Anuj @ ColdFusion, Flex and some more….

I was trying to transfer all my emails (keeping the folder structure intact) from Outlook (on Windows) to Mac. I decided to go with Thunderbird as my email client on Mac (the 3 contestants were Mail, Entourage and Thunderbird).

To my surprise, it was not the most straight forward thing to transfer emails over (as I had thought). Apparently, Mail (email program on Mac) needs mbox files and you cant convert your .pst files easily to mbox files. There are a few apps out there that would do this for you but they are all paid ones. I didnt think it was worth it to pay for something so simple. After looking at a few options, the one I found to be the easiest was this :-

1) Install Thunderbird on your Windows machine and import email/settings/addresses etc from MS Outlook into Thunderbird. (might take a while if you have lots of emails,  took me about 20 mins to do this)

2) Copy the Thunderbird profile to a USB stick or drive.

3) Copy the profile on to your Mac and then if you prefer to use Mail , you can import the Thunderbird profile into Mail or if you prefer to use Thunderbird ( like I did ), you can just replace your default profile folder with the ones that you just copied over. Or you can restore the backed up profile. There is a program called Mozbackup which can backup and restore profiles for you and you wont have to bother about knowing where the profile is etc but unfortunately it only works for Windows. So, would work only for a Windows to Windows transfer.

Thats it, you should be done.  I found this to be the easiest and cheapest way to transfer emails over, I might be wrong though.

Anyone got any better ideas ?

As stated in my earlier post, I have got myself a Mac recently. There was no real reason for me to do so, but I just wanted to go ahead and try it and I had also heard some good things about it from a few people, so I thought lets get one then! Before this, I never really worked on any OS other than Windows, which makes it a bit slow when it comes to getting my head around some of the stuff.

So far, I only have gotten as far as setting up Eclipse/ColdFusion on the machine, install some IM softwares, install FTP client, setup my email and I think thats about it. In general, things seem to be taking more time than normal. I will try and put some of my initial thoughts on some of the things I notice and I know I could be completely wrong because of my lack of awareness in the Mac world.

Things I don’t like :-

1) Nothing is without a cost! - That seems to be the norm in the Mac world. Every little utility you need e.g. Text editor , ftp clients etc are all with a price tag. I am not against paying for softwares but , to be honest, coming from Windows, I am not used to it. Again, I could be wrong but if thats the case I would like to be corrected.

2) Some very basic things like making hidden files visible and vice versa is not part of the OS or atleast that’s what I found out from my little search on the subject. I would have expected this to be a simple toggle on/off config in the Finder window. Cant think of a reason why its not there.

3) I am not sure if I am right or not but I could not find a way to eject a CD/DVD other than ejecting it from the context menu. I was expecting a hardware eject button (spent a fair amount of time looking for it actually and finally said to myself, “get over Windows” !!)

There are a few other minor things but it all comes down to getting used to it I guess.

Things I like :-

1) I love the dock and the way the whole thing works! The way the dock elements start jumping when an app needs attention is just awesome!

2) I love the fact that I dont really have to worry about viruses when I am on Mac. Getting an Antivirus up and making sure its always up-to-date and occassional cleanup/system checks were just so annoying in Windows.

3) I also like that Apache/PHP is all built in and no extra effort is required to get those things up and running.

I like it overall as a better system to work with, its more stable and reliable and I beleive I just need to give myself some time to get used to it.

I cant wait to get my macbook pro. Apparently, it has been shipped and should be with me before the weekend. This will be my first ever non-windows expereince and I am getting ready for the adventure. I realize the migration from Windows to Mac is not an easy one and there will be some (may be lots ;)) hurdles along the way but I think nothing really major.

Any tips for regular Mac users on what / what not to do, would be really handy.