Two steps forward, one step back: A switcher’s tale
Matthew Bookspan (ex-Microsoft?) has written an interesting account of his experience as a switcher 
for the web site Apple Matters.
Switching back to Macs, he began with high hopes:
I initially tried absorbing every key Mac app to “live the life†of a Mac user. What I found was quite interesting: very task-focused applications designed to do simple things and get them done quickly. These applications include Mail.app, iCal, Address Book, Safari, and more.
But things soon turned sour for him. Address Book and iCal “drove him batty”:
Address Book has too many limitations for the amount of fields you can use and customize. The Address Book Smart Groups are hard to configure unless you have exacting details. For example, it is annoying to create a “Family†smart group when many family members have different last names. Also, the Smart Groups do not work like Smart Playlists in iTunes as they don’t auto-fill the entry field as you type; this requires that you remember the exact spelling of everyone’s name (which renders the feature relatively useless to me). With iCal, I find that it is too limited in defining and updating meeting requests. It seems non-intuitive to define meeting requests in iCal and not in Mail.app. Lastly, the iCal UI is just unattractive, which is surprising given that Apple makes the product.
As a result, he is now using Entourage, which seems more natural to him given his Windows habit of using “monlithic apps” like Outlook. (He tried integration with Daylite, but doesn’t mention if he tried the other “Outlook-like” all-in-one plugins for Mail, iCal and Address Book — CRM4Mac and OD4Contact – now Contactizer Pro).
What I found interesting about this was the realisation that software really plays second fiddle to more ingrained work habits. And old habits die hard. You can hop from one productivity tool or workflow methodology to another, but in the end the resources in your head are more significant for your productivity than the resources on your computer.
This must drive productivity software designers mad.
It makes me think from time to time of going “Back to paper”, in order to fine-tune the resources in my head. I would miss all the whizz-bang “very task-focused applications” and plugins that I have grown to love as ends in themselves rather than as tools to achieve other ends, but that’s the whole point.
Enough editorialising from me.
Similar Posts:
- Mailboxer 5.0: Smart mailboxes for everyone
- Emailing a Smart Group in Address Book
- Two Tips for Leopard’s Address Book
- iCal Duplicates Script updated for Leopard
- Dates to iCal: Syncing birthdays, anniversaries
Tags: Address Book, Apple Mail, back to paper, iCal, mail.app, Productivity, tools, unfocussed musing
April 4th, 2007 at 12:59 am
An interesting observation since I find that Address Book is one of the key tools that makes OS X such a nice place to work and play.
The comment that the smart groups are dumb since you have to enter a variety of names is just silly – My extended family is enormous with probably 20+ different surnames to follow. Not to mention the potential overlap since my business contacts number near a thousand. Therefore, I just put the word “family” in the comments section and use a smart list to look this up in the comments. I think that this would be a perfect solution for free form tagging (just a little more structured that raw text notes).
As for iCal, I disagree – I think it’s pretty. However it’s not terribly ergonomic. I still use it since it integrates with the sync services with my various accounts and electronic devices. I have found that the latest iteration that auto detects incoming invitations really very nice to work with.
April 4th, 2007 at 1:25 am
I understand frustration with Mail, though my frustration is junk mail.
I started having huge junk mail issues. Mail wasn’t “learning” what I considered junk. It would rescue emails from my yahoo email account’s spam folder and put it in Mail’s inbox. I would tighten controls and virtually nothing would make my inbox. Finally gave up and switched to Thunderbird.
April 4th, 2007 at 4:49 am
“What I found interesting about this was the realisation that software really plays second fiddle to more ingrained work habits.”
That reminds me. I looked at Mailsmith, whose update you recently noted. It felt like using Firefox–like it was a port from another OS. And in point of fact, I suppose it is. I’ve only ever used the Unix-based/NeXT-derived OS X never the “classic” OS, and it felt odd to me.
Even the tabs in the UI looked odd: I recall those glassy tabs from IE5.2 (and from the Apple website, which is sadly in need of a facelift). Those oversized windows, that non-proportional–and tiny–font; nothing quite where you’d expect to find it, no HTML rendering, poor integration with the OS, and no IMAP support. It was just bizarre to me: I couldn’t imagine using it. And yet people like John Gruber and Michael Tsai, who are obviously long-time users of the old Mac OS, clearly like it. I guess they are used to it from the old days, so that it has become engrained into their work habits, and they would find Mail.app uncomfortable to use.
April 4th, 2007 at 5:32 am
Tim,
Thank you for linking to my article. And yes, the big thrust of the article was about workflow. When Apple ships Leopard, I will re-evaluate my position on the iApps & Mail. However, Entourage 2008 is around the corner too. It will be interesting to see which really ensures that the workflow needs are met.
Thanks,
Matthew
April 4th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Yes, this is #2 on my list of The Cons of Switching from Windows to Mac.
It’s different.
This is a con as much as it is a pro, as much as I hate to admit.
April 4th, 2007 at 8:48 am
I stuck with Entourage for about a year when I switched but slowly moved over to mail and address book. Yes they appear very simplistic but they are very powerful apps and I love them :)
Simply is no bad thing…. it is hard to switch if you are a massive outlook user but there is no way I could go back now !
April 4th, 2007 at 9:47 am
This is where monolithic apps leave me cold. “It seems non-intuitive to define meeting requests in iCal and not in Mail.app.”
He’s mistaking ‘intuitive’ for ‘what he’s used to’ because expecting to make meeting requests in a mail program rather than a calendar program seems to me more than a little like trying to use my oven to make coffee….
April 4th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
I’d agree with Bruce. This would not make sense to me, either, and I think it is more what people are used to.
It would seem that PIM clients are around because a long while ago software houses offered the business market suites of programs. These basically constituted programs for employees to work in (wps, spreadsheets, etc) and to go with that there was a program for what was ancillary to their work (calendar, contacts). When email began to make its way into the office it was added to the latter program.
IBM now puts instant messaging into its “everything else” program, Notes, as well these days; and one might just as well wonder why most PIMs *don’t* incorporate that, since a lot of intra-office communication is going on over IM these days.
Interestingly, people have even gone further than that. There’s a PIM client that was written with the notion that it would be a good idea not just to have mail and calendaring in the same application but to do away with the distinction between them. That’s “Chandler”. It’s not been a success. In fact, it’s become a cautionary tale:
” ‘No Silos’ was supposed to mean that instead of having your email in one silo, and your calendar in another silo, and your reminder notes in a third, there would just be a single unified silo holding everything.
“As soon as you start asking questions about ‘No Silos,’ you realize it’s not going to work. Do you put your email on the calendar? Where? On the day when it arrived? So now I have 200 Viagra ads on Friday obscuring the one really important shareholder meeting?”
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/01/21.html
That’s one client available on Mac that even Tim, who probably likes to try everything around, would probably steer clear of. I have tried it, and you can send and retrieve mail – just about – when you finally find where in the program to do so, but it crashes every few minutes.
To me calendaring and mail are not necessarily linked functions, although there can be links between them. This is no different from the “real world” where my calendar doesn’t even have to be in the same room as my letterbox.
But, obviously, some people are used to working with PIM clients and like that way of doing things.
April 5th, 2007 at 3:42 am
Bruce,
To clarify, I am not mistaking what I am used to vs. what is intuitive. In effect, they are one in the same. A person intuits what makes sense to them. If it makes sense to organize information in one fashion, then that is how a user will do it.
Matthew