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Old 23 Jul 2019, 07:33 AM   #5
Berenburger
The "e" in e-mail
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: The Netherlands
Posts: 2,894
The Eyes Have It

Somewhat worrying news about David Harris.

Source: http://www.pmail.com/devnews.htm

Quote:
In January this year, while I was taking a brief holiday with some friends in Christchurch (a city about 350km north of Dunedin, where I live), I ended up being admitted to hospital for emergency eye surgery on a detached retina. It was probably just as well that my friends are both doctors, since it meant that the condition was caught early.

The surgery was successful, but since that time I have had almost constant problems with my vision, partially as an after-effect of the operation, but mostly because of a rapidly-growing cataract that has formed on the lens of my left eye: for the last three months, I have had almost no useful vision in that eye. I am scheduled for priority cataract surgery to correct the problems, after which I should be back to normal (or even, they tell me, a little better than before the initial problem), but at this stage the best estimate the hospital can give me for when it will happen is "sometime in the next four months".

The effect this series of issues has had on my life, and on Pegasus Mail and Mercury, is quite considerable. My right eye has always been weaker than my left eye, but it now has to handle the entire burden of my vision. What this means for my user community is that I can only do screen work for about half an hour at a time before getting eye strain: I'm still working, but at a reduced rate, and my ability to do things like answer mail is heavily reduced.

Warning: raw emotional outpouring alert!
It's frustrating. So mind-bendingly frustrating! Some days it makes me so desperate I could almost cry.
End of emotional boilover

Now that I've got that off my chest, let me give you a small progress update. Mercury v5 is very near to going into beta - I just have to finish the mailing list manager overhaul that is required to support the new split interface and it will be ready. I do not expect a long beta period for v5 - I have done huge amounts of testing as I've worked on it (I had to - just about every source module in the program has changed significantly).

WinPMail has been lagging behind a bit as I put my efforts into Mercury, but I would rate progress as good, and believe I should be on target for rough public betas before the end of the year. WinPMail needs fewer structural changes than Mercury, but far more modernization, and there's much more of it.

I will put out another developer update soon laying out some of the changes you can expect to see in the new versions of both programs, but for now, I'm afraid, my half hour is up, and I'm squinting so hard at the screen I can feel my eyelids seizing up.

All the best!

-- David --
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