Since Apple won’t give me the new macbook pro I’ll have to stick with the one I’ve got. I used to be a windows user, but since I’m doing alot more Ruby on Rails development these days, the darwin OsX environment is better for that. I have the older version of mac mini, but attempted to use that as development environment but it was just too slow and couldn’t output a dual display. What I’ve been doing before was running Eclipse on Windows directly using a workspace folder in a shared drive on the mac. Then I ssh login through putty and run mongrel on the mini and view the server on firefox from windows.

Here’s a few tips for some usefrul freeware on Mac and transferring your mails from outlook.

Migrating from Outlook to Entourage

This process is more complicated than I thought since they are both Microsoft office products. What I needed to do was:

1. Install Thunderbird on Windows and automatic import Outlook emails.
2. Install Thunderbird on Mac
3. Copy the Thunderbird mail folders from Windows to Mac
4. Download the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner and import mails from Thunderbird to Apple Mail.
5. Install Entourage and import emails from Apple Mail

Migrating your address book to Mac

1. Goto Plaxo and sign up for an account
2. install Outlook plugin and synchronise the address book to Plaxo online
3. Install Mac address book plugin and synchronise from Plaxo online
4. done!

Useful freeware

1. Optimised Firefox 2 for Intel Mac. Also download the osx theme, it’ll look almost like safari.
2. Adium – aggregated IM tool
3. MSN mesenger – I still enjoy the custom emoticons.
4. Desktop Manager – multi virtual desktop before Spaces come out in OSX 10.5
5. QuickSilver – even better desktop search than spotlight.
6. VLC – multimedia player
7. Timeout – break reminders
8. OsXVNC – remote desktop login
9. Eclipse – still my preferred editor since it is free.
10. PathFinder – Finder extension with thumbnail views and stuff
11. Parallels – utilise your duo core CPU with running windows side by side.