There is some nice documentation in the source code archive (sadly, all
"bad words" have been removed from inline comments, usually one
of the interesting things to look for first in released code!).
Attached are a couple of interesting documents (PDF).
And from the architecture doc:
"User Customization: One of the hallmarks of Eudora is the degree to
which it can be configured by the end user. There are close to one
thousand different options in the application. The general guideline is
that if a judgment is made by the developer when implementing a
particular feature within the program, and there exists a reasonable
expectation that a user may differ in that decision, then there should be
a setting that allows the user to change that behavior."
At 10/2/2018 01:50 PM, Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I use Eudora 7.1 now on my work
PC. I would love to participate in any beta
testing.
Alas, there's nothing to test. Someone has to figure out how to
restore the missing pieces and get the build environment working
again.
- Ken
At 10/2/2018 02:00 PM, Ken via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
>>Truly one of the
greatest pieces of software ever written.
At 10/2/2018 01:45 PM, Evan Koblentz wrote:
>What's great about it?
>
>I used (unknown version) in college but I don't remember much about
it.
It's hard to summarize, because it just does so many damned things.
It was really interesting, when the "Penelope" project got
going (original Eudora authors were going to augment Thunderbird to be
like Eudora, I think with financial support from Qualcomm), feature
requests from the original Eudora were solicited and collected in an
issue tracker. The list of "must-have's" was enormous,
and intimidating.
It includes little things like wonderful little shortcuts, like when you
alt-right click a subject line in a mailbox view and similar
messages are grouped into that spot without affecting the previous
sorting of the rest of the mailbox. Big things like how the
filtering system worked. Often tremendous responsiveness. And
it just got better and better with each release, rather than blooming
into bloatware, or suddenly shifting away from everything we loved, or
pulling features we came to depend on...). But I can't even start,
it's just so much. It's crazy what a tiny fraction of features and
configurability every email client that remains supports. Yet
another example of the mass shift in commercial software, away from power
and features and efficiency and casre for the
users.
Even with no updates in 12 years, it's still such a joy to use. The
shortcomings that still exist (that would've been resolved if the project
had kept going, as had been the consistent path with Eudora development)
are irritating (no Unicode support, for example), and yet the benefits
somehow still outshine the drawbacks. There are a lot of people
running Windows environments on their Linux machines just to keep their
Eudora's going.
It's a real shame this source code didn't come out 5 years earlier.
It would've been a lot more likely to have been picked up then.
There's been inevitable attrition in that time.
- Ken