Sean McBride wrote:
>Well, I sorta agree. It's hard to compete with Apple since they make
>the OS too. But email is an essential feature and Mac OS should come
>with a mail client. But CTM is to blame too, they haven't been keeping
>PM up to date. It still doesn't even have sheets, a feature added in
>Mac OS X 10.0, 8 years ago.
Keeping an application up to date with Mac OS is not trivial, you know.
PowerMail's foundation were built on the Mac OS 8 days, using PowerPlant
which was the most used GUI framework at this time (also used by some
Apple applications, like Finder and iTunes IIRC). Since then, Apple came
with a new framework (carbon HIViews), that can't be fully adopted using
PowerPlant. A new version of PowerPlant based on HIViews, PowerPlant X,
was started by Metrowerks, but there was no easy migration path from
PowerPlant to PowerPlant X; and PowerPlant X has never been finished and
is now abandoned. Carbon HIViews itself is now being abandoned by Apple
(it will never support 64 bits).
During this period, we also had to change lots of things: transition to
Carbon APIs, transition to the CFM binary format of Mac OS 9 to Mac OS
X's MachO; transition to resource based application files to file
packages; transition from the CodeWarrior compiler to Xcode; transition
from PPC to intel; etc...
Some technologies we have been using in PM 3 or 4 have been abandoned by
Apple: HTML Rendering, AIAT (sherlock's indexing engine), OpenTransport...
Concerning the Apple Address Book, it does not have the same feature set
than PM's address book. Instead of dropping our address book and fully
adopting Apple's one (which can be abandoned by Apple at any new major
Mac OS X release...), we chose to implement a synchronization mechanism.
So, yes, PM is not fully "up to date" with Mac OS. But doing so would
require to spend 95% of our time rewriting things just to be "up to
date". We chose to be "up to date" for important things (Mac OS 9 -> Mac
OS X, PPC -> intel...), but not for things that require a lot of work
for a minor feature (supporting sheets would have require to adopt
PowerPlant X), and not for things that Apple can abandon any time like
the Address Book APIs.
Jérôme - CTM Engineering
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