With our regularly scheduled Windows rants, I thought it would be only fair to rant about OS X, and maybe somebody will be able to help me out. Of course, I do like my PowerMac. The Cinema Display of Doom is truly stunning, and it's fun being able to type 'make -j 2' and watching both processors get slammed. But...

- Mozilla crashes like mad. I can't get it to read the 1000-odd messages in my IMAP without crashing. Mozilla works just fine on WinXP. Also, the latest one (Mozilla 1.1a1), while supporting Quartz anti-aliases text, gets the kerning wrong. Often very wrong. *Sigh* Thus, I'm forced to use IE, which I dislike for other reasons.

- Is there a decent MP3 tag editor, along the lines of Tag&Rename or MP3 Tag Studio? So far, the best I've been able to find is EasyTag, a GNOME thing which I was able to build and get running with XDarwin. iTunes ain't half bad, either, but It still pales in comparison with Tag&Rename.

- Support for Canon digital cameras sucks. In particular, neither Apple nor any of the third parties have support for Canon's "raw" file format (CRW) which records exactly what the CCD received, no more, no less. There's a recent update from Canon that gets their ImageBrowser working again, but you don't have the flexibility and controls that are available on Windows -- in particular, there's no way to set an image's white point. If you want to do any kind of serious color correction, you need this.

- I can't seem to find any documentation for how the hibernation stuff works. I was able to get wake-on-LAN working (which is cool -- now I can let my Mac go to sleep and can ping it remotely to get in). However, I can't find the reverse. What system call or what utilities put the computer back to sleep? So far, the only mechanism I've been able to find is the "Sleep" item on the Apple menu. I want a command-line tool that does the same thing.

- The lack of a decent virtual window manager really sucks. The closest I've found is "Space.dock", but it can only hide and redisplay whole applications. Is there some better solution out there?


*sigh*

It's so close to being great....

Mozilla...
If you're just after a better browser, try Chimera. http://chimera.mozdev.org/ It's in the early stages of development, but it is coming along nicely.

MP3 tagger...
Try MP3 Rage. It's shareware.

Canon cameras...
If the CRW format truly is raw, then Photoshop and maybe even Graphic Converter will be able to open them. You'll probably need to do a bit of guesswork with the header length.

Sleep...
Under Mac OS 9, you could do this with an AppleScript, so that route might be worth inventigating. Alternatively, maybe try a QuicKeys macro to go to the apple menu for you.

Virtual Windows...
This is a nuisance to me too. I found space.dock buggy and inelegant. I've resorted to just holding down option when switching apps.

Mozilla - Also try OmniWeb. 4.1 just came out of beta, and it's too bad. Mozilla seemed in need of some PPC optimizations when I ran it.

MP3 tagging - Not sure, haven't done much of this on OS X yet

Cannon - Hmm, no major problems here yet with my Powershot S30, though I haven't done a raw import yet. Most of the time I just let iPhoto do the import, and I run Image Capture when I have movies to download.

Sleep - Do you have a timeout set in Energy Saver? I don't have any specific suggestions here, just wondering if the WOL is canceling the timeout somehow.

Virtual Window Manager - I haven't looked around yet, I really have never gotten used to the idea yet.

David, do you know of a way to flip the default so that when I click a program, it hides the other one, and if I hold option, it keeps both up?

The problem isn't with the Mozilla browser. It's with the mail client. Right now, I'm just using Mail.app, which works, but it's just not the same. Canon raw (CRW) files: these are in a truly proprietary format, and Canon's not told anybody how it works. They require you to use their libraries. On Windows, at least, they give you half-way decent tools to manage CRW files, and there are a number of third-party apps (such as BreezeBrowser) which improve over Canon's software. On the Mac, I was hoping iPhoto would do it. Apple's marketing certainly led me to believe it. It doesn't work. MP3 Rage: trying it now. It's more complex than the Windows stuff, but it looks like it can be coerced into doing what I want. Sleep: I suppose I could write some sort of AppleScript, but I'm a Unix weenie, and I have to believe there's some kind of magic ioctl() or whatnot and a simple command line utility to use it. OS X isn't supposed to be like Windows, where the only way to do lots of things is through the GUI. Right?

Oh, one more frustration:

Support for ripping MP3s with Lame sucks. Audion has an old version of lame (3.90) built-in and doesn't let you use newer command-line options like the --alt-preset flags. There's an AppleScript for iTunes that will run the command-line lame encoder, but there's no way to easily make it use two processors, or do any of the other features you might expect from something like EAC. For example, it only reads the WAV files by copying things from /Volumes/Audio CD. No cdparanoia, etc. (Although, it does just output a shell script, and I'm thinking how much I want to hack it to output a smarter script...).

So, for now at least, I'm using iTunes "out of the box", but that means I'm stuck with the Fraunhoffer encoder. Grrr.

I tried to build grip, but it had compiler errors. *sigh*

I've found Mail.app to be prefectly good as a home email client, however I would have reservations about using it to manage and answer the large amounts of email I get for work, so I can understand that you'd rather use something more streamlined. Have you tried Mulberry? Ugly interface, but if you're used to Mozilla, you probably won't mind

It is a pity that Canon didn't just go with TIFF. If you collect together all you can find out about the format and send it to the guy that writes GraphicConverter, he might just add it - he's been known to be quite helpful with such things.

I'm not aware of anything that will reverse the action of the option key - in effect you'd be bringing back the 'single window mode' that was in the developer previews. I thought it was a good idea, but Mac users like their cluttered desktops, so complained enough for Apple to ditch the idea. It might still be hidden away somewhere though.

Not wanting to start a flame war or anything, but what tool do you use to read your work e-mail? For me, Mozilla was (and remains) a compromise. I've yet to find an e-mail client that I'd call "perfect".

Bitt's Corollary on Software for Computerized Missives:

All email clients will always suck.

My email needs are probably different than most people's needs, but I am still running a version of Forte's "Agent" that is... let's see... 5 years old now. I consider it perfect (for my needs).

Snap.

I have been searching for an IMAP enabled email client (I want to stop using POP3) that I can use to replace Agent, which only does POP3. The problem is I can't find another client that threads messages in the same was as Agent.

I'm surprised that more recent versions of Agent don't have IMAP.

The problem is that development was stalled for about 5 years as Agent was passed around as Forte got bought up and then messed about with.

It is now back in the hands of a new company, staffed by the original developers and development has restarted. So hopefully one day there will be a 2.0 with IMAP support.

Yeah, I just "read up" on the history at their site, as well as scanned the usenet group to see what discussion there has been on the IMAP subject. So far, no indication from the team on possible IMAP support that I could see. However, some of the people on the newsgroup suggested IMAP-to=POP gateways as a work-around.

A gateway would be no good for me I fear. I have my own mail server, so I can choose whether to connect to it with POP3 or IMAP, so I have no problem getting my email with Agent. I want to move to IMAP though, so I can keep my mail on the server in organised folders and therefore access it sensibly from several locations.

After reading this thread I have gone back and tried the latest version of Mulbery again (I have tried it out before) and it looks like it might actually now be able to thread like Agent. I can't work out how to move the order of columns in the mailbox view yet (it displays Author, Date, Subject where I want Subject, Author, Date).

I use Outlook Express at work. Officially I should use Outlook, but I really can't deal with it. For such a major application, it has a surprising number of flaws.

OE has its limitations though, the lack of filters on IMAP mail is a big one and only being able to search downloaded mail another.

Every know and then I realise how silly I am to be using OE and look around for something else, however I've yet to find a replacement that has an attractive interface (why do all mail apps have ugly toolbar icons?) that also follows the Windows GUI guidelines and is free.

Mozilla has all the features, but I've never been keen on skinnable applications. It is also far too bloated for something that I use all the time.

I've even considered switching to webmail. I'll stop short of using Mutt though.

Unless it's changed recently, Mutt has the absolute worst IMAP support of any mail application I've ever seen, short of ones that don't support it at all. People are always going on and on about Mutt, and I can't use it because of it's awful IMAP support.

So there. I've said it. I'm a Mutt hater.

I spoke too soon, looks like Mulbery can't collapse a thread, so it is no use to me.

So, my search for a IMAP client that threads the way I want continues. My requirements seem fairly simple, I wonder why no client but Agent seems to do want I want, which is:

- thread by subject
- but at the same time sort by date
- allow me to collapse threads
- allow me to move the mailbox columns to the order I want (Subject, Author, Date)
- not be MS Outlook XP...

None of the clients I have tried out so far can do all of these, I have tried The Bat, Mulbery, Eudora and a few more obscure ones.

I hate skinnable applications, too, as the vast majority of skins look awful and work worse. However, the Orbit theme (available at mozdev.org, which is down for me right now) is both at least reasonably attractive and works well. A bigger plus would be if it didn't have the author's signature at the top. In order to fix that, put this in your userChrome.css file:

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");

menubar > .toolbar-orbit-holder > .toolbar-orbit-stack > .toolbar-orbit-box > .toolbar-orbit-right {

  background-image: none !important;

}

I thought it would be only fair to rant about OS X,

Hey, if you're going to discuss religion, there's already another thread running about "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.

tanstaafl.