Shocked and Dismayed

I was shocked and dismayed this morning to discover a very pathetic thing.  After many moons of wanting and begging, I finally bartered my way into a brand new Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server.  Now, before you go and say, what’s this – the Microsoft Fanboy playing with a Mac, let me explain.  In fact, I have three Macs at the house (a laptop, an iMac and now the Mini) which I think complement the geekery quite well.  The geekery consists of a Dell 2950 and and Dell 1850 among another five computers of various shapes and sizes (I have to keep my options open).  I digressed.  So there I was, tinkering along at 6:30 this morning before little Andrew got up on my Mini Server.  I was incredibly impressed by a few things – the blogs/wiki/calendaring web interfaces are fantastic.  It’s by no means SharePoint and Exchange (in fact it pales but duh).  The DNS server is pretty weak but I think it’s just the interface that Mac stuck on it because it’s bindd so it’s decent.  But I was absolutely shocked and disgusted, after seeing the very nice looking web interface for wiki/blog/calendar when I clicked on the email link.  Are.  You.  Freaking.  Kidding.  Me. — Squirrel mail?  The original SQUIRREL MAIL?  Yes, THAT Squirrel mail – from 1999.  I was so disgusted I just powered off the Mac Mini.

Now, let me be clear – I’m not saying that Squirrel mail didn’t serve a purpose 10 years ago.  It also makes for an excellent mental exercise to see such simplicity in a fully (ish) functional web application.  But for the Apple team to have spent so much time and energy building SL Server to have just dropped the ball so completely and utterly, begs the question – what other shortcuts are waiting to rear the ugly head.  I was going to use the Mac Mini server for some home brewed family ‘stuff,’ and probably still will – Podcaster and QT Streaming is pretty slick, but the Mail tool just got canned.  Sad day.