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Even with Office running quite well on Leopard through VMware Fusion most of you switchers will still not want to depend on the messaging solution from Microsoft on your Cupertino OS. But how would the required migration work for all the emails from the past? There is no export feature in Outlook that would create anything meaningful to Apple Mail. Obviously for pure IMAP (or Zimbra connector) users as I am, it is no issue, as you just point your new client towards the right ports of your server and off you go. But I’m also an offline user as a POP3 user would be when it comes to mail archives. My thousands of received but also sent messages are nicely archived in separate local folders in Outlook format for each of the past years.

The answer to the Outlook to Mail migration question is: Thunderbird.

Simply install Thunderbird on your Windows environment next to Outlook and agree to all import from Outlook suggestions you will get during setup. Thunderbird will store online as well as offline content in the local application data folder in your home directory.

C:\Documents and Settings\[USER]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\[PROFILE]\Mail\..

The .msf and the corresponding files that do not have an ending are what you need to move over to your Mac. Mail.app has an “Import Mailboxes…” feature that you can use to include them into your local mail.app setup.

During my own migration I realized that not all files (each representing one folder from Outlook) were offered for import. This seems to be file size related. The solution here is to split them into items below 1 GB in Thunderbird before moving them over to the Mac. Note, if you split e.g. a 1.2GB file into two 600MB files you have to compact them before moving, otherwise the file size doesn’t change.

This way I successfully migrated 18′972 emails from Microsoft Outlook on Windows to Apple Mail on OS X Leopard. All available at the tip of my finger through spotlight of course.

This is a playful approach to designed tag clouds. It lacks the real time aspect, but it is perfect in layout and typography. This cloud is based on my del.icio.us entires. Check it out.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Albeit all the preaching we do and all the common sense you think people would/should apply, Outlook is today the most popular e-mail tool in the world. And some Frisco based guys think that the program is so poorly suited for most people’s intensive e-mail habits that they have founded a company, Xobni, intended to fix it.

Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards) has produced free software that indexes all Outlook e-mail and makes messages quickly and easily searchable.

You might think Google Desktop would do the same for you (does for me for years now), but Xobni, which its creators call an “intelligent filter,” adds a few more features. When it scours the inbox, it extracts phone numbers it thinks are associated with the sender. So when a user searches for a person, Xobni presents the number in a side panel. The software also interprets the social relationships between people who are sending messages to each other by interpreting the to: and cc: headers of each message.

In addition, the data collected are visualized during normal action per user or per object, and can also be analyzed in details through Xobni Analytics. Interesting stats like most frequent mailer or mailee, fastest responder, mails per timeframe etc. can be easily and in a Google Analytics type way be retrieved for whatever purpose you might have.

The company raised $4 million from the investment funds of Vinod Khosla, a Sun Microsystems co-founder, and Niklas Zennstrom, one of the creators of Skype. In February, Bill Gates demonstrated the program at Microsoft’s San Jose developers’ conference and called it “the next generation in social networking.”

The idea is to sell the tools to companies later in time and Xobni now has ambitions that extend well beyond Microsoft Outlooktowards the popular Web-based services Yahoo Mail, Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail as well as social networks like Facebook and Linkedin. Apple Mail is also on the list.

While discussing Xobni I was also pointed out to ClearContext, which seems to do similar things. Did not try it though.

EU-Wettbewerbskommissarin Neelie Kroes hat die Regierungen der Mitgliedsstaaten aufgerufen, frei verfügbaren Software-Lösungen den Vorzug vor kommerziellen Angeboten zu geben. Die Nutzung von Open-Source-Formaten sei “eine sehr kluge Geschäftsentscheidung”, sagte Kroes am Dienstag in Brüssel auf einer Konferenz der Organisation OpenForum Europe, die sich für offene Standards einsetzt. “Kein Bürger und kein Unternehmen sollte durch Entscheidungen einer Regierung gezwungen oder ermuntert werden, eine geschlossene Technologie statt einer offenen zu wählen”, sagte Kroes. Auch die EU-Kommission werde ihren Teil dazu beitragen, wenn es um die Verwendung von Software-Standards gehe.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,558801,00.html

Tonight is our little anniversary party in Zurich and we just received the delivery of our open source beer. Here are some pictures:

Optaros’ open source beer is not free as in free beer but as in free speech. Tonight it is also free as in free beer. Got it?

Check freebeer.ch for details.

Thank you Martin and the guys from heldenbar.ch to make this happen. Cheers.

Mail Badger is a plug-in for Apple’s Mail.app that enhances the application’s dock icon by allowing users to set up multiple “badges” that display message counts from different mailboxes or counts of messages that satisfy a wide range of conditions. (more…)

According to the latest usage stats, the iPhone is the most popular camera phone among Flickr users. These graphs show the number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one photo or video with a particular camera on a given day over the last year. I like my Nikon D-SLR and would consider neither the N95 nor the iPhone a proper replacement. But it seems that the overall experience is good enough and definitely better that the N95 and the like.

Animoto.com is a 2.0 style web application that creates videos out of still images with the click of a button.

You simply choose a song and images. Animoto then automatically generates a unique video for you. According to animoto, no two videos are ever the same.

Many of the post-production techniques that the founders used while working as producers for MTV, Comedy Central & ABC are used in Animoto’s patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence developed to think like an actual editor and director. The resulting video is produced in a widescreen format, containing the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

See the about video here or check out this video about great people at Optaros…

Apple said today it will reveal its software plans for its iPhone device on March 6, including tools for outside developers and features aimed at businesses.

Reading John’s post on open source, Mac OS and Freedom 0, I reflected a little my first 3 months of using a Mac for some of my work (I was not as fortunate as John, so I have to use the one at home).

I agree that most of the people you meet at camps and conferences (at least the one John and the like get to go to) have at some point or the other worked with most of the available environments and figured that a combination of OSes including OS X on a Macbook Pro is the most productive combination in a very sleek form factor with an acceptable level of evilness.

The thing that does make me think with OS X is actually not the mentioned closed SW and iTunes DRM issues you might consider that no freedom or even evil, but I don’t. I want to make sure I can buy what I want to buy (if you do not have an American credit card you have to steal your favorite soap as you can not buy it in other iTunes stores but the US one) and that I can use what I’ve payed for (where is the point to paying for Music if I then have to break the law - remove DRM - or steal it again to be able to play it in my car?) As long as the offer matches the requirement at a reasonable price point, I’m well willing to accept certain limitations, especially if the are market or even economy driven and not just made up by a monopolist for his own interest.

For me it would be the 100 missing features issue you can only partly solve through the great repository of open source or not always open source but mostly free solutions. The obviously more tricky ones leave room for just one too many 39$ smart but closed tool purchases (UI configurable firewall, use a scanner, place an .htaccess file on an FTP server,…) if do not want to solve them on a command line and do not want to switch OSes all the time for the smallest feature.

But looking at it from another angle and comparing to the Windows world, I can quickly conclude, that the combination of engaging experience and open standards foundation of the Mac platform allows for smart people to make a living by doing what they like (coding and solving problems). The fact that the tools are not available as open source is only due to the fact that the open source business models will not work for software for 20$ to 40$ that will never ever need support. So I will continue happily to load my credit card bill with small $ items for add-ons to my work environment. If Apple will manage to integrate the right ones over time into their platform without putting the developers out of business, then even better.