30 July 2008
I signed up to Apple’s Mobile Me to get good synchronisation between my iPhone, MacBook and Outlook on my work PC. Its been interesting. I sync my iPhone with my MacBook, but also want to sync my contacts and calendar with my work PC. Perfect scenario for Mobile Me … right?
I think I’ve entered the same contact into my iPhone about three times now … I’m not sure where it goes, but Mobile Me keeps deleting it then syncing with all my devices and deleting it everywhere. Or maybe Outlook is deleting it – but the point is that deleting something seems to work perfectly across all devices, while adding something often leads to a conflict that I have to resolve. Same with calendar appointments – but I think that’s my fault (see below).
This is a problem that I’ve also discovered with Live Mesh. I sync my working folders and have had a feeling of confidence knowing that my files are in three locations. But, over the weekend I discovered how flawed this is when I moved a folder and Mesh deleted it then pushed this out to all of my devices. Mesh was even clever enough to put the folders in my recycle bin, but not the files themself – so the files are successfully deleted from all locations.
Back to Mobile Me – unfortunately it won’t sync with an Outlook calendar that’s stored in Exchange. For a while I’ve been running the Google calendar sync, which works well with Outlook, but Mobile Me won’t sync with Google Calendar either. No problems I thought, so I set up a sync between Google Calendar and iCal on my MacBook – which does sync with Mobile Me.
This is what I’ve ended up with:
Wow – that’s enterprise for you. Hopefully our infrastructure guy will install the Exchange-MobileMe plugin soon so I can sync directly between Exchange and MobileMe, but I’m still left with this feeling of doom that all I’ll achieve is that Mobile Me now has direct access to seemlessly delete stuff from my exchange calendar, iCal and my iPhone.
I’m not complaining – I’ll still have 90% of my appointments on my iPhone and that will be great. If you’re one of the 10% – I apologise in advance.
Cloud storage is great and synchronisation between devices is great too – but nothing beats Time Machine and my trusty external hard-drive.
17 Comments | 
Mac, Technology, iPhone | 
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Posted by Andrew
24 December 2007
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been comparing Parallels with VMWare Fusion on my Macbook to see which gives a better experience running Visual Studio. Fusion was winning, until Parallels released build 5582.
My comments:
- Both have similar startup/compile/shutdown performance (running 32 bit Windows XP)
- Both install and run cleanly over my Bootcamp installation
- Swapping between VMWare and Parallels requires Windows to be re-activated every time due to changes in hardware drivers
- Both handle sleep/wake in OSX nicely
- Under Parallels, Windows XP wouldn’t shut down properly, but this was fixed in build 5582
- Parallel’s ‘Coherence’ mode integrates with Leopard more cleanly than Fusion’s ‘Unity’ mode
- The defaults in Parallels are better – it maps my Mac partition as z drive by default and enables all USB devices by default
When running Windows XP on my Bootcamp partition, they are very equal. They both also provide full migration from a Windows PC and from each other. Overall, I favor Parallels – not for performance reasons, but for its cleaner integration of devices and visually within Leopard, although this could all change with one more VMWare release.
Leave a Comment » | Mac, Software | Tagged: Parallels, VMWare | Permalink
Posted by Andrew
8 December 2007
OmniFocus is a Mac application for tracking to-do lists. Quite a basic concept that Outlook and every mobile device has been doing for years, but I’ve tried every task management system I can get my hands on, including various ABC-123 systems, and I always seem to end up with lists so large that they become useless and I return to the good-old daily list on paper.
OmniFocus is different because it follows the ‘Getting things done‘ methodology of dealing with tasks. Control-Option-Space opens the ‘new task’ window and adds a task to your task inbox.
Dealing with tasks in your inbox is easy – if you can do it today, then do it and mark it as complete. Otherwise, drag-and-drop it onto a project and/or assign a context. The context could be home/office/phonecall/lunchtime etc.
The task list can be viewed by project, group of projects, context, due date etc. Very simple, yet the three dimensions of inbox/project/context provide enough power to manage an ever-growing list of tasks and to actually get stuff done.
OmniFocus is 10/10 because its to-the-point and simple yet much more powerful than a one dimensional to-do list. Also – until Jan-8 its half price at $US 40.
1 Comment | Business, Mac, Software | Permalink
Posted by Andrew
28 November 2007
Its been two weeks since I moved to the dark side and upgraded my Toshiba laptop to a Macbook and I wish I’d done it sooner! In two weeks I’ve gone from complete Mac novice to Mac evangelist … here’s my highlights for all of you wondering if you can live without windows:
- I’ve used XP for 5 years and the switch from XP to Leopard was much easier than the switch from XP to Vista.
- Windows apps run seamlessly in Leopard (using Parallels running XP) and Visual Studio runs faster and compiles faster than on my desktop. You can launch windows apps from the dockbar, or have the windows taskbar visible.
- The best feature is the instant on / instant off just by opening/shutting the lid. No waiting for 5 mins while it hibernates and wakes up.
- I have a whole new appreciation for software. I’ve always preferred installed software over web apps, but after using Apple & other Mac software – I’m even more sold on installed software. Web apps won’t be as powerful/graceful/fast/loaded with features yet easy to learn and use for years (if ever).
- Time machine is amazing. No more waiting for backups and no more pain of restoring.
- Omni focus is great – I can finally throw away paper to-do lists (www.omnigroup.com).
- When building windows software, you typically follow Microsoft’s lead and copy the latest version of Outlook. Mac software vendors copy Apple software and therefore everyone’s building beautiful software for the Mac. Even the mac version of Skype is nicer!
- One of the coolest features is that the headphone jack is also an optical audio output, allowing me to play digital audio (& video via DVI) to my AV receiver.
- What’s you favorite Mac feature that I need to try?
There’s definitely no going back. You need a Macbook.
2 Comments | Mac, Software | Permalink
Posted by Andrew
