On 11/6/03 5:50 PM, "Entourage:mac Talk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Of course, the ideal situation would be for Entourage to simply take > advantage of Apple's architecture for all these tools in the next version. > This would make Paul's tools obsolete (bad for Paul), but it would give us > the best possible tool, that then works with all of Apple's synching tools. > > Essentially, have Entourage: > > - use Apple's iCal as the backend. > - use Apple's mail.app as the backend > - use Apple's Address book as the backend. This isn't really going to happen for a number of reasons. For one, the integration between the three without EXTENSIVE modification isn't that great. If I have a message in Mail, I can't link it to events unless it was created by iCal. I can do this in E'rage. I can't easily build non-modifying links between contacts and events with Address Book and iCal. I can't save custom finds as custom views, so that I can view my mail, contacts, and events in a way that I want to, which may have nothing to do with the standard views. I can't run anything in mail on a schedule but mail checking. I can't have per-account signatures. I can't have per-account schedules, and on, and on, and onnnnnnnn.... There is also some basic problems with using other applications as a back end. Most of E'rage's superior scripting would be gone. In fact, to keep the better features of E'rage, would require so much modification that it would be a completely different product ANYWAY. What happens when Apple changes the structure of the address book database? No upgrade for you, you're using EntourMaiIcalAddressBook 1.5, you must wait until 1.6 comes out. Ran Software update? Gee, I'm sorry, your third party addons broke, so you either go back to the 'standard' Apple front ends, oh, and you lose any of the 'non-standard' features, or you reinstall your OS. >From the other side, how does MS add new features without doing extensive modifications to the back end data stores? How does it do these modifications without changing them and causing problems with other applications, like, oh, MAIL, ICAL, ADDRESS BOOK? Now you have to keep separate shadow copies that are always synched to the 'real' data stores. So you now have an application keeping separate copies of these three data stores...the ONLY difference between that, and E'rage *now* is the number of data stores, but since they aren't redundant, you don't even get improved data integrity out of it. Oh, and if someone hacks those data stores, they have ALL your data. If someone figures out how to hack address book and mail so that they can pull an Outlook Virus on a Mac, you can't even switch mail applications to get away from it, because they ALL RELY ON THE SAME FEATURES. This level of homogeneity is why windows networks are patheticly easy to subvert. This is just a baaaaaaaaaad idea cloaked in a nice fantasy. john -- "March or Die" - French Foreign Legion -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
