Whether or not a CD shows up on the desktop shouldn’t have anything to do with whether or not it’s being read. A CD is mounted until it’s ejected. Worst comes to worst, Mac keyboards have an eject button on them.
No need to download any program. Mac OS X supports contextual menus out of the box, and right clicks from two button mouses will bring up said menus (you can also see them by holding control and clicking the left button).
The MacOS experience is, for me, sufficiently better that I would rather use an 80 MHz 7100 running MacOS 8.6 than the best Alienware box money can buy running XP. But I can’t point to any one, or twenty, things and “prove” it’s better. So much of it is a matter of taste, and so much of the rest can only be assessed in complicated statistical studies.
And even then, Apple just plain gets it wrong sometimes. Always has. It’s been part of the Mac user experience that you modify the Mac user experience to suit yourself, though. Ask old-time Mac users about SFVol (System 4 through System 6), Escapade (System 6 or earlier through MacOS 9), Flash-it (System 4 through MacOS 9), PopupFolder (System 7) or FinderPop (MacOS 8-9), and so on, and you’ll discover that the Mac experience that most Mac fanatics tout is not a plain-vanilla, out-of-the-box Mac experience at all, so much as that as a starting point with a dense overlay of customizations.
Historically, the Windows experience was less tweakable. You could not just download a little snippet of system software and cause your OS to notice when you’d inserted a floppy or a CD. You could not just download and install a patch to your OS that would let you hide all menus and make them only appear in a window when you hit a certain key combination. Or eliminate the application window behind document windows, so you could position various document windows of different apps however you wanted.
Mac users expect that they should own their computers. Make them as they wish them to be, from providing a name and icon for their hard drive to disabling a key feature of the OS because they just don’t like it.
Aeschines: Are you running Panther (10.3) or Tiger (10.4)? There’s a big difference between the two. I’m still using Panther, but there are some more powerful features in the new version of the Mail program, including virtual folders.
In Panther, if you want to sort your mail by account, you can set up a rule in the preferences to flag messages by account or move them to a designated folder. If you have things sorted to folders, I suggest you add the account flagging option in your Rule actions to visually alert you to the fact that the message is from a certain account.
If I reply to anything sent to an Inbox, the account associated with it is automatically selected. The key to which account is selected depends on which mailbox you have selected when you create a new mail message, or what account the message you are reading was sent to. If I’m reading, for instance, my Yahoo mail and I want to send a Gmail, I will have to select the Gmail account. Having any other folder than the Inbox selected gives you the first account you created as the default. For me, that was my Yahoo account since I set up Gmail later.
The attachment problem can be solved by going to Edit–>Attachments–>Always Send Windows-Friendly Attachments.
I know that it’s not really helpful to say this about something that is personally annoying, but I’m not really getting why you have a problem with this behavior. It makes sense to reply to mails sent to an account using that same account. If I had a bloody dialog asking which account I wanted to use pop up every time I created a new message, I’d end up using my laptop as a frisbee. It’s always clearly displayed in the message which outgoing account you’ll be using, so if that’s not the account you want, it’s easy to select the one you do want to be using.
For an alternative, I would also suggest Thunderbird. It may have the features you’re looking for. My girlfriend uses it on her XP machine and loves it compared to the other programs she’s used. Bare Bones Software’s Mailsmith is also recommended for power e-mail users, according to MacWorld.
AHunter3: Eudora does have some really powerful features, and I used to use it way back with System 7 through 9. The problem is that even now, when OS X makes it easy to implement multiple languages without hard-coding it into the program and Apple encourages developers to write modular and portable code, it doesn’t support many languages. When I last checked it didn’t even support Unicode properly. While they do have a Japanese version of the program, I don’t want to have to run the Japanese version of the program just so I can read and write mails from Japanese correspondants who only make up about 1/4 to 1/3 of my total mail, especially when Eudora has so many features that even running it in English I would probably get lost from time to time. Those things make it a bad choice for me.
Just select the mailbox you want to use before you compose the mail, and it’ll send from that box. It works for me. You tend to send e-mail from an account while reading mail in the same account and everything. Also, you CAN change the send account when you want to. Even if they prompted you every time, which would be an annoyance, you could still fuck it up.
Oh, and a couple more things while we’re at it:
OSX doesn’t spontaneously fucking download system updates and reboot while I’m in the middle of working on a complex Pro/E model as it did this morning, causing me to lose 50 minutes worth of work. It asks me if I want to install the patch and then lets me reboot when I see fit. After spending half an hour sifting through Microsoft’s excreable excuse for documention and not finding any way to prevent this, I’m fuming. If this happens one more time shakes fist I’m…I’m…I’m…sigh going to give up and cry. What happened to my Unix box?
Oh, and Windows doesn’t have Hexley for a mascot. (Technically, he’s not affiliated with Mac OSX, either, but he’s DarwinOS’ avatar, so that’s close enough.)
Mail is pretty puny…but so is Outlook Express. Heck, even full featured [sic] Outlook is no great shakes.
Stranger
What version of Windows? I haven’t encountered any version that positively forces updates on you with no option to change things; if you can’t find the option, it sounds more like your IT guys have set a stupid lock on things to ensure that employees can’t skip updates for long.
If you’re running XP SP2, the relevant option should be in Control Panel … Automatic Updates. You can choose to to auto-download and install, just auto-download, or set it all to manual.
This is most likely the case. (We’re running a combination of XP and 2K/NT. Corporate policy is that everyone must be running XP so we’re all good little clones, but since some of the codes we use are not stable or do not work on XP we get a pass.) The Automatic Updates panel is locked out, with the selection on Automatic. This is no doubt part of our Brilliant New Corporate Strategy, which doesn’t take into account that:[ul]
[li]Many times we leave “jobs” running on workstation machines overnight,[/li][li]Just 'cause it says “3:00am” doesn’t mean that it updates at 03.00, and[/li][li]It would not lead to wholesale destruction if individual users were permitted some degree of flexibility in updates.[/li][/ul]
The “forced reboot” is what rankles me the most. On the old FreeBSD server I’d just recompile the kernel, make install, and keep playing PointBlank without missing a beat. Mostly, I just wanted to bitch about it. That, and having to run cygwin or remote access to an obsolescent Sun box to run some frequently used applicaitons.
Stranger
You mean besides the blindingly obvious “Eject…” menu command?
Yes, well, you need a certain level of intelligence to drink upstream from the rest of the herd. 
How about software that is just really, really good–for the whole herd? Simple and effective for them as need it, customizable (not through hacks or complicated extras, but orignally) for those want that.
Both Windows and Mac OSes and software are lame (with plenty of exceptions on both sides). Can’t we hope for better?
No, because that would make it infinitely harder for assholes like rjung to jerk themselves off in the mirror at night thinking of how god-damned cool they are that they’re a fucking Mac obsessed nerd.
He codes FORTRAN, too!
Hey! I code FORTRAN! Well, I have to…some of the apps we use go back to the Seventies, and it was the programming requirement in the School of Engineering.
Stranger
Hmmm, well then, it must just be that it intensifies his orgasm.
It takes nerditutde of hithero-unknown levels to associate FORTRAN with orgasms…
(You people are weird. :eek: )
I had some trouble with Eudora trying to use the wrong personality to reply to messages until I wrote a filter that specifically assigned messages to personalities (addresses and profiles).
Can that be done in Mail? (I don’t use a mac, so I don’t know.)