Two steps forward, one step back: A switcher’s tale
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007
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.
Tags: Address Book, Apple Mail, back to paper, iCal, mail.app, Productivity, tools, unfocussed musing