!
Razor blades. They're shiny too, but we don't jump on them as soon as we see them.
(We need a proper *smug* icon)
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Monday 28th October 2013 06:13 GMT M Gale
Re: I can help a brother: "our preferred word processor, Lotus/IBM Symphony"
ASCII? Really now?
£££££££££
If you can see the above, you're not reading ASCII. Extended ASCII at best, and even then only if you have the right code-page loaded.
And if you really think either vi or emacs are at all suitable as word processors (as opposed to script editors, a task at which I'm sure they excel, so long as you don't mind learning obsolete or esoteric keyboard shortcuts that no modern editor uses), I may want to give you a percussive introduction to a clue-by-four.
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Monday 28th October 2013 07:12 GMT jake
Re: I can help a brother: "our preferred word processor, Lotus/IBM Symphony"
They asked about a word processor. They did not ask about document formatting. Please try to read for content. The first is about putting thoughts into the computer. The second is about formatting it for presentation.
I published my first book using vi as the word processor, and LaTeX to format the document.
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Monday 28th October 2013 13:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I can help a brother: "our preferred word processor, Lotus/IBM Symphony"
>>And if you really think either vi or emacs are at all suitable as word processors
Actually, vi(1) is pretty good for a pure text word processor, with all sorts of handing settings and easily written macros to speed up "ascii art". Add some troff(1) commands and it is good enough to produce books, such as the original K & R C, Perl etc..
What you mean is megabyte-consuming Word and similar.
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Monday 28th October 2013 13:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Yawn...
Then I suggest, most respectfully, that you do not know vi very well. It is brilliant for writing documents quickly and, in conjunction with (g)roff, tbl, eqn, pic and friends or Latex, one can produce beautiful documents in PDF, postscript, text and so on, as many technical and other books until just a few years ago. You've probably got some if you are a programmer or network designer. The things I really miss with Word etc. are control, interesting global edits using patterns, easy, fine adjustment in one command of fonts or indents and the ability to write macros or use abbrev or map. Like most things first aimed at "non-technical" users, Word has become vast, over-complicated, displays difficult to understand or control interactions and produces vast files just to record, "hallo world" in any of its output formats. What's more, roff has been around for most of the life of UNIX, is installed on most as standard and can handle the oldest and newest forms. It includes lots of macro packages, such as those to produce manual pages and it is easy to write your own. Better still, for UNIX developers/users, it works on UNIX. To do the code documentation, one does not suddenly have to copy it to a windows machine and cope with the formatting problems of your code that that entails.
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Monday 28th October 2013 16:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Yawn...
@AC 13:18 - You prove my point exactly. VI is great for making scripts, that sort of thing, but in order to act as a wordprocessor with even basic functionality it needs several add on packages, which you helpfully list. I can't put my mum in front of vi and get her to produce a basically functional document with a little formatting and some spell check, maybe a picture or a table. Word, OO, LO, Symphony all these other wordprocessors she'd be able to use just by finding the icon. As likely as not, if I put my mum in front of VI, she wouldn't even be able to work out how to start typing, depending upon the version of vi/the OS it runs on, she wouldn't be able to move the cursor because of the whole hjkl thing, and she certainly wouldn't know that :qw! means save.
I get that vi has fans, but really it's a nieche tool for techies (which I use), but in no way is it intended to be a user friendly wysiwyg wordprocessing environment.
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Monday 28th October 2013 09:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Symphony?
"Here in Vulture South, OS X Mavericks is not doing well: our preferred word processor, Lotus/IBM Symphony, crashes as soon as it opens a document. Feel free to help a brother out with a fix."
Oh, I have a ton of helpful advice. You could try Pages, MS Office, Google Docs, Open office, Wri. Actually, forget Google Docs (and pages too, if it can't be used in a none cloudy manner) - you don't want to make it too easy for the NSA.
Seriously? Symphony? That's awfully bloody minded of you.
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Monday 28th October 2013 13:54 GMT Anthony Hulse
Gmail problems? Not here...
Using Mail with IMAP4 to Gmail on an iMac I took from Mountain Lion to Mavericks last week. Not seen any issues with performance nor stability. Am I just lucky or is there a common link between the Macs seeing problems that excludes mine, i.e are they all MacBooks or something?
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Monday 28th October 2013 14:17 GMT MyHandle123
Steve Jobs is gone
And I can see the quality of Apple's products decline — getting sloppy. Jobs would never have let this crap get through.
They need to hire a product dictator who is a high-functioning OCD crazy person. Tim Cook isn't up to the task. Neither Jonathan Ive (VP of Design) or Craig Federighi (VP Software) are good enough with getting all the details right.
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Monday 28th October 2013 16:33 GMT Greg J Preece
Re: Steve Jobs is gone
And I can see the quality of Apple's products decline — getting sloppy. Jobs would never have let this crap get through.
Jobs was around for the stupid i4 antenna nonsense, and the beginning of the iOS-ification of OSX, and I think he was still with us when they started gluing stuff together again.
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Monday 28th October 2013 15:40 GMT jubtastic1
Bullshit
Jobs let plenty of crap through, these are just bugs in a point zero update, which for reasons that will never be understood, always include some that would appear to be impossible with even the most cursory of pre-release testing. Which is why I always advise my clients to let the fools rush in and discover all the bugs.
Regarding the article though, one sentence stands out: "using legal IMAP commands in a stupid way", That strikes me as the sort of qualified statement people issue when they're technically to blame, but aren't prepared to admit it.
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Monday 28th October 2013 18:41 GMT Breen Whitman
A few years back, Macs were essential for designers etc. as the software only came on Mac
Now Photoshop, and Indesign look and act as their Mac brethren.
Screens could be an argument, but these days I note the Hipsters in Graphics grizzle about "colorspace" etc.
PCs with professional monitors would now outperform a Mac and save the company money and productivity.
But why is it everyone is scare of stomping on Graphic Designers. I know they do whine and squeal a lot. Just do it when their nose is pressed against their iPhone screens. So ample opportunity...
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Monday 28th October 2013 19:58 GMT ThomH
On the contrary, the Mac is still better than a PC for creative work in a whole bunch of key areas — see e.g. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/making-the-ultimate-creative-content-os-ubercreate-os-1-0/ in which the author starts from the position that some people will be turned off by the new Mac Pro so, hypothetically, what would the perfect alternative platform be?
The Mac comes out as by far the closest thing to the ideal, based on much better out-of-the-box support for professional formats (HDR, EXR, etc), better multitasking under load (so you can do something else while a render occurs), system-wide scripting (though the author dislikes AppleScript, he likes the Automator) and search (ie, in every file dialogue in every app), much more mature HiDPI support (for people working with 4k video and without magnifying glasses) and a bunch of other things.
Windows wins only in 10-bit video output (which sounds quite significant to me, but isn't enough in isolation) and aero snap.
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