Irfan's Corner on the Web » mac

Apple Mail Tip: Speed up your Apple Mail

admin — Mon, 18 May 2009 09:24:40 +0000

Tim Gaden has documented an excellent tip to speed up Apple Mail.

It involves optimising the SQLite database Apple Mail uses to store indexes and subject lines of emails.

You can check your current 'envelope archive' size by entering this in the terminal:

ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

Then to optimise it (cleans out stuff that has been marked for deletion but not actually deleted, defragments the structure, etc):

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum;

Then check your envelope archive size again to see the results…

ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

It compacted my envelope archive down from 55MB to 50MB — not a huge increase, but the speed difference was dramatic.

In particular, my 'sent mail' folder which had been taking 10 - 15 seconds to open (8,000 items) now only takes two or three seconds.

Read the full post and many informative comments here.

Upgraded to iLife ‘09

admin — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:06:32 +0000

I've just upgraded to iLife '09. Over the next few posts, I will evaluate each component of iLife '09, with the exception of iMovie and Garageband, because I've never used these in iLife '08.

CrossOver Pro and WINE

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:44:21 +0000

Its been long since I last used Wine on Linux. But I am impressed by the progress it has made.

Yesterday I was attracted to the CrossOver free Software give-away. I downloaded CrossOver Pro for Mac, and instantly tried out installing some software. I was impressed how smooth the installation of Office 2007 went. MS Visio 2007 installation failed, but Visio 2003 installation went smooth.

I'm disappointed though how few games are supported on CrossOver Games. But that doesn't mean that WINE lacks in the gaming department. Many of the recent games for the Mac are using a Transgaming product Cider, which allows companies such as EA to run unmodified Windows games, such as Spore, Command and Conquer 3 on Mac using WINE. Cider has impressive performance, and I have played and enjoyed a couple of cider games, which include Spore. It been quit a journey for Transgaming because their initial product, WineX, which was a directX implementation on WINE supported only a few games, but was powerful enough to run Warcraft 3.

CrossOver Pro is based on WINE. WINE requires numerous configurations for it to work on complex software. CrossOver makes those configurations easier. Previous versions of CrossOver Office were not easy to use. Check this link here, and you can see some real geekery was involved in installing Office 2007 in previous versions.

This software give-away definitely benefited CrossOver. Because with the hue and cry about virtualization, people had forgotten that it was possible to run common Windows software without installing a complete VM. I expect this company to get more visibility in future.

Some screenshots, of successful software installation with CrossOver.

While installing MS Office 2007:

After a Successful Install