Jorge Arango

I first saw a Mac in 1985, and it was love at first sight. I didn’t get to actually own one of the little beasts until 1991, when my parents bought me an SE30 for college use. I felt so at home with that machine! It was so personal and… perfect. Hard to describe—it just fit.

After I graduated from college, reality set in: nobody outside of a few select industries (design, video) uses Macs. I grudgingly left the Apple camp behind. (Not that in 1993 the Apple camp was a sexy place to be—John Sculley and his successors managed to turn what was once an amazingly innovative company into another pusher of beige boxes.)

Fast forward to 2002. I am now back in the Apple camp and I’m loving it! They have definitely fixed the biggest complaints, especially the antiquated OS. I have a belief that we should support companies that are doing things right by voting with our dollars. In my book, Apple ca. 2002 is doing things right in a big way. Unix, digital hub, gorgeous hardware, a vision… what is there not to like?

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It seems as though I have run up against a problem that most users migrating from PCs to Macs will face at some point: moving email archives can be a pain in the butt.

I have tried various approaches:

• moving my PC Outlook 2K mail onto PC OE, and importing these PC OE files into Mac OE (No good),
• moving my PC OE mail into PC Eudora and then from PC Eudora into Mac Eudora (No good),
• creating an account on mac.com and moving my PC mail onto their IMAP server, then retrieving this mail from the Mac (Partially works, some mails complain about break formats),
• various combinations of the above.

I am starting to get a bit frustrated. I have over six years of email archives, and whatever platform I stick to needs to give me unhindered access into this information.

I’d like to see this issue addressed by Apple in one of their “Switch” ads. I’m not holding my breath.

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I’ve finished migrating my MP3 collection onto the TiBook. I am tremendously impressed with iTunes 3. It does so many things right! My favorite feature by far is Smart Lists: lists of songs assembled on the fly based on tag searches you establish beforehand. The search criteria are ample enough for the lists to be really “smart” and therefore meaningful.

I have found this to be a consistent feature of Apple software: as a user, you are completely isolated from the complexity unless you intentionally want to be exposed to it. The first time I became aware of this concept was while using HyperCard: the power of a scripting language was there if you wanted to dig, but there was also an easy point-and-click interface for use by most folks.

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A couple of weeks ago I jokingly said that I wanted a Titanium PowerBook for my birthday. Much to my surprise, this is exactly what my beloved wife Mariana gave me! (BTW, she hadn’t read my wish in jarango.com. She just knows me well!)

So I am happy as a clam, exploring OS X. What a cool OS! Whenever I’m done with the migration from XP, I’ll post an entry on switching platforms—I have found very little useful information to date on the subject of moving from Windows applications to Mac. At the moment I’m focused on getting my email out of Outlook 2k (Win) into Entourage. Much less intuitive than you would expect. (I suspect that the difficulty in switching is not accidental.)

Stay tuned…

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