Now that Snow Leopard has given us Exchange 2007 support, Apple’s Mail, iCal and Address book are now serious business tools.
Check out the following post for info on the available plugins: http://www.hawkwings.net/plugins.htm
Please note that many aren’t yet compatible with Apple Mail 4.0 that ships with Snow Leopard.
When accessing Windows format network drives and disks, OS-X has a rather annoying habit of adding small “resource” files and DS_STORE files. We Mac users can’t see these files Finder (they’re actually added there to store metadata about the presentation of that particular file and folder, as well as backup information). However Windows users can see them, and don’t appreciate that they’re there for our benefit.
“Your f*****g Mac’s been screwing up my network drive” is a shout that I’m sure many enterprise Mac users have had directed at them.
Blue Harvest has a straightforward GUI and does "exactly what it says on the tin."
Blue Harvest, by ZeroOneTwenty is a preference panel plugin that allows you to turn off the saving of these superfluous files to network drives or USB keys. It has a very straightforward GUI, and does exactly what it says on the tin.
I’d recommend this for any enterprise Mac user who doesn’t want to seriously annoy his Windows-wielding colleagues!
Blue Harvest costs $12.99
I’ve just upgraded to Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro. The process itself was pretty painless, taking less than an hour to run through the install. I can confirm that Snow Leopard is more compact than Leopard and frees up some 6Gb of my hard disk space.
General Impressions
It’s very hard to put your finger on exactly what has changed, post install, but my Macbook definitely feels more responsive. It’s almost like I’ve added a faster processor. Animations in Finder for things like Coverflow appear more fluid and effortless, and the icons themselves load quicker.
The screen also seems a little more vibrant, especially the red and green close & maximise buttons on a windows’ title bar. Maybe Apple have changed the calibration files for my OLED screen. I’d be interested to hear if other people have a similar experience.
Exchange Support – Mail
This, for me, is the make or break function of Snow Leopard. Last week my company upgraded their mail servers from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 and it has messed up my Entourage profile. I’m sure that I can get this working with a bit of fiddling, but I prefer the “native Mac” apps so I thought I’d give Snow Leopard a go.
When I first opened Mail after the OS upgrade, it verified and updated my mails to the new Mail 4.0 format. This took about 3 minutes to complete. After this process, a couple of my mail plugins where removed to a temporary folder as the were apparently not compatible.
I created a new email account in Mail and entered my corporate email address. Mail autodiscovered my email server but didn’t get my username and asked me to enter it. I tried simply entering my domain username but this didn’t work. Next I tried entering the domain as well using the standard Windows domain\username approach and this worked fine.
Immediately Mail created the account and began downloading all of my mail from the server. This was incredibly quick, compared the process I’ve seen on both Entourage and Outlook 2007 on Windows, but all of my mails now appear within Mail, and interact fully with the Exchange server.
One thing of note is that if you received an Exchange meeting invitation you now have Accept, Decline and Tentative buttons in the message header and preview pane. You don’t appear have the option to add comments to your response, but this isn’t a major issue.
Exchange Support – Address Book
As part of the mail account setup, a new directory icon is added to the Address Book viewer. When I first clicked on this, there were no contacts listed. Bearing in mind that my company probably has in excess of 100,000 employees, I presumed that Address Book was downloading the directory. It turns out that you can’t just browse the whole directory, but actually need to search for specific contacts. This searching is very quick taking less than a second to populate the search results. Very cool.
Exchange Support – iCal
As part of the mail account setup process, two new calendars are added to iCal. Calendar contains your Exchange Server calendar, whereas tasks contains only tasks. I’m not sure why Apple have made this split; I’d imagine it’s because of Exchange’s approach.
My Exchange calendar was instantly viewable in the standard iCal fashion. All of the relevant Exchange information also appeared viewable from within the details pop-up window.
When adding attendees to a meeting, iCal searches both your local Mac address book and the Exchange Server directory for matching contacts. Again, this is very quick.
Apps that don’t work
A couple of apps that don’t appear to be compatible with Snow Leopard are:
iStat Menu (web site says they’ll be releasing an update soon.)
Blogo (no mention of Snow Leopard compatibly or issues)
Conclusion
First impressions of Snow Leopard are very positive. My Macbook seems to have been given a significant performance boost, and the new Exchange support is well thought out and implemented. I’ll be hammering this over the next few weeks and will let post as to how I get on, but at this stage, I’m rather impressed.
Let’s face it.. Apple’s BackToMyMac is a great idea in theory, but just doesn’t work without making specific configuration changes to your firewalls and routers, which, in a corporate environment, you’re unlikely to be able to do.
I’m sure that they’re busy working on an implementation that will actually work properly. Until they release it, I’ll be using LogMeIn’s free Hamachi tunnelling software that actually does what it says on the tin!
From LogMeIn.com..
Hamachi is a free (for limited use) service by LogMeIn.com. I’ve been using LogMeIn’s web-based remote desktop software for over a year now, and have been really impressed. It seems to have no problem dealing with whatever firewalls and routers are put in it’s way, and supports a number of different client technologies for reviewing your remote desktop including HTML. This means that you can remotely access your Mac or PC from your iPhone if you’re so inclined.
Hamachi…
Hamachi provides a secure tunnel between the different member computers on a “virtual network”, such as your home Mac and office PC for example. LogMeIn’s servers act as a co-ordination service, to affectively join the various tunnels from your various computers into the virtual network. This means that you will need to initiate a connection on each computer, but this is a fairly straightforward task.
HamachiX vs Hamachi
The official Mac release of Hamachi is command line only, and requires a fairly difficult (in Mac fluffy gui terms) installation process. However, there is a third-party Mac client called HamachiX which, as well as managing the configuration of the Hamachi service, also installs the relevant Hamachi drivers and files automatically.
However, the HamachiX client did crash on both machines on my virtual network, although the actual Hamachi tunnels continued to work fine. I presume this is because the command line process is still happily running in the background.
There is also a rather good that seems to work well. This has a smaller footprint than HamachiX so I’ll try this for day to day usage for a while.
Results
Once installed on both my Macbook Pro (in Devon) and remotely on my iMac in London (via LogMeIn Free) both computers recognised each other via Bonjour, and all of the usual MacOS network services were available, including:
Movie and audio sharing via iTunes
Now, the network speed is a little slow (I’m connecting over a 1Mbps/256kbps ADSL connection) but certainly useable.
Conclusion
Hamachi is a excellent. Until Apple pull their finger out of their arse and make BackToMyMac work properly, Hamachi will have a place on my essential apps list.
o I’ve finally got Office 2008 for Mac installed, but how well does it hold up under scrutiny? Well, firstly, I would say that this release is not ground-breaking in the way that Apple’s iWorks 2008 felt groundbreaking. All of the Office applications (I’ve not used Entourage a great deal) work pretty much as you’d expect them to.
However, this, in itself is the key improvement with Office 2008. Having struggled with Office for Mac 2004 running emulated under Rosetta, with all it’s stability issues, we Mac users finally have a robust and stable processor-native OS-native version of the Office suite for ourselves.
In conclusion, it’s “evolutionary, not revolutionary”, but that’s just what I needed Microsoft to deliver.
Microsoft have published a sneak peek at some of the functionality
implemented in the totally rewritten Microsoft Office for Mac
package. I’ve been struggling with MacOffice 2004 for quite a while
now, and it is extremly sluggish under Rosetta emulation on Intel
Macs. It also has a tendency to corrupt files when accessing them on
network shares making them unusable by my Windows-wielding colleagues
(which makes neither my MacBook or myself particularly popular!) The
best solution that I’ve come up with to avoid running MacOffice 2004
is to run the Windows version of Office under VMWare Fusion. This
works very well, and, if you ignore the whole Windows boot-up time,
is actually more responsive for most text-based work than MacOffice
2004 on Intel.
Anyway, can’t wait for the new 2008 version of Office to ship! The
preview site can be accessed here.
bt_jonknight