Write Technology

Dear Apple:

Using another blog, I previously expressed my exasperation with MobileMe. You know, that service I pay for? So, I would like to re-iterate something - STOP DOING SO MUCH AT ONCE.

Well, since then, MobileMe has actually worked for me. Everything was syncing up just fine, and rather quickly too. Cool!

Then today, an email was released into the wild from Steve Jobs to his employees. From Steve's mouth, "The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour. " No kidding.

Also today, I was given the 2.01 version of my iPhone software. Hooray!  I can now search my contacts on my phone with speed instead of being mired in molasses. The whole thing appears to have picked up speed, which is good.

However, my MobileMe stopped working. Your site tells me we're at 100% and all is well. Apple, please know, all is not well. My mail hasn't been sync'd in 3 days, my contacts in each location (phone, machine, web) are all different, and not to be greedy, but that additional 30 days you were going to add to my account? Never added.

My confidence is not inspired.

So Apple, please stop releasing so many things at one time. I've been a .Mac user since before you started charging for it and I hung in there when you started charging too much for it. Please don't make me regret my decision.

Warmest regards,

Michelle

Cheers!
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Find Michelle Lentz here on Write Technology, on Twitter, Pownce, and FriendFeed.

Switching to a Mac, Part 3.5: Parallels Update

Last night I needed to work on a web site that I've been required to put into Sharepoint. Those of you who have worked with Sharepoint know that you need to use IE for it to work well. I realized that because I was only updated to Windows SP2 on my Mac, I couldn't use IE 7 (or preferably 8). What can I say? I'm spoiled by tabbed browsing in Safari and Firefox.

I took a deep breath and downloaded - directly to the Mac, not Windows - SP3 from Microsoft. Then I installed it. What amazed me was that it installed easily! Once that was installed, I restarted the virtual machine and installed IE 8 Beta.

Everything works fine. I worked easily on the Sharepoint site all last night and a bit of today without any performance issues. As far as I can tell, installing SP2 was the main issue in my previous fight with Parallels. I highly recommend, if you're installing a Windows XP virtual machine, that you install a more recent version of XP - perhaps with SP2 already integrated.

Cheers!

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Find Michelle Lentz here at Write Technology, on bub.blicio.us, on Twitter, or Pownce.

Switching to a Mac, Part 3: Mail & iCal

In my original switching to a Mac post, I was leaning more towards Entourage. And I own it. It's sitting here, in its box, with the rest of the Office suite, waiting to be installed. I'm trying to avoid the temptation and force myself to use iWork, iCal, and Mail.app. It's hard. I want the familiarity of the Microsoft products. But it's time to break old habits.

Moving Messages from the PC
On Monday I downloaded Outlook2Mail (O2M) for the PC. This app easily converts your Outlook contacts, calendar, and email messages/files/folders to iCal/Mail formats. That part was easy. They easily slid in to their new homes on the Mac. I ran into some trouble syncing with my iPhone, but that's tomorrow's post.

IMAP v POP
I set up my 6 (yes 6) different email accounts and made them all IMAP. This makes it so much easier for me because I also check mail from my phone. Now I won't be seeing messages twice. Several of my accounts, such as my wine-girl.net account, are run through Google Apps for Your Domain - in essence, Gmail. This is great because it then employs the GMail spam filter. I thought this would be a good time to bring all my accounts into one Inbox, so that I don't have to check different webmail accounts plus my regular email.

My choice to go 100% IMAP affects a lot of what I'm about to tell you. I have to deal with a lot of separate calendars, mailboxes, todo lists, etc, that I bet you don't get when you use strictly POP. Keep that in mind.

Mail is strange. It shows each IMAP mailbox separately. I figured out that if you flip the triangle and collapse them, you can view all of your messages in one single Inbox, but still have access to the separate inboxes if you choose.  I ignore everything but my main Inbox.

Rules
The next thing I did was set up rules to color code my mail. Mail that comes to the writetech.net account is blue, mail that comes to the wine-girl.net account is purple, and so on. I actually couldn't do this in Outlook, so I was thrilled that I could in Mail.

iCal
iCal and I get along okay. I color coded my calendar similar to my email. In iCal, instead of labels or categories, you have separate calendars. I don't really care for this though. In the view menu, I hid the calendar list. Now I can just see the main calendar and my ToDo list panel. Much better. This is similar to collapsing the IMAP inboxes in Mail.

Switching to a Mac, Part 2: Parallels

The Mac arrived two days early, on Monday morning. Not that I'm complaining, but it completely destroyed a well-planned day. And the next well-planned day. I am now playing catch-up.

I think I'm about switched from the PC to the Mac. Not quite - I'll still be poking around, tweaking, but I'm pretty darned close.

It's not as easy as those commercials make it sound. At least, not if you're a power user on your PC. Sure, my mom could seamlessly switch from a PC to the Mac - it wouldn't even cause a speedbump. For me, it was a bit of chaos.

My first problem centered around Parallels, which is the virtual machine software I picked up to run Windows. Until Microsoft develops OneNote for the Mac, I need it. It functions as my own personal wiki and I have two years worth of notes easily organized in OneNote. So I installed Parallels.

And then I installed a copy of Windows XP I happen to own, from circa 2003 I think, or just before SP2 was released. That's when everything started to go downhill.

My whole computer slowed down to molasses. It was awful. Well, I thought, I've got 2 DIMM memory sticks sitting here. So I upgraded the MacBook Pro memory from 2GB to 4GB. That was an experience in itself, and took me three times to get it to work. I don't blame the Mac though - I should never be allowed to modify hardware. I'm accident prone.

With 4GB of memory, I was still running amazingly slow. Not only that, every time I tried to download SP2 from Windows, the virtual machine crashed, followed by the entire machine. Over the course of 3 hours I rebooted the entire Mac more than 6 times. I was really frustrated.

I turned to Twitter for Tech Support and recieved amazing troubleshooting. First off, I installed iStat, which is a nice widget that lets you know what's going on with your CPUs.

That didn't enlighten me though. Next I checked the Parallels web site and found that Leopard users should install a certain build. Why that build isn't in the box, I have no idea, but I re-installed Parallels. Then I downloaded, outside of Windows, the SP2 file from Windows Update. I tried again, but everything still crashed. On the advice of the Twitterati, I deleted the entire virtual machine and started over. I re-installed Windows. Egads! Once Windows was re-installed and Parallels tools were installed, I installed the local version of SP2.

Everything worked. It took 3 hours and tons of Twitter tech support, but everything started to work.

Now I'm actually a little freaked out to open Parallels, as I'm afraid it might crash. I'll need my OneNote notes sooner or later though, so I'll have to get past it.

Tomorrow, my adventures in extending Mail.app so that it's a useful productivity tool and doesn't frustrate me.

Related:
Switching to a Mac, Part 1

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Find Michelle Lentz here at Write Technology, on bub.blicio.us, on Twitter, or Pownce.

Switching to a Mac, Part I

I've always been a Mac fan girl; there's no doubt about it. I got my first Mac (which I named Maxine) in the mid-90s. A boring beige box with a rainbow Apple logo. Maxine was my home computer, where I built web sites, played with rudimentary Photoshop, and dialed into Geocities. At work, my world was based around the PC.

That trend continued through the present. I have a 2005 white iBook that is old enough to not have an Intel chip and currently serves as the TV room computer, where I can grab it and use it to just find an answer. It's basically an Internet machine. In addition to the iBook, my husband and I have networked 4 PC laptops and 1 PC desktop (as well as a Linux box). We are predominantly a PC home. My work, which up until 2008 focused on technical writing for Windows software apps and Windows help files, required a PC.

Why?
This morning I ordered a MacBook Pro. Here's why:

• I can either dual-boot and run a full Windows box on the Mac or run Parallels. Virtual Windows has come a long way since 2005 and I've seen it in action. If I need PC apps, I'll be able to run them without much worry.
• I want the ease of use. On my primary laptop, I've re-installed Windows over 5 times since 2006. You don't have to do that with a Mac.
• There are still few viruses for the Mac.
• I depend heavily on my iPhone, my iPod Nano, and even my old iPod. I might as well have them all on a Mac, where I can get a full feature set (like Photo Albums on my iPhone).
• I love the video and audio editing software that comes with iLife. GarageBand and iMovie are so easy to use. I can't wait to start using them again.
• Finally, I believe Macs are just friendlier. That counts a lot, even for a geek like me.

Live Blogging the Apple WWDC Keynote

Later today, right here in this post, I'm going to attempt to live-blog the Apple WWDC keynote that everyone (myself included) is so excited about. One of the reasons I'm doing this is because I want to test out CoveritLive.com, a nifty live-blogging application. Now, I say I'm going to attempt the live blog. It depends on a couple of things. I need to at least HEAR the keynote, and iPhone Alley is delivering that. However, The Digital Lifestyle is videostreaming the event, and SEEING is better than just hearing. I'm not the only one tuned into this information though, which means that I could lose the connection, the streaming could be down, and all sorts of technical things could go wrong, which means the live blog won't happen.

But I'll try. For those of you on a feed, the liveblogging shows up as an embeddable widget. To read the liveblog transcript, at the moment, you'll need to actually visit the blog.

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Find Michelle Lentz here at Write Technology, on bub.blicio.us, on Twitter, or Pownce.

An Apple a Day

I'm often inspired by Guy Kawasaki. Lately I've been inspired by his Tweets. Today he pointed out some things, which I I think make an excellent point about the MacBook Air. It doesn't come with any of the external things you need to make it a primary machine.

I'm an Apple girl at heart (although I'm typing on a PC, there's an iBook right beside me). I also plan on buying a MacBook Pro this summer as a primary machine. But I don't always buy into all of the Apple hype, which tends to save me money. Once I got past the initial ooohs and ahhhs over the MacBook Air, I decided it just wasn't practical for my everyday work environment. For instance, it's great that Apple thinks all software can downloaded or streamed OTA, but in reality, it can't. Not unless you've got an insanely high-tech household AND want to go through the trouble of putting the install files on a separate computer to access them. Really, I just want a CD drive. If I've got a DVD, as opposed to a downloaded movie, I want to be able to watch it on an airplane. Apple has great ideas - they're just ahead of their time.

To my point, here is Guy Kawasaki's standard configuration for his MacBook Air:

And here is a humorous video he tweeted today, which is an ad for a lenovo Thinkpad: