Last week, on October 26th, I met with my friend Dave to buy our copies of Leopard. Not long after we finished installing we started trying out the various features of Leopard to see what was new.

At one point, we got to trying out Apple Mail. This is Apple's email reading program that comes with OS X. I had been using Mozilla Thunderbird for years and was curious about how Apple Mail worked. One feature that I used all the time was Thunderbirds 'View only Unread Mail' setting. This was a setting on the menu that changed it so it only showed the unread mail in your inbox. I liked this setting because I like to keep my old mail around, but after a while, all that old mail starts to 'clutter up' the list and it's hard to find the new email to read.

We loaded Apple Mail, and searched everywhere in the menus for this 'View Unread Only' setting. It was nowhere to be found. This of course made me mad. How could Apple leave out such a common feature that exists in all other email programs? This sucks! Back to Thunderbird for me. But then Dave came up with a solution. Just create a smart folder that displays all the unread mail in your inbox! Suddenly I understood why Apple left off this obvious feature. It wasn't needed and it was a poor approach to the problem. Why waste menu space creating a feature that not everyone is going to use? Why not simply add it as a feature of smart folders. This way, people like me can add the feature, and the rest who don't care about it, never have to see some confusing menu item. Everyone wins.

Nice job Apple. Once again Apple is forcing me to 'think different', but in a good way.