Eudora goes open source, and joins Thunderbird

I began using Eudora 2.x on the Mac, back when Steve Dorner owned it. I even corresponded with him. When I went to Windows I moved my email files to Win 95 and ran Eudora there. I still use in on my XP box, even though it’s definitely showing its age. I figured I’d eventually move all my mail archives to a future version of OS X’s Mail.app and use Gmail for much of my routine emailing, but to my surprise Eudora has a migration path …

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

... Qualcomm … and the Mozilla Foundation… announced that future versions of Eudora will be based upon the same technology platform as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email program. Future versions of Eudora will be free and open source, while retaining Eudora's uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements. Qualcomm and Mozilla will each participate in, and continue to foster development communities based around the open source Mozilla project, with a view to enhancing the capabilities and ease of use of both Eudora and Thunderbird.

Qualcomm also today announced that it has released the final commercial versions of the current Eudora products for Windows and Mac operating systems. The open source version of Eudora is targeted to release during the first half of calendar year 2007. Once the open source version of Eudora is released, Qualcomm will cease to sell Eudora commercially. In the interim, Qualcomm will continue commercial sales, at a reduced price of $19.95 and with a six-month period of technical support. Existing technical support commitments will be honored in their entirety.
"I'm excited for Eudora to be returning to the open source community," said Steve Dorner, vice president of technology for Qualcomm's Eudora Group. "Using the Mozilla Thunderbird technology platform as a basis for future versions of Eudora will provide some key infrastructure that the existing versions lacked, such as a cross-platform code base and a world-class display engine. Making it open source will bring more developers to bear on Eudora than ever before." ...

I had no idea Steve still worked for Qualcomm, and for him this probably really is going “home”. it sounds like a win-win for Mozilla and Eudora email users, and a credit to Qualcomm. They really didn't have to bother providing a migration path, they could have just killed Eudora.

Natural Language Search: a handy critique

The next time someone sells you on the joys of natural language processing, read this critique of Natural Language Search. NLP is reasonably big in my industry, I am skeptical but still receptive.

No Aperture at the Apple Store?

Odd. I'm at the Mall of America Apple Store -- and they don't have Aperture anywhere. It's as though it never existed. Clearly it's not a big seller here, but the machines have the rest of the pro suite. I wonder if Apple wants to wait for version 1.51 to install.

Another odd thing. I appear to be one of the few people that care that Aperture does not allow users to edit date metadata associated with an image.

Selective apps from Apple's restore disks

From Apple's kb: Using Restore discs with computers that ship with Mac OS X 10.3.7 or later. You can "Reinstall some (but not all) bundled applications without erasing the Mac OS X volume". I didn't know that. Handy.

Google has a Mac Blog

Official Google Mac Blog. Note Google Calendar now supports Safari. That surprised me. If Google adds Safari support to other products (Gmail perhaps?) I'll have to retract my Safari execution request.

The real suprise would be if Google Calendar were to support iSync.

Media-Convert: Web-based converter for most everything - Download Squad

Good resource: Media-Convert: Web-based converter for most everything - Download Squad

Carbonite (XP only): Online backup goes mainstream

I came across this via The Atlantic's print edition, not via any of the many blogs I track. Odd.

Carbonite Online Backup is XP only, but the price is right. $50 a year for "unlimited" (really?) backup.

If it were OS X as well I'd have signed up by now, but no matter -- the $50 price point is the key. At long last, online backup is going mainstream. It's the only way to go, but expect restores to be unbelievably slow and tedious for sometime. It can't be the only backup solution, but it's a good companion to backup to an onsite external hard drive.