There are moments in every Mac users life that are common across our experience. We all have that moment of abject horror when we install an upgrade to an application and the result has us screaming like we just saw a new set of scars on our face. “Oh God,” we shout, “What have you done to my beautiful application?!”
Today’s unfortunate victim of a poorly-thought-out interface “upgrade” was FirstClass, which upgraded to 8.1 today. FirstClass is a great piece of groupware, but the development of the Mac client has always lagged behind its PC counterpart. Today, it received some much needed upgrades including anti-aliased text, better voicemail handling and a few improvements to the admin interface. But, in the midst of those changes came some unwelcome additions and slowdowns in the application, and now I’m faced with a client that doesn’t even work at all.
Sure, it’s easy to back up to an earlier version, but there’s nothing more disappointing than a failed update.
Wasn't FirstClass first a Mac app? I remember using it many, many years ago from the pre-www days, when it was running dialup BBSs.
Well to be fair, FirstClass hasn't always been behind its PC counterpart, since it did come out for the Mac first.
Mac first, Mac best
Windows first, Windows worst
Say no more.
Eons ago, I used to run a BBS using FirstClass on a Macintosh II with a Hurdler Serial card and several modems.
Err... I don't remember a time when FirstClass didn't have an ugly, poorly-thought-out user interface. I remember loathing it on BBSes years ago. Seems like it went out of its way to ignore the Mac UI guidelines. Years later, a misguided corporation I worked for used it for intranet stuff. It sucked even worse then, cross-platform dreck with 'themable' UI: you could have ugly in color or you could have ugly in B&W.