Migrating to Mac… the tools

Date Stamp:: 23 December 2007
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Yesterday, I migrated many of the key chunks of data from the PC to Mac. I’ve written up these notes for my own future reference, and for others who will stumble across this via Google.

In this post:

Migrating email from Outlook to Apple’s Mail
Migrating Firefox
Moving the iTunes Library
Sharing the Address Book
FTP

Migrating email from Outlook to Apple’s Mail

Being a nice new machine, I didn’t really want 1.4Gb of email from 2002-7 imported into Mail. But it still needed to be readable, in case I did want something. Outlook’s PST files aren’t readable by anything but Outlook and they’re not convertible.

Apple’s How to Move to Mac page suggests transferring via IMAP (meaning all the emails are put back on a server, and downloaded again). I went for the second option, a program called O2M by Little Machines. This utility converted each folder and sub-folder into the mbox format, readable by Mail.

This process wasn’t completely smooth. O2M doesn’t allow you to select a folder and sub-folders in one click, meaning you had to select each individual folder or sub-folder. At some point O2M or Outlook lost the plot and O2M decided all the sent dates were wacky, but couldn’t fix them, and so I ended up with heaps of empty exported folders. So, I redid a fair few exports.

Overall, O2M worked, and for $10US it’s a good price. An alternate product, MesssageSave has a nicer interface, but wasn’t worth $45 for a piece of software that was going to be used once.

Migrating Firefox

To move all my settings and add-ons from Firefox on the PC to Firefox on the Mac was easy. Use the reference, How to Manage Profiles, to find the profile on the PC. Copy it to the Mac. Rename the old profile on the Mac and then rename the copied profile to have the name of your existing profile on the Mac.

A note of caution: The profile that you have copied over has all sorts of references to your old PC, which seem to screw up things like downloading particular files. For example, I needed to change the default location for downloads. This was not causing an error, but some files were not downloading correctly.

Moving the iTunes Library

Our main music library was on my PC. I didn’t move it to the Macbook, but to Lauren’s iMac. By copying one directory, all the playlists, ratings, artwork was migrated. See Migrate Your iTunes Library from Windows to Mac.

I’ve set the iMac to share it’s library, which the Macbook can then see. My Macbook will just manage my podcast subscriptions.

Sharing the Address Book

For a few years, we’ve managed our address book using a simple web application (PHP/MySQL) running on Apache on my PC. Whilst I could have ran this on the Mac, I wanted to use Apple’s Address Book. But, I also wanted to synchonise the Address Book between the two Macs. It looked like I was going to have to invest in .Mac, a set of Web based utilities from Apple ($$/yr). However, Leopard added the ability to synchonise with Yahoo!‘s Address Book.

So, I took an export from the MySQL database, fiddled in Microsoft Access, then imported into Address Book. The synchonisation was easy to setup (see: Leopard Tip – Sync Mac Address Book via Yahoo without .Mac).

Now both machines have the same address book available, which is also used by Mail.

Having got all this going, I found a nice “it just works” feature that you stumble across on Macs. If I put a contact’s IM (Instant Messaging) username into the Address Book, then Adium my IM client, picks up the contacts name, and replaces whatever screen name they’ve specified. Of course, you can turn this off.

FTP

No tip here. Moving all the FTP details of web-sites I manage to Transmit on the Mac was simply grunt work (and a lot of guessing of saved passwords).

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categories:: Apple

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Hi Simon,

It is good to hear of your transition to the mac. Tim’s mac is an interesting beast, though I’m stuck with a few things.

Why are you using FTP to transfer files? Why not use something more secure like SFTP or SCP, which also allows for easier navigation around the online server? (A positive is that it allows you to go back, behind the mount point.)

On the PC, my preferred program is winscp. Yesterday I was playing with Fugu on Tim’s mac, which also sort of looks promising.

An issue that I found was with the default text editor on the mac didn’t show the raw text of a .php file, but rendered the html portion. What basic text editor are you using for editing .php source files? I’m also interested in the potential of the command line access on the mac, though Tim doesn’t want me to destroy it too much! Will the mac run perl scripts easily? Do I have to change a lot of my hpux perl and shell scripts before they will run on this platform? Is there something as powerful as putty (specifically ssh tunneling and other features) available on the mac that is cheap and simple? The mac looks and feels great. I’m just a little green on the tools available to execute the less mainstream activities. It is interesting to read your transition.

Cheers,

Graham

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Comment by: Simon ·
Date Stamp: Sunday 23 December, 2007 at 09:55 AM

Hey Graham,

I used the term “FTP” to simplify. I do use SFTP, which Transmit handles. I used WinSCP on the PC. Initially because it allowed you to sync the remote and local views as you navigated. I haven’t got to installing a text editor yet, but will go with TextMate – seems to be the most popular, and it has the ability to add Bundles. There’s a bundle that adds Expression Engine template syntax colouring, which I’ll find handy. Other options include BBEdit and the free TextWrangler. Have no idea about running perl scripts. Looking on perl.com, I found “Mac OS X distributes a modern version of Perl, so you already have it.” For an equivalent to putty… obviously you can just use terminal for some stuff. I don’t “do” SSH Tunnels, which I guess is a little more complicated. I found SSH Tunnel Manager via Secure wireless email on Mac OS X. The one thing I’ve found with the Mac is that cheap 3rd party apps are abundant, good-looking and work well. Far better than stuff you find for Windows. More generally, have a look through my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged apple+software.

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Comment by: Simon ·
Date Stamp: Thursday 27 December, 2007 at 07:15 AM

MacBreak (Leo Laporte and Alex Lindsay) look at text editors for Mac in their video podcast, Text Editors.

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