New OSX Mail Client Makes Me Happy

I just finished the OSX upgrade on my laptop. It took a little longer than I thought (roughly an hour). At one point, it said it was going to take 5+ hours.

The first thing I did was to fire up Mail.app to see if it worked properly with my Blackberry. Before, deleting email out of Mail.app didn't delete it out of the Blackberry. Entourage also has this problem. The only thing I found that actually worked was Thunderbird. Thunderbird is all right, but it's just not as smooth as Mail.app.

The Leopard version of Mail.app does work properly. That means I get to switch back!

Blackberry Dies

My Blackberry has become incapable of charging today. When I plug it in, the charging symbol shows up for about 3 seconds and then disappears. Of course, this happens two days before I go on the road for a week.

I called Rogers. The earliest I can get a new phone is Wednesday, which is long after my Monday AM flight. Our corporate account managers, C-Link, offered me a loaner. I could have picked it up today.

Instead, my boss has a spare 8800 from when he got his iPhone. I'm going to pick it up tomorrow from the office. Until then, I can't help but feel my car is going to break down and I'm going to be stranded in the middle of no where.

Stuck in Calendar Limbo

I'm currently in a world where I have my email on Exchange, a black berry and a Mac. It's not a fun place to be.

Entourage and Blackberries don't play nice together. Entourage deletes one of the header fields that BB Enterprise Server uses to track emails. Apparently Mail.App does too, as my bb doesn't know when I delete stuff. Thankfully, Thunderbird does work. So if I use Thunderbird, I can keep my Blackberry in sink.

Next up is my calendar. I typically use Google Calendar, but one of the main points of Exchange is being able to share calendars in the company. Since I switched to Thunderbird today, I thought I'd look at the calendar. There is apparently no way to sync Exchange at this point.

I did find imap calendar proxy. It looks interesting. The code didn't work for me.

After seeing it, I wonder how hard it would be to set up a IMAP to Webdav proxy server using something like mod_perl. I'd use authbasic to get the credentials and put the imap server as path info. Then any client could connect to it. Maybe I'll toy with this in my spare time.. I'm sure all the perl modules are there for vcalendar, imap and webdav..

My First Experiences with a Black Berry

Just when the iPhones are hitting the US, I'm starting to use a blackberry. I got a Curve. It's a pretty slick little phone.

I've been a Nokia fanboy for about 7 years now, but since I've started using this new phone, I can see how far Nokia has fallen behind in the cellphone world.

I liked how my Nokia peripherals hadn't change since my first phone. I also like the quick access menus -- I could hit menu 1 3 3 to change my profiles quickly. Both of those things are starting to change. New Nokia models apparently have different chargers and the quick menus don't work so well in Symbian OS.

Blackberries all use the mini USB connector for charging, and I imagine that won't change for a while. Bluetooth accessories typically work with all devices as well. Blackberry has a pretty big market for software as well.

The Curve is nice and small too. It's actually smaller than my last Nokia. I think the screen is bigger too.

I haven't had any luck with syncing the blackberry with Macbook Pro. It's not such a huge deal as it syncs to the Exchange Server just fine. If only Address Book and iCal would talk directly to Exchange..

Data plans still suck in Canada. I haven't seen my bill yet, but I'm thinking it'll be about $130 for 50MB of data, 350 minutes of voice, voicemail/caller id and free evenings and weekends. I can't believe people were complaining about the iPhone plans.