You know, I kinda feel bad about the last post I wrote regarding my laptop. With all the discussions of problems I’m having, casual readers might reckon that I’m having a negative experience with OSX on my PC. Quite the contrary, I can assure you. As a matter of fact, this experience - if anything - has solidified my firmly held belief that OSX is the best damn operating system, period. All the problems I’m having aside, I’m very impressed by OSX; It’s obvious to me that Microsoft or our friends The Open Source Community got nuthin’ on Leopard.

I don’t want to discuss technical merit. Obviously, Windows has it’s uses where OSX simply wouldn’t fit. I.E. anywhere you already have a non-apple computer and want to put an OS on it. Anyone who wants to win that discussion can simply point at my laptop and laugh. I want to discuss design philosophy, I want to discuss User Experience, and most importantly - I want to discuss work flow. Not the scripting app, the concept involving starting from point A, and ariving at point B. Getting things done, if you will.

I love the Macintosh Desktop. Leopard still has a few mountains to climb before I call it Computing Utopia, but it’s lapped Vista six or seven times already. The proof is in the pudding, I reckon. Just look at Vista.

(Another long post, after the jump)

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But, luckily for humanity, there’s this dinky little importer tool that made it happen. It’s called O2M or Outlook2Mac, and it did a mighty fine job. Even got his distribution lists. Well worth the $10 they are asking for it.

To recap: I tried to import my fathers Outlook 2003 contacts in to Apple’s Address Book.app. After trying everything I could think of, and a few things that the folks on the web figured might work, I was left with being able to do it via Mozilla’s Thunderbird, albiet very sloppilly.

But, as I said, Luckilly for humanity, the guys at littlemachines.com figured it out for us. You see, that’s the difference between folks who make software for Windows and those who make it for the Mac. Even if it’s coded for Windows, you can safely expect that the program will do its job.

Windows Developers make terrible software. Mac developers don’t. Anyways, Thanks for making the right tool for the job. I was able to install the windows app on my dad’s virtualized xp desktop, make a single vCard (.vcf) file that imported in to Mac’s Address Book without any fuss. 340 some-odd contacts, a dozen distribution lists… all in order like I knew what the hell I was doing.

You know, I always suspected - but the PST database, however the hell it works, must not be very reliable. Look, I don’t know exactly how Microsoft Office Works, I didn’t write it. I wasn’t even in the same state at the time.

No, I’m a lowly computer guy. I want to get contacts from Microsoft Outlook into Apple’s Contact Book. It shouldn’t be hard. In theory, you go in to Outlook, and follow the Import/Export Wizard in the File Menu and dump you out a CSV or a Tab Delimited Text File, and go import that motherfucker on your Mac.

Kid, in his ongoing endeavor to switch from Windows XP to the exponentially more awesome Mac Platform sorta needs to get his shit from Outlook to Address Book.app.

You’d reckon, since Outlook can export text files, and Address Book can read text files, this would be perhaps one octive above trivial. No, it doesn’t work that way at all. First off, even Microsoft Excel can’t figure out what the hell Outook’s trying to portray in the bloody file, and even when you can screw with the contents of the file so that maybe you could import it, No. There’s no telling why it won’t work, just that it doesn’t.

So, you start scratching your head wondering what in the world you’re going to do. Then, it hits you - vCards! I know! I’ll go to my contacts list in Outlook 03, Select All, and go to the Actions menu and forward every damn one of those to Kid’s e-mail.

No, that won’t work either. Kid uses AOL’s IMAP service for his e-mail in Outlook (which, BTW he has used probably once… their IMAP implementation is exactly as advertised though - kudos AOL… I still hate you, though) and AOL auto responds with the e-mail being to complex to send. I guess that’s what happens when you have like 300 Contacts.

In an attempt to seem witty and cool, I try to bulk save the 300+ Attachments to a folder so I can get them on the Mac and import them. Outlook 2003 doesn’t have that feature. So, I try to save the message, complete with the attachments, so I can extract them on the Mac. Couldn’t find a way to do that.

So, I head off to Google to find an answer to my woes. Somewhere, I found a blog post claiming you can install Thunderbird on the PC, Import the files, then export them to an LDAP file and finally import that in to Address Book.app.

I can’t really say that it didn’t work - but it mangled his Distribution Lists, so by the time you got it imported you’d have to spend the next six years fixing all of the problems.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is exactly the way Microsoft intended it. These are those switching pangs people bitch about as a reason not to learn a new platform. Shit like this. It doesn’t even make sense, either. Why would you reward Microsoft for their total, utter, inexplicable ineptitude? I say, when Micosoft makes an application that is totally uncooperative when your trying to accomplish some task, you don’t reward them by still using it.

You say ‘You know what, Microsoft? Fuck you’, you start from scratch - if for any other reason than to finally have something that doesn’t reak of suckitude, and you punish Microsoft by taking away from their market share.

Remember, it doesn’t hurt Microsoft if you quit using Windows. It hurts them when you switch to their competitors.

I know what you’re thinking. But Doug! Starting from scratch is hard! Do you know what I did when I switched to Linux just to find out that Media Player 11 took it upon itself to override all 7000 MP3’s on my hard drive with it’s incompatible bullshit ID3 Tag implementation? First, I sought a program that would salvage it. When that didn’t work, I started over. In the process, I discovered Amarok; it’s like iTunes, but better and for Linux.

Sorry Apple, Amarok is king of the MP3 Database. Having said that, when I imported my Amarok library in to iTunes when I switched, I even had album art. When I copied my iTunes Library to my Ubuntu laptop this weekend? It worked fine. Literally, I copied the file over, opened amarok and intel took it from there. Pretty much, if you want some shit to work, it will - just so long as your not dealing with Microsoft.

I have to say, I agree with pretty much every legitimate technologist on the planet. A Web OS is asinine. It amazes me how much these “tech journalists” drop the ball when covering these kinds of things. It’s like with Google Chrome, and how the popular buzz is indicating that it’s Google’s Trojan horse in to the OS market.

Let me explain to you how an OS works. You’ve got a pile of parts, that when put together can create an environment suitable to run something. It doesn’t have to run anything, but it can. The computer’s perfectly content with just sitting there at a black screen wasting electricity.

I’m tying this page, right now, in Zoho Writer. It’s an ‘Office 2.0′ app written in AJAX and god-know-what-else that can be rendered in a good ol’ fashioned standards compliant browser.

Now, that’s all well and good. It’s the order of things. In order to run a browser, you need a kernel which can tell the hardware what to do so the software can function, you need an API that the software can utilize so it can communicate with the kernel, and you need some code which gives the computer the ability to perform whatever we expect it to conform. A computer simply can’t work without these things.

It’s not like Microsoft, Apple, the entire FOSS community, and practically every developer who wrote every piece of software ever built just arbitrarily decided to base their entire development model around an Operating System as a ploy to make some middle man gargantuan stacks of cash. Without a Kernel translating high level API programming in to low level instructions, a computer couldn’t function. Without an API, an application wouldn’t be able to do much of anything. Without application software, a computer is useless.

I haven’t seen any evidence, once so ever, that Google Chrome will address any of these issues. As it’s a WINDOWS APPLICATION, I assume that Google has, in fact, realized that it needs an OS, like Windows, in order for the app to work. Trust me, if I could format a hard drive, extract Google Chrome to the drive’s root, stir and run - It might be a game changer, but I can’t.

Google Chrome, since it’s an application, doesn’t understand how to communicate with hardware. It knows how to communicate with an API framework. That API knows how to communicate with device drivers. Those device drivers know how to communicate with a kernel, and that kernel knows how to deal with that Grey box by your feet to make lights flicker and things to happen.

So, Balmer says ‘Hey guys! Check it out! We’re releasing a Cloud OS is a couple of weeks!’

I call shenanigans. Of course, I might be eating my hat by the time PDC08 is concluded, but if I were you, I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Any “Cloud OS” Microsoft releases has to have a software stack for it to function. Even, as some desperately point out, if they release a bloody thin client… guess what? IT STILL NEEDS A STACK!

I can assure you that Microsoft isn’t going to abandon Microsoft Windows. They can’t! If I had to take a guess, ‘Windows Cloud’ will be a Google Gears clone, perhaps in conjunction with a few other technologies that make our Web 2.0 experience more streamlined and make them act more like traditional applications in the run time environment.

Microsoft might try to market it as a Cloud OS, but it’ll be a Cloud OS like Windows 3.x was an actual operating system. In other words, It’ll be an application running inside an operating system cleverly disguised as just an operating system (You see, Windows 3.x didn’t have a kernel, and required MS-DOS to be installed and running before you could load Windows. This means that the operating system was not Windows, it was DOS).

I think that our idiot tech pundits confuse an operating system with a Graphical User Interface that runs within an operating system. They think the operating systems sole purpose is to paint things to a screen, and that if a user interacts with a web service without first having to physically launch a web browser and point to a URL, then someone has successfully created a Cloud OS.

In reality, they have created a Cloud Shell for an operating system that runs on a computer. You could gut Explorer, make every icon on the screen load its data from a URL, implement something like webdav so the user could save files to a server and treat it like a hard drive, you can even make fill the start menu with links to websites and web apps, but its still not an operating system that runs from a cloud. It’s a ‘cloud wrapper’ that runs in an operating system.

Besides, why would you want a cloud OS, anyways? Even if the powers that be were to pull a rabbit out of their hat and develop some kind of software that went from boot loader to running an OS on a server somewhere in the cloud, what have they accomplished? You’ve got to be online to use the bloody thing, which for everything except for desktops hardwired in to an internet accessible network would be a nightmare. You’d lobotomize your ability to get anything done, your computer would no longer be suitable for storing files securely, you’d hand off control of your computer to a single company who kept you in a walled garden of inferior, proprietary applications, and you’d totally lose your ability to run the vast majority of the applications that wouldn’t make sense to run over the internet.

Let me demonstrate. One of the Cloud OS’s being pushed today is Eye OS. Here’s a little overview of what it looks like and how it works.

Now that you’ve seen the video, and you’re convinced that I’m wrong… actually use the thing. See the actual, running OS in action. Now do you see what I’m talking about? Until the day comes that my computer can go from the POST to Eye OS with little more than a boot loader, you can’t call that shit an operating system. It doesn’t fit the description. An operating system is one thing, this is another. Until then, it’s a web app that mimics an OS Shell. It’s masturbation, folks. Pure and simple.

Have you ever wanted to run Windows on a iMac G5? Sure, you’d never replace Leopard… you love leopard. If it weren’t for Leopard, you’d be slumming it on Windows XP. Having said that, Maybe you need to be able to hop on to IE every once in a while to see if something works, and it’s not exactly possible when your one architecture over from anything Windows is compatible with. If I were using a Mac from the past few years, I’d throw Parallels on it, laugh rather loudly as I enjoyed it’s soft gooey middle.

Now, I have a need that requires that I be able to run one Windows Application, Internet Explorer. I can not run this application on my Mac because of the aforementioned problem with running proprietary x86 code from Microsoft on a RISC processor. So, I’ve decided to forego Virtual Machine Environments for Virtual Network Computing.

Take a look at how elegant this is.

On the Mac side of the equation, it’s just about perfect. Leopard has a VNC Client built right in, you can get to it from the Go menu in Finder, ‘Connect to server’ and type in vnc://ip_address. It really couldn’t be more perfect. Well, I guess there’s the whole Host Cursor always being toggled on, even though I always turn it off… but, the host cursor does come in handy when you scale the VNC window down. You see, you can scale it down so it will fit unobtrusively in some corner while you work on your mac, and it’s still useable… The Host Cursor still shows, so you can control it. Works well with Windows Updates.

However, I figured since I had the ‘Server’ (as I’m calling it) there running IE for me, I might as well outsource some of my overhead to it, so my Mac will run better. Those of you who have noted my Dock will notice that I’ve removed Transmission, my trusty Bittorrent client, off the showcase. Instead, I installed uTorrent (probably the best BT Client, ever), installed and enabled the WebUI plugin, scarred up a decent little Torrent Folder hierarchy, shared it, and then wrote an Automator Script to transfer any Torrent Files from my Downloads Folder to the ‘Drop Box’ folder in my Torrent’s Folder on the server. uTorrent can automatically add any new torrent files in a given directly to it’s download list. When the Torrent’s finish, the files are copied to a specific folder, and it basically offloads a good chunk of data slowness to a computer that was just sitting there taking up wattage.

For anyone who’s never worked with Automator before, you can save your Workflows as plug-ins, like as a Folder Action. Then, The workflow is ran every time something happens in the folder. I like Apple’s broad range of automating options. It makes life a lot easier.

I couldn’t go this far without gutting my MAMP setup and making it in to a WAMP setup instead. I’m finally able to complete downloads again, and my system runs a lot faster.

It’s crazy… I’ve recently added the out-and-out peachy Alarm Clock 2 App, which brings my Mac out of Sleep Mode and starts playing ‘Make it Mine’ by Jason Mraz 9AM every morning. Used to, My computer was always on, always doing something or another. I was used to sleeping with the hum, I was used to the glow it made, but lately I’ve gotten in to the habit of Sleeping my Mac when I’m not using it. My REM cycles thank me. It works great - everything that requires constant back-end processor cycles has been offloaded to a computer somewhere else in the house.

My Mac is literally just a music player, web browser, text editor and does a little photo editing. My Mac handles BT files by handing it off to a Windows machine, and the Windows Machine keeps me apprised of it’s progress through a web interface. Plus, if I need to use a Windows machine for anything, I can use it with VNC. When I get XP spitting and stuttering, I can just close the window and do something else with no performance boost once so ever.

Sure, if I had a faster Mac none of this would really be necessary, but since I don’t, I might as well embrace making it run better with bitch XP desktops.