Purrito

What’s the worst Apple application program, and why?

John Brissenden:

OK, I’ll start. It’s a tie between Safari 3.x and Mail. Safari because it’s slow, and temperamental - I’ll do the slow and temperamental around here, thank you very much - and so much worse than the boring-but-at-least-it-worked 2.x. Mail for pretty much the same reasons, and especially because it’s the poor man’s GMail.

Andrew Fox:

Mail is awful. Safari is tolerable, mostly because it works with the new multi-touch trackpad motions and Firefox doesn’t. I’m not a huge iChat fan either.

I think Mail and Safari are both pretty good, especially considering how bad the competition is and how young they both are. But that’s it — “pretty good”. Neither is great. But my standard may be a little different than yours — I don’t believe anyone has made a truly great web browser or desktop email client. (Having used each of them for long periods, I can confidently say this at least about Eudora, Outlook Express, Outlook, Thunderbird, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Camino, and Safari. Some, like Lotus Notes and Opera, were so awful that I couldn’t use them for long enough periods.)

My vote goes to iCal. It’s not that it’s bad — it’s just inexcusably mediocre for such a simple program. It takes a lot of effort and money to truly improve on mail clients and web browsers, but improving iCal should be cheap and easy — Apple just never seems to think it’s worth the resources, receiving almost no meaningful improvements since its 2002 release.

…

I love Mail and Safari, because they do what they are supposed to do and they do it good. I can’t say too much about iCal though, the only thing I use it for is the Dock-icon that shows me the date.

I’m using Mail with Gmail and I believe it’s the ultimate solution for me. I prefer “real apps”, webapps are often too heavy or ugly, but Gmail have a really good spam-filter and I can access it from my iPhone or any web browser too.

Safari is my primary browser, both because I love WebKit and because I feel that it’s the only browser that still feels like a native application. Some years ago (when I used Windows) Firefox was my primary browser for the same reason, Firefox 3 however looks and feels horrible in both Windows and Mac (it’s okay on Linux though).

Now, I havn’t tried all applications on my Mac yet so I can’t really say what I’m voting on, but for now I think I’ll have to say iMovie. It’s supposed to be a simple solution for home-users, but when I tried to make a movie I couldn’t figure out how to make slow-motion effects (which I later found out wasn’t possible in the latest version) or fade-effects.

Source: jhnbrssndn