For more than a decade, the Eudora e-mail client has been an indispensable tool for many Macintosh Internet users. When Mac OS X hit the scene the company that develops Eudora, Qualcomm, had released some development versions designed to work with the operating system, but efforts have stalled in recent months. Now Qualcomm Vice President of Technology Steve Dorner has good news for Mac users who have been waiting for a finished version to be released for Mac OS X.
Named after the author Eudora Welty, the popular e-mail program predates just about any other that’s still in regular use on the Macintosh today. Eudora was originally conceived as a freeware project by Steve Dorner at the University of Illinois back in the late 1980s. Later released to Macintosh users all over the Internet once Apple made MacTCP available, Eudora’s popularity grew.
Ultimately Eudora was acquired by Qualcomm, Inc. and released as a commercial product for both Mac OS and Windows. Since then, Qualcomm has released a number of updates for the software, but almost all of the Mac updates have been specifically for the Classic Mac OS version, not the Mac OS X version. This has caused great consternation to Mac users who prefer Eudora to other OS X-native mail client applications.
“Many people have noticed that new betas of the OS X version of Eudora have not been coming at exactly breakneck speed,” said Dorner.
“I’m happy to announce that we will be resuming the OS X effort immediately, and that we intend to have a final version of Eudora for OS X sometime early in 2002.
“Thank you for all your patience, and many apologies for the long delay,” said Dorner.