Ronge

Entourage 2004 is stuck in the pre-OS X interface days. Although the application has received some overhauls, it still feels clunky. On OS 9, Entourage was best of the breed. I lived and died by Entourage, no other app could hold a candle to it, but Entourage has not matured like I wish it had. It’s now slow, buggy, and maybe worst of all: hideous. I decided that it was time to leave behind the dinosaur and find something new. My first stop was Mail.app.

My biggest gripe with Mail.app is that it does not have a widescreen/3-pane view like Entourage does. I figured that it might be possible to modify the Nib file and move the preview pane. After a short hacking session it became evident that it wasn’t going to work. The splitter between the preview and the message pane is drawn via code. If the splitter is switched from horizontal to vertical it gets all messed up and the window doesn’t display correctly. So I was out of luck with Mail.app.

Then I remembered hearing about Thunderbird supporting a widescreen view. Since I have been very impressed with the polish and usability of Firefox and I decided to give Thunderbird a shot. And I have to say, it seems like I made the right decision. I am very impressed; it’s incredible the quality of software that the Mozilla foundation has been churning out lately. The application is cross platform but it feels very OS X native. While it may not have the same level of integration as Mail.app, it really holds it’s own. I’ve found Thunderbird is very very fast at downloading new message, and order of magnitude faster than Entourage. All of my mailing lists are on a Pop3 account so that increased speed up is a big win for me. The threading support is nice, oh and did I mention it has a widescreen view.

But Thunderbird is not perfect. I would really like to see support for looking words up in a dictionary via a pop-menu, integration with Spotlight and the Address Book. Besides the above, it’s a great client. It’s prettier than Entourage and more heavyweight than Mail.app, a perfect fit for me. Here’s a screenshot of my new and old setups. Thunderbird vs. Entourage