Welcome to the MacRebel blog

I’ve been quite busy last two weeks, but I’ve finally found some spare time to install Parallels Desktop 4.0 on my MacBook. Installation was smooth and easy and I chose to start with an image of  Windows XP Professional. Everything works like it should work, period. And the speed? Well, I tested the Bizagi BPM tool and if I’m completely honest, I have to admit that there is just a little bit more latency compared to working on a Windows computer, but it’s subtile. You can compare it to working on a Terminal Server on your local network. It’s fast, very fast but still a tiny bit slower than working on a local copy of MS Windows. It does have a rather bigger impact on your Mac applications that you are running in background though. So I wouldn’t recommend to continuously switch between some heavy Windows apps and e.g. Adobe Photoshop (Mac version). My conclusion: it’s a perfect fit for my needs: a platform to run one or two Windows-only applications now and then. Thumbs up!

Every year, in the second half of January,  we organize a small private party with all the neighbours to celebrate the new year. And this year I was in charge of the music. I started my DJ set at 9:00 PM and at 3:00 AM my dance floor was still crowded…  All thanks to the combination of my new MacBook Pro, my Hercules DJ consule MKII and the Traktor 3 LE software of Native Instruments. Maybe the software misses some blows and whistles, but it’s very straightforward and reliable. It all worked smoothly, no hics or hips, no interruptions, no errors, no latency… it worked great! I used nothing but my Mac and I never touched any CD player. About all of the 50 people were showing their best thumbs up and I was appointed as a Chinese volunteer to be the next year’s DJ. Thanks a lot, Apple and Hercules…

This cute cat definitely knows how to use a MacBook.
Though I’m not 100% sure that the laptop liked it…

According to TUAW, Apple launched an updated version of the white polycarbonate body MacBook. This low-end entrance model now comes standard with 2 GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM (instead of 1 Gb) and the same Nvidia GeForce 9400m graphics processor that is found in the unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro. The CPU speed still remains at 2.0 GHz, and there’s no backlit keyboard option. You can check out the new specs in the online Apple Store (U.S.). Shipping to Europe has not been confirmed yet, but will probably follow soon.

Yesterday afternoon I had serious problems with my iPhone. I couldn’t make outbound calls and inbound calls were automatically terminated after one ring. It was a colleague of mine  who sent me a message round 4:00 PM to let me know that my cell phone was unreachable. He was using an iPhone, he uses the same provider (Proximus) and he was in a radius of less than 1 km of me (so probably using the same repeater/antenna). He had no problems at all. I tried to call my cell phone from my land line… Nope, didn’t work.  Hmmm… I restarted my iPhone… Nope, didn’t work. I broke my WiFi connection, ’cause I installed a new D-Link router in my home office. Tried again… Nope, didn’t work. I tried to reach the helpdesk of my Telco provider… Busy… In the end I tried to restore a backup of my iPhone. iTunes told me that my iPhone would reboot… Ouch… some scary moments… come on, come on, you can do it! … And yes, it still worked! Restore of my backup succeeded. It’s always nice to take a backup. But it’s even nicer to know that you have a correct and valid backup. No need to tell you that it’s by far the nicest to have a backup that you can actually restore… So, I iTunes did pass the ultimate test: backups of your iPhone actually work. And my problems? Solved this morning. Proximus had major problems with their 3G network yesterday. The reason that my colleague could make his calls? He has an older iPhone that only supports Edge.

There is a lot to find out for us Mac newbies. Of course OS X is very user-friendly, but to call it very intuitive would be one bridge too far, especially for ex-Windows users. A nice example is the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V reflex to copy & paste. Exactly the same under Mac? Forget it, you need to hit Cmd+C and Cmd+V, except if you are working in MS Office applications. Microsoft was so kind to confuse us even more: both work in MS Word, MS Excel…  but only in MS Office, so you better retrain your reflex…

The problem with trained skills is that it’s very difficult to tackle or change them. It’s so much easier to learn something from scratch than to change a (bad) habit for instance. So yes, my dearest switchers, it will take some time and effort before we all become fully skilled Mac users. But there is hope: I have found a very good site for us newbies: MyFirstMac.com. The site is stuffed with training videos, articles, FAQs etc. The crash course page is a must read for all the (ex-)Windows geeks like me who start their Mac for the first time. Happy reading, but most of all: have fun with your Mac.

A couple of years ago, I was probably one of the first Sonos-customers in Belgium. And just like with my Apple experience so far, I liked the Sonos multi-room music system since day 1. It’s extremely user-friendly, the design is superb (stylish white and gray), the hardware never failed to work, the indexing of the music on network hard drives and shared drives of your computers is superfast and the remote control works great… You would start to suspect Sonos of being an Apple company.

I must agree that the argument that Sonos offers a Mac version of their desktop software is far from a watertight proof, but since a couple of weeks I’m more than ever convinced that Steve Jobs is definitely on the list of shareholders of Sonos!

Why? Well, because Sonos has developed a free iPhone version of their controller software. And it rocks! It really rocks! So let me end with a simple advice: people who are the proud owner of a Sonos system should really consider buying an iPhone, and people who own an iPhone should definitely buy a Sonos.

One of the first things I had to take care of, after switching to Mac, was to transfer my e-mails. On my Windows laptop I was using MS Outlook 2007 (with the fabulous Xobni plugin) and I had bought the MS Office Mac 2008 suite, so I had decided to start using MS Entourage on my MacBook. After the first launh of Entourage I was quite shocked(!) : apparently there was no (easy) way to import my e-mail archive into Entourage! Was this just another filthy trick from the guys from Redmond to discourage people to swith to Mac, hmmm… Since I had an archive of about 1.5 Gb and given the fact that I don’t use an Exchange Server mailbox or an IMAP connection to an online e-mail box (like GMail), there was only one way to go: finding a solution to import my e-mails from my pst-file.

I finally found a quite easy way to do it: by using the cheap O2M tool of Little Machines. This nifty little Windows program of only $ 10.00 connects to your Outlook and guides you through an easy wizard to create mbox files of your e-mail folders. Then I just copied them to my Mac and dragged the mbox files from the Finder window towards a folder in Entourage. You don’t see a progress indicator so don’t panic if Entourage freezes for a couple of minutes. And ‘tadaaa’… all my e-mails easily imported into Entourage. 

I transferred my contacts and my agenda by synchronizing my Mac with my iPhone (in iTunes).

Before you start ,you should enable the option “Synchronize events and tasks with iCal and .Mac” in the Preferences of Entourage. This will create an iCal calendar with the name “Entrouage”. Then you can synchronize your calendars with iTunes. I hope this works for other people too.

Tom and Sibren (two colleagues at Vivaldi Software) convinced me last summer to buy an iPhone 3G and I have to admit that it was one of the best purchases of the last decades. I was already the proud and very satisfied owner of an iPod (after using a Creative Labs Zen) so I started to think I was getting into the grip of the the Apple-effect. Since a couple of months Tom was teasing me with his MacBook Pro: superb design, great useability and user-friendliness… hmm… Would it really be that good?
And then it all happened last Wednesday when I entered the Apple dealer GCA in my hometown Roeselare (Belgium). 30 minutes later I stepped out of the shop as a future MacBook Pro owner. It took me only half an hour to make a final decision. Of course this was just the finale, I’m not that impulsive! Since a couple of months I had convinced myself that maybe one day I would make the switch from a MS Windows PC to a Mac. After handing over the daily management of Vivaldi Software to our ambitious Business Manager Sibren, I had decided that the day had come. Time for a change… a big change!

My new MacBook Pro was waiting for me in the shop on Thursday afternoon (2:00 PM). About twenty minutes later I found myself sitting at the desk of my home office in front of a brand new Apple laptop, an external keyboard and mouse, MS Office for Mac and Parallels Desktop 4.0.  The start of a new era… And the start of my life as a Mac Rebel.