It's time to update my Missing Manual. My copy covers Jaguar 10.2. Time to find the copy through 10.5.8.
Re-visited. Getting a useful manual is not so easy. Reading 50 or so reviews on Amazon makes me wonder if any of them covers how to fix things when they break, such as the Mail problem that brought me here.
As a user of Leopard who will not be updating to Snow, I'm more inclined to buy the Leopard Bible than the Leopard Missing Manual, based on the reviews.
Do you (or does anyone) have advice on which OS X 10.5 manual is most designed to help when things go wrong? I don't need a book that does little more than reproduce the Help files and screens Apple includes in OS X. I can read. I don't need a repeat of what Apple already said. I had my fill of those manuals with Gates's operating systems.
Back when B&N kept in stock every Windows manual published, I spent more than 3 hours comparing WIN NT manuals to see which was best at covering problems. These manuals were priced from $50 to $150. Answer: none. They were ALL mere reprints of what Microsoft published within the OS itself, the very Help screens found useless by Windows users.
Microsoft's approach to Help was perfectly skewered by the anecdote of the lost helicopter pilot. He was hovering in the air outside Microsoft headquarters, and used his PA system to blast out the question, "WHERE AM I?"
The chief of Microsoft's department responsible for designing HELP files quickly prepared a sign and put it in the window. It said: "You're in a helicopter."
Useful HELP writing requires both art and refinement. In my experience, IBM specialized in it, while MS and Apple have no clue. That's why these forums and folks like you are so vital.
Today Apple's PC problem is an operating system so convoluted that it works as designed rather than as intended. The company's programmers are assigned to projects other than computers, because Apple has moved on.
Couple that with Apple's lifetime company culture we are all familiar with: incorporating arbitrary software changes imposed from the top down while ignoring the impact of change on users, and that brings us to today.
Software breaks and Apple won't bother to fix it, or can't, such as Apple's stock market widget. And 3rd party replacements are often as bad or worse, though I don't know why.
I had 20 years experience working with freeware and shareware programmers (ran Freeware Hall of Fame) and never saw anything like this. The last two -recommended- 3rd party programs I downloaded simply didn't work despite claiming to be be written for Leopard.
Oh, well. If anyone has a recommendation of the best manual to keep OS X 10.5 humming and fix it when it breaks, please pass it on.
