Tag Archives: microsoft

Thoughts

To buy or not to buy an Apple

➡ Updated 3/7/08: My opinion has changed quite a bit since I wrote this post. I am now going to get a 15″ MacBook Pro after working on a Windows laptop for the past two years. Feel free to read this further though, because it shows how far things have come since then.

I’ve been doing a lot of research lately, because I’m looking at buying a new laptop. I’ve got this terrible dichotomy in my head. On one hand, I love Macs, and I’d love to get a Mac, but on the other hand, most of the work I do (web development stuff) is still handcuffed to Windows. It’s not minor stuff, either: Access, SQL Server, ASP, ASP.NET.

Yes, I know, I can run Windows on the Mac with Boot Camp now, but have you taken a look at the caveats? Apple’s had to write the Windows drivers for the Apple hardware, and certain things simply won’t work. Among them are: the Apple Remote Control, the Apple Wireless Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, Apple USB Modem, the sudden motion sensor, the ambient light sensor, and, most importantly, the built-in iSight camera.

The very reasons I want to get an Apple – fantastic design, tight integration when it comes to software and hardware, obsessive attention to detail – are stopping me from getting one. Since I’ll need to run Windows on it, and my cool Apple hardware won’t work with Windows, what’s the point? I’ll be forever shutting down either Mac OS or Windows XP in order to use the features I want out of each system. Want to use iChat to talk with my wife? Oops, need to boot up in Mac OS. Need to do a bit of development work? Oops, got to boot up in Windows. Got to use Skype Video Chat? Double oops there, since only the Windows version can use a webcam, and iSight doesn’t work in Windows!

As if laptop hard drives aren’t small enough, I’ll need to partition the drive and share it with Windows. Not cool! On the one hand, I want to handle photos, music and videos on the Mac, filling up the drive with that stuff. On the other hand, I need to do development work and create large graphics in Photoshop and sites in Dreamweaver, both of which are Windows licenses, by the way. I work with large files there as well, and I know I’ll fill up that drive. What am I supposed to do? Shuffle files between the two operating systems using an external drive? Sounds easy enough, until you realize that Mac OS doesn’t read NTFS partitions and Windows doesn’t read Mac drives. Huh? Yup, it means you can’t copy files bigger than 4GB to that external drive, since it needs to be formatted in FAT.

Oh yes, let me not forget about emulation/virtualization software… Or rather, let me forget. I still shudder at the dismal performance of Virtual PC on my PowerBook G4 or my iMac G5. Yuck! Everything crawled, including the web browser. Copying files back and forth between the operating systems, although it was only a drag-and-drop operation, was excruciatingly slow. Running software like Dreamweaver took forever, needless to say. Virtualization software like VMWare, running Windows on Windows, albeit a little faster, was still slow in the desktop version. Although the speed should improve if virtualization software is run on the new Intel Macs, I don’t hold high hopes for it.

There are plenty of caveats with virtualization, other than performance. Software doesn’t always behave as expected, because it’s not a real computer, and certain things simply aren’t available. Then there’s that always disappointing jump between the real OS and the virtual OS. Although it’s as easy as Alt+Tab on Windows or Command+Tab on the Mac, the performance hit is depressing every time one needs to use the virtual machine. I tried other emulation software as well. Q, was one of them, and although the interface was nicer than Virtual PC’s, it still disappointed. No, no thanks.

I’ll let Parallels talk about how fast their virtualization is all they want. I’ll believe it when I see it encode video and run the latest versions of Photoshop and Visual Studio at near the full speed of the CPU. Meanwhile, I’ve had enough of emulation/virtualization. It may be good for servers, as VMWare is proving with their Enterprise suite of products, but it’s not good when one’s computing needs involve lots of high-availability graphics, memory and processing power.

It seems like I’m hopelessly caught between Scylla and Charybdis, not knowing where to turn, part of me wanting Mac OS and part of me needing Windows. What to do? Nothing to do but to hold off for now, and hope that either Apple or Windows get their act together for people like me.

Standard
Thoughts

Microsoft will drop PDF support as a standard option in Office 12

After whetting my appetite for Office 12 by talking about native support for PDF formats last year, Microsoft now disappoints once more by announcing it will drop the option. Interestingly enough, it isn’t to blame. Adobe’s up in arms about this – they’re unhappy that Microsoft will not charge extra for the option to save to PDF – which sounds hypocritical at first look. After all, the option to do so has been standard on the Mac through OS X, and is available through a slew of apps on the Internet (free, nonetheless) which let you do that very same thing on Windows.

So why has Adobe jumped up about this? I think it has to do with the following two issues:

  1. Microsoft’s market share: if saving to PDF becomes a standard option in Office, it will obliterate Adobe’s profit from Acrobat, which is its most popular software package.
  2. Microsoft wanted to include the ability to save to PDF as a fully functioning feature – in other words, hyperlinks and other special formatting would be preserved. Typically, with the free products out there, and with the Mac, when one saves to PDF, it’s essentially a print to PDF function, where special formatting and tags aren’t preserved. If you want the full-featured save to PDF function, that has usually only been available with the paid Acrobat product.

I have a feeling the months of negotiation between Adobe and Microsoft centered around these two issues, and neither wanted to budge from their position. Microsoft wanted to include the feature because it wants to dominate the market and please users, in that order, and Adobe can’t just give away a star product. I have to side with Adobe on this one.

Standard
How To

Moving email from a PC to the Mac

Background

For the purposes of this guide, I’m going to assume that you were using Outlook or Outlook Express on the PC, and you want to import your messages into the Mail app that ships with Mac OS X. I speak from personal experience with this guide. I had to do this when I switched from a PC to a Mac in September of ’05. I’ve finally solved the last piece of the puzzle, and I wanted to share this information with you so it won’t take you as long as it took me.

I had an email archive that spanned close to 10 years – a fairly complete one at that. I’d been keeping it in Outlook Express, then Outlook, over the years. When I switched to the Mac, I didn’t want to lose it. My wife had an archive that spanned a few years as well, and she kept it in Outlook. We didn’t want to lose those messages, either. As you know, there’s no easy way to import email directly from the PC into the Mac. There’s no nice and easy transfer wizard, for multiple reasons: different operating systems, different file systems, different ways of storing the mail, different applications, etc. Even if there had been a wizard, given my huge mail archive, I’d have probably crashed it.

What didn’t work

Still, I tried to be reasonable. I thought equivalent Microsoft products on the two platforms might be able to import from each other. So I took my PST from my PC, transferred to my Mac, and opened Entourage (the Outlook equivalent on the Mac). The import failed. The two can’t talk to each other. You can’t import between them either way. I thought that was pretty silly. Of all the things Microsoft does wrong, this has to be one of the more obvious ones.

Next I tried the less possible, which was to import from the PST file directly into Mail. That didn’t work, either. I surfed the internet for solutions, and stumbled across a possibility of installing Eudora on the PC, importing from Outlook into it, then copying the library onto the Mac, and using some special utility to do the PC to Mac translation. Well, Eudora failed on the import from Outlook. Again, I had a big PST, I wasn’t surprised. Plus, even when I tried transferring the messages it had managed to copy to the Mac, the utility didn’t do its job. At any rate, I hadn’t put my hopes in Eudora. It might have been all the rage in the early nineties, but it’s pretty useless now. Somebody else suggested using old versions of Netscape Mail. I tried that as well, only to fail again.

I called Apple Support, who were completely clueless about this. Finally, on my second try, the technician suggested I use an IMAP account to transfer the email between the two computers. I saw two problems with that, both related to the size of my archive: one, where am I going to find an IMAP account with more than 4GB of storage, and two, I’m not going to sit there and upload over 4GB of data through my DSL connection. It was going to take days, if not more. Obviously, not a very practical solution.

➡ Updated 1/3/08: Gmail now offers more than 6 GB (and growing) of email storage, and includes both POP and IMAP access.

What worked

Just so I won’t drag this out needlessly, Thunderbird turned out to be the best solution for the transfer. I installed it on the PC, imported from Outlook into it, then transferred the mailbox files to the Mac, where I had to delete the mailbox index files (.msf) files, and only leave the un-indexed data files there. That’s because the Mac version of Thunderbird needs to build its own indexes. So, I located the directory where the email got stored for Thunderbird on my Mac, moved the mailboxes there, and deleted the index files. I then opened up Thunderbird, and after it re-built the indexes, there were my messages! After all the trouble, I was pretty happy!

Next, I wanted to get my email into Mail. This is the step that took the longest for me, and I just solved it yesterday. Granted, I hadn’t been looking very hard since last September… Now, some of you might be asking yourselves why in the world I’d want to switch from Thunderbird to Mail, and I’ve got two reasons: one, and the most important, Spotlight indexes Mail messages, so I can search for what I need from one location, and two, iPhoto sends out photos through Mail, and we email photos a lot; we wanted to have our email messages in one place. Yes, I know, we should share our photos on the web instead, etc…

So, how did I solve it? Certainly not by calling Apple Support, who are were clueless on this issue as well. And I also didn’t solve it by importing from Thunderbird into Mail, which is impossible (not any more), as you might find out if you try it. Version 2.0.7 of Mail crashes miserably, and has done so, reliably, since September of ’05, on my every attempt to import from Thunderbird. I choose Import, then I select the Other or the Netscape/Mozilla option (since Thunderbird isn’t listed as one of the options), then I browse for the location of the message databases, and when I select Import, it crashes like a drunk limousine driver.

Instead, I solved this by doing a search on the Apple Support forums, where intrepid users have posted some great solutions. Among them, I found the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. It’s a wonderful little utility that will let you drag your Thunderbird message databases onto its icon, and will automatically convert them to Mail message databases. It will also copy them to the proper Mail message library. All you need to do is sit back and wait for it to finish, then rebuild your Mail folders, and all your messages will appear – just follow the directions you’ll find on their website. The best part is that it didn’t crash while it processed my entire archive (over 4GB of messages)! Now that’s a reliable application!

➡ Updated 1/3/08: It turns out, as one of the commenters has pointed out, that Leopard’s version of Mail includes an import function from Thunderbird. Problem solved. Thanks Logan! Now I wonder if a new version of the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner will be released, or whether this new import feature in Mail will negate the need for it.

When I got done, I was ecstatic. All my mail is indexed with Spotlight, and I can instantly find messages and files that are years old without having to do separate searches for each!

Let’s review

  1. Install Thunderbird on PC, import from Outlook/Outlook Express into it.
  2. Install Thunderbird on Mac, note storage location for mail files.
  3. Copy message databases onto Mac, in the specific directory where mail is stored, delete index files, then start up Thunderbird and let it rebuild the indexes.
  4. Use the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to export to Mail. (only for OS X Tiger)
  5. Rebuild mailboxes in Mail, then relax, because you’re done! (only for OS X Tiger)
  6. If you have Leopard, skip steps 4 and 5, and use Mail’s import function to get your messages out of Thunderbird. (only for OS X Leopard)

💡 Thunderbird and the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner are free software. If you find them helpful, please don’t forget to donate to them, even if it’s just a few dollars. It’s the right thing to do if you want to support the efforts of their developers. Here is a donation link for Mozilla (the maker of Thunderbird), and here is a donation link for the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner.

Standard
Reviews

New Hotmail shows Microsoft still playing catchup

I’ve been a user of Hotmail for several years, probably since 1998. I can’t remember the date very well, but it’s been a long time. The point is, I had a Hotmail account long before Gmail came out. Why do I say this? Because I stuck with Hotmail through the years. That’s not to say I wasn’t fed up with the service before – I had it up to my neck with the never-ending ads that overwhelmed the page.

What the Hotmail folks did recently is to move the service to the Live platform without regard for the users. While Hotmail worked fine on different browsers before, now it just doesn’t. Unless I use IE and only IE, the site doesn’t work properly. The functionality is stunted. I can choose between two modes, Classic and Live, and no matter which one I choose, unless I use IE, it just won’t work right. Just a few examples of the shortcomings: I can’t select multiple emails to designate them as Spam, I can’t empty my Junk Mail folder with one click, the site looks weird… The Live portal seems to do okay, but not Hotmail.

And while the Microsoft folks made a big deal about doing away with one of the ads on the page inside Hotmail, I still see two, and it’s still very annoying.

What’s worse, I can’t help playing the comparison game with Gmail. I love my Gmail account. I get barely any spam, and when I do, it’s sorted nicely in my Spam folder. Once in a while, a random message makes it to my inbox, only to be dispatched to its cyberspace grave. In Hotmail, unless I set my Spam filter to exclusive, spammers make it to my Inbox most every day. And if the filter’s set to exclusive, I run the risk of having legitimate emails end up in the Junk Email folder. I have to constantly check it and be barraged with ads for erectile dysfunction or penile enlargement and other such things. And the volume of spam that makes it to my Hotmail account is… voluminous, whereas at Gmail, it’s just a few every day. Hotmail obviously doesn’t have a very good spam filtering system, no matter what Bill Gates may say.

I also can’t help looking at my Gmail account’s size limit (now over 2GB), and Hotmail is still at 250MB. Let’s not forget that before Gmail came out, Hotmail was at 2MB. Not 20MB, not even 10MB, but 2MB! Pathetic… I had to constantly delete emails from my Inbox. If I hadn’t been able to POP into my Hotmail account with Outlook Express and download my messages, I’d have had to delete years’ worth of emails. That just wasn’t right.

While I’m on the subject, let me not forget that Gmail has worked cross-browser from the start. That includes IE, Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, Camino, Safari, and I believe Konqueror. With Hotmail, and now with Live Mail, it’s IE or you’re guaranteed a less than full functionality experience. You’d think Microsoft, with all of its talent, could come up with something better, but no, they can’t… or won’t.

So, let’s see, Vista disappointed, Hotmail disappoints… Is there any other conclusion to draw, other than Microsoft is still playing catchup?

Standard
Thoughts

The Apple-Microsoft Deal

This is just a year after the “Steve Jobs on Microsoft” video. Here is the link.

Standard