Blizza Blizza

The upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” has been mostly flawless, but there’s one huge annoying problem with Eudora.

Under 10.3, you could type the first couple characters of a menu item and the OS would select that menu item. It worked wonderfully, and was a very logical extension of the ancient (System 7.5-era) behaviour of the OS in a dialog box.

Being a keyboard type, I prefer to avoid the mouse where possible, so when moving messages around in Eudora, I would click the Transfer menu, then type the first couple letters of the mailbox where I wanted to move the message(s), and then press return. Boom goes the dynamite! — my messages would go where I wanted them.

The problem, as the other five Eudora users left in the world may have noticed, is that Eudora uses the “-> ” (dash-greater-than-space) prefix for mailbox names in the Transfer menu, ostensibly to signify to the user that something is going to happen to that message. This is all well and good, and I didn’t mind it at all until Tiger came along.

Tiger’s menu selection via the keyboard now respects (for better or for worse) non-alphanumeric characters in menu items. This means whenever I type some letters, every single mailbox is ignored and the menu selection jumps straight to “New…” or “Other…”, which is something I want approximately once out of every thousand or so transfer operations.

This wouldn’t be a big deal at all except for the fact that <x-eudora-setting:7411> refuses to allow me to set an empty prefix string. To be honest, I don’t care whether or not I can change that string or not. Qualcomm needs to fix it so a little graphical arrow displays there, lets the power user turn it on or off via setting 7411, and dispense with this nonsense of putting typable characters in the menu item ahead of the mailbox name.

Rumour has it the entire Eudora application is being re-written in Cocoa (hopefully for version 7), so perhaps this problem will go away by then. There is nothing that would make me happier right now.