After discovering another switch blog, I’ve decided to create a Post-Switch category in my own blog, and possibly start blogging again about my most recent switch experience. So much has happened since I last posted anything of any value on this blog, and I’m hoping to document some of it. We’ll see - I’m in the midst of a major job change and I might not have a much time as I’d like.
I just now realized that when I converted from MoveableType to WordPress (on a different hosting provider), the images were pointing to the old site, so when I canceled that service, they disappeared forever.
Edit: I managed to recreate a few of the images, so we’re back in business.
Yikes! Here I go with a new hosting provider and a new blogging tool. I’m now planning on blogging every single minute of every single day of my life: imagine, you’ll be able to find out what I had for breakfast, how long I spent in the can, what I dreamed about? BET YOU CAN’T WAIT??? 
But seriously, I probably won’t touch this thing for a while because, in the words of the great George Costanza: “I’ve got nothing to say”.
Entourage 2004 is “OK”. It gets the job done for the most part, but it’s simply not up to par with Outlook 2003. Here’s my short list of complaints:
1. If you sync with an Exchange server, you cannot get the Progress popup window to stop popping up unless you HIDE the application. Command+W or clicking the red X doesn’t work. This is ludicrous.
2. Notes and tasks to not sync to an Exchnage server.
3. You cannot force a sync to an Exchange server. You have to wait for it to happen.
4. Can’t mark calendar entries as private.
5. Can’t block read receipts from being sent. I had someone complain that I was deleting their messages without reading them, when in fact I WAS reading every one in the preview pane and then simply deleted the message without marking it as read.
6. I have the USB Overdrive mouse driver and 3rd party mouse with scroll wheel. I have the wheel set to double click. This doesn’t always work in Entourage, but it works EVERYWHERE else.
7. Can’t customize inbox columns. Outlook 2003 handles this much better, switching between a multi-line view and single-line multi-column view as you resize the list.
8. Entourage always seems to add my signature to everything: including replies. On a long e-mail thread, my signature appears many times.
9. If you uncheck the “Display the Reminder” option in Outlook 2003 (which is buried under Tools/Options/Other/Advanced Options/Reminder Options - DUH), and you Snooze when the reminder comes due in Entourage, at some point, Outlook 2003 CLEARs the reminder, which propgates back to the server, and thus to Entourage, causing Snooze not to work. Since when does DISPLAY THE REMINDER mean CANCEL THE REMINDER.
10. As I’ve already pointed out in this post, there is some very sloppy UI work in Entourage. Here’s the screen shot again:
JUNK! It went back to the store within hours of purchasing it. I can’t stand the micro-second delay after the mouse turns off. I’m being picky - yes, but I find it very annoying.
Clicking the mouse wheel requires too much effort.
Clicking the left mouse button requires too little effort. My father-in-law has trouble with accidental clicks on his single button Mac mouse. He has big hands, so I thought this mouse might be a good fit for him, but when I accidentally clicked on something myself, I immediately knew it wasn’t going to work.
Using MICROSOFT’S remote desktop to access a Dell box running MICROSOFT Windows using the MICROSOFT mouse with MICROSOFT’S IntelliPoint software is next to impossible. I found myself scrolling documents just by moving the mouse with my fingers nowhere near any of the buttons.
Last but not least, I did not like the jittery movements of the mouse pointer in general. It did not appear to move smoothly across the screen, regardless of the settings used.
I’ve been preparing to make one last huge entry (or a series of short entries) to sum up my Switch experience, which has been overwhelmingly positive, but until I can find the time, I have to share with you an addiction - package tracking. <LOL> Isn’t this lovely? Can anyone guess what this is? 
Edit: well, of course, the image is no longer available. It was a UPS shipment log for my Powerbook.
Many thanks to Alf who in this blog entry pointed out (among other things) that you can configure Firefox to allow tabbing into all form fields. Simply enter about:config in the address bar, and change the tabfocus settings to either 3 or higher. According to this page, the default is supposed to be 7, but mine was set to 1 for some reason.
I thought I had a good backup solution in place with BounceBack Express, which came with my Seagate external hard drive, so I upgraded to the Pro version for about $40. Within the first few days, my scheduled daily backups started crashing, and eventually I lost my file selections and exclusion list. I contacted tech support, and 4 days later they responded and asked me to make sure I shut down all other apps before backing up, including any apps that seem like “benign background apps”. Here was my response:
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Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, it took 4 days and it was not the response I was looking for. Allow me to explain…
I’m a recent convert to the Mac, and I was hoping to find a backup solution that would allow me to schedule nightly backups and have them run reliably regardless of what apps are running. If I could use the built-in Backup program in Windows XP to do this, surely I could find something on the Mac to do the same. If I have to go through the trouble of shutting down my apps before doing a backup, even background apps, then I might as well run the backup manually.
I have since re-installed the software twice, and I suppose I’ll give the scheduled backup one more try before starting to look for another solution. There are two things I still don’t understand, though:
1. Why the crashing didn’t start until the first scheduled backup after installing Pro. (Note that at that time I did not uninstall the previous version, which is the version I received with my Seagate external hard drive).
2. Why I can keep all my apps open and run a backup manually with no problem.
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I decided to try out Retrospect, which did not make me feel too comfortable after seeing this dialog (hint: where’s the Cancel button?)
Edit: sorry - image no longer available
After figuring out the rather non-intuitive user interface (e.g., you don’t “delete” things, you “forget” them), I performed a manual backup of my home directory with no problem.
I’m sure Retrospect will work just fine, but I got to thinking that the Mac should really come with something out of the box that can do backups. Well - it does - sort of. There’s rsync, which looks great but doesn’t handle resource forks, which if I understand correctly will still be around for a while even though Apple is moving away from them. ditto seems to handle resource forks, but I don’t think it can backup just changed files or delete files from the backup that are no longer on the hard drive.
It was then I discovered psync, a command-line/Perl-based utility, and a nice GUI tool that sits on top of it: psyncx. My first full backup of my home directory was MUCH faster than Retrospect, and I was able to easily schedule a backup to run with no problem. I think the developers of BounceBack need to look at the “man” page of psync - after listing the backup times for several backup trials, they’ll find this:
Note screensaver was on with some other background programs. I used this program happily with my PowerBook G4 (Ti) while I am surfing the web and listening to iTunes at the same time letting SETI@Home search for cosmic programmers With MacOS X, background backup is no problem
Needless to say, I think I’ll stick with psync and make a donation for psyncx if it all works out.
Time to get my ideas out of Stickies and into the blog - I’m going to try and create 1 entry/day until I’m caught up.
Although there are many things about Firefox that I really like, I’ve switched to Safari. The biggest reason is HTML form support, which really stinks in Firefox. In Safari, HTML form fields appear to be “1st class” Aqua elements, while in Firefox they look like Windows components:
Safari:
Edit: sorry - image no longer available
Firefox:
Edit: sorry - image no longer available
Appearance alone would not be enough to make me switch. As someone who builds HTML forms as part of my living, I find myself filling out forms probably much more frequently than your average home or business user. Because of this, I’ve become quite speedy at it, at least until I tried Firefox on the Mac. The problem is that Firefox doesn’t allow you to tab into anything other than text fields. It skips right over dropdown lists and checkboxes, making me reach for the mouse, which in this case tends to slow me down. Safari allows this (although I think you have to enable full keyboard access in the System Preferences). Furthermore, the home/end key remapping technique doesn’t work in Firefox, but works great in Safari.
Another big problem for me is that I can’t use Firefox to access the WebLogic admin console because it refuses to display the Java applet in the left pane. This doesn’t make sense to me - it’s just Java after-all.
But wait - there’s more - in the upcoming release of Tiger, Apple is claiming that Safari is now faster than Firefox, although I honestly don’t have any speed issues with Safari under Panther.
It’s been quite some time since my last post, but stay tuned - I’ve got a bunch of notes to sift through and some interesting stuff to write about. I’ve been very busy with work and I’ve also been tending to a very sick dog who is finally starting to come around.