TechnoTakes with Tim

Yet Another Reason Why I Cannot Ditch Windows Entirely: Interactive PDF Creation

I encountered another unexpected pothole in the road to Mac migration. Adobe Acrobat for Mac does not integrate with Word for Mac, so creation of PDFs which convert structural tags in Word to the same in PDF is impossible. The one I use daily, in the creation of client content, is conversion of Word hyperlinks to PDF hyperlinks.  No can do with Acrobat for Mac in Word for Mac 2008.

So I had to install Acrobat for Windows AND MS Word for Windows on my XP virtual machine, to remain functional.

Last month, I had a chance to lodge a personal plea with the Acrobat Product Team to support Office for Mac. As an analyst though, I have to recommend to ISVs like Adobe that they watch the enterprise knowledgeworker Macbook adoption trend carefully, but the trend is not significant enough to warrant large investments just yet. But tier 1 ISVs also run the risk of a smaller tier ISVs beating them too it, so they cannot wait forever to make a decision.

Turns Out MobileMe Was For Me

I tested and reviewed a lot of personal online file backup products to use with my Macbook, in addition to my previously posted intent to try Apple's MobileMe. After using using MobileMe for a trial and investigating other products, I decided MobileMe was the right service to use and signed up for one year.

I found it very easy to copy my work and personal documents to the service, then simply copy the folder links I wanted from my iDisk to my Finder navigation bar, right underneath my Desktop. Reading and writing to the iDisk this way is very easy, so I forget that all of my documents are being automatically sync'd to the online service. I did change the sync rate to once a day though, since I was seeing a slight performance hit from syncing too frequently. I have Time Machine running to an external drive, so I'm not worried about losing data.

I'll be honest though and say the kicker was the release of iDisk for iPhone. It's great to be in meetings and pull up a document and/or e-mail it to someone or post it to a public space on MobileMe, without having the laptop.

So the bottom line is that easy synchronization, mobile access and collaboration won me over. The price was also competitive for the same space available elsewhere.

This is It: The Dreaded iPhone/iTunes Migration

I freely admit I waited until last to transfer the iPhone over. I knew from past experience that iTunes has little to no real library services or migration tools. Quite frankly, the iTunes application is a lump of coal in the otherwise jeweled Apple tiara.

All of my music is backed up on my NAS device...far more music than my 16 GB iPhone 3G will even hold. Of course, importing all of my music to the Macbook worked OK, especially since I did that over 1GB ethernet and not WiFi.

But, then there was the hard part. How do I transfer my "iPhone" playlist to the Macbook, so when I am forced by iTunes to wipe my iPhone and start over to sync it on the Mac, I can resync the music I want on the iPhone without having to go back and manually rebuild the playlist? I finally gave in and bought a third party tool which transfers playlists and other metadata.

What a smirch on Apple's reputation, that the company which revolutionized portable digital music has such a horrible gap in its library management tools.

So now I have the iPhone synced on the Macbook, with all of my playlists intact, thanks to a third party application. However I now have two and three copies of many songs again. Now I have to manually dedupe the library and hope I don't screw up the iPhone play list in the process. Oi.

Is MobileMe for Me?

I decided to experiment with MobileMe for file work file back-ups. Taking a cue from an online poster, I simply created an alias to my business documents folder within my iDisk documents folder. Things seem to be kept in sync well, although it does generate a lot of conflict notices, because of open files on the Macbook.

I don't use the other features of MobileMe though, since I don't use any local Apple email or PIM applications. Everything is on my Exchange Server, in a local Outlook PST and on my iPhone via Exchange ActiveSync.

Not decided yet if I will keep it when the trial is up.

Time to Tackle Time Machine

Now that the major things were done, I started to turn to other issues, like backups.

I have a love-hate relationship with Time Machine. I just expected it would work over my network to my NAS, but my files shares on the NAS simply refused to show up, even when mounted on the desktop and given that NetGear supports Apple protocols.

Am I doing something wrong, or this Apple's way of saying buy our Time Capsule device?

Anyway, I plugged in a 320 GB Maxtor USB drive I wasn't using and it worked fine. So when I'm in the office, I have that drive permanently connected.

Now for the love part. It is so easy to browse Time Machine and look for previous versions of files in the backups. The incremental backups happen seamlessly in the background and the automatic FIFO overwrite strategy that kicked in when the drive became full is great. I've never had backups happen so easily in the Windows world.

A Tale of Two MS Office's

After a few weeks, I'm completely comfortable using Office for Mac 2008. I'm switching back and forth with Word for Mac, Word 2007 on the XP VM and even Word 2003 on our virtual desktop a la Citrix. It took time getting used to the Mac tool palette though. I just told myself think Photoshop or other Adobe applications and the switch in mind-sets was easy.

I cannot, however, adjust to Entourage. I've been using Outlook in production since Outlook 97 beta in 1996. I just cannot bring myself to switch. But VMWare's "Unity" mode makes using Windows apps fairly transparent and totally within the context of OS X.

I also continue to use Microsoft OneNote. I just have too much invested in OneNote over the years. As an analyst, I am a prolific note-taker. My years as a total road warrior at ye olde META Group  taught me to rely totally on the computer for note-taking. I must say kudos though to Circus Ponies' Notebook. I tried it and it is an incredibly powerful tool, especially for those Mac users just entering the electronic note taking world. But the switching costs from OneNote were just too steep for me. Come on Office for Mac Team; let's get true Outlook and OneNote for Mac out soon.

I will be interested in seeing what impact --if any-- native Exchange support in Snow Leopard has on my configuration.

Accessing Corporate Resources

Accessing corporate systems wasn't too hard. To access Exchange via Outlook, of course I did have to connect to our VPN within the Windows XP virtual machine I'm running, since I'm running the network in bridge mode with the Macbook. I had to use bridge mode because too many Windows problems using NAT mode. Outlook worked fine, as did the other Office apps. Although, I soon found out that a 512 Mb XP machine was too small. I raised it to 768 Mb and now it runs less sluggish. Making that change with VMWare Fusion was a breeze.

VMWare Tools was nice enough to install a shortcut to my Macbook files. I added that to my favorites bar in the default Windows Explorer file open/save dialog boxes.

Mapping to network file shares with the SMB protocol was simple from within Finder's "Go" menu, once I configured a VPN connection from within Mac OS X. While there's no easy way to make that permanent, as it is with a single click in Windows, it does remember the UNC in Finder, so manually reconnecting is easy. I know there's a way to make it permanent through a start-up script, but manual connection is fine for me.

Since I use most enterprise applications through our Citrix virtual desktop anyway, I was now fully functional within my company. One note: Since I am a remote worker across an international border, I maintain my own equipment anyway, so my machines are never part of any managed infrastructure. While I will not be directly testing Macbooks and IT service management with this machine, we will be doing more research on this within our company to satisfy client demand. After all, we are an IT industry analyst research and advisory firm.

Making a Macbook Part of My Office

Now that I've had three weeks back in the office, before heading back out on the road, it's time to catch up on my activities and observations of the last few weeks.

By the time I got back from the last trip, my accessories had arrived: a small Apple bluetooth keyboard, the Apple bluetooth MightyMouse, a VGA display adapter and the portable 802.11n wireless access point. I already had an old portable D-Link 802.11b WAP I've traveled with for years and thought this would be an opportunity to upgrade.

The first thing I did was hook up the Mac to my existing HP 2048w wide screen 20 inch monitor. What a difference for someone used to simply using a function key to switch between monitors. Like most things, I intentionally tried to do it on my own without researching how to enable an external monitor; I wanted to see how "intuitive" the Mac really is. I soon discovered that the default setting was to span both monitors instead of switching solely to the external monitor. A quick search of Apple support and I learned you have to close the lid, put it to sleep and then wake it up from the remote keyboard.

Ooops. I hadn't hooked up the keyboard and mouse yet.

OK, backup. Turn on the bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Nothing happened. More research on Apple's website. I went to the settings for bluetooth and was able to pair both after about three tries. In fairness, bluetooth is just as much of a pain in the Windows world, so no difference here. Both worked fine.

The keyboard is just amazingly sleek and looks cool. It works just as well too. And, it doesn't accumulate cat hair under the keys like most keyboards, because the keys are so tightly fit inside the aluminum frame. Yeah.

I was also surprised at how functional the mouse is and how easy it was to learn. Left and right clicks were easy...far easier than on the Macbook's built-in touchpad. I admit I had a two-decade misconception of the evils of a one button Apple mouse.

OK, back to the monitor. After putting the Mac to sleep by closing the lid, I was able to wake it up with the external keyboard. The external monitor now indeed was the only display. After selecting a higher resolution and doing a gamma adjustment from the Mac, I got it to look pretty good. But not as good as when connected to my Windows machines, by VGA or HDMI. Score one for Apple though by having a decent gamma adjustment tool built-in, as opposed to Windows where you have to use Adobe's gamma control panel, if you can copy it from a machine with Creative Suite installed.

Seeing the printers on my network was easy as well as finding my storage devices. In fact, the NetGear NAS device I have shows up as both an Apple file server and as an iTunes server. I love how Netgear pre-installed so many different protocols. That's how NAS should be.

Virtually There

Thankfully my first day back in my office was also a Friday. That night I grabbed an old Windows XP CD and license I was no longer using and inserted it into the Macbook.

The VMWare Fusion experience was stunningly simple. It did everything for me. I was wondering if a 512 MB RAM and 40 GB hard drive machine was enough, as suggested by VMWare, but it turned out to be just right.

After learning the basics of switching between Mac OS X and the XP virtual machine, I ran Windows Update and got caught up to SP3. I installed Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and Acrobat 9 Pro Plus for Windows. Everything went fine. I then added some free anti-virus and third party firewall and started to get some work done.

With help from my co-worker Mark, I was able to connect to my Exchange server by putting the virtual machine's network in bridge mode with the Macbook and using the local Windows VPN client, not the Mac's VPN client.

I had problems getting to my personal POP3 account and with web browsing when the VPN was engaged, but quickly figured that out. Had I been away from XP so long that I forgot to uncheck the "Use default gateway on the remote network" option in the VPN's advanced TCP/IP settings? Yep, that was it. Now everything works fine when the VPN is engaged.

So now I feel like I'm driving a Cadillac. I have an excellent physical machine, a reliable primary operating system and access to all of my favorite Windows applications on an extremely stable virtual machine. Unfortunately, all of this comes at way too high of a price to be a practical solution for typical knowledge workers. For the ultra power-user road warrior though, it is computing nirvana.

Next, trying to connect the wireless keyboard and mouse and to connect to my external HP display for office use.

Back to PC Reality

Day one back in the office was a busy day with client calls back-to-back. I didn't even turn on the Macbook. I had to have real Outlook and access to all my notes in OneNote, so I just sat down at my Dell at my home office desk, as usual. It was love/hate. I had all the applications and resources I love on an operating system I hate (Vista).

That's it. Where are those Windows XP and Office CDs? Where's that VMWare Fusion FAQ web page?