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| Best Mac email client: 6 on test Posted: 01 Jan 2011 04:00 AM PST  Despite the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other social media, email remains something that we all use every day. And although over the past few years, more and more people have been using email via web-based clients such as Hotmail and Gmail, using a rich, desktop-based client still has some key advantages. Using a desktop client gives you a local copy of your emails, which enables you to view them even when you're offline – and although it might amaze some, there are still plenty of occasions when an internet connection simply refuses to connect. In this test, we've looked at six of the best desktop email clients on the Mac. Apple Mail comes with every copy of OS X, and has improved over the years from a bare-bones email client to a more powerful product. Outlook 2011 is the latest email client from Microsoft, replacing Entourage in the newest version of Office. Mozilla Thunderbird is an open source email client from the team responsible for Firefox, and includes plenty of powerful features. PowerMail, GyazMail and Mailsmith complete our line-up. All of the clients have strengths and weaknesses, but we've chosen to focus on ease of use, support for different email protocols, filtering and spam handling. Let's take a look… Test One: Ease of use Setting up an email client can go one of two ways…
All of the products on test support the POP protocol, and all except Mailsmith support IMAP as well. Mail and Outlook also support Microsoft Exchange servers. Most will have a go at auto-configuring themselves to your account settings, although results can be variable depending on the type of account you use. As expected, Outlook performs well if you're using it with an Exchange account, but given a Gmail account it requires some tweaking. Likewise, GyazMail, PowerMail and Mailsmith require a little fiddling to work with Gmail properly. All of the products are easy to use when it comes to day-to-day tasks. Mail and Outlook integrate with calendar systems (built-in and iCal respectively) to create to-do items based on emails. Thunderbird, which in its previous incarnations was somewhat tricky to set up, has been much-improved. Now the overall interface has been brought up to the kind of standards set by Mail and Outlook. Test Two: Multiple accounts How well does the product handle multiple accounts?
Many users now have multiple email accounts, which makes handling more than one email address important. All of the applications on test have the ability to handle multiple email accounts. There are two schools of thought about how email clients should handle multiple accounts. The first is that every inbox must be kept separate, so that you don't mix work mail with home mail, for example. The second says that everything should end up in the same inbox, so you can process all your email quickly and easily. Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird give you the option of both methods. With Mail or Outlook, you simply click on the Inbox icon at the top of the list and it places all your inboxes into a unified view. With Thunderbird, you need to click through to its special 'unified view' mode. The other packages keep inboxes separate, although in all cases you can create filters or special views that show you unread mail from all accounts. Test Three: Filtering How well does each package filter incoming email?
All of the clients include the ability to filter messages as they arrive. Often, this will be used to file incoming mail from a mailing list into a folder, to avoid inbox clutter, but filters can do a lot more if given a chance. PowerMail includes some extra filtering options that will please power users, such as the ability to automatically save attachments to a specific folder – handy if you receive files from a client and want to ensure they are always saved in a particular place. Outlook enables you to set To Do actions using a filter. This means, for example, that you can add a rule which creates a To Do item for any email from your boss. Mail – the only other client with support for To Dos – doesn't have an equivalent feature. However, it does have 'smart mailboxes', which let you set up folders with a set of filtering criteria. Instead of moving mail into a folder, though, a smart mailbox just displays matching email, no matter where it's located, which is useful when searching. Test Four: HTML handling Email can come in HTML form, but do our clients like it?
Despite the complaints of the purists who believe that all email should be standard text, HTML email is a fact of life. Not only do companies send out formatted newsletters using HTML, but some clients even enable users to create HTML emails to send to others. Mailsmith takes the purist's approach, and doesn't display HTML in-line at all. Instead, if you receive an HTML email, it converts it to text but gives you the option to send the HTML to a web browser for display. All of the other applications attempt to display the HTML, with varying degrees of success. PowerMail enables you to turn off HTML email by default, and – like Mail – also offers to automatically download images (although both applications note that this can be a security risk). PowerMail also includes a handy 'Quick Look' feature, so if an email has an attachment, you can see its contents without having to leave the application or open the file. The Winner: Apple Mail
Of the six clients on test, three fell by the wayside fairly quickly. Mailsmith's lack of IMAP support outweighs its plus points. GyazMail, while having a simple interface, has little to recommend it, and PowerMail – despite its excellent filtering – feels like a product in need of a major upgrade. This leaves us with Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird. All three are easy to use and have powerful filtering and account support. However, Thunderbird lacks direct support for Exchange servers, while Outlook is the only one that costs money. That leaves us with one winner: Apple's Mail. It's free, works with virtually every kind of server going, is integrated well into OS X, and has plenty of options for handling accounts, spam, and filters. 
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| 10 of the best Linux window managers Posted: 01 Jan 2011 02:00 AM PST  The window manager is the most important part of the Linux desktop environment. It defines how your windows look, how they behave, how applications are launched, and how they're closed. In many cases, window managers have evolved into complete desktop environments, helping with file management, configuration editing and computer management. They're at the very heart of your interaction with the system, but their best feature is that they're swappable, which sets Linux apart from both Windows and OS X. With Windows you're stuck with, well, Windows. With Linux, you have a choice. And whether you have a preference for a 'do everything' approach, or a 'do nothing at all' one, there's a window manager made for you. 1. Gnome
Gnome is the first example of a window manager that's grown into a complete desktop environment. There's also a very good reason why Gnome has become the default desktop environment for the most popular Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora – it's because it's simple, concise and starting to look rather beautiful. Taking many cues from OS X, most functions can be reached in one or two clicks, and its designers have reduced screen clutter and superfluous options. There's an excellent network manager that can help you navigate even the most wayward wireless networks and inconsistent wired ones, while the new on-screen notification system – along with Empathy's support for Twitter, IM and Facebook – mean you have a full screen to fill with your own applications. Thanks to applications such as Firefox, Chrome and Gimp using the same graphics toolkit as Gnome, many of the most popular Linux applications will feel better integrated with the desktop. 2. KDE
Gnome's great adversary is KDE, a feature behemoth. It's easy to use, but its many and varied options can drown the unwary. That's not to say it's unapproachable, though. The new window-snapping feature of the latest versions can emulate all the new snapping functions from Windows, and there's integrated support for desktop and panel widgets, nicknamed Plasmoids. These can be dragged and dropped from a small cashew symbol that sits on the top right of your desktop window. Many of KDE's community-developed features can be downloaded in-line using the 'Get New Stuff' feature of many configuration panels. This means KDE users are always experimenting, and always changing the appearance of their desktops. This can create problems, and recent versions of KDE are somewhat unstable. KDE is the desktop to choose if you like eye candy, though. It integrates many of the visual effects that have made Linux famous, including the desktop cube, sliding spaces, wobbly windows, drop shadows and hardware zoom. The new 'Activity' feature means you can restrict visual elements to a specific task, such as 'Office' or 'Downtime', shifting between them as you would a virtual desktop. 3. XFCE
Despite being marketed as a lightweight alternative to the likes of Gnome and KDE, you won't find any obvious functionality missing from XFCE: its configuration panels are comprehensive, and the flexibility in the window decoration design is also impressive. You can ape the look of many other popular window managers, as well as creating a custom layout. There's an integrated file manager called Thunar, a text editor called Mousepad and a custom CD/DVD burning tool, calendar and image viewer. But the key reason to run XFCE is for its speed. For a fully featured window manager, it still has a low set of requirements, and is ideal for older hardware and netbooks. 4. Enlightenment (E17)
Enlightenment is more than a simple window manager, and less than a full-blown desktop environment. It calls itself a 'desktop shell' and attempts to make all your desktop tasks easily and quickly achievable. It's also the first of these environments that you're unlikely to find pre-packaged for your distribution. As a result, the easiest way to try it out is to download and run Elive, a Debian-based distribution built specifically to showcase Enlightenment's capabilities. Elive's Enlightenment looks fantastic. There are deep drop shadows and a dynamically scaling toolbar. Everything opens and moves very quickly. Elive has also pulled applications in from other desktops, such as the file manager from XFCE and Debian's older version of the Firefox web browser. However, there's a problem – if you want to install Elive, you have to make a donation of at least $15, which we feel is just too much. 5. LXDE
The 'Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment' is aimed at older hardware, netbooks and low-powered thin clients. It manages this trick while remaining easy to use because a lot of effort has been spent creating the kind of configuration panels you'd expect to see in Gnome and KDE. There's an Appearances panel, for example, where you can change the look and feel of the desktop, and a Session Settings window that can be used to define what is and isn't launched at startup. Like many of the smaller desktops, LXDE is usually augmented with various tools and applications from other environments, including both Gnome and XFCE. The easiest way to get hold of LXDE is to either install Knoppix, or grab the latest LXDE-themed Ubuntu release, called 'Lubuntu'. The latter provides many more user-installable packages and several mainstream applications. 6. Window Maker
Window Maker is an old-school window manager. It hasn't seen a stable release in over five years, but that doesn't mean you should write it off just yet. It's design was based on NeXT, the desktop that went on to be the foundation to OS X. The desktop panel, for example, is a low-resource alternative to the ones offered by Gnome and KDE, and you can find plenty of tiny panel applications that can make it a very functional part of your screen. These applets may even be compatible with your current panel. Window Maker's age gives it another advantage – it runs well on hardware from five years ago. 7. Fluxbox
Based on Blackbox, Fluxbox can normally be installed from your distribution's package manager, and the three packages that come by default shed some light on its philosophy – the window manager, a configuration panel and the pager. The window manager is lighter than most. You won't find many icons in the launch menu, for instance, and the default toolbar at the bottom of the screen is filled with text. This makes it quick, but it will take a while to learn where your applications are hidden. Despite the graphical brevity, you'll still find many modern window management features. Applications will snap to a screen's borders, for instance, and the left/right cursor keys in the toolbar will quickly skip between the four virtual desktops. If you need something with a little more shine than simple X11, but don't need any guidance, Fluxbox is the window manager for you. 8. AmiWM
If you're of a certain age, this is pure nostalgia. AmiWM is a window manager that's designed to look and feel like the old Commodore Amiga WorkBench. It apes version 3.x, rather than the earlier 1.x and 2.x releases, and this means the default background colour is slate grey, while the window borders are blue. You can even slide down the main window to reveal the default X server that's running in the background. Despite looking just like an Amiga, it's actually a very fast and well-behaved window manager. You can launch all your favourite Linux applications, and even use the 'Execute Command' functions, just like the old Amiga. Any normal Linux application you might be used to will automatically look like it's been transported back to 1988 – except this time, there's memory protection for the multitasking, and hard drives are affordable. 9. Sawfish
The unique selling point for Sawfish is that it's built using a Lisp-based programming language. If that doesn't scare you off then Sawfish might be for you. It's one of the most user-configurable and quick window managers you can try. Almost every function has a user-defined keyboard shortcut, and you can change the way it reacts to events within the window manager. Sawfish was Gnome's window manager before Metacity, and as a result, it doesn't have some fundamental features, like a desktop panel. This means you'll get your hands dirty, both to install and configure it. It doesn't look too bad, in a Matrix-style, mid-90s kind of way, but if you don't like the look, it's easy to change. Other users have come up with dozens of better examples and the whole project is still being actively developed. 10. IceWM
IceWm is based on Motif, the ageing native toolkit for the X Windows system. This is brave when you consider that Motif is part of the reason why many developers have tried so hard to create an improved desktop experience! However, Motif does have its good points – it features a very clear and concise design, and IceWM borrows from this, adding lots of improvements. You can control everything from the keyboard, there's a taskbar with launch menu, virtual desktops and both Gnome and KDE compatibility. The theming engine is impressive, and most default installations include so many that IceWM needs an A-Z menu to list them all. IceWM is still being actively developed, it's a great modern equivalent to the usual suspects, and about as hard to use as Windows 98. 
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| Posted: 01 Jan 2011 01:30 AM PST  Most people wouldn't expect to pay over £2K for a compact speaker system, but then Monitor Audio's Apex is anything but average. It's a slice of pure audio luxury, with each speaker housed in a precision-engineered enclosure and furnished with some of the best driver tech Monitor Audio has to offer. The system on test here includes four A10 speakers, which handle front and rear-channel duties and stand just 250mm high. They retail for £275 each, and that's before you've even added the bespoke stands at £250 per pair. They're joined by the A40 centre and AW12 subwoofer, £425 and £900 respectively. Pricey they may be, but they're worth it. Build quality is brilliant. The inert die-cast aluminium enclosures are robust and weighty, while the use of a metallic black lacquer finish, brush effect metal side trims and curved cabinets epitomise cutting-edge chic. Magnetic grilles leave no visible fixings – the icing on an already sumptuous cake. Inside the A10s a 1-inch C-CAM gold dome tweeter handles high frequencies up to and beyond 35kHz. Like the Silver RX range, the drivers are attached to the enclosure using a single through bolt fixing, which eliminates a possible source of distortion and acts as a brace to resist unwanted vibration. There's more clever tech inside the floor stands. Plonk the A10s on top and there's no need to connect up the cables as they're internally wired with built-in connecting forks. The A40 centre features the same technology and mind-boggling build quality as the A10s, but adds an extra mid/bass driver – the two flank the gold-dome tweeter in the middle. The A40 can be mounted on the tabletop using the supplied feet or on the wall with the attached brackets. Once in position it can be tilted up to 22.5° to suit the angle and position of your screen. The B. A. Baracus of this particular A-Team is the AW12 subwoofer, supplying a considerable 500W of muscle from its 12in long-throw C-CAM driver. Exclusive to the Apex system, this bass-monger is every bit as classy as the speakers, thanks to the spangled black lacquer finish and gorgeous metal side trims, but be warned – it's a lot heavier than its compact dimensions might suggest. The sub's volume and EQ controls are helpfully located on top – a godsend if it's tucked in a hard-to reach spot. There's a couple of buttons for two different EQ modes – the standard EQ1 setting offers the best overall balance for music and movies, while the movie-centric EQ 2 mode boosts output by an extra 4dB at 21Hz for added punch. On the back is a crossover dial, which goes from 40Hz up to 120Hz, but the low-pass filter switch will bypass this if you'd rather control it with your receiver. Phase control and line in/out sockets complete the lineup. In action The Apex offers a masterful performance with movie material. Right across the soundstage there's an astonishing amount of detail, unearthing sonic minutiae you might not have noticed before – even with movies you know like the back of your hand. I've seen The Dark Knight's monumental Batpod chase scene countless times, but this system suddenly had me noticing subtle noises and nuances in the surround design that slip under the radar on lesser compact systems. Engines sound extra raspy, while weapons load and fire with extra snap, crackle and pop. This level of insight and dexterity isn't entirely surprising at over £2K, but that doesn't make the Apex's talents any less incredible. It's also astonishingly powerful. I was expecting fireworks, but what I got was Bonfire Night and Bastille Day rolled into one. Herculean doesn't even begin to describe the low-end might afforded by the AW-12 – it's thick, punchy and tighter than a public sector budget. If you can remain seated when The Joker blasts his bazooka you're probably dead, but even when you decommission the sub there's still a healthy dose of bass in the mix thanks to the terrific bottom-end extension of the A10s and A40. What's more, high-frequencies are smooth as silk, speech couldn't be clearer if the actors were in the room and the rear soundstage is willfully expansive. And with music, this system nailed the emotion and energy of any recording I threw at it. Clean, full-bodied vocals, metronomic timing and wonderful detail reproduction make for a spine-tingling listen and reveal it to be a fantastic all-rounder. These speakers may be small, but their sound certainly isn't; if you have this sort of money to spend, you'll be hard pressed to find a better compact system. Related Links
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