Here’s a nice story.

Michelle Lentz, a US technology writer, has recently switched from PC to Mac. She was tempted to stick with Entourage for her email–”I want the familiarity of the Microsoft products”.

But she was brave. She transferred all her email over and was delighted by discoveries like Mail.app’s rules-based ability to change the background colour of emails. (“I actually couldn’t do this in Outlook.”)

But what really turned her head around was the wealth of plugins that allow Mail.app users to tweak and extend the app to meet their needs:

…I used a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more useful productivity tool for me. I was not happy with the way the ToDos worked, plus I wasn’t overly thrilled with how I had to manually file things. I remembered that a lot of these things I had fixed in Outlook as well using plug-ins. I was thrilled to find tons of Mail.app plug-ins.

She found – and loves – MailTags, MsgFiler, Mail.appetizer (recently updated for Leopard), MenuCalendarClock and (briefly) Letterbox , a fair number of the plugins in the Hawk Wings Top Ten Plugins list.

And the end result?

I’ve made Mail just as productive, if not moreso, than how I was running Outlook. This I can live with.

switching, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, entourage, outlook, plugins, rules, smart mailboxes

Tom Negrino at MacWorldhas written a review of Entourage 2008, part of the newly released Microsoft Office for Mac 2008.

Although it has its fans, the shortcomings of Entourage 2004 were well-known and many were hoping for greater things from Entourage 2008.

MacWorld’s verdict?

There are several other new or improved features relating to e-mail or calendaring, but they apply only to users in corporate environments that connect to a Microsoft Exchange server. Given that it’s been four long years in the making, it’s a missed opportunity that Entourage 2008 hasn’t also added some of the best new features found in Mail, such as automatic detection of physical addresses and dates, or e-mail stationery templates.

Entourage gets points for more complete AppleScript-ability, for compatibility with Mac OS X’s Services and for looking nicer, but when you get down to business — backing up your email and working with other apps — things look less rosy.

Negrino notes Microsoft’s advice that Entourage’s monolithic database be excluded from Time Machine backups and that users employ “alternative backup methods” instead. This is not only a pain in the butt, but cuts across the comprehensive design of Time Machine as a “set and forget”, everything-that-matters-to-you backup system.

Working with iCal is also fraught in Negrino’s view:

When you first synchronize Entourage with Sync Services, it creates an Entourage calendar in iCal, replicating your Entourage events in iCal. If you add or change events in that Entourage calendar in iCal or on a mobile device, those events will be synchronized back to Entourage’s internal calendar. But there’s no way to bring events from other iCal calendars (such as the default Home, Work, or Birthdays calendars) into Entourage’s internal calendar. Put another way, Entourage can publish data to iCal, but can’t subscribe to any of iCal’s other calendars. In effect, Entourage uses iCal as a convenient conduit to synchronize its data to other devices, but doesn’t treat iCal as a full calendaring partner.

After getting to the end of the review, I was surprised by the final sentence:

“Finally, if you’re outside of the corporate realm, and need a mail, calendar, and contact manager with lots of headroom and solid integration with the rest of the Office suite, Entourage provides a wealth of features that are deeper than Apple’s trio.”

Are you? entourage, microsoft, office for mac 2008, mail.app, ical, address book, sync services, time machine, email

The Mac Business Unit has published its fifth sneak-peak of the new Office for Mac 2008, focussing on Entourage 2008.

The video demonstrates the creation of an event in Entourage’s calendar, giving a sense of appointment features familiar (colour-coding for each calendar) and unfamiliar (allowance for travelling time to and from the appointment).

The new, previously-seen “My Day” Desktop interface for Entourage also gets a good work out. You get to see the creation of a to-do, the reordering of to-dos and other bits and pieces.

Since I am feeling grumpy with Leopard iCal at the moment (although not as grumpy as Pierre Igot at Betalogue who today rightly unloads on iCal’s lack of keyboard support ), it all looks pretty attractive.

It pains me a bit to say it, but here is something that looks like it works. And gives users some control over how to manage their to-dos and events and edit them easily. Of course, it may be a different story when we actually have the app in our hands.

See the sneak-peak for yourself below or on the Office:Mac 2008 web site :

microsoft, office for mac 2008, entourage, ical, mail.app, apple mail, switching, productivity, email, MBU

Engadget has published the results of its shoot-out between Vista and Leopard. Naturally, Mail.app and iCal win over Windows Mail and Windows Calendar.

In fact, to cut to the chase, Leopard wins the features shoot-out with 46 points to Vista’s 41.

Thinking about this exercise put me in mind of Umberto Eco’s well-known comparison between Macs and PCs, which he published in the Italian news magazine Espresso in 1994.

It is worth quoting at length:

…Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It’s an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ‘ratio studiorum’ of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach–if not the Kingdom of Heaven–the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revellers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions; when it comes down to it, you can decide to allow women and gays to be ministers if you want to…..

And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic…

Which is more whimsical: the attempt to compare the feature sets of Vista and Leopard on the assumption that they rest on some notional level playing field or structuralism gone wild in correlating computers with Christian denominations?

What spirit of prophecy lead Eco to pair Anglicanism’s current troubles so precisely with the ever-increasing torment of Windows users? apple, not apple mail, not mail.app, windows, vista, leopard, catholicism, protestantism, Anglicanism, whimsy, switching, conversion

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. mail.app, apple mail, address book, ical, productivity, tools, unfocussed musing, back to paper

Joe Tan at Tan Tan Noodles has written up a way to switch from Outlook to Mail.app using the open source utility, libpst , which was originally developed for Linux but runs fine on Mac OSX.

There are already a number of tried and true ways to crack open Outlook’s PST files and make the transition, either using Mozilla or (for Outlook Express users) DbxConv.

Or you could use the shareware utility, O2M (formerly known as Outlook2Mac) which only costs USD 10.

Still, some people get a kick out doing this kind of thing for free, and libpst offers another way.

Joe outlines just twelve steps from downloading the source code, compiling (not as hard as you imagine) and running it, to the end result.

If I had a PST file to hand, I’d try it myself. Fortunately, I don’t.mail.app, apple mail, outlook, outlook express, microsoft, pst files, switching, freeware

Apple Matters has produced a walk-through on switching from Mail.app to Thunderbird using the emlx to mbox converter from CosmicSoft.

It covers all the steps from finding your Mail.app messages, converting, moving and importing them again and features some screenshots to help you on your way.

Perhaps the emlx to mbox converter has got smarter or perhaps the author was lucky, but he doesn’t mention any of the problems encountered by another user trying to do the same thing, which were posted on macOSXHints some time ago.

Needless to say, moving back the other way again from Thunderbird to Mail 2.0 will be easier and the outcome more pleasurable.mail.ap, apple mail, thunderbird, email, switching, mbox, emlx