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Sierra (MacOS 12)
  • First jump out of the box Sierra broke my SoftRAID RAID 5 array. In fact the install would not complete with it connected to the system and if it is plugged in while the system is booted it causes a hard crash. After several chat sessions with OWC and SoftRAID, SoftRAID revealed that some change in the second non-public bata broke it and they are looking for a workaround. (I can't really complain, that is the chance you take with beta software) 😠
  • The only software incompatibility discovered so far is SpamSieve 😐
  • I haven't tried all of the various utilities so far but several open with a warning they are not approved with this version of the OS and refuse to run. 👍
  • I know it is the same monitor and resolution, but somehow everything seems just a touch sharoer and crisper 🙂
  • Siri on the desktop is wonderful. You have to trigger her (hold command space) to listen but that is probably a really good thing, particularly in an environment with lots of conversations going on 😃
  • Applications may be a touch slower launching but this is the first public beta after all 😐
  • All in all everything has remarkably uneventful for a first beta release. 😃😃

iOS 10
  • Obviously Apple's download servers wwere slanmmed so the download was slow but the installl was completely straightforward 😃
  • The major new thing I noticed is the new Homekit icon and I am eagerly awaiting a new door lock so I can try Homekit out 😐
  • I have found the Health app a useful tool for keeping all sorts of medical information and records. At my age that gets a bit tedious at times. But in the iOS 10 version of Health much of the data entry has been relegated to third party apps almost all of which have free versions and very low priced ($1 - $2) upgrades. Overall better information, but perhaps not quite as convenient. 🙂
  • Several UI tweeks and so far all strike me as improvements. 😃
  • It is difficult t make a side by side comparison of my iPhone 6 Plus running iOS 10 and my wife's iPhone 6 (no plus) running iOS 9 becausse of the difference in the screen sizes but to my eye iOS 10 is crisper and sharper. 😃
  • I have encountered a couple of older games that have presented me with a warning they are not 64 bit and may slow the overall system while running but they do still run. 🙂
  • I have yet to encounter any actual incompatibility😄

[b]Watch OS[/b]
  • 😡😖😩 I am doing something wrong and so far I have been unable to get the new Watch OS to install 😡😖😩
Thanks for the breaking news. smile

I hope the release of the first public beta so close to the eve of Sierra's official release indicates that Apple is more confident about it than they were about El Cap!

Quote:
I hope the release of the first public beta so close to the eve of Sierra's official release indicates that Apple is more confident about it than they were about El Cap!

The original El Capitan public beta was released July 9, 2015, and El Capitan proper was released September 30, 2015.

With the Sierra public beta released July 7, 2016, and Sierra proper coming this fall, I don't understand the inference you're drawing RE the timing of things.
Originally Posted By: dkmarsh
Quote:
I hope the release of the first public beta so close to the eve of Sierra's official release indicates that Apple is more confident about it than they were about El Cap!

The original El Capitan public beta was released July 9, 2015, and El Capitan proper was released September 30, 2015.

With the Sierra public beta released July 7, 2016, and Sierra proper coming this fall, I don't understand the inference you're drawing RE the timing of things.

Wow! I "remember" joemike having reported on El Cap public betas for considerably more than 10 weeks, but they were obviously just being released in pretty quick succession.

Thanks for clearing that up, although I'd have preferred to have been correct about Apple's confidence in their handiwork.
"The only software incompatibility discovered so far is SpamSieve."

Michael Tsai is reporting: "SpamSieve 2.9.25b4 adds preliminary support for macOS 10.12 Sierra Seed 2." See this.

I am a big SS fan so indeed this issue captures my attention.

And many thanks for the heads-up on all that other stuff.
My burning question; is there a new macOS logo?
Originally Posted By: crarko
My burning question; is there a new macOS logo?

If you mean the Finder logo the answer is NO. There is a logo for Siri but that is of course a new addition to MacOS.
SoftRAID

Drives formatted for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 using SoftRAID 5.5 or earlier will reliably crash the current public beta of Sierra. This happened to me and after a lot of troubleshooting on my part I gave up and contacted SoftRAID support.TheyI verified the problem and said,
Originally Posted By: SoftRAID tech Support
SoftRAID 5.5 was broken by a change in the second MacOS 12 and we are working on a workaround.

ScanSNAP 6.3.50.1006

ScanSnap reliably crashes when scanning a document. However VueScan works well using the same Fujitsu ix500 scanner. Contacting Fujitsu Tech Support will have to wait until Monday.

I will try to come up with a list of configuration and disk utilities that refuse to run with MacOS 12 this afternoon.
So far I have encountered the follow compatibility issues and warnings with third party apps:
  • Drive Genius 4 — launches without error or warning, but I am unwilling to run it until it has been certified by ProSoft Engineering 👎
  • MacPilot — Launches with warning and quits when the warning is acknowledged 👍
  • OnyX — Displays warning banner and quits 👍
  • TechTool Pro — Launches with warning but offers to ignore the warning and continue 👍👎
  • TinkerTool — Displays compatibiity warning and quits 👍
  • TinkerTool System — Displays warning, does not work, and offers link to developer seb site to check for compatible versions. 👍

I have looked but other then Apple apps that is all I have that actually modifies the system.

Siri
  • My biggest disappointment so far
  • She works well with questions that can be looked up on the internet and has a variety snarky ansswers to impudent questions but...
  • The promise was she could open apps, search for files, etc on the Mac but...
    • She does not recongnize any of the apps on my computer including Safari, Mail, and Pages. She can open apps on iOS
    • File searches either come up empty or an internet site is suggested
    • If phrased very correctly Siri is semi-successful at playng requests from my music library but unless "my library" is specifically stated she searches the iTunes on-line entries.
    • To be fair I think much of my initial lack of success is most likely due to insuffictient specificity in my requests
    • Hopefully the vaunted AI will kick in soon and certainly before full release or there will be major disappointment from the users

Hiya Craig! smile

Say, whatever happened to the 18 month release cycle, anyhow? Seems like I'm going to skip from Yosemite to Sierra just by procrastinating on an El Capitan installation. Maybe I'll wait for Big Sur...
I'be stayed with Yosemite so far because of issues the corporate VPN software has with El Capitan. Although I think disabling System Integrity Protection (rootless) can bypass that. May try Sierra on a backup system, and see how that goes.

Or find a different place to work. smile

And hiya back!
iOS 10 Camera and Photos

I have a couple of Photo apps I have come to rely on to enhance the capability of the iPhone Camera and image editing, specifically ProCam and Cortex Cam. iOS 10 broke both of them. The apps launch, but they are apparently unable to trigger or control the camera. So far they are the only iOS apps I have found that are broken.

Camera does not appear to have changed much, but to my non-professional eye it appears the focus is a touch faster and maybe more accurate, and functions such as the anti-shake are working better . 👍

Photos has added some nice built in photo editing tools and in app access to Markup (which comes with iOS 10) third party photo editing apps such as the aforementioned ProCam. 👍 The ProCam editor does work, it is just taking the picture with ProCam that is busted. Markup duplicates most of the editing features of ProCam which makes ProCam's usefulness in question to me.
Carbon Copy Cloner

Carbon Copy Cloner launches with significant warnings that it use under an uncertified operating system could cause data damage or loss. I was disappointed that I shouldn't use it, but the caution is well placed after the issues that arose with El Capitan so I have to applaud the caution 👍

Addenda: CCC has an interim release of CCC 4 that has fixes for some "very minor issues with Sierra" but is not yet fully certified. I have cloned my Sierra partition and booted from it and all appears to work as advertised, including creating a Recovery drive on the cloned disk. 👍
A small glitch has appeared in Launchpad. When opened the app icons are not filled in, close and quickly reopen and they are filled in. It happens every time. I have also noticed and reported several other minor display anomalies but this is after all the first public beta and none of them are stoppers.
A security feature old timers are going to love (NOT)

EDIT: I was interrupted as I was writing this and was unaware it posted. Now it is too late to delete it. It was a false alarm anyway. My apologies for the error.
Originally Posted By: joemikeb
A security feature old timers are going to love (NOT)

OK, I give up. wink
Sierra

FWIW other than a few app incompatibility issues, which are expected in and early beta, and an annoying tendency for apps to very occasionally lose focus, the beta is relatively trouble free. I have not seen any noticeable difference in system performance between El Capitan and Sierra which is really good for an early beta. Other than Siri the differences between El Capitan and Sierra are numerous but relatively subtle changes in detail. That is not to say there aren't significant new features, I encounter new ones in almost every day, but they are in the details and too numerous to remember much less enumerate. So far the enhanced security features have not evidenced themselves except it seems the padlock appears in even more System Preference Panes than before.

iOS 10

The changes in iOS 10 are more noticeable than those in Sierra. The first thing ye see are the UI changes in many built in apps and in the Desktop. Functionally not so different, but visually and human engineering wise a lot more user friendly and easier to use. Two kits from iOS 9, HealthKit and HomeKit have matured and evolved nicely. There is much more dependence on third party apps for data collection and functional execution in iOS 10. The evolutionary trend of these kits seems obvious. There are devices that can be directly controlled or accessed using the Health or Home apps through the assistance of the device's own proprietary app, and other data collection apps that feed their data to the Health or Home app which integrates the different datum into a single report.

For example the Home app can read, report, and change the status of Phillips Hue lightbulbs that are linked through the Hue app. In a sense duplicating one another, but Home can combine that along with the status of wireless door locks, thermostats, and alarm systems to present a complete picture and control of the home status in a single screen. A lot of developers that claim to be HomeKit compatible still have a lot of work to do. By-the-way this makes Family Apple accounts really useful.

It is hard to visualize how this is useful until you have tried it. Then you begin to recognize the long term value of where Apple is going with this. I am looking forward to this trickling down to MacOS at some point in the hopefully near future.
First Disappointment

There are a couple of really neat features in Sierra that I have been looking forward t using
  • Auto Unlock that automaticalluy unlocles your computer when you come near it wearing an unlocked Apple Watch and...
  • Universal Clipboard that allows you to clip something into the clipboard on a MacOS or iOS device and it would be available for pasting on another.
I had tried to find and use either feature with no success and then today ran into an unsurmountable wall. These two features are both part of the Continuity feature in MacOS 12. This feature set, or at least this part of continuity have four requirements,
  • MacOS 12
  • iOS 10
  • Watch OS 3 (for the auto unlock feature)
  • a 2013 or later Mac
Unfortunately I have a Late 2012 Mac mini. So I while I won't exactly be kicking and screaming about upgrading, but I will be eagerly awaiting the next release the Mac mini.
Beta 2

MacOS 12
  • I am a lot happier since installing MacOS 12 and iOS 10 this morning. My two major incompatibility issues had been with SoftRAID and ScanSnap Manager, neither of which would work with the first beta. Both are purring along nicely with the second beta, without either one being updated so the issue was in MacOS 12.
  • Other than those two bug fixes I have not found any noticeable UI or other change in beta 2.
  • None of the various configuration and volume repair apps such as Cocktail, OnyX, TinkerTool. TinkerTool Pro, Drive Genius, and TechTool Pro have MacOS 12 certified versions yet, but that is not surprising this early in the beta process. They will want to be sure things have stabilized first.
  • I find I am using Siri and Dictate extensively now and it is driving my office mate (my wife) crazy. OI thought this would wear off, but instead I find I am using both on my iOS devices more than ever. It is habit forming.

iOS 10
  • The only incompatibilities I had encountered in iOS 10 were in apps that extend/enhance control of the camera. Those apps now work in iOS 10 beta 2.
  • I am stil wworking on the HomeKit, Apple TV, HomeKit compatible device links without a notable lack of success. I am not sure what I am missing. Apple's documentation and the thrid party developers all say it is simple and that may be the problem. I need to get my 9 year old grandson to set it up?
  • Did I mention my disappointment that Auto Unlock and Universal Clipboard won't work with my pre 2013 Mac min? 😡
For those of you old enough to remember the kiddy matinee serial, The Perils of Pauline (Its first run began the year my mother was born so I caught it caught it over three decades later). Each episode consisted of Pauline escaping or being rescued from the peril in the previous week's episode and ended with her in yet another dire peril.

I would not say beta testing puts the tester in dire peril, but at least in the early betas one fix seems to inevitably accompanied by another break. 😠 In the case of MacOS 12 public beta 2 my two major incompatibilities ScanSnap and SoftRAID were fixed but it appears Automatic Time Machine backups that were working perfectly were broken with beta 2. Manually triggered Time Machine backups work correctly it is just that the automatic backups do not happen at all. 👎

One of Feedback Assistant's questions that must be answered before you can submit a problem report is, Does this prevent you from using this version of macOS?. The available answers are somewhat limiting, but obviously they are designed to help prioritize the issue. I wanted to answer, This does not prevent me from using this version of MacOS but it sure as H____ increases my risks. but the was not one of the available options. 😠
YIPE

I just made a discovery in MacOS 12. In System Preferences > iCloud > iCloud Drive > Options there is a new item in the list of "Apps that store documents and date will appear here" Labeled Desktop & Documents Folders, and at the bottom of that widow a checkbox labeled Optimize Mac Storage. The idea is making the Mac Desktop consistent across all your MacOS and iOS devices. Sounds good doesn't it?

What it took me a while to catch is that once that is checked the Documents folder disappeared from my user folder. After some frantic and unsuccessful searching of the boot drive failed to turn up the missing Documents folder (I knew the files were still available because I could access them in the applications with zero download time) I noticed a Documents folder had appeared on the iCloud Drive. [*]This is not an entirely new concept, rather a new application of a concept that has been around for a while now and is a logical step in Apple's move toward an integrated desktop and handheld coputing environment.

I opened it in Finder and there was all the contents of the Documents folder. I went to the iCloud Drive using Safari, and my iPad and yes all the files were there. I tried moving the documents folder to no avail and finally sat down to scratch my head and see what was going on. It was at that point I read the note under Optimize Mac Storage in System Preferences which reads
Originally Posted By: MacOS System Preferences
The full contents of the iCloud Drive will be stored on this Mac, if you have enough space. Older Documents will be stored only in iCloud when space is needed.

The Mystery of the missing Documents folder had been solved. However, if you Uncheck Desktop & Documents Folders the following warning appears…
Originally Posted By: warning
If you continue, documents on your Desktop and in your Documents folder will be available on iCloud Drive only.

New items added to the Desktop or in the Documents folder on this Mac will not be stored on iCloud Drive

My thoughts at this point are...
  • Functionally I am not aware of any difference in how the computer operates under MacOS 12 with this feature turned on., in fact it has taken this long for me to even notice the change.
  • The Documents are still on my computer and can be accessed even if I do not have internet connectivity
  • If I elect to quit using the iCloud Documents folder the folders and files can still be downloaded back to my Mac.
  • I don't know what level of effort would be involved in redirecting everything back to a new Document folder on my Mac
  • As far as security goes, all of my critical data files are already encrypted which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling
  • I know there are changes coming in FileVault and FileVault protection of the iCloud d=Drive but that is on the schedule for 2017 along with the new file system
  • Admittedly I could easily overlooked any writeup or explanation of the feature elsewhere, but this did come as a shock
  • I am going to make a feature request that there is a detailed warning/explanation of what will happen if the Desktop & Documents folder when the user attempts to activate it.
  • I could easily make a long list of pros and cons for this new behavior, and frankly I am going to have to think about this for a while before I make up my mind about its utility.

ADDENDUM
I have had some time to think about this change and at this point my thinking is there are multiple potential benefits but a change is required in what you think of as part of your computer…
  1. You can reduce the cost of a new Mac by as much as $500 by purchasing the smallest SSD and relying on MacOS and iCloud to store any Documents you do not have room for on the local drive.
  2. Because the oldest and least recently accessed files are the ones that will be deleted from your local drive you are unlikely to notice and they are still available if you have an internet connection. All of this is invisible to the user. (But I am living proof that it can cause waves of panic in old computer users who aren’t expecting the disappearance of the Documents folder.)
  3. Because the Documents folder is on iCloud all of your documents are available to any Mac Computer, iPad, or iPhone that is linked to your Apple ID/iCloud Drive.
  4. The duplication on your computer means
    1. You can access your files even without an internet connection and thy will be automatically synched the next time you connect to the internet.
    2. There is no delay or lag accessing your documents on your Mac.
    3. Because there is a copy of the Documents on your local drive they are included in the Time Macbine backup so you have a double backup of your Documents, Time Machine and Apple’s iCloud backups.
  5. In essence this parallels what already exists with Photos and iTunes.
  6. I am just now experimenting with it but I have several apps that run on both MacOS and iOS and currently I have to use DropBox and a couple of other network drives services, each of which requires an app, an annual service fee, etc. This new feature has the potential to eliminate all of that with a simple iCloud access.
  7. Watch for new automatic and transparent document compression which will further reduce the need for local document storage capacity. This will probably come into play with Apple’s new file system and full disk encryption in 2017.

SECOND ADDENDUM
To my chagrin I have discovered two App Store apps that I use daily on both MacOS and iOS do not store their data files in the Documents folder, and there is no way in either app on either platform to force this happening. On closer examination I have found that lots of apps now store their data in ~/Library/Application Support and ~/Library/Containers so these are NOT on the iCloud Drive. This at least partially defeats a major purpose of having the Documents folder on the iCloud Drive. I have submitted a feature request to Apple with several alternative solutions and hopefully that will find an accepting audience at Apple.

I have already tried using an alias, but that doesn't work. I may try hard links, but I am not crazy about that idea at the moment for maintenance reasons if nothing else.
And here's another evaluation of Sierra: First Impressions: Taking macOS Sierra Public Beta for a Test Drive
MacOS 12 and iOS 10 beta 3 are out and I almost overlooked beta 3 includes iTunes 12.5. According to App Store iTunes 12.5…
Originally Posted By: App Store
This update allows you to see works, composers, and performers while browsing Classical music in the Apple Music catalog. It also included stability and performance improvements.

ADDENDA
A few quick observations about Beta 3
  • Some minor but annoying glitches appear to have been corrected in Beta 3
  • Off hand it "feels" as if Beta 3 is "snappier" than Betas 1 & 2. Not that they were noticeably slow but beta 3 feels snappier.
In my memory and limited experience, that will be the first time Apple has accommodated classical music listeners. smile frown
THIS IS COOL
For a good while now I have used iCloud for my iTunes storage because:
  • They don't take up any storage space on my Mac
  • They don't take up any storage on my iPad or iPhone (Unless I am going to be on the road and relying on cellular data connections in which case I download a selected group of tunes to the iOS device)
  • All of my music is available on all of my devices as long as I have a WiFi connection
But….
Synching tunes playlists was only available through a physical connection between the Mac and the iOS device. 😡 Not undoable, but a royal pain in the nether regions of the anatomy. Along comes MacOS 12, iTunes 12.5, iOS 10, and the iOS 10 version of Music...
  • iOS 10 âž­ Settings âž­ Music there are two new options...
    • Add Playlist Songs
    • iCloud Music Library
With those two options enabled, Music on my iPhone and iPad running iOS 10 are complete and total duplicates with iTunes on my Mac running MacOS 12. All my tunes, all my playlists, all my folders, everything is the same automatically and completely transparently with no physical connections involved — it all goes through iCloud. (I say transparently because I only noticed the significant new change this morning while helping my grandson set up his new iPhone 6S.

Now I am beginning to wonder when will iTunes on MacOS become Music with no store capabilities and iTunes Store becomes a separate App as it is on iOS?

Similarly App Store iOS is already segregated with iPhone only and iPad only sections, why not roll in MacOS only apps and do all app shopping in one place? As I already look at any new app purchases to see if there is are equivalent versions for MacOS and iOS just go to one call does all app shopping.
THE THRILL RIDE OF BETA TESTING

I was on the road when the beta 4 versions of MacOS 12 and iOS 10 were released so I have only been able to install iOS 10. The next day I got an email from SoftRAID advising users know to be beta testing MacOS 12 not to install beta 4. The "fix" Apple had made kin beta 2 to correct the immediate system crash when a SoftRAID volume is present had managed to disappear in beta 4. 😱

Glad I was on the same road. Besides that it is a LOT cooler hear at 8,200 feet than it is at home right now and not only would I have been hot from the heat, I would have been hot under the collar. 👺

As you can see iOS 10 beta 4 is working well.
Somewhere between Sierra Beta one and Sierra Beta eight Apple slipped and dictation a big dose of steroids. I started playing around with it the other day out of curiosity and discovered the built in features have dramatically expanded. The line between Siri and dictation is fuzzy Think of Siri in sierra as being the handy dandy look anything up on the Internet tool that it is on IOS. Dictation and dictation commands look and feel very much the same way as Siri does but those are limited to commanding actions on the Mac. There are too many dictation commands to count, but you can switch to, hide, close, any application in the systems application folder, scroll left right up down, and the list of internal commands for an application is context-sensitive, in other words want application has one set of commands another application has a different set that is appropriate to that application. I am guessing that is tied do the AppleScript dictionary for the application. You can also create custom dictstion commands using WorkFlows, AppleScript, etc.

There are two or three different options for triggering command recognition.
  • Using a keyword to trigger commands recognition, the default is computer but I ended up changing it to Siri
  • You can simply have the computer listen to what you were saying and recognize commands out of the conversation screen without a keyword
  • You can trigger dictation commands with a keystroke pattern such as command space

Interpretation accuracy using the microphone in my display is good. Using a semipro USB microphone on the desktop yield an outstanding interpretation accuracy. My major complaint at this point is when I call for a period punctuation mark it comes out a comma. I have submitted a trouble report and hopefully that will be corrected in the final release.

Anyone who has ever used speech recognition will tell you you need to learn to pronounce your words carefully or they may not come out quite what you expect. But I have noticed the contextual artificial intelligence and interpretation in sierra is amazing. The initial interpretation is sometimes wrong but as the sentence is completed the incorrect word will change to the correct word. Unless you're watching closely you might miss it entirely.

Would this work in a noisy office environment probably not unless you were using a very good highly directional headphone mike. Is it useful? IMO Siri, dictation, and dictation commands just may be Sierra's killer app once we learn to really use it and to dictate correctly.
It's official: Apple Announces Sept. 20 Release for macOS Sierra. I'm wondering why I would want Sierra. I don't have an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch. I definitely don't want anything to do with the Cloud. Siri might be OK if it works, but I don't have any great compulsion to use it. Are there any things about Sierra that would be an improvement over El Cap? I certainly won't upgrade until at least 10.12.2, as is my custom.
There is lots of stuff going on under the hood in Sierra particularly as relates to security and of course there is the foundation for the new file system, but that will not be fully implemented this year (but maybe in a MacOS 12 update) and as far as most routine stuff goes the first thing you are likely to notice is that Sierra is even more persnickety about installing apps from non-registered developers. Annoying at first, but IMO the additional protection is worth the minor annoyance.

I have encountered two or three absolute incompatibility issues in beta testing but those have all been fixed. Diskwarrior, TechTool Pro, Drive Genius, Cocktail, OnyX, TinkerTool, TinkerTool System, MacPilot, etc still do not want to run but that is wisdom on the developer's part. Apple's recent announcement about cleaning the App Store inventory of apps that are no longer supported is a tacit admission there are apps need to be or should have been updated for full MacOS 12 compatibility, but the same can be said of virtually every OS upgrade on the Mac, PC, or Unix platforms. Even non-registered developers could have had access to MacOS 12 for some months now so there is little reason for apps to go out of date unless they are either marginally supported or no longer supported at all. Personally I am allergic to non-supported apps anyway.

Probably the most significant features in MacOS 12, Siri and even tighter iCloud integration, can or will be initially overlooked or ignored by many users. I have been running the beta since its first release and only began to recognize the true utility of Siri and her sibling Dictation a bit over two weeks ago. I didn't think I needed it, and truthfully I can live without their help, but I have reached the point, I no longer want to. They make my workflow go faster and easier to manage than I could have imagined. (Admittedly it is noisier with all my talking to Siri — just ask my wife.) The problem now is learning and remembering all the proper voice commands. It took a few weeks until a Trackpad became natural and automatic for me and I suspect Siri will be the same.
Thanks for that, Joe. I'll have to look at app compatibility with Sierra but it's too early to tell. I have consulted http://roaringapps.com but there isn't much info yet. My main concern is that MS Office 2008 works with Sierra. I can probably live without Word (although it suits my needs) because there are good substitutes, namely Nisus Writer Pro and Libre Office, but I like Entourage, probably because I'm used to it. I could get used to Mail but my wife is another story... As far as I'm concerned, Pages is unacceptable.

If Photoshop CS5 doesn't work with Sierra, I can always go to Photoshop CC. The monthly fee is annoying but I can afford it.

At any rate, I'll wait and see.
Can't help you with Office 2008, I haven't had anything from Microsoft for several years now. I can verify that LibreOffice, NeoOffice, Nisus Writer Pro, Mellel, and Scriviner all work flawlessly. (OpenOffice works too but that project is shutting down. 😥) While I don't find Pages totally unacceptable I never use it so I guess that tells the tale.

If you don't care for Mail and are looking for a change from Entourage, you might take a look at AirMail 3 from the App Store. It doesn't have Rules like Mail, but it is highly configurable and quite fast. I like it but no longer use it because the interface was different between OS X, iOS on the iPhone, and it did not play as nice with iOS on the 12" iPad Pro but it is under constant development and that may have changed by now. It is worth a look.
Jon, your questions often encourage me to revisit ideas, apps, etc. and your comment about Mail was no exception. I noticed in the App Store the current version of Airmail is now Airmail 3. Since I had liked it before I decided to take another look and now I have to correct men previous observations. I start by saying all of my previous reservations have been taken care of.
  • The MacOS and iOS versions are as far as I can tell absolutely identical
  • through the magic of iCloud what you set up on one platform will be completely reflected on the other platforms including Rules
  • Speaking of Rules…
    • ...work in either the InBox or Sent mail box
    • ...can either be universal or restricted to a specific email account
    • …offer more options and functions than Mail
  • Offers six diffferent looks and in general is more colorful than Mail without being obnoxious or glaring.
  • offers a variety of options to tailor it to your specific needs/wants/desires
  • …links with a number of third party apps including Dropbox and Evernote
  • ...has a variety of keystroke actions and optionally supports Google Mail shortcuts
  • handles left to right or right to left writing
Can you tell I like Airmail 3? smile
Airmail certainly sounds good. I could deal with the change from Entourage (and I could deal with Mail also) but my wife, on the other hand... Domestic harmony always trumps (no pun intended) practicality.
Having been married 57 years I certainly understand.
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