For the past two or three years I have often contempated replacing my Windows PC/Notebook with an Apple based MacBook especially once they were running on Intel hardware and were able to also run MS Windows.

Well finally I have made the leap! A couple of weeks ago I picked up a shiny new Macbook Pro 15" complete with a 3 year warranty - just in case.

My first impressions were that it was very slim and sleek. No obvious vents just brushed aluminum all round. Indeed it is only in the past couple of hours that I have discovered that there is an internal fan, and also vents behind the screen hinge. Until now the only sound has been the SuperDrive (aka DVD rom/burner) spinning up, and the occasional tick of the HDD, otherwise it has been silent! Considering that this unit is almost identically spec'd to my previous ASUS notebook with a 2.53 GHz CPU, 4 Gig Ram 1440*900 screen the change in operating volume is been dramatic. Perhaps even more noticable is the battery life. Where as the ASUS struggled to make 2.5 hours, the MacBook Pro always tops 4.5. It would seem that the processor is a later generation model and that the LED backlit screen must also assist.

During the first week

I also installed Win 7 Pro (64bit) using BootCamp together with VMWare's Fusion to enable me to install my Windows based apps like the Adobe MasterSuite, my favourite multimedia player ZoomPlayer and of course Sony Vegas Video Pro 9.0 (64bit).

Priority number one was to get my iPhone 3GS connected and synced so that my calendar and contacts were in place. The only trick here as to ensure that the iPhone as de-authorised on the ASUS both for music (and the iTunes store - which I initially overlooked). Thanks to a couple of useful web guides this went relatively smoothly.

To make my move across to the OSX platform a complete sea change I decided that I would not install MS Office. I had earlier tried to move to Ubuntu but quickly discovered that I had no way to sync my contacts and calendar with my then Imate Jas-Jam (Win Mobile 6) ended up having to move back to MS Vista and Office 2007. I knew however that this time I had one advantage, my iPhone was designed to work with OSX from the begining! Therefore I was confident that I would be able to move away from my reliance on MS Outlook (indeed MS has not yet released Outlook for OSX - only the poor cousin Entourage is available).

I was rapt to find that the very freshly released Mozilla Thunderbird v3.0 was available. Aliki has been using Thunderbird 2.x for the past couple of years and has found it to work quite well, so I had high hopes for TB 3.0. I can report that it does work very well. I particularly love the separate "Sent" boxes for each account, together with a combined multi-account inbox which you can also drill down to individual account "Inboxes".  From a mail perspective I miss the three vertical panes... although you can configure TB to work this way the mail list has to be far to wide to be useful and still lacks the multi-line approach which makes Outlook 2003+ work so well for me.

Also missing is the tight integration with the address book, it always opens in a separate window. One plus is that TB can utilise the built-in OSX Contacts, however there is serious flaw with this in that you can not add a new contact to the OSX Contacts form with-in the TB Address Book, it only allows adding to the "Personal AB" and "Collected Addresses". (Collected Addresses are the collection of addresses that you have sent to.) I am still looking for a way around this limitation.

Mozilla Thunderbird crew have been working on a calendar addon for some time now and "Lightning" is progressing well. Indeed it feels like it is part of the application now. It allows subcription to both iCals however at this point this is limited to Google Calendar and not the local so syncronisation is limited to round robin of Lightning<>GCal<>OSX i Cal. Time will resolve this.

What this means is that I have to rely on the local "Contact" and "Calendar" apps in order to maintain sync with my iPhone.

Another implication of moving from Outlook to Thunderbird was moving my old mail - always a fun task!! In MS Win world importing email from the Outlook PST file works well, provided that you have Outlook installed. In could then have copied the relevant TB mailboxes and then imported them to OSX TB. That still sounded like a lot of work, so since all my mail is not handled by various GMail accounts I decided to flick the setting to download all mail on each of my accounts. MISTAKE!!! I had not considered the fact that there were some 10,000 emails!!!! Well after 3 days it was done - I set the my TB accounts to check for mail every one minute as mail was only downloading in 30-200 email lots. Once I had started I felt that I should just let things go otherwise I would end up with several hundreds or perhaps thousands of duplicates (I still ended up with a couple hundred.) Oh the wisdom of hindsight.... I should have done the migration directly from Outlook it would have only take an hour or two at most!

After the mail was all downloaded -- of course it all downloaded in reverse order so my latest email arrived on day three!! -- it was finally able to be productive.

In my next post I will describe working with BootCamp.