Mail Clients and Contacts, Part II
I don’t like updating blog entries so I’m starting a new one on my last post about mail clients. My buddy Josh, likes calendars a lot and I found a piece of software called Chandler, which is a major memory hog. He said he does not like gCal much and wanted a local calendar program, but I remember him saying a long time ago that he wanted the calendar online. CalDav has been in development, but I am not seeing a solution that is simple to implement or even looks fun to use. I don’t quite understand why CalDav has to be a different specification, why can’t it just use the existing WebDAV system, something Microsoft should have implemented in Outlook a long time ago (Correct me if it is not already implemented).
I like Sunbird because of the nice little to do list on the left, but the calendar is not integrated with my email and contacts which causes problems. I am finding more things in Outlook I never bothered to look for making it even harder to make me want to switch. I know a lot of people HATE Outlook, and I really question why; it runs smooth, is feature rich, and rarely crashes, which is about all I really ask for.
At the very least my laptop will have Windows and Office on it, mainly because most of my clients run Windows and I would rather dual boot or VM linux to work with the other clients than run it as the primary OS. The other reason I have to run Windows is that if I ever need to use my modem I would have to buy drivers from a company to get the Conexant modem to work at full speed.
So that pretty much ends my debating which email client to use, on linux I have still not made up my mind what I plan to use, but whatever I use it will be strictly for viewing new mail for the time being. It would be great if Microsoft write a Qt based version of Outlook for Linux, but I somehow doubt it will happen. While it would mean more users in Linux might user Office it also means those people waiting to move from Windows to Linux may make the switch.
I will save the topic for a later topic, but that must be a real struggle for a software company to determine what they should do. As a quick example if users love the contact management of Office, and they know that should they make a side project as a standalone contact suite. I would be very happy if they did or maybe just sell Outlook separately.
