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My MacBook has passed away for the second time, a vicim of bad Nvidea chips it seems. Repairs will be complete (a new logic board, without faulty chips) in a week or so.

Labels: mac

Stuff I miss:

• Picasa
• µTorrent

Stuff I love and didn't have before:

• Adium
• TextMate
  
• Terminal
• QuickSilver
• Hazel

Things I noticed:
There are plenty of excellent Mac programs out there.
A good Mac program is much less likely to be free than a good Windows program. I bought both Hazel and TextMate.

I noticed that Front Row didn't like my iPhoto library. Even though I have over 20,000 photo's in there, it kept reporting my iPhoto library was empty. A little Googling gave me a partial answer in the form of this blog post. However, it was not immediately clear what I really needed to do. Using the instructions mentioned eralier, I noticed that my AlbumData.xml was corrupted, and the corruption was in the master keyword list. I went to iPhoto, started the preferences, and navgiated to the Keywords pane. There I removed all the Picasa keywords that were imported (for me, this wasn't a big issue, since I hardly used them). After that, my Front Row integration problems were gone!

This one was easy as pie. I wanted to convert all my Outlook contacts to vCards, so that I could import them into Address Book, but also to back them up in a non-proprietary format. Outlook doesn't seem to have a menu option to batch convert contacts to vCards, but it is possible to tell Outlook to do just that. I've used vCard as the standard format for exchanging contacts for a few years, so I already knew this trick for multiple contacts, and it works perfectly for all of them at once too.

• Go to your Outlook contacts, and select them all (select one, press Ctrl-A).
• Click Actions -> Forward as vCard.
• Depending on how many contacts you have, Outlook might be busy for a while. Eventually, you'll end up with a new e-mail message with all your precious contacts included as vCards.
• In the menu of the e-mail message, click File -> Save attachments. Select a folder, and save.
• Congratulations, you've just saved all your Outlook contacts as vCards, using only Outlook. You can discard the message, or send it to an e-mail account as a backup (I mailed mine to my Gmail account).

Labels: mac, switch

If there's one application I will be missing when the switch is complete, it will be Picasa. It's almost perfect. Light weight, fast startup time, lightning response. From what I've read online, iPhoto will probably be a bit slower. I'm hoping the excellent integration will make up for this.

What did I do to move from Picasa to iPhoto?

• Made a Picasa backup to a USB hard drive.
• Copied the backup folder from the USB drive to the Mac.
• Imported the newly copied folder into iPhoto.
• Deleted the imported folder (iPhoto makes copies when importing).

I could have imported directly from the USB drive, but I thought this would be faster.

After importing, I noticed that Front Row reported "No pictures in my library". I took me a while to find out what was wrong, but eventually (thanks to some Googling) I found out that iPhoto sometimes writes bad XML to it's AlbumData.xml file.

To fix it:

• Close iPhoto.
  
• Load AlbumData.xml into Safari.
• Safari will attempt to parse the XML. If it's invalid, it'll tell you the number of the offending line.
• Load AlbumData.xml into a text editor and fix the XML.
• Repeat until valid.
• Enjoy.

Next: iTunes.

Labels: mac, switch

I've been using a Pocket PC and Microsoft Outlook for close to 6 years. This means that my current Outlook calendar holds precious data that I would like to move to my MacBook Pro. Since I'd already been fiddling with Google Calendar, I didn't really research this one. The only thing I looked for was a way to move from Google Calendar to iCal, and I found that. This is how I got all my Outlook calendar data into iCal:

• Create a new calendar named "Outlook Export" in iCal.
• Create a new calendar named "Outlook Export" in Google Calendar.
• Exported Outlook calendar to CSV.
• Import the CSV file into Google Calendar's "Outlook Export". This may take a while.
• Installed the fully functional Spanning Sync trial on the Mac.
• Set Spanning Sync to sync your Google Calendar's "Outlook Export" with your iCals "Outlook Export".
• Wait, confirm your choice when your Mac asks for it, wait some more.
• Done!
  

Labels: mac, switch

August 1 I will be switching jobs. This will mean that I am once more (among other things) a professional programmer. This time around the tools of the trade will be PHP, MySQL and JavaScript (with more than a touch of jQuery). Also, I'll be switching from Windows to Mac OS X (actually, I'm typing this entry on my brand new MacBook Pro).

I thought this would be a good time to convert this site to a live blog once more. I'll document some Windows to Mac switching issues, share some startup stories (we're starting a new company, and I'm sure some tales will be worth telling). And, most importantly, I'll share some code, jQuery or otherwise.

I hope I can keep you amused for a while.