I'm not so much complaining about Apple's software as I am quietly accepting of the fact that Apple makes pretty consumer gadgets not tools for professionals.
Actually, I think it's a good thing that Apple's software is unsuitable for intensive use. It leaves space for actual software developers (us) to provide that.
Calendar~ I use it with an Exchange server and often accept appointments or meeting, but if I restart the application, it seems to forget about it and the event is marked as new. Problem: If I reply to the invitation once again, the creator of the event will receive another email, bad bad bad... I also hate when Calendar complains 10 times in a row that it cannot connect to the platform when I am actually offline, extremely frustrating to have to deal with all these modal dialogs.
Mail~ Not mentioning the poor user experience, the modal dialogs complaint apply as well, mails are not often sent, HTML signature is a pain to setup, often becomes unresponsive, or simply crashes.
All this to say that for a development environment, OSX is my OS of choice, but it is about emails, contacts, meetings and so on, the embedded applications are not good at best.
I had a laugh yesterday when the MacWorld editor said about Apple that they were not only doing good OSes, but excellent applications as well during the TechCrunch talk about the iPhone 5. In my experience, I have always found Apple applications average at best, even on the iPhone.
Ah, there's your problem.
> Mail~ Not mentioning the poor user experience, the modal dialogs complaint apply as well, mails are not often sent, HTML signature is a pain to setup, often becomes unresponsive, or simply crashes.
I haven't had this problem. Then again, you sound like you live in the MS world, in which case the problem really isn't Apple.
My Android phone does a better job at handling Exchange accounts than my mac. All my work environments are Mac environment, I even coded on open source OSX projects for a while so I am not the kind of person to just dismiss OSX because it is not a MS platform.
Like it or not, it is a reality that the Mail & Calendar are broken, the simple fact that Apple tries to convince everyone at each release that the new version is finally a good one is enough for me to see that they have trouble developing a good email/calendar clients.
And again, Exchange is one of the most used corporate infrastructure, that's the state of the market, and Apple should support it the best they can.
They work just fine for me, when using servers that conform to standardized protocols.
> And again, Exchange is one of the most used corporate infrastructure, that's the state of the market, and Apple should support it the best they can.
You say this as if Exchange was some sort of common standard, instead of a proprietary walled garden that has been nearly impossible for 3rd-party clients to support completely and reliably for nearly a decade and a half.
Do you also expect 3rd-party office suites to interoperate perfectly with MS Office?
The point I was really trying to make was that Apple's recent failings have been their attempt to work with others - they don't understand how to design/deploy/develop internet services. And they don't play (very) well with others.
They succeed best when you stick to their walled garden, with perhaps the one exception that proves the rule being their web browser - which is pretty spiffy on both the mobile and OS X platform.
Both approaches have their benefits. At least with Apple products you always know where things are. If you open MS Office on a power user's machine you may find something completely unique to that user. It's very useful to them but totally unsupportable for anyone else. Office is the people's Unix shell in a way. Apple doesn't want to be that and it isn't.
Mail was one part of OSX I never actually had any problems with.