So as you can tell I really need a good email client. I do far too much work over email both work and private. When I posted earlier that I went back to the default Mail.app on OS X I forgot that I had seen a link for a beta of Thunderbird 3 from Mozilla.
After some searching I found the download link:
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/early_releases/downloads.php
Turns out this does solve most of the issues I was complaining about. There still isn’t any background sending options but it is a beta, maybe they’ll be nice and turn that on just before release … you know … who doesn’t save a few gems for the end :)
Anyway, I had for other reasons started to look at the features that will be available in Snow Leopard the next big OS update from Apple. Turns out it will have, what they’re at least calling, full Exchange 2007 support for native applications like iCal and Mail. If this really is the case and it supports offline and remote email (RPC?/or OWA) then I’ll be rocking.
So I’m using a mix of Mail and Thunderbird 3 beta and it does the job. Fingers crossed for a release soon from Apple for the OS.
Well that didn’t last long did it! :) It only took two days to realize that Thunderbird is stuck in the 90′s. I can’t Q messages for back ground sending, you can’t drag an attachment into a new message (really!!?) and you can’t paste image data from the clip board into a message.
So for the time being I’m back to the native Apple mail client. Bummer.
These posts are for my x-fellow windows users who might have or want to switch over the using a Mac. Not everything is 100% perfect and for some reason Email software is probably the biggest missing piece of Apple’s offering.
The default Mail.app that comes with os x is Ok but that is about it. If you’re like most people you need to connect to your work exchange server and the only way to do that is via IMAP. The IMAP integration in Mail just sux, no other way to put it. It jumps off messages while reading, gets out of sync with the server and other macs and sometimes gets really slow.
So I shopped around and besides Microsoft Office 2008 … you don’t really have any great choice. Sorry. I’ve heard MS Office 2008 is fine but I really only need Entourage (Outlook) and you can’t buy that on it’s own. Open office for the Mac is just dandy for almost everything else.
Right now the best IMAP client I can find is Thunderbird from Mozilla. It is fine but not great either, not enough editing options. As I stated in another post my personal email is kept on GMail so no worries with that.
So for now this is it – not great but still, better than living in a Vista world.
It’s a cool title right? :) Here is the problem. As a busy developer I find I have more machines and more virtual machines than I can count, trying to keep everything in sync is damn near impossible. Even with the best sync software and online sync services I find that it is still too difficult to keep everything in perfect sync.
One of the core reasons is bandwidth, if you have a lot to sync and especially if you’re doing development you probably have thousands of files to always sync. This eats bandwidth and until Internet2 really gets going I guess it is still a pipe dream. If you didn’t know internet2 starts off at speeds above 100Mbits.
So the solution at the moment I think is too have as much work online as possible, i.e. browser based. So for this I keep email on gmail and docs with google docs, so google docs isn’t that great and local docs sync using mobileme across my macs. I sync what I can over local machines using mobileme and my 20gigs of space with Apple but if a service works well via the browser, that is definately easier.
Coding is always the tricky one – an online SVN repository is a good place to start. Tools however generally need to be running locally … or do they? Coming from the .NET world then yes but now that I’m getting into Rails and other such technologies using a nice editor like TextMate is easy and also shows how development could be in the browser.
Anyway .. that is how I’m rolling at the moment. Lots in the browser and a fair bit a syncing seems to work.
That is what you want to hear right? Why else would you be reading a blog posting about switching to Macs. Like me you’re probably a hardcore, long time windows user and developer and you’re sick to death of the crap that comes out of Microsoft these days.
So again, let me keep it simple. Go get a Macbook Pro and see what that world is like. No point playing with one in a store, to really get into it you need to commit so you need to buy one. I really didn’t think I’d like OS X and would just end up installing Vista on their nice hardware but it turns out that OS X is really great – not just super stable but feature rich and far more intuitive than any Windows OS you’ve ever used.
After a day or so I maxing out my new baby I wasn’t just happy but pissed at how crappy all my machines up to this point had been. How crappy Microsoft products really are. Why can’t Microsoft make some of these really simple things work? I mean, Apple have really nailed the “it just works”.
I’m not sure what has gone wrong at Microsoft. Everything coming out of Redmond is just crap – and Vista … let’s not put lipstick on that pig. It is crap, it is built on crap and mark my words – it will probably go down in history as their biggest failure. Sure it has a couple things better than XP … wow, that really isn’t very hard. Want a concrete example of something that should just work properly? How about file copy – identical hardware – 30-45 minutes to copy 20 Gigs yet on my Mac, just 9 minutes. Basically 3x-5x faster. Everything on this machine is just better. I think Microsoft has become too big, trying to do everything and nothing well. They need to go back to basics, a few core – good products.
So you’re probably asking … but I have all these programs that run on Windows … quit ya crying, there is a program either identical and just compiled for the Mac or something, usually better that what you’ve used before. Get this, even MSN Messenger is better, from Microsoft … on a Mac. Go Figure. Everything I do development wise for .NET I use under VMWare Fusion which is fantastic, it actually integrates the guest XP into OS X and with Unity you can’t go wrong.
My next purchase is going to be a 8 Core G5 with 24″ Cinema display … I’m comitted to Apple hardware and software now for at least 5 years. We’ll see how the playing field looks after that. I do know this much. Every student I know or talk to or see or hear from these days has a Mac, more and more home users have Macs and when people like me start switching, you’ve got a land slide coming. I’ll convince a ton of people to switch :) Including you …
I think this is one of those great little achievements that goes un-noticed and that far more companies should be adopting. Like most computer savvy people I enjoy ordering online, most times it beats dealing with people :) or people having to deal with me! When I first saw you could buy “super tasty” wings online I thought – this is going to be great …
Boy was I wrong. I went onto their website, which is part of Pizzahut. I clicked the sign-up button entered a bunch of information and then tried to create my login … and tried … and tried. The password requirements are more ridiculous than my banks. Not only that but they wanted a bunch of those secret question/answer items completed. For wings …. right. No thanks. It is bad enough they didn’t just adopt an open id system but now I’m supposed to jump through hoops.
I didn’t go back to the site for probably close to 6 months, that amounts to a lot of lost business just from one person. Just because they had thrown up walls I wasn’t prepared to take down. So, what did I find upon my return – well the crazy password requirements are still there except that now, you can order as a guest without ever creating an account.
Finally! They do have good wings :) – I don’t order as often as I would if I was able to create an account and simply click to order, see: Papa Johns … anyway – it is a big step forward for these guys. The lesson is simple, if you make it hard or even moderately hard to use your website, a lot of people will just go away.
I really like the idea of open id – use it. thanks :)
Signing up is a real no brainer, if you can’t get past that – time for a new day job :)
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2
The first problem was – what next? There really isn’t a clear next steps but after a little digging this is the path that I took.
You will first need to get your X502 certificate, it is all done via their website so that was pretty easy. I stored it in a folder called EC2\Keys – both public and private. Remember to backup those keys!!
Next you need to download the tools. These are a set of command files and java libraries so yes, you need to have a Java runtime installed.
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/setting-up-your-tools.html
Set your JAVA_HOME to the Java installed folder and not the /Bin folder. Make sure to setup the rest of those variables. If you already had a java runtime installed, don’t assume the java home path is set.
Next I followed the instructions on this page to setup a keypair and run a default image.
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/running-an-instance-windows.html
Once you have this all done and a image running you’re done – this is a server just for you. Install whatever software you want and get hosting! Overall not too bad :) You will need to bundle the instance before ever shutting it down otherwise you will loose OS changes. Once bundled you get your own AMI to relaunch clone instances.
Don’t forget if you TURN OFF, SHUTDOWN, TERMINATE any running images they are gone forever! only attached storage volumes persist.
Yes finally!! :) If you aren’t a fun of cloud completing you should be. It is extremely cost effective, reliable and easy to use. I’ve been dying to get really hands on with Amazon’s EC2 but since launch it has only supported Linux images.
Today they have turned on support for Windows! including SQL Server and the licenses are bundled in the image. You can also store information directly in their S3 service.
I’ll be posting results here from testing and pricing as I spend the next month getting some applications deployed in their cloud.
It was interesting to see that Rackspace is going to try compete – albeit too late to the party but we’ll see what they come up with. I can’t blame them – cloud competing is a huge threat to traditional hosting companies however it took Amazon a long time to get EC2 ready so it isn’t something you just dive into.
Wow, who said learning new stuff wasn’t fun! :) Here is another little gem I found which will change your understanding of how Silverlight applications work.
I had a little application that was working great, it even had a bunch of nifty video things taking place in the code behind. I wanted to redo my layout and so cleaned out the old code, built my new layout and then something went wrong.
I just got a blank web page with no errors, compiler error or warnings – just no Silverlight control. I checked and checked and recompiled and cleaned cache and had a beer – still nothing.
So I created a new project and test xaml page and that worked fine – then I looked at the code behind and spotted the issue. The code below is added by default and IS required – I had accidentally removed it when cleaning up, must be getting old ;-)
You must have the following in your code behind page (user control class)
public Page()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
Pretty simple but something you can delete and not notice until nothing works :) Silly me.
Just a simple tip if you haven’t already tried to use these layout controls.
When you are creating content (controls) to add to the grid via a Row and Column number it would help if you knew the index is 0 (Zero) based …. that would be Column 0, Row 0 for the top left corner and not 1,1 as it should be :)
Enjoy!
