Written by About two years ago I got myself a MacBook Pro. After having been away from Microsoft for a couple of years, and having heard a lot about Ubuntu’s latest release which was supposedly pretty good, I installed it on an old laptop. While the install was great, within a couple of days I kept hitting the gritty Linux under-belly and just didn’t have the patience for that stuff anymore, there is better out there and I wanted it. So I went to Apple’s website, and haven’t looked back. As a note, we do have Windows 7 around the house, and an XP somewhere I’m sure.
Earlier this year I did the classical .NET developer with a MacBook thing and I installed Windows 7 in a Bootcamp setup on my laptop. Life had been very good using VMWare Fusion (excellent stuff, well worth it), but now I wanted to try the direct way. Maybe it was some MSness creeping back in, but I did it and it was good.
A couple of days ago, when my latest purchase arrived and the parcel sat there, hmming with the need to be opened, I decided to reclaim the Windows 7 space for my Mac OS side needed more room. I then opened my parcel and installed the MS Office 2008 for the Mac that lay within. One of the things I was curious about was the famous Entourage that I’ve heard about for a couple of years.
For those unfamiliar with it, Entourage is the cousin of Outlook for the Mac. Not a clone, not a copy, it’s a bit of a different beast, with a different UI, yet for what I wanted it was Outlookish enough.
Apple Mail is simple and good, but there’s no highlighting, no flagging, and to be honest I don’t like the way it manages To Do tasks. I wanted my Power User elements which I recognize are in conflict with the simple and effective means by which Apple Mail is governed, though I think the To Do part is a crude bolt-on.
So I have the latest version of Entourage, the 2008 Web Services edition. I downloaded and applied the updates, and everything should have been smooth sailing. After setting up the synching services for Entourage with iCal and MobileMe and what not, I started to get duplicates and triplicates of meetings, contacts and the fists were flying. Holy Bleep I must not have understood how this works together I said to myself. That was only the beginning. The more I deleted and tried to rectify, the more I felt I was waking up on Ground Hog Day.
What I learned was that Microsoft’s Entourage goes with a very Outlook style understanding of certain concepts, instead of making it fit with the Apple view of things. Which makes sense if you take a Windows-centric view of the world, which on an Apple platform does not make sense. This creates not only confusion on the part of the user trying to get iCal and Entourage to play nice (to say nothing of what happens through MobileMe and ends up on my iPhone. Apparently I have to pick up 4 copies of my daughter from school… when did that happen? The two instances of my wife, each with their own distinct ring tone it seems, are going to be annoyed).
SO I Googled, and did some reading, and it seems that Entourage 2004 was great and 2008 is only great if you use it and nothing else, because otherwise you are at the mercy of the gods.
As per some of the articles, I tried CalGoo. It’s a calendar synching program ,pretty good but they state they don’t support Entourage. While it’s technically possible, your results may vary and they point to the forums where its all over the map. I now understand why they say that.
To manage the synching, and then getting Entourage and iCal to stop shooting at each other and just allowing the Entourage calendar to show up properly, things continued their downward slide. Did I mention I have a Google calendar and a Plaxo one that’s connected, perfectly fine, with my iCal?
The biggest thing that frustrated me was that if I delete a meeting in Entourage’s calendar, I would expect that to be reflected in iCal, and I can say after waiting an entire day, it ain’t happening. Creating a meeting, no problem! Bingo, within a minute or 5, there it is. Bang, it’s on my iPhone. Delete the meeting from either the iPhone, iCal or Entourage, and most likely they are now all in disagreement. I don’t understand this. From what I’ve been reading, this is not to be unexpected. What? Seriously? Then I had to remember whose software I’m dealing with.
Leaving all of that aside, about every hour or two, Entourage crashes regardless of whether or not I’ve been doing anything with it other than letting it poll for email regularly. It always asks in such a Windows-like manner if I would be so kind as to allow it to restart and to send the information off to Microsoft. I had honestly forgotten what this part of life was like. It is so very rare that things crash on my Mac.
Snow Leopard with my Norton Antivirus (yes, you should have antivirus on your Mac, I had a virus before and learned my lesson), and the various apps I have, have somehow allowed me to forget about the world of Dead on Demand and the cuss words full of colourless ASCii. When I worked on a Windows machine, it’s okay because I’m waiting for it, but on a Mac? It’s not part of the paradigm really.
While this is a “wag of the finger” at Microsoft, it has a lot to do with Natural User Interface type and Cohesive Integration thinking. A year ago I was at Microsoft “mothership” (a.k.a. Redmond) getting trained up on the theory and practices of Microsoft Surface (MS’ touch table). It was amazing to hear that these PhDs and designers really understood the seamless experience, the evolution of interfaces, etc. Among other things, they understood that surprising the user created a state of anxiety and thus decreased their immersion and thus dramatically increased their chances to be frustrated or misuse the system. Unfortunately Windows 7 still violates plenty of those principals, but that’s a different discussion. The notion of truly integrating, of making your application part of a seamless greater system is what is truly absent I believe with Entourage.
I’ve surrendered the idea of having any my activities done in Entourage and it getting synched so all my worlds (laptop, online and phone) are in harmony. It’s unfortunate, because at the end of the day it’s a fine program Im sure, on its own (if it would stop crashing) but unlike Outlook on Windows it isn’t the “only thing” that I’m using that needs to be part of the equation.
Very frustrating. For now, it’ll be sitting on the sidelines for me. I understand it can be used as a component in the greater whole, but it’s not good enough.
