Continuing on from my last entry, I’ve begun a series of blogs about my computer life since switching over to a Mac.  Almost everything I do is on my (now outdated) Mac Mini, with the exception of using NewsGator’s FeedDemon for my RSS feeds as I have not liked one RSS reader for the Mac.

Sometimes I work from home and I’ve needed a time tracker for awhile.  One that crosses all platforms is Klok, a flexible time tracker which works using Adobe’s Air engine.  Similar to Flash, (and made by the same people), any applications should be able to work whether on Windows or OS X.  So far I’ve not found any issues, though this program is constantly in beta mode.  Still it’s easy and can make reports into Excel which is quite handy.

With news that 3.0 update is out for iPhone, I’m still disappointed no task management has been assigned.  So far I’m using CalToDo and not that happy with it.  It works but it doesn’t keep the formatting of the text so everything is jumbled up in one big paragraph.  Very frustrating.  If rumors of a 3rd generation iPhone are correct, I want a task manager and this is something Apple should just build in period.

I had another issue with CalGoo where it just stopped syncing my main calendar with Google.  I presume this is more of an issue with Entourage, since that’s the only one affected, but it’s frustrating to realize that your appointments aren’t showing up online, and then the only way to fix it is to recreate the connector, thereby suddenly having duplicates.

I’ve been renewed into Evernote now that they finally have the Firefox clipper for Mac fixed.  Since I’m using it primarily now as it was intended, I’ve begun loving the software again.  It’s also nice to have it synced online.  It’s now began supporting Growl which is helpful to hear it backed up.  Of course, this works across platforms as well.

I’ve not updated to Safari 4, I’ve heard there are issues with it making Entourage crashing and since I only use Firefox anyway, that shouldn’t bother me.  I downloaded a free program called Simple Sync which I use just to manually keep various folders of mine synced with their PC version.  It works fine so far though I’ve only had it a short time.

This continues my blogging on using a Mac over a PC.  My initial post was about five weeks ago, and I last updated last Sunday.

This week has been extremely long as I had a lot to do. This is where I  am most thankful for Entourage’s project center. It’s exactly what I need.  I talk about it so much in my blogs, I feel like I should expand on why it works so well for me. After all, there is more dedicated project management software out there which is more practical, efficient and useful in an enterprise.  I would never recommend Entourage for trying to share projects.  But for just individuals looking to try to keep everything in one place (email, contacts, appointments, tasks), Entourage does a fine job.

First, the way I use Project Center is more like customer management.  Each of my clients are listed as their own project so I can have a dedicated area for each of their information. From there, I treat “tasks” as a single project.  For clients who simply have a list of problems needing to be addressed, that’s included in the entire task/project.  Thanks to Entourage’s “link” system, I can then connect all related emails, contacts, appointments, files, and notes related to that specific task/project.  Though I’ve only used this for about 5 weeks now, some tasks/projects have grown rather large, yet so far the system works.

After this, I can also use the category feature to further index information.  Categories are not new in software, I know Outlook has had them since at least 2003.  The default categories don’t work for me, so I edited them.  For example, I can use a category for order information when a purchase is made for me or on behalf of my customer.  This usually corresponds to just emails but categories can go across to the address book, calendar, and notes.  A good example is the generic “Business” category which I can assign to a contact, an appointment, email, or a note.  This might be overkill for people who have a good memory, but it’s nice to cross index information as much as possible, since a year from now I may need to remember the cost of an order for an item I knew I purchased, but can’t remember exactly which client the purchase corresponded to.

Of course, there is always the fear that Entourage will fail me.  If I’ve read it once, I’ve read it 1,000 times Entourage 2004 was notorious that their project center would become corrupted and I’m certainly using it to it’s capacity.  Hopefully, that has been addressed in 2008, but you can never tell with Microsoft. That said, I found a wonderful way to back up Entourage, using Automater and Growl.  I’ve already spoken on Growl which has truly come in handy now that I’ve gotten it to work with Entourage for new emails, but I’ve not used Automater as of yet and I realize now how extremely powerful (and easy) this program is.  These are the types of programs that makes Apple so much more popular than Windows. It’s powerful, elegant, simple and it’s built into OS X.  Of course, the default backup utility for your Mac is Time Machine which is easy if you have an external drive (warning, it will reformat it, thus wiping out the data).  Unfortunately, it’s not necessarily great for Entourage, especially if the app is open so hopefully this is a more dependable solution.

I have been doing more app testing this weekend since I’m basically snowed in.  One thing I realized I needed desperately is a shared clipboard for my PC and Mac.  I found one application called Share Clip which is free and works between Windows, OS X and some distros of Linux.  It’s incredibly simple and works great so far.    Not letting the clipboard go, I needed a clipboard manager that would save a list of items I copied to pull back up later.  I’ve been most impressed with iClipboard, though it’s not free but for $29 it is a tempting offer once my trial is over.  I realize there is probably a program out there that can do both but in the interest of time, this will do.

One application that is kind of neat but sadly not complete is a small program called AddressBookSync. It lets Apple’s Addressbook sync up with the contacts in Facebook.  Unfortunately, Facebook decided it went against the privacy terms after it was initially releated but it still allows for pictures and birthdays to be synchronized.  It’s easy and free.

Lastly, something I’ve downloaded is Delicious Library 2.  There are some free library programs out there to keep track of your inventory of DVDs, books, and music.  However, this one can expand to just about anything.  It makes me want to run out and get a webcam as it can take a picture of the UPC code and immediately pull up the product’s information.  I’ve not really had time to use it yet but I’m fairly certain I’m going to get this, now if I just had time to import everything in.

So thus is the end of this week’s blog.  I hope it’s helpful to you, and feel free to comment on anything I’ve not covered or need expanding on.

It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged about using the Mac.  I apologize and if anyone would like to read the FIRST entry, it’s way back here.  I’ve come a long way since then.

After working for nearly a month, I’m still enjoying Entourage the most, simply because I’ve fit it into my business so well, using the project center for GTD.  I swear my earlier issues of Rules not always working has improved, though still not that dependable.  One thing I just implemented is using Growl, which I’ve set to be speech recognition.  This comes in especially handy for IM, so what people are saying to me is spoken, and I can multitask better. Tonight I found a way to set up Entourage to use Growl which works by downloading a script.  Unfortunately, it uses the rules which as I stated before have proven unreliable so it doesn’t always work.

Another limitation with Entourage is it only supports syncing with iCal using one calendar.  Since I like to keep my calendars separate (on Google) between personal and work, this is a bit irksome.  The good news is since my iPod Touch (iPhone) can sync with all the calendars in iCal, at least all my events and appointments are listed there.  Speaking of syncing with this device, Apple is trying to push out to everyone in the universe, it astounds me they have yet to allow the tasks in iCal to be synced up as of yet.  There are many workarounds at this time, but none of them seem too successful for me to really bother taking the time to set it up.  It’s 2009 and it’s not too much to ask for your main cell phone/PDA to be able to sync with the common tasks other PDAs have been doing for years.

Now, onto applications.  Lately I’ve been testing a really neat, high end app called Curio.  It’s basically awesome, and while most users might just see it as a free style note taking application, the “free style” part is what makes it so fully functional, as people thinking outside the box can use it to fit them, rather then the other way around.  Recently they allowed for connecting to the Evernote database, which can help to pull in information if one is away from the computer but wanted to write something down in their PDA/iPhone.  It isn’t free though, but there is an academic price, which makes me jealous I never got anything like this for school but I used to try to mimic the same style in Word.

Speaking of Evernote, I’ve been using it on my Mac.  This was a program that I really had expanded past the “note taking” abilities and was using it for project management.  However, due to features stripped in their latest version, I knew my relationship with them would end.  While Entourage has picked up where Evernote has left off, I haven’t completely given up on the old app since you can synchronize so easily on the web.  I quit using the desktop version, and mainly stick to clipping via Firefox, uploading to the server, and then bringing it down to Entourage via the Imap servers like it’s another email account.  That makes it easier to catalog web site information with the rest of my project information, though I wish I could stick in as a “note” or “clipping” (still not sure what that is) instead of a mail message which allows for no editing.

At this time that’s all I can think of to blog about.  As for operating, this computer has “froze” up on me once, but then I had left it running for maybe a week.  I’ve kept up with updates so far, not many have come along since it’s only been a few weeks.  I need to spend more time with Parallels, but as I stated before, the Windows installations setup were faulty and need to be started over.  Maybe I can work on that this week.

So here I am, still not having my Mac a week yet.  Some things I love about it, other things I am not thrilled about, and I just discovered one I gave up on.

So, the bad news first.  I have exhausted a search on finding a RSS reader that I really like that runs on a Mac.  I know of the front-runners like NetNewsWire and Vienna.  I had hoped to use those, they work well with the awesome application of Growl but they were so limited to what I needed them to do, such as tagging and deleting items.  I wish I could go with online RSS feeds like Google Reader or Bloglines, but they have no “watch” abilities for subjects that alert me right away when something I’m really interested comes through.

So what do I use on a PC?  I’ve become addicted to FeedDemon.  It looks great as well as does everything I need plus more.  Oddly, I realize the same people make the Mac app NetNewsWire but the latter falls short in so many ways.

My keyboard has now stopped taking the home and end keys.  I tried to redo the keyboard but it’s still seeing it as a standard keyboard, which it actually isn’t (some keys are in odd positions).

Now onto what I’m still enjoying or loving.  In spite of the lack of rules dependability, I’m still enjoying Entourage.  I think my love for it comes down to how much I missed a true PIM.  I’ve been dorking away on projects, emails coming in have been appropriately filed and added own categories.  Tasks and events are added too.

I really love Adium.  It’s such a girl thing really.  It’s icon is a little bird which when not running, has it’s eyes closed in the program bar.  When it is running, it’s eyes are open.  When a new IM pops up, it talks it out to me and the bird will jump up and down.  The wings continue to fly until I answer it.

Continuing on with my Mac blogging, today I’ve spent the day downloading new programs.  The ones I really like, Adium, an all in one IM service.  Being a girl first, I am always loving cutesy items, and when I get a new IM, his wings flap up and down.  Being a geek second, I HAVE to integrate all my chat accounts into one program.  All I look for is the skins being changeable, the sessions to be logged/saved, and of course the sound notifications to be customizable.  So far, this program meets all of my needs.

A bonus to the program is the installation of Growl.  This is something totally new for me, but it’s a service that integrates with certain supported applications to notify you when needed.  Obviously for Adium, it “growls” when I receive a NEW message.  Of course you can customize the growl to just about anything.  I changed it to a “speech” style and now it speaks out the messages to me.  Hilarious.  Other supported apps for it are ThunderBird, MacJournal and DayLite.

While searching for programs out there, I stumbled across Wallsaver which is brand new (just released this month).  It’s awesome as it sets your screensaver to be your wallpaper (provided your hardware supports it).  The downside is this sent me off on a tangent of looking for new screensavers.  I really want an aquarium screen saver, but not wanting to pay for one at the moment so I settled on “SkyRocket” located at Softpedia.

So those are the good things for today.  The bad?  Why can I not select text on a line by typing CMD + Home or CMD + END?  That is something I realize I use constantly, especially while blogging and emailing and I can’t believe there isn’t a way to do this.

Second, I’ve been looking for a PDF writer for OS X.  I realize that supposedly the system has a built in PDF writer already installed, you simply choose “Save as”.  Either this wasn’t installed on my Mac or it’s not compabible with Firefox.  Anyone have any ideas?

Finally, and most frustratingly, I still have not been able to get Entourage to be more dependable on it’s “rules.”  I’ve done research. I know that rules only follow after the MLM and Junk filters run.  I have no MLMs setup and my Junk mail is set so low hardly anything is being caught.  It seems the rule will halfway work, but the main purpose I want it to do, is move certain emails to certain folders.  I can test the rules by having them run by themselves and the emails successfully go their designated folder.  But if I select the main “Run all rules” nothing happens, even if it’s the only rule I have setup.  I’ve posted questions on Mac forums and done research but so far there seems to be no help.  Tell me somebody has figured this out.  For the love of my sanity.

Something I forgot to touch on yesterday when mentioning my new Mac, I am using a standard two button scroll mouse.  (Well it’s actually a gamer’s mouse but that’s not important).  One thing I refuse to do on a Mac is go to the single button route.  Upon having the right click menu, so many options are opened up for me, especially someone who isn’t exactly sure where everything is at this time.

As I’m growing more attune to my new workstation, I really have to admit I’m liking it more and more.  One thing that I just touched on yesterday, was how my iPod Touch was able to synchronize my calendar and contacts. However, because it’s all possible using the program Calgoo, I would have been able to do this on my PC as well.

Of course, speaking of Outlook, I’ve forgotten how great it is to have a powerful PIM on your machine for GTD (getting things done).  I am really enjoying Entourage, probably my favorite part of the Mac.  However, that doesn’t mean I love everything about it.  First, why doesn’t it by default setup your icon to notify you when you receive an email?  If an email comes in but you aren’t around to hear the sound, then you have to manually check the application.  Another thing I don’t like is the My Day app.  It should be something that is on the dashboard but it’s not.  It’s nice to see upcoming appointments and tasks with minor editing abilities, but I’d rather it also show me a straight link to my project center (my favorite part of Entourage) or email notifications.  Lastly on Entourage, and this is most troubling, for some reason the “rules” I have set up aren’t working dependably.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  That’s very frustrating and I’m going to have to get fixed once I have time to investigate.

Yesterday I spoke of my keyboard not working quite right but I’ve since fixed that in the settings section.  You don’t realize how much you would miss the “end” key until it’s gone.  Also, I’ve added my HP Laserjet 2600n printer which was a breeze to add.  That’s more then I can say for trying to add the same printer to my notebook running Mandriva.  I finally got it to work but it took hours, downloading of scripts and editing of CUPS several times. I know CUPS exists in some form in OS X and I was rather concerned I would have to dive into it here but luckily Bonjour did the job for me.

I worked on a spreadsheet in Excel 2008.  The problem with reviewing this is I haven’t used 2007 enough to really know if the features I’m disliking is because of the huge changes in Office overall, or just the Mac version. At first I really didn’t care for the formatting options (I’m fairly sure this is a Mac thing) to be popped out in a panel like Photoshop does, but I eventually got used to it. However, when switching between applications, the fact that Excel has multiple windows that can each be hidden on their own, that slowed down my work pace considerably.

I’m not giving up Windows/PCs, but I do need to expand my experience with Apple computers and invest in making one my main workspace.  I chose to purchase a refurbished Mac Mini, mainly because that’s the best deal I could get for what I could afford. It has 10.5 (Leopard), 4 GB of ram and an already too small 80 GB hard drive. Installed software is Office 2008, Firefox, iwork ‘09, parallels (with XP and Vista), and Toast. There is actually more, but right now that’s all I plan to speak on.  I plan to blog my experiences through this process.

Email

The first thing I wanted to do was setup Entourage.  I was a big time Outlook user, but wound up switching over to Thunderbird which I enjoyed.  For my projects, I was actually relying on Evernote 2.x which was outdated and sadly, the new version was stripping out features I loved and have forced me to look elsewhere.  I see Entourage has a project center and keeping emails, schedules, tasks, and notes in one place would work best for me so I immediately stepped in.  Of course, Entourage 2004 had reports of corrupting projects so that is a concern of mine as I go forward with this, but I hope Microsoft fixed this issue.

One thing I need Entourage to do was connect to my Gmail calendar and be able to edit from there.  Thunderbird had an extension that worked with Lightening that did allow to edit a remote Google calendar but obviously Evernote (being NOT a calendar program) had no such ability.  I know that Entourage only supports syncing with iCal (Apple’s built in calendar) and from there I would have to sync iCal to Google.  Of course, that was read only.  After some reading, I discovered a program called CalGoo, which will be a connector to sync both sets of calendars both ways.  Of course, what I’m doing is actually syncing three programs but many Apple users appear to use it for their Entourage, so I’m hardly an innovative user.  So far, it worked GREAT the first day, but the next for some reason it stopped syncing with iCal and gave me no reasons why. I recreated a new connector which proceeded to duplicate all of my items in both calendars.  That did not make me happy, but since then I have switched on the “remove duplicate” feature in Calgoo so hopefully that won’t happen again.

Lastly, Entourage had to be slightly tweaked due to the nature of OS X and how it kills me they put no SAVE button by default on any of the app windows.  The good news is you can add these really easily by right clicking anywhere on the toolbar and choosing “Customize toolbar”.  Drag the save button (and any other button you desire) to the place you want to see it and click close.  I’m very thankful that’s a feature I can tinker with, but surely it’s not just PC users who desire to possibly save something while working on a file?

Parallels

The program itself is standard as vitalization’s go.  What this means is, if you have a program that can run in Windows only, then Parallels allows you to boot up any version of Windows within your Mac environment w/o rebooting.  Many call this a virtual machine.  The person who sent this to me went ahead and created XP and Vista installations which are hosed up badly.  I suppose you don’t let a Mac user try to setup a PC, even in a virtual world.  I’m gonna have to redo them but at least it’s allowed me to see if this is gonna work for me.

Browsing

Using Firefox is probably cheating, it’s not that I hate Safari but after you become a FF user, it’s tough to use any other browser.  Importing in the settings to my favorite extensions (tabmix plus, speed dial) makes it nearly identical to the versions running on my PCs.

iPod Touch

I use an iPod Touch for work however, because of my reliance on Google calendars, I haven’t been able to use the calendar function at all.  Since Calgoo is working, I have set up my iPod to sync on the mac only for contacts and calendar items.  I have chosen to keep my media library on my PC. I’ve a vast collection on the PC which is running fine, connecting to both my iPod and my AppleTV.  I’ve not resynced the iPod back up with the PC and I see a new update for the Touch is out, which may complicate matters.  Another thing I need to do is cancel the backup process within iTunes on my Mac, I’ll use my PC to backup the iPod.

What I miss so far

I miss the middle click function in Firefox to open/close a new tab.  I do not care for OS X’s need to tile my apps that way and need to look up on how to override this, but hadn’t had the time.  I also have not enjoyed switching to the command key instead of CTRL.  For some reason my END button doesn’t work though that could be because my keyboard is a standard Windows keyboard and I need to reset. Finally, an external hard drive I’ve been using forever apparently was formatted with the NTFS system which only gives me read only access though the Mac and to fix it I need to reformat, which I don’t want to do.  I may have to invest in a new external.

What I like

The speed out of the gate is awesome, though I bet that has to do with my 4 GB of memory more then anything else. I also didn’t expect to like the program bar at the bottom but I actually do.  Other then my issues with Calgoo, I really do love Entourage so far.  I’ll keep updating this blog as new issues/postives occur.  I have some free Mac downloads I want to try, and I’m actually looking for a mouse/keyboard/clipboard sharer out there that is newer then Synergy if anyone has any suggestions (free would be better).

i.TV has been working on TiVo scheduling. Their updated i.TV iPhone app now links to your TiVo web account to schedule recordings. And i.TV’s television guide sure beats TiVo’s own mobile site.

This new feature joins Netflix queue management and various video previews.

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Today Google starts rolling out voice and video chat inside Gmail—which requires a free browser plug-in download, and, obviously, a webcam or microphone. Googler Justin Uberti explains:

Once you install the plug-in, to start a video chat, just click on the “Video & more” menu at the bottom of your Gmail chat window, and choose “Start video chat.” You’ll have a few seconds to make sure you look presentable while it’s ringing, and then you’ll see and hear your friend live, right from within Gmail. You can click the “pop-out” icon to make the video larger, or click the fullscreen icon in the upper left-hand corner for a fully immersive experience.

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It seems Gizmodo is reporting that $200 Eee netbooks were a distinct possibility next year. That’s a great start, but there was also word this weekend that $99 netbooks could be around the corner too. Of course there’s a catch, and anyone with a cellphone can probably guess what it is.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the catch is the netbooks will be subsidized. Instead of paying full price for an Asus Eee PC, the Dell Mini 9 or HP 2133 Mini-Note, customers will pay $99 and agree to a two-year broadband contract. The WSJ reports that HP is already well underway with talks with unnamed carriers. The paper speculates Dell and Asus are talking too.

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