Wednesday, August 20, 2003
Mailsmith 2.0.1 is a nice little update that addresses two peeves of mine. You can now see a message’s label when it’s selected, and filters can test senders for membership in the address book and in groups. Additionally, every copy of Mailsmith now includes SpamSieve.
I was initially excited about Mailsmith’s increased control over its list fonts, but due to the way Mac OS X draws text it’s pretty hard to improve on the defaults without sacrificing readability or space. You can pick a screen font like Geneva or Verdana, but they just don’t look very good with anti-aliasing off.
E-mail E-mail Client Font Smoothing Mac Mac App Mailsmith SpamSieve
Congrats to John Gruber on getting published in Macworld, but I must disagree with his assertion that “CVS is notoriously cryptic even by Unix standards.” If he were comparing it to a Mac program with a real interface, I’d agree. But compared to other Unix programs, no. Maybe CVS just happens to fit my brain, but I think its basic commands are straightforward and just about what you’d expect. I had thought that was a generally accepted view, just like most people agree that vi is hard to learn. (What they disagree about is whether it’s good once you know it.) There’s no denying that CVS has some dark corners, but those aren’t the areas that BBEdit deals with. BBEdit makes the easy stuff really easy and convenient. You’re on your own if you want to set up a repository, deal with branches or tags, do non-standard checkouts, control wrappers and ignored files, or set up hook scripts.
