Earlier this year, Apple, after a long wait, updated its pro line of laptops by introducing the MacBook Pro, the Intel-powered equivalent of the PowerBook. MacSupport, together with Apple Netherlands, was so kind as to provide OSNews with a MacBook Pro for review purposes. Since Adam bought a MacBook Pro for himself only a few days earlier, we decided to review the machines together. Here are our findings.
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Member since:2005-07-06
My comment wasn't about them moving away from mbox, I was just saying that
1) It was silly Spotlight couldn't index within standard databases, e.g. by using the Mac OS X vfs API to create an mbox file-system (much like Kat does in KDE)
2) It was silly to use a proprietary format when they felt compelled to split up the file when a standard format like Maildir would have helped both them and their users.
With regard to mbox, a lot of file-systems have trouble dealing with several thousand small files. mbox solved this by allowing you to bypass the main file-system entirely: it works a bit like a Database and with mmap and a separate index file you could get some decent performance. The reason the did it was clearly for Spotlight support. It was a rush job, just like the templates in iWeb (that use DIV for everything instead of H1, H2, P etc.) or the RSS in iPhoto (which is staggeringly non-compliant).
I'm thinking seriously of getting a Merom powered Macbook Pro, but I have to say the software isn't a huge draw: I could see myself using Camino, Adium and Thunderbird instead of Apple equivalents.
Member since:
2005-07-20
Mail.app may be silly for using a proprietary format instead of Maildir, but it is hardly silly to use a single file for each email.
The mbox format is an *old* format, designed for use back when hard drives were small and storing a 1K email would consume an entire 512K disk block. It is also designed to be a very simple format.
But as a format for a filesystem or database, mbox is awful. Using a format like Maildir or Mail.app's is much better and is a good compromise between easy text-format access and a full-up database.