As I think I've commented, Q has come out with what was supposed to be a spiffy new version of Eudora, first full number release in a few years -- v6. I was all excited about this, thinking they'd finally fix some basic oversights like the Win3.0-style GUI, lack of control over fonts, mailbox threading, and maybe even skinning or something similarly cool. So as soon as I found out that the crack was out, I decided to give it a test run to find out whether I should buy Eudora 6.

My first gut reaction: bleargh, this thing is UGLY. I don't mean a little ugly. I mean FUGLY. The design team clearly started out with the right idea -- shaded "XP-type" icons -- and then, for zog only knows what reason, deployed it to work with 256-color videocards. WTF? Yeah, we've moved up from the days when everything was done in shades of crimson, to actually having multi-color icons. But for the love of all that's bizarre, this is 2003, we don't need to use checkerboard grids for shading anymore!

More of a report will come in the future as I figure out all of the other "improvements" in the program, especially the weird Content Concentrator. I have already noticed that it has the one amazing feature of rendering everything quoted in a forward between the first and last lines into "...snip..." which in many cases is an improvement over reading the full post. *snicker*