Switching to Mac OS X: The Ugly

Out of the frying pan into the fire. Here I was all excited that now my mail was in a format (mbox) that most mailers readily recognised. I used the mail2pine perl script tip but that wasn't successful. I initially thought that there was a mistake in the script (as it is a few years old) and hacked around it but still no success. Using Unix shell commands, I linked some of the pine mailbox names to the ones imported into Mail. When I tried to view them through pine, the penny dropped. I could not see a list of messages but a list of individual text files each containing a single message. Some research on the Internet revealed that Mail no longer uses the standard mbox format. Though the mailboxes are mbox files, they are in fact folders where each message is stored individually as a .emlx file. Pine does not expect this. Mail has good reason for doing so as this allows for indexing of individual messages (and hence searching).

Imagine my frustration. I decided to move away from Outlook to escape a proprietary format and fell into another one.

You may ask why I just do not use pine off an IMAP server. I still like to use POP3 and download all my email so that I have an offline archive that does not need to be synchronised with a server again and again. Also most IMAP servers have fairly strong space restrictions (I cannot upload several gigabytes of data ... I am not the only one ... there are other equally crazy email stashing people in the world :) ).

I also did not manage to import my contacts, calendar, etc. The CSV or tab-separated files that I could export from Outlook were not even properly readable by Entourage. AddressBook kept on hanging while trying to read them. So I ended up manually updating my calendar entries and just archiving my contacts in an Excel file for later adding to AddressBook as needed.

But do I regret making a switch to Mac OS X. Not so far. I am frustrated by the "ugly" (IMO :) ) set up of mailboxes in Mail. But I love the flexibility of Unix. Things are so much easier to manage compared to Windows. So far the mail import is the hardest thing I have had to do. I do plan to run the two machines in parallel for a while to ensure that any proprietary data formats on Windows can be transferred. I suspect I will end up having a dual boot to surmount the problem of using MS Project. So far the switch seems to have been worthwhile but it is only a few days in and I suppose I am having far too much fun being back to Unix to notice the quirks. But that was the main reason I decided to switch to Mac OS X. So it works so far. More later.

Switching to Mac OS X: The Bad

The biggest challenge in the switch is, of course, moving all your data across from Windows to Mac OS X. This is not as simple as it sounds especially if you have been using MS Outlook for email, calender and contacts management for years (as is the case with me). There is no equivalent of MS Outlook on Mac. There is Entourage but I found it rather fiddly to use and was adamant to get away from being bound by the proprietary .pst files that Outlook uses (but that somehow will remain a dream ... see the next post). I decided to use Mail that comes bundled with Mac OS X with a view to using pine in the long run. I was pleased to read in various articles that Mail uses the (sort of) standard mbox format and even had thoughts of interleaving Mail and Pine (I just love the austere simplicity of pine) as described in this post: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/h/335.

So how does one port several gigabytes of email from MS Outlook (2003 in case you are wondering) to Mail. I searched around on the Internet and found a number of options. One is to use a software from Little Machines that does the conversion for you. It costs only $10. However, a bit of research seemed to indicate that it may not work that well for large mail sizes. Of course, I have no evidence that this is true as I haven't used it myself. The other option is to enable IMAP in googlemail and upload all your email (you will have to create custom labels for all your folders) onto googlemail and then download it using Mail. This seemed reasonable but, again, some research indicated that googlemail has a habit of organising your mail in some clever ways which may mean that you end up having your email in a a bit of a mish-mash (not something you would want with several gigabytes). It wasn't clear whether it is really the case but I didn't want to take the chance. Also, uploading and then downloading several gigabytes on googlemail could take eternity.

From the various options, it seemed the simplest was to install Mozilla Thunderbird on my PC, let it import all my Outlook email and contacts and then import those in turn into Mail on Mac OS X (you can use Eudora as well BTW). This is the option I went for. Thunderbird uses the mbox format. So once all the mail was imported, I transferred it to my Mac and was ready to import into Mail when disaster struck. Each folder would have to be imported individually which would mean recreating the folder hierarchies manually in Mail, something I wasn't prepared to do. So back to some more googling and I found a nifty little utility called Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. The name is historic and it actually converts across a number of mailers on Mac. It can preserve the folder hierarchy. Upon opening Mail you can see the folders but you have to "rebuild" them to see all the emails. The software comes with an Apple Script but it is somewhat temperamental. So I decided to use the convertor and manually rebuild. Sigh. This took hours. I can only thank the author of Eudora Mailbox Cleaner as otherwise I would have spent even longer importing the mailboxes individually.

Did the import work? Yes. Some of the attachments got garbled up but nothing disastrous. Given that I imported several gigabytes of mail, I felt it was pretty good showing (and not sure who was to blame for the garbling: Thunderbird, Eudora Mailbox Cleaner or Mail ... or even Outlook ... with its pst format!).

You can expect to encounter such challenges. I use Microsoft Project and AFAIK there is no version for Mac OS X. So I may end up creating a dual boot to be able to continue using Project which is quite central to the work I do.

Any case, at this point I was pretty excited. Now I could interleave Mail and pine and enjoy the best of both worlds ... the nice GUI of Mail and the simplicity of pine ... whenever I wished. But like the Saracen conquest of Constantinople, it seems it would have to wait for a few centuries.

Switching to Mac OS X: The Good

So my new laptop arrived and as I started it up, I was pleased to see that it did what it said on the tin. No OS crashes, no long boot-up sequences. Though my Mac knowledge was rusty I could recognise that some of the nice usability features of the GUI had been maintained. I could also finally get to a Unix shell to prod around the file system without having to remotely logging into a Unix server. I am afraid I live in the past. I am not a big fan of GUIs. I use them and like them but I also like being able to do things simply from the command prompt. Somehow I have always found it quite hard to do with Windows. The system is not designed to be operated from the shell which makes using the command prompt rather painful. The same cannot be said of Unix and this is where Mac OS X outclasses Windows for me.

A host of applications came pre-installed such as Safari, Mail, etc. I was also pleased to see a built-in multi-desktop feature which I have tried to use for years on Windows (based on experiences with some Unix Windowing systems) but without much success. The multi-desktop systems on Windows are third party applications that never fully integrate with the OS. As a result you have to fight your way around the multiple desktops which kills the point of having a multi-desktop set up. The Spaces utility on Mac OS X is fully integrated and is a joy to use. 

I could also install other applications that I normally use, e.g., Skype, etc. with ease. I really like the feature that a download can be mounted as a partition and used as such. It is a great use of the underlying Unix functionality and very intuitive to a Unix-biased user such as myself. I also installed MS Office (yes sadly I have far too many documents in MS Office format to fully escape the clutches of Microsoft products). Overall, the basic set up and installation was easy. I was also pleasantly surprised to see Airport work well straight away (despite hearing lots of people complain about it over the years).

Switching from Windows to Mac OS X: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I have recently (well 3 days ago) started to make a transition from Windows to Mac OS X. I thought some of my experiences might be useful to others who may be thinking about making a transition and how painful (or otherwise) it might be.

So why did I decide to move to a Mac. The simple answer is that it is Unix. I had the (dis)pleasure of doing some freelance programming for the Macs back in the 90s and the experience was so painful that I swore never to work on Macs again. But the best of us have to eat our own words often so I should have seen it coming.

I have increasingly been very frustrated by the unreliability of my Windows machine. It is painful to use and the operating system constantly assumes that it knows better than you, which means that if you wish to do anything remotely clever with it, you are likely to end up with no hair (on account of pulling them out in frustration). One of my Mac-evangelist friends was watching this frustration grow and constantly prodding me to move to a Mac. His argument was that it was now all Unix and given my love for the rather austere world of Unix and things such as Emacs and Pine it would be ideal for me. So finally I decided to take the plunge. In the next few posts I will share some of the experiences in making the transition. But you should bear in mind that my motivation was that I wanted a Unix machine (no Linux won't do ... I'll explain some other time :) ). So bear that in mind if/when you read these posts.