As part of my ongoing series, I thought I would explain where the Windows to Mac transition that I have undertaken is now at.
Part-way through the process, I decided to take a little break, because:
– I was very busy anyway
– I wanted to take stock of where the issues had been thus far
– I needed to figure out what was remaining
In terms of porting, I had come a good distance along the road, and was definitely past half-way – so no turning back! But let’s take a look at what the standout issues had been:
• Windows and Mac technologies don’t play nice together – fact. Whether it was trying to get an Airport Extreme to speak to a Windows PC, or getting the iPhone sync’ed with Outlook, there were substantial issues (particularly with the last of these, but more of that in a minute). Fortunately I wasn’t the first person experiencing these, so the power of the InterWeb helped solve them
• iPhone (and Mobile Me) vs Outlook don’t like each other – my default setup of an WinXP PC and Outlook 2003 proved to be far from a match made in heaven – the reality was that calendars wouldn’t sync at all! Even the re-launched .Mac (MobileMe) couldn’t sync with Outlook when you installed the application stub that was required!
• Multi-platform sync is pretty tricky – for me, there were two classes of information I wanted to sync – data (calendar, contacts), and media (video, audio, images). Syncing these across PC, Mac, and iPhone was only marginally less painful than repeatedly sticking pins in your eyes!
Despite all of this, and thanks to another evening last night re-configuring things, I now have a solution that syncs calendar remotely (across all three platforms), and syncs contacts locally (which will be fine for the moment, since they don’t change as much / as often) – that just leaves the “media” information to be sorted out.
Interestingly, syncing of email across all platforms was sorted out by the simple fact that IMAP is setup to provide exactly this kind of functionality to people – so that was a snap to sort out.
In summary then, then flight of Rocketship Apple is nearing completion, and we are due to dock on Planet Apple before then end of the year – exciting times!