Apple - iPhone In these jaded times, it's hard to impress people. But I sincerely doubt that even the most ardent Apple-haters will be able to look at these demos of the new iPhone by Apple, Inc. (yes, they just dropped "computer" from their name!) without giving in to awe... pure, marvelous awe. If the delivered product is half as good as it looks, I'll be standing in line for one, because it so far exceeds my expectations that I'm really, really... impressed! The iPhone is a misnomer, because this is the "convergent" product the market has been anticipating for years. The iPhone is:

• A widescreen iPod for video and audio, synked through iTunes
• A mobile phone (yawn) with integrated camera, voicemail and photo sharing
• A web browser (Safari), including email, Google maps, search, and widgets
• A technological marvel, featuring a new "multitouch" touchscreen system (no buttons), an embedded copy of Mac OS X, wireless computing (bluetooth, 802.11b/g, and Cingular's Edge network, and sophisticated new sensors that do a heckuva lotta cool things just by moving the device around.

Did I mention it comes with a Bluetooth headset?

Help! I can't wait until June!

GyazMail -- An all-new email client for Mac OS X -- Originally downloaded 1/9/07. I've been unhappy with Mail's performance in handling my IMAP-based Exchange mail account ever since the release of Tiger, but there haven't been any good alternatives. I don't yet know if GyazMail is a good alternative or not, but at least now I can try it and find out. Previously, GyazMail only support the POP3 protocol, but it's now added support for IMAP. If it can fetch my Exchange mail with some reasonable speed, it'll be worth the $18!

Version as tested: 1.5.

Kiwi: A next generation e-mail client, built for IMAP and Mac OS X Kiwi is an outgrowth of the MailCore open-source Cocoa project. It aims to provide something that's generally lacking in the Mac experience to date: A truly kick-ass IMAP mail client. An interesting article on the developer's blog explains some background about why IMAP is so slow on the Mac. I'm bookmarking this site and keeping my fingers crossed that Kiwi actually does bear fruit.

Entourage Vs. Mail.app This is an interesting account of a Mac user who felt forced to switch to Entourage because his company moved to a Microsoft Exchange server.  That's a sad state of affairs, but I do understand.  Fortunately, I haven't felt compelled to use Outlook calendaring here at my office, where Exchange also rules.  I do miss the full directory search, but I think there are solutions to that so I can keep using Apple Mail.  Anyway, his article---and its followup---make for interesting reading.

Daylite Productivity Suite: Productivity power helping you be successful Now here's an intriguing software product that's missed my radar screen before... It's up to version 3 and has components that cover your

• Calendar
• Projects
• Mail
• Contacts
• Reports
• And more

DPS comes with a module that integrates with Apple Mail and Address Book, but apparently has its own Calendar software (though it will import iCal's). I don't think it's intended to stand in for Office, but rather for Outlook. But it seems to have more functionality than Outlook does. This is a serious professional tool and carries a serious price: $189 for a single user. However, the available download is good for a full 30 days, and you can get a 30-day extension to that for $19. Hope I don't need the extension...

Mail Watch: A discrete application to monitor your various email accounts This is the third little utility today I've downloaded from Astrok Software... they seem to have a knack for taking existing apps and adding one or two new features to differentiate them. In this case, Mail Watch can run as either a menubar item or as a floating window, and unlike others it lets you delete mail from the server directly, without opening it in your regular email client. At $6, it's worth a try! I paid about that much for eCheck, a neat little Dashboard widget that does much the same thing, except you can't delete mails... only view the subject line. Earlier, I had used a menubar freeware called MailTicker, which did much the same as Mail Watch but couldn't handle IMAP.

Fast Company Now This is the opening salvo for a study the author promises to reveal soon, which looks at the options for a small business that wants something more affordable and manageable than Microsoft Exchange/Outlook for Email. The study will look at hosted services that provide all the same features for a lot less. It's about time people started asking hard questions about this "ingrained" Microsoft bloatware!

Hawk Wings - Plug-ins for Apple Mail Who knew there were so many plugins and extras for Mail? I knew there were some... in fact, I've used Mail Appetizer and Mail Act-On for quite a while now, but there must be a hundred here!

AppleBerry might be the next big thing I'm always up for speculation as interesting as this! It wasn't so long ago that RIM's BlackBerry was an off-limits-to-Mac users device. Could it really be that Apple will find a way to integrate BlackBerry email functions into the iPod? Could be sweet indeed!

iDive: digital video catalog and dv logging tool for mac osx and ipod video 5G All of the video stuff is neat, and it would be great to have something to easily convert videos to use on my iPod video, but I'm really interested in trying the innovative Quartz-based animation tool built into iDive as "Mosaic." The samples I've seen are quite amazing and might well be worth paying for.

MailSteward: The Ultimate Mac OS X Email Archiving Solution Not only does this provide a backup for your email, it also enables much more flexible queries on that mail. The tool stores all parts of your email--messages, HTML files, attachments--in the database, while not removing it from Mail. If you use MailTags, the latest version of MailSteward imports those, too. Works with Apple Mail, Entourage, and any mail that can be converted to mbox format. The developer has Spotlight integration on the drawing board. MailSteward is a little pricey at $50, but it will be interesting to see if this enhancement to the mail experience is worth it.

MHonArc for Mac OS X: Convert mail boxes to HTML

Well, this certainly looks like a useful tool… if you’d like to read your mail through a web browser, now you can do so! This site also includes a Mac OS X Gui front-end to the CLI MHonArc tool.

Zimbra is an open source server and client technology for next-generation enterprise messaging and collaboration.

If I ever find the time, I’d love to evaluate this for my office. They so desperately need to get weaned off of Microsoft Exchange server… but they just don’t know it yet. I wonder if I can try this out with my little group of people called my family? Hmmm. There is a Mac OS X edition available to download, but the last I checked the Ajax interface wasn’t supported on that platform (really strange).

Gmane -- Mail To News And Back Again This could be a very powerful resource for doing research within the news groups. It presents the newsgroup conversations in a much more digestible form than I've seen before.