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The Bat: Great program, terrible documentation and support
tomos:
40hz's historical explanation today is very revealing and thought provoking.
-superboyac (February 24, 2011, 01:11 PM)
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where's that ? :)
J-Mac:
40hz's historical explanation today is very revealing and thought provoking.
-superboyac (February 24, 2011, 01:11 PM)
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where's that ? :)
-tomos (February 24, 2011, 02:24 PM)
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Yeah - I've been looking around for it too!
Jim
Oops - think I found it; the Ubuntu thread here.
vizacc:
vizacc, firstly, is that the Terminator 3 chick? She was bad ass.
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Yes, that is her. I am female and I think Kristanna Loken makes great role model for the younger generation.
Let's get back to topic... I used to use TheBat, Outlook, and formerly OutlookExpress and Thunderbird.
The biggest gripe about OutlookExpress is there is no backup. In the past, you could simply copy files from the \OutlookExpress\{GUID} directory to make backup until Windows XP came out, then you could not copy the files, OutlookExpress simply won't recognize the extra directories when you add extra files to the directory (TheBat does). OutlookExpress is so prone to viruses and auto-execution, auto-sending in the "Outbox" and lack of spell checker. In Vista, they renamed Outlook Express to Windows Mail but it was soooo slow after you have about ~10,000 emails and no easy way to move them to another computer. Sure... there's utilities like Outlook Express Backup or Outlook Express recovery but most of them don't work and you end up with lost email :(
ThunderBird is more of a work-in-progress and I disliked it when I update ThunderBird and lose all emails because of incompatibility between versions. :(
The biggest gripe with TheBat is IMAP incompatibility, inability to send well-formatted email, editor problems (as discussed on this thread), inability to specify intelligent rules, tagging, folder issues, account issues.
The number one issue isn't due to TheBat itself - it's problem with IMAP compatibility. Suppose you have a Windows Exchange Server and 20 users on the network with mobile devices and these users want BlackBerry/iPhone/iPad/Android to play friendly with TheBat. Oops, nobody think about sync ability.
I cannot understand why TheBat has so many issues with Exchange and program inflexibility - such as moving IMAP folders, creating invalid IMAP folders, cannot retrieve emails or number of emails does not match number count on folder.
TheBat specific features, like color grouping does not persist into IMAP. Then you lose color grouping feature unless you take your email off-line.
There are rules in TheBat where email goes to different folders. Nobody think about a "review" feature where everything is the InBox, you click on a button and it auto-file it to the correct folder after guessing what you by previously moving email.
There is export issue. Select export message. What do you get? - MSG, EML and Unix Mailbox. Select "import message" - there's a mailbox import wizard to take all your email from Outlook, OutlookExpress, and other email systems. It feels like once you have your emails in TheBat, the developers didn't think about synchronization to other devices or server-based solutions. Did anyone think about export to Android or Nokia phone?
There's TheBat backup which is fine, but no server-based email backup solution, or archiving or even web-based solution. Once I got a Mac server, I replaced the very expensive Exchange Server with Mac Mail Server which was at least US$5,000 in savings. :tellme:
The MicroEd editor is famous at making your text break or add annoying spaces in-between. I don't know why they think this is a good feature :(
TheBat has much going for it...
MacMail comes with considerably less features but seems to play nice with IMAP/Exchange, in-box review feature, colored emails that persists into IMAP, tagging @done, @todo, keywords, to-do list feature which persist into Android or Nokia or even iPhone or iPad.
I'm not asking for much. All I wanted is a simple straight-forward way to get my email archived, selected folders on-line (to sync with iPad, iPhone), working address-book, calendar and to-do list.
From emails, I need to create to-do entries, mark appointments or deadlines, get things done and have 10 years of emails I can look back into.
Take a look at the iPad or iPhone email client. It has much, much fewer features but makes an amazing email client.
Then go back to TheBat and wonder why the developers cannot focus their time on the features everyone wants instead of adding new features without much reasoning or thought and new versions every two or so years...
superboyac:
great post, vizaac. I don't know anything about Loken other than Terminator. I'll have to read what makes her so special. I haven't even hear of her since.
Some of your great points:
The MicroEd editor is famous at making your text break or add annoying spaces in-between. I don't know why they think this is a good feature Sad
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exactly. They think it's a good feature because the only people they pay attention to are the beta testers on usenet, who are not exactly representative of people who like to make things easy. Also, they just don't seem to care about really developing the software. It seems like the code has remained pretty much the same for years, and very very minimal effort has been put in between versions. I bet the programmers spend a few hours a year here and there doing stuff. All the feature requests go unanswered. The list bugfixes and new features that I have to assume is just the simplest, easiest things to add.
Did anyone think about export to Android or Nokia phone?
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They will NEVER do this. Waaay too much work for them. they have difficulty adding a checkbox in the options menu, there's no way there going to do something like that. only minor things will be modified.
Take a look at the iPad or iPhone email client. It has much, much fewer features but makes an amazing email client.
Then go back to TheBat and wonder why the developers cannot focus their time on the features everyone wants instead of adding new features without much reasoning or thought and new versions every two or so years...
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yup. Surprisingly, Apple tries to give an experience that a NORMAL person will enjoy. The Bat tries to give an experience that will only be enjoyed by those who consider usenet as their preferred forum-type communication. People who get really mad when you top-post. People who get really really really mad if you don't do the proper dash-dash-space-enter delimiter for signatures. That's who the Bat developers listen to. If you want, say, the editor to work well...meaning the place where you write emails and spend 90% of your time while you're in the program...you will be ignored.
vizacc:
It goes with other software too...
Take Trillian for example and how it has gone from the simple IM client to the mega-IM client with all bells and whistles... while getting slower, more bloated, more annoyingly colorful, seems to forget all your settings, has 101 features you don't need... and look at Audium for Mac.
You could drive yourself nuts over looking for that feature Trillian has to make it look normal and non-distracting or spend ages wondering wading through the plug-in list. Same goes for MSN Messenger. The latest version of MSN Messenger (v9) is just plain horrible and what were the developers thinking??
Same goes for some of the ShareWare/ASP developer software. They added so many features and then complain nobody buys their product.
Take any average image editor for sale - for Mac and for Windows. The Mac image editor is simply elegant, has almost everything you want (vector graphics, editable annotations, call-outs, shapes, human-usable image transformations, usable clip-art, human-usable features - like various wooden photo-frames, oil-paint feature and so on) Then look at Windows image editor - it looks like it was designed for zombies or has so many useless features... :(
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