In late September, I mentioned that I’d no sooner finished a draft of an ebook about .Mac than Apple went and changed the service, updated their Backup utility, and generally wreaked havoc on my schedule by forcing me to spend days rewriting. Specifically, they fixed a number of issues I’d complained about, so I had to take out my complaints and even add a compliment or two.
Incredibly, that’s just happened again. Today, while I was in the process of reviewing my editor’s first round of corrections to my forthcoming Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger, Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.3. This update includes about a dozen changes to Mail, which will cost me a morning of experimentation and rewrites. And yes, in all probability, the deletion of a few gripes. I hate it when they do that.
One thing I noticed right away after applying the update is that my rules no longer worked—at all. After a few panicked minutes of tests, I found the source of the problem: the MailTags plug-in, which enables you to add Spotlight-searchable metadata to your messages. Disabling the plug-in resolves the problem. I reported this to the developer, and hope that an update will be forthcoming. (Update: Just a few hours after my initial post, MailTags 1.1 was released; it fixes this problem and adds a long list of new features. Excellent.)
I will say this, though: When this new ebook comes out in a couple of weeks, it will be shockingly up-to-date!