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:

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.

Edit: well, of course, the image is no longer available. It was a UPS shipment log for my Powerbook.

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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.

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.

As expected, I modified the key bindings as stated here to enable the home/end keys to work as they do on Windows. Too bad this doesn’t seem to work everywhere (like in the text box I’m typing in right now in Firefox), but it works in every text editor I’ve tried so I’m content. IMHO, the key commands for cursor movement make much more sense on Windows than they do on the Mac. (This doesn’t apply to window management, though: Command+W and Command+M is much better than CTRL+F4 or ALT+F4 and ALT+SPACE, N, respectively).

Also as expected, I’m back to the 2-button mouse with a scroll wheel. Rumor has it that Apple is working on a 2-button mouse of their own. Good. Although I honestly could have done without the 2 buttons, I really missed the scroll wheel.

The scanner is another story. First let me comment on how bad the software is for this thing on the Windows side. The install process involved several different types of installers, each with their own quirks, and then when you finally get all the crap installed, there is no facility for viewing freshly scanned images. Instead, you get an error that the external application is not “linked” properly (or something to that effect). Then I try to link it to ACDSee’s viewer but it causes the viewer to crash on startup.

Now on the Mac side, the problems continue. I first try to download the latest driver thinking that would make more sense than trying to install from the CD I had, which was already a few months old. Running the install, however, results in 3 different nasty looking error messages complaining about permissions or something, and then I get a window that says: “Driver Installation was Successful”. Yeah right. Nice coding, idiots!

So I proceed to try and install the software from the CD that came with the scanner. First, I was amazed at how stupid things are organized on the disk. You would think there would be a single setup program, or at least some clue as to what to click on without having to read anything. Nada. This is what it looks like:

Edit: sorry – image no longer available

I go on to figure out that the program I want to install first is the CanoScan Toolbox, so I go ahead and double click that program and wham: Error creating file. 1008:5,-5000 Access denied error. I fire up the Disk Utility program and repair the file permissions on the disk. Turns out there were pretty screwed up! (HOW they got this way I have no idea). This allows the setup program to get a bit further, but I quickly get the same error again. So now I’ve sent an e-mail to Canon. This should prove to be a barrel of laughs.