Thursday, July 23, 2009

First it was “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Then it was, “It’s the Software, Stupid.” Now I’m thinking “It’s the Data Stupid.”

There are two kinds of people in the world: A) Those who think email is the killer app; and B) Those who don’t. I’m a type A person (in more ways than one, but I digress.) And mostly those whose opinions I respect believe mail is the killer app. My wife has a couple hundred Megs of Outlook email, contact and calendar data squirreled away on her PC. Me? It’s about a Gig. We need to get that into the Mac in a way that it continues to make sense. But the Mac doesn’t speak Outlook. And Outlook doesn’t speak Mac.

We had a choice, move the data to Microsoft Entourage (an Outlook clone) on the Mac or move the data to the Mac’s native mail, iCal, and Address Book applications. For reasons that revolve around synching with our iPhones, we chose to use Mac’s native applications. They are not as capable as Entourage, but they look to be “plenty good enough.” (Check out “The Rest of the Story” to see what pushed us over the edge.)

And to get the data into the native apps, we followed Apple’s recommendation and bought a copy of Little Machine’s Outlook to Mac (O2M) for short. For $10, how wrong could we go?

Pretty wrong as it turns out! Trouble is, out of the box, in its standard configuration … it doesn’t work. It fails to export more than one contact. It destroys calendar data. And exporting email folders is frustrating on a nuclear scale. ARGH! What to do?

Calling Apple, we worked over the issue for a few hours and developed some work-arounds. Mail folders – decide that “frustration is the new bliss” and suck it up. For calendar – export to an ics format directly from Outlook. Easier than O2M, actually. For contacts – using O2M and exporting to a previous vCard format works great. Then use native app “import” functions as is.

It worked!!! We’re done on Nancy’s iMac. My Mac Pro is next. I’m confident it will work there two and more simply - now that I know how.

How are iTunes; Mac mail, iCal, & Address Book; and Entourage related? You’ll have to read The Rest of the Story.

Click here for the rest of the story ...

Posted by Digital Quixote in • PC to Mac
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Monday, July 20, 2009

I’m on Jeopardy! And “I’ll take False Assumptions for $2,000, Alex.”

As I begin my consciousness-altering migration from a PC to a Mac, I’m like the kid in the candy shop configuring hardware: Two 2.66 GHz quad processors; 12 Gigs of memory; Two 1 TB disks; Raid; 30 inch display; and so on.  Risking mixing my metaphors … This isn’t Burger King, mister. I’m not going to “hold the pickle, hold the lettuce. ‘cause special orders don’t upset us.” I want a big Mac. But when I’m done, it’s just a lump of e-lec-tron-i-cal-stuff. It won’t do anything!

I need to remember, “It’s the software, Stupid!”

I assumed that for every Application I use on the PC, there was an equivalent Application for the Mac. Photoshop? Sure. Office? Sure. And so on. So I knew I might have to re-buy some software. It’s time to take inventory and tally the damage. In descending order by usage, here’s what I use:
• Outlook Mail -> Mac Mail – Cost: Zero
• Photoshop -> Photoshop – Cost $6 for new media
• Photoshop Pluggins -> Photoshop Pluggins – Cost: Zero*
• Lightroom -> Lightroom – Cost: $6 for new media
• Office -> Office – Cost: $129 for Mac version
• Quicken -> Quicken – Cost: $79
• Pro Series Tax -> Pro Series Tax – Cost: $250
• Norton 360 -> McAfee - Cost: Zero

Phew! I was worried about an $1,800 hit for Adobe CS4 (Photoshop et.al.) Hooray for Adobe’s intellignet approach to licensing!

Worst case, say, around $500. I can live with that.

False Assumptions Time: Pro Series Tax doesn’t have a Mac Version. And Quicken for Mac is incompatible with Quicken for Windows. Shame on you Intuit! Now I’ve got some serious head scratching to do. I need these programs more than I need to switch to a Mac!

Should I cancel my hardware order while I rethink this?

Posted by Digital Quixote in • PC to Mac
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Friday, July 17, 2009

I’ve had it. And you won’t believe what I’ve “had it” with!

I’ve been a PC guy for literally 25 years. Cut me and I bleed Windows. Staunch the flow with a Ctrl-Alt-Delete styptic salute.

My hot Dell workstation, originally optimized for photo editing isn’t so hot. It’s had just about every moving part replaced, some multiple times and when each and every part is working, it doesn’t work for very long. Every so often it seems to get tired and stop to rest. Sometimes it’s for a few seconds … enough that if you’re typing a sentence, a few words in the middle never reach the keyboard’s escape velocity. Sometimes it’s for a dozen minutes or more … during which nothing gets done and “System Idle” consumes the entire machine.

Talking with a PC friend who’s switched to a Mac, he said, “Maybe you like fiddling with the registry. Possibly you enjoy spending several hours each week on system administration. It could be you feel incomplete unless you’ve re-imaged your PC in the last 6 months. But if not, maybe you’d like a Mac that ‘just works’ instead.” He went on to say, “When my daughter at college had a PC laptop, we’d talk by phone every week to fix its latest glitch. I realized she hadn’t called for like seven months. Feeling a little left out and fearing a serious boyfriend, I called her and learned she’d bought a Mac laptop. She hadn’t called because nothing had gone wrong. She was silent on the boyfriend concern.”

I am a victim of ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts,’ and Tier 1, 2, and 3 Support at Dell do not know what to do. My fear is that there are so many hardware devices, software applications, OS Versions that the number of permutations is impossibly large … too large to be tested and certified by mere mortals. My fear – they not only don’t know what to do – there is nothing to do that will work.

Time to simplify!

I’m taking the plunge. I ordered a Mac Pro today from Apple’s website. My technology life is literally flashing before my eyes.

I sure hope the “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” ads are right.

Break out the Kool-Aid; the journey begins!

Posted by Digital Quixote in • PC to Mac
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