Synchronicity

I have mentioned in a couple of earlier blogs the issue of synchronizing Macs at various places. This has become a practical issue for me, since I have two (well, actually three) Macs, one at home, one at the office, and one in between, in addition to my iPhone. I spent a lot of time copying files back and forth, making sure that my email was available on both machines when I needed it, and so on. So, finding out ways not to have to do that has been important. And, it seems, important not just to me; everything and everybody seems now to be working on syncing and co-operating, inside or outside what is more or less vaguely called the "cloud". In fact, I have now completely lost track of what applications in my systems are actually syncing and with what. I probably do not use more than a fraction of the options available to me. But let us look at some elements.

Email
I think my first efforts into actually syncing must have been with Eudora back in the 1990s. By checking the option "leave mail on server for ... days", I was able to download incoming email both to my office Mac and my home Mac. I went through various variations of that, whether I would only get "weekend mail" at home and complete storage only at the office, or to organize it in different ways at each machine. But in whichever way, I could not store mail I sent (without copying it to myself), and I spent much time resorting mail into mailboxes, since everything dropped into the In box on both machines.

This changed when I switched from the old mail system (POP) to the IMAP system. These are not Mac programs, but email systems ("protocols") that the server (e.g. your university email system) provides. Today, most servers let you choose, and most, nay every email program will support both; Apple Mail, Eudora (old and new) and others. Webmail is by definition imap, and so are Google Mail and MobileMe. (Check with your university system what options you must set for imap with their setup.)

If you read email on two or more Macs (or PCs, or in a web browser), imap makes things much easier. The point is that all your mail is stored on the server and each Mac accesses the mail stored there. I held off because I thought this meant I could not read old mail when I was offline. But no, a copy of everything is also transferred to each Mac, so you always have access to it, on- or offline. That sounds like "leave on server", the mail is both on the server and on each Mac. But the difference is that the mail you sent, as well as unifinished drafts, is also stored there. And, in particular, your email folder structure is also stored on the server. So once I sort a read email to its mailbox, it will be there whether I read it on the Mac, iPhone or on the web (iPhone Mail has some way to go before multiple mailboxes are really convenient, but anyway).

Imap is for all computer types. What about specific issues for the Mac and (Apple) Mail? Each mail server may have its own issues with imap setup. Mine refuses to let me create folders within folders. Instead, I must create the folder with a subfolder inside in the "On my Mac" section [which is the mail stored locally on your Mac only, you can have such as well], and copy them over to the imap section. I am also not able to sync "To Do" tasks between Macs. Such are neat in that you can point directly to a word in an email, assign completion dates etc., and they sync with iCal. But my iCals sync through MobileMe, while the mail syncs with imap on the campus server. And they do not work together. I may get a task to the second Mac, but then the link to the email is lost (I have discussed this elsewhere).

Mail also has "smart mailboxes", and methods for automatically sorting incoming mail (filters, in Mail called "rules") to specific mailboxes, these are part of the Mail program, not the server's imap system. If you have a MobileMe account (below), you can sync these settings between Macs, so you only need edit a filter once, and it will be used on every Mac. Sadly, that part of MobileMe sync will disappear with that service next summer, iCloud will not sync these mail settings, so you will be back to remembering what criteria you actually set up and repeat them on each Mac.


Address book, Calendar
One result of switching from Eudora to Mail was that I moved into the Apple "all things connected" system, thus having email addresses in Apple's Address Book and using iCal as calendar. Of course it is essential to keep these, and in particular your calendar in sync, not least with your iPhone / iPod-Pad ("iGadget" as David Pogue calls them collectively). There are ways to sync them outside of Apple's system, but these are somewhat convoluted, and while I did try to look into the alternatives, I decided to plunge for Apple's .Mac (now MobileMe) a few years ago, and did not regret the $100 a year I paid. Syncing the calendar and adresses as well as Safari booksmarks was a cinch and has basically worked well. Once, I was napping when I was asked "more than 25% of your addresses have been changed, sync anyway?" and clicked Yes before I realized that I had hardly changed any address lately. The Apple server had crashed, and I had just accepted to delete all my addresses on my home Mac. At the time, I was on sabattical and lived just around the corner from my office, so I jumped on my bike and pedalled furiously over to the office (the Mac there was sleeping, and had thus not synced yet), and in the few seconds delay before the auto-sync began, I forced Address Book to push the still preserved address book there back to the server, and then from there to my home Mac. A bit of panic there (Time Machine would also have saved me), but it is I think the only major crisis I have had for Address book.

There are some issues with iCal on the iPhone, though. I use a couple of calendar derivates (Calvetica for simplicty of entering new appointments, Weekly Calendar for monthly overview), both of which get their data from the built-in iPhone calender, but they do not always sync perfectly. Sometimes I have to wiggle quite a bit to get an item sent from the iPhone to the Mac or the other way, and sometimes an item that is properly edited on the Mac appears as "New item" on the iPhone, and is then copied back as New item to iCal! Never found out exactly what happens, and the issue is mostly (as I recall) iPhone to Mac, not Mac to Mac.

Anyway, this requires MobileMe which is going away to become iCloud (opened last month). This system only works with Lion, and as I will try to avoid Lion as long as I can, at least while MobileMe lasts (next June), I wondered if I also had to keep off upgrading my iPhone to iOS 5, as that uses iCloud. Apple does not say if you can still use MobileMe with iOS 5, but after searching on the web, user experiences seem to be that you can. I have not done it yet, but it appears thus I can upgrade the iPhone to iOS 5, and still have it sync with my Snow Leopards using MobileMe. Until next summer.


Files: iDisk and DropBox
So much for the small and automatic stuff, the next Big Thing is the documents we are working on. Perhaps you do different things at home than at the office, but like most academics I take stuff home to work on in the weekends or evenings. From floppy disks, I graduated to saving a copy of relevant documents to some online server and then copying back from there to the other Mac. For this, I could use my campus server, but once I had MobileMe, I could access Apple's iDisk as the go-between. It wasn't very fast, and of course you had to remember to copy back and forth and accrued many versions of the files that could be confusing. Another MobileMe feature, which I rather like, is Back to my Mac, which allows me to access my office Mac directly from my home Mac (and vice versa): I can see it as a volume in Finder and copy directly back and forth (so I am certain I get the latest version), or even see the actual desktop and operate the remote Mac as if I am in front of it. Very canny, but it works only under certain network conditions, and not if the remote Mac is sleeping.


Anyway, as iDisk is also going away with MobileMe, as discussed earlier, I looked at alternatives, and I made a great discovery, which has actually changed fairly dramatically how I use the computer, particularly the home/office situation: DropBox. This is a remote service, free for regular users, which does basically only one thing: You (or it, actually) assign a folder on your Mac to be the DropBox folder. Anything you put in there is continuously and automatically copied to the DropBox server, and immediately synced back to the similar DropBox folder on your other Mac(s). The point is that, the syncing apart, the DropBox folder is just a regular folder on your hard disk, it is not on a remote machine (like iDisk folders). So, working with documents there is just like in any other folder (and they are of course still on your Mac whether you are on- or offline). Thus, I have put all my Filemaker databases into the DropBox folder as well as any paper or other document I am working on. Saving, opening etc. is just as quick as if it was in any other folder, but the document is immediately (a split second) identical on the other Macs, so I can just get up from one Mac, sit down in front of the other, and continue working as I left off. It just works, as Steve said. Goodbye all worries about "am I actually editing the current version now?"

The only thing to remember is to save (and preferably close) the document before you leave the first Mac; if both machines have unsaved changes to the same doc, DropBox will (so they say, have not tried) notice this and save each as a separate copy, so you have to figure out which is which. But it should be second nature anyway to save the file you work on when you leave the Mac.

DropBox also works as an extra backup, because you then have separate copies on each Mac as well as on their server in case one Mac falls into the sea, and they there also keep older versions a bit like a surrogate TimeMachine. Or even better: A colleague of mine soaked her iBook with water the other day. Clean water, so she just left it to dry out and it worked fine (well, the screen sloshed a bit). But she needed her files on that particular day while it was drying. She had a backup with TimeMachine on a TimeCapsule, but what good was that? We realized that TimeMachine is fairly restrictive. It will restore old files to the original Mac only, or to a direct clone such as a fresh hard disk. In our case, we wanted to access her files from another Mac, using her account name and password, but the TimeCapsule would not hear of it. When we tried to connect to the capsule from another Mac with her identical account settings, it saw just the hardware Mac, not the account, as a new client (which is logical, since Time Machine of course also backs up system settings, not just account data, and the system was different). Maybe if we had TimeMachine on a physically connected hard drive rather than the wifi Time Capsule, we could have accessed the volume directly, but that was not an option. Here DropBox would have been a better solution, had her files had been on that server, she could have just picked it up from a web browser.

That is because you can also access your DropBox folder on the web, so you can get to your files there in a browser on any Mac or PC and copy to that machine, as well as to your iGadget. There is a DropBox app on the iPhone, in it you can read but not edit the file, and only the basic document types are supported for reading, thus not e.g. FileMaker databases. But it can "send" the DropBox file to other apps that allow you to open and edit; thus my databases (now all on DropBox, remember) can be downloaded and passed on to the FileMaker Go app (the "official" Filemaker for iPhone), which opens it normally. Of course, that is then a separate copy and changes made to the file are not reflected back to DropBox; I would have to transfer the file back to a Mac via iTunes, but still, being able to access to all my databases anywhere is great, even if just for reference (have I actually bought this book I see in the bookstore? Ah yes, I did.)
            For example, I have an app ShowAnytime which allows me to display PowerPoints directly on a VGA screen from the iPhone, without using a PC or Mac. It can pick up files from my DropBox folder, so if I am on the road and something happens to the provided PC (which it often does), I can instead just connect my iPhone to the video cannon, download the file I left at the office (in the DropBox folder). Without having to plan it in advance, just as long as I have the iPhone-to-VGA cable with me in my backpack (it never leaves).
          I said DropBox is free, that gives you 2 gigabytes storage, you can get more with a subscription, but 2GB for current projects and all my Filemaker stuff is enough for me. There are other similar solutions, but I am quite happy with Dropbox.

Notes and stuff: Evernote
Those are the big things. But then there are piles and piles of stuff that also syncs, as I said, I am not sure I remember all accounts I have any more. The blog you are reading is edited in Blogspot, which syncs my draft to my account with them, so I can write on it anywhere (that is why they get so long). Blogspot is part of the Google empire, which is also heavy on syncing if you have a Gmail account (gives you access to everything). If you do not need very advanced word processing, you can write your files in GoogleDocs, from anywhere.
There is a GoogleDocs app from iPhone, I used instead NoteMaster which syncs back and forth with GoogleDocs, but really, I don't actually write anything on the iPhone. Perhaps more useful on an iPad, but I have not made that leap.
         I have earlier discussed creating a newsstream ("Make your own newspaper") with the RSS system. This does not have built-in syncing (so you can create different "newspapers" on different Macs), but many apps and programs use, again, Google as a repository: You set up your subscriptions in Google Reader, and then other apps sync your settings (and read status and so on) from Google, so they are all on the same page. I use Reeder both on iPhone and Mac, but there are many others who also sync with Google.
        I have also discussed the "ToDo-list" issue, where syncing was an issue. I have for the moment stayed with WunderList that I mentioned there, but maybe look into the Omni alternative suggested by a comment, when I get back to that.
         Specifically for academic purposes, I have also elsewhere discussed citation and bibliography software, that is alternatives to EndNote, and suggested the program Sente, which is what I mostly use. This also syncs my bibliographic database to its server, so that when I add a title at home, I have also access to it at the office. Several other alternatives also do this. It has worked fine so far.

Evernote
One program that has been much recommended, but which I initially didn't quite see my need for, was Evernote. It is not a to-do thing, but a place to write and store notes of pretty much any kind, and, again, synced between computers, and also accessible on the web (so you can get to your notes from any PC or Mac). I am sure that could be used for pretty much any purpose, but I couldn't quite think up what I would need it for.
             However, I came up with one particular very limited purpose, and since it is also free, I have started using it for just that: Storing web pages. There are of course many specified services for this, like Instapaper and others (and in the latest version of Safari, more of which in a moment), but the idea for me was not to find a way to delay reading web pages - they pile up, and if I can't read a page now, I will never get the time.
             But, at infrequent intervals I come across references to books I might like to buy at Amazon (or elsewhere). I can't buy everything the moment I see them, so the ideas must be stored to be prioritized later (and not in Amazon's wish list, please). I actually began creating Safari bookmarks for each Amazon page, but that was cumbersome. Perhaps Evernote could do this for me.
It did: You install the app, and it puts an elephant icon in the Safari toolbar. Click on the elephant, and the current web page is stored to your notebook (and thus synced between your Macs, of course). You can structure the entries as you like (Must buy, Perhaps later, Maybe not) and so on. This is also useful for newspaper cuttings which I have read, but would like to keep. Unlike Safari 5, Evernote saves the actual page, not just the link (but also the link, if you want to go back to the Amazon page), so you have the article even if the newspaper has removed it. So far, that has been useful enough for me to make me stop upgrading Safari for the moment.

Because, this "web clipper" was excellent in Safari up and until the latest Safari upgrade a few weeks back. Then it broke down; Safari has done something so the elephant icon no longer works. Happily, I read a warning about this before being asked to upgrade from Safari 5.0 (OK) to 5.1 (not OK). If you have already dutifully done what Apple told you and installed a full system upgrade in the last month or two, then unfortunately, the train has passed (you can upgrade the other elements, just deselect Safari). A few days ago, Evernote released a new "extension" for Safari that should supposedly restore the web clipping function, but that did not work at all for me with Safari 5.1 under OS 10.6.8. Maybe it is made only for Lion. Anyway, it wasn't quite the same thing. The original extension copies the web page directly to Evernote on your Mac (from where it is synced later to the server). The new cannot do that, it instead copies the page to the server, and it is later synced back to your Evernote collection. In any case, it didn't do anything of the sort, it simply refused to load or do anything.
         There is another "recommended" option, which is to set up an Evernote bookmark in Safari. That does work in Safari 5.1, and again copies the web page to your account on the Evernote server. But while the original web clipper gave you a perfect copy of the page, the bookmark does not. Most of the html disappears; you may get the text (with some code around it), but not all images etc. So, if you want Evernote to clip web pages, hold back on upgrading Safari beyond 5.0. (I was able to downgrade by dragging a copy of Safari 5.0 from another Mac back to the one I had upgraded. No, Time Machine did not work here either, it reinstalled something that was not an application, just a folder.)

Will it iCloud over?
So what about the new Apple iCloud? As mentioned, I have kept off because of the Lion requirement. To me just now it seems to be a step backwards rather than forward. It is free, of course, while MobileMe was subscription, but otherwise it does less. Dropbox is a vast improvement over iDisk, and the other third-party syncs probably do much of what iCloud can do. For me, syncing iCal and Address Book is very important, in particular the calendar, and for the moment it seems iCloud will do that more easily than other options, so I will probably move over when MobileMe closes down and/or I have to go to Lion anyway. Unless I can find a better solution for iCal by that time. I was enthusiastic about the "pick up where you left on the other machine" that iCloud promised for iWork documents, but it was only for Apple's own programs, and I now already have that and better in DropBox. But, again, iCould is free, so using it for iCal alone will be OK.

What other syncing software do I have? iSync of course, but for my purpose, it was only used for linking mobile phones, it is not relevant for my iPhone, but I used it for my old Nokia. Then there is the paraphernalia of social networking things that evidently sync, they are often actually web services, not Mac programs, but several of them have corresponding Mac programs that do pretty much the same thing as the web site, such as Skype, Spotify, Wimp, Twitter (for me: Twitterific) and others have indpendent apps for Mac as well as iPhone. For all these, and for Facebook etc., you can of course just as easily use your regular browser.

Keeping track of the account names and passwords for all these services are another matter. Some log you on automatically, or keep you logged in for long periods of time, so you should be aware of who can access your computer(s). For others, you must find your own system of how to remember it all. But in any case, while you should perhaps not keep your head in the cloud, you can keep pretty much everything on your Mac in some cloud or other by now. Even without the iCloud.

To do a to-do

Apparently, one of the most common type of utility programs / apps out there are tools to create to-do lists, Jiminy Crickets that whisper in your ear what you have not done and how long overdue it is. For a long time, I did not think I needed any such, not because of the clarity of my conscience, but because I tended to use Mail's "In" box for the purpose: Most of my "tasks" come through email, and I tend to deal with them in one of two ways: What can be done at once, I reply to immediately as I read the email, which is then sorted to its permanent storage (hence "reading my morning email" tends to take me until lunch or longer). What needs consideration, I leave in the In box and get back to when I have pondered. The In box thus became the To do list. When an item was so old that it passed out of sight above more recent emails, then it was probably too late to do anything with anyway.

This actually worked fairly OK, except for those who had passed above, who mostly never received a reply. Since I use imap mail, my In box is identical at home and at the office, so I could see my tasks whereever I went. What began to break it down, was actually as I started to create new filters ("rules") that put email from such and such correspondent (students, e.g.) directly into their respective mailboxes (and into an "unread" smart mailbox). Then, if it contained tasks of the ponder type, it could disappear from view if I did not move it to the In box or set its status back to Unread.

So, to avoid overlooking things I should do, I noticed the "To do" button in Mail's toolbar which I had previously ignored. Could I mark these pre-sorted emails as "tasks" in Mail's To-do list so I could find them there on need? Yes, I could, selecting some text in the email creates a link so I from the To-do list can click directly to the email and see what I am supposed to do. This link was essential for me. Mail also allows me to set a due date to sort the tasks by, and priority. It also syncs the to-do items with iCal, which is of less use to me. Good. However, what about the home / office synchronization? Both iCal and Mail are synchronized, so logically, my new to-do list should sync either way, shouldn't it? Well, it should but it does not. The two sync in different ways, iCal through MobileMe, and Mail through the iMap on my university mail server. Neither syncs the to-do list between office and home.

As for iCal, it matters which calendar you select for the item. Since the original email was in a campus imap folder, iCal links the item to a separate imap to-do calendar outside of the MobileMe calendars it syncs. If you try to move it to a MobileMe calendar, the link between the task and the original email is broken in Mail, which was the object of the exercise. As for syncing directly in Mail through the imap account, that just does not work. Perhaps my imap server does not support task syncing (or attaching to-dos to emails in the first place - which sounds reasonable, since this appears very much to be an Apple Mail thing). Anyway, it does not show up.

Full sync attempt
So, I started looking at third-party options. Because of the history above, my requirements were:
- It should link tasks with Mail and/or iCal, and not break the email / task link inside Mail.
- It should in some form or other allow syncing between two Macs (home / office).
That was really what I wanted, and was missing from the internal Mail solution that was otherwise good enough for me. Yes, of course, grouping tasks into topics, marking overdue items, and so on were useful additions too, but not essential. And, since my needs beyond Mail was so simple, I was not willing to pay terribly much for the app: simple would do.

There was indeed a bewildering array of programs to choose from. So, the correct one may have passed me by. But I started out looking for the first requirement, linking with Mail (or iCal). Not many did so, and of course I did not look at the behemoth "project managers" that deal with flow charts and project subroutines and whatnot, I was not about running a company or assigning underlings. Many programs add my simple "to-do" requirements to other tasks that were not important to me, I just wanted a simple manager that took care of my two wishes. In the end, I found one I thought might do it: Things (€40). Fairly straightforward, it does allow grouping tasks into projects, keeps track of "Today" and "Later", and lets you set priority (like Mail does). Pretty much what I wanted. It syncs with iPhone as well, and it syncs with iCal, which was point 1.

Syncing with iCal and through it with Mail worked pretty well. There is always some confusion when you have three programs that sync with each other, but easily sorted out. However, the second point was not in place. You can sync one Mac and iPhone (over wifi), but not Mac with Mac, which was what I wanted. So, I thought maybe I could use my iPhone as relay: Sync office Things with iPhone, take that home and sync iPhone with home Things. Well. It worked after a fashion, I guess. It would refuse to auto-sync the iPhone to the second Mac, so you would have to delete the iPhone connection and re-install it each time, which only takes a few seconds, actually. But eventually, it got confused. Of course the original emails were the same at home and office, but Things saw the to-do tasks as separate, so you would have to make sure to create a task on only one of the Macs, and not to change the status, category or anything else on a task "belonging" to the other Mac, otherwise it would be orphaned or appear in duplicate or triplicate, or the email/task link would be broken. In time most of these links that I wanted to preserve disappeared. I mostly do different things at the home and office, but not quite always, and in this system a task could have its email link only on the Mac it was created, not on the other. It became more and more messy and less and less useful.

Semi-automatic
So, in the end I gave up on the full-automatic solution. Proper syncing should really take place inside Mail or iCal, and adding a third party solution does not seem to work. If Things were to add full Mac-Mac syncing, then maybe, unless that also introduced some new troubles for the Mail links.


Thus, I have settled for a simpler "semi-automatic" solution. Leaving Point 1 by the side, I focused on Point 2, Mac-Mac synchronization. Here, again there may be many solutions, but I found one which seems to fulfil my requirement: Wunderlist (free). Since it is free, it is also as simple as it could be: It does not link to iCal or anything, you type in your item and set a date. You can create groups of tasks and star an item, but no other priorities (but you can add text in a comment field). It does not sort items by due date automatically, but you can move them around in the order you want.

Most importantly here, it does sync between all kinds of devices, including multiple Macs, iPhone, other smartphones or PCs, using its own server; you can also access your list on the web.

So, that has become my solution for the moment: It requires me to create the to-do item in Mail either on my home Mac, on the office Mac, or in both places, they are now quite separate. At the same time, I create an item in Wunderlist, into which I can paste relevant bits from the email, if I want to. The wunderlist works as the actual reminder of what I should do, and when I get to it, I can open the To-do panel in Mail and click on the link that takes me to the email. The extra work is not substantial, and if I know that this is an "office-only" task, I can ignore it on my home Mac and vice versa; and if I know that I will get to the job quickly in Mail, I can create the to-do there only without adding it to the Wunderlist, which makes the system perhaps more flexible even if less automatic. Of course, I can, in Wunderlist as in all these solutions, type in reminders to tasks that are not based on email. And the price is right.

In Lion, this kind of syncing should be vastly improved in the cloud, so we will see when all my Macs eventually get to that stage, but for the moment, I think this will work. Just as long as I remember to check into my to-do list to find what I exactly have to do.

A digital radio for the iPhone crowd?

Last summer, I was much annoyed by a publicity campaign by some broadcasters saying "Yes to digital radio". Not because I am against digtital radio, but because it was disingenious. Digital radio is already here. What they actually meant, was, "No to analog radio": They were asking for permission to turn off regular FM transmission so that all listeners would be forced to purchase a digital radio, which in Europe means a DAB radio. Their arguments were mostly wrong, to wit, that DAB means better sound (it does not, DAB is normally sent at a sound / bitrate quality similar to good FM) and we would get more channels (some will, but most only marginally: the proposed DAB band is already full with 16 channels, while I currently get about 13 FM channels and not quite the same ones, many get more.) And, of course, DAB radios are still pretty expensive, more likely above 100 euro than below 50. Multiply that by the number of FM radios you have in your kitchen, bedroom, car or cabin which you will have to replace, for no apparently good reason.

Anyway, the campaign worked and it is decided that FM will be cut off in this country in 2017. That is still some time off, but in spite of my irritation, I decided to experiment a little in this direction. But to make it worthwhile and to mask my DAB annoyance, it would have to be something of real new value; meaning internet radio (which is also digital, but unrelated to closing down FM).

Command-line radio
So, when my fifteen-year old bedside radio started to grow a bit wonky, I started looking around for a "triple radio", FM, DAB and Internet. I already had an internet-only radio that I got while in the US (Grace Digital, $300), but clearly adding terrestial radio was useful. Such triple radios do not of course cover the lower range of the price spectrum, but I wanted to see what was available and how they worked.

The Grace radio works fine, but is not overly user-friendly. It is based on a two-line command-line interface which you control through a wheel dial, navigating up and down lists and "typing" by locating each letter with the dial. For presets beyond the first three, you must use the remote, which by and large does not respond to double-digit choices. Once in a while, however, the radio happily turns itself on and keeps going until someone comes along to turn it off. It apparently did so when I was away on holidays and must have driven my dormitory neighbour nuts, blaring incomprehensible Norwegian 24/7 through the paper-thin walls until I came back and could turn if off. By which time she had moved out.

Anyway, the command-line works, and once you got through the setup, the radio did its job quite well within its limits. Also, as I started looking at ads for internet, DAB and triple radios, they all seemed to work pretty much in the same way, although some had a larger display with four or five lines, all seemed to be based on a command-line interface reminiscent of 2-inch computer screens of the 1980s. Price-wise, triple-radios run from about £100-150 up. Functionally, they allow you to search the radio's [online] database for internet stations by name, country, type of content, etc., and often transfer music over wifi from your PC/Mac, hook up your iPod etc.

Pure Sensia
But scanning through these fairly similar-looking offerings, suddenly one stood out as really a radio for the iPhone crowd: Pure Sensia. A British product, it was also almost the most expensive I found, at £250, but gorgeous, shaped like a rugby ball with the front cut off for a large colour 6-inch touch display. Instead of a dreary LCD line with bluish letters, you get a real menu, a list which you flick up and down like on your iPhone and tap to make your selection. Flick left and right, and different options and gadgets appear. You turn it on and off by waving your hand above the radio (literally). So, I did not actually need it, but I wanted it. Lust won over sensibility. I got one.

So how well did it do in practice? Well, the start was a disaster. After unpacking and turning it on, finding the 16 DAB stations and entering my wifi details, it at once asked if I wanted to install a system update (an internet radio is of course a computer, and updates over the air). This was to improve responsiveness in the touch-screen, which was said to be under par, so I said yes, it waffled away, and then said, "Unable to complete" on an otherwise blank screen. Power down and up again, but no go. The old system was gone and the new was "unable to complete". Reset? Check the manual (online on their website): "Go to the menu such and such on the Settings screen". What settings screen? The only screen was "unable to complete". Never mind, what about the hardware reset switch? Nowhere to be seen. A little hole for the paper clip? There was a little hole, but it made no difference - actually there was just a screw in the bottom of it.

So, checking the online knowledge base, it did have the answer: "If you get the "Unable to complete", download the system update to your Windows PC, attach this by USB cable and run the installer.exe." What Windows PC? This is the radio for the trendy, Jonathan Ive-inspired iPhone crowd, the iMac of radios, and they thought I owned a PC? Well, we do have some on the campus I could access, so I took the radio with me to town. But, no way. The installer is an .exe, and we mundane lab users are not allowed to install .exe files on campus PCs. Well, so. Time to test out the VM Fusion PC emulator with Windows 7 I had bought but not really used (what do I need Windows for? Anyway it takes half an hour to boot and brings the rest of my Mac to a virtual halt, not pleasant). But here, I apparently needed it. But wait, did the Sensia update  run on Windows 7? It was very specific, and yes, XP, Vista or Win 7, 32-bit-version. Since my Mac is Intel, I had installed the 64-bit version of Win 7 (which I probably shouldn't have, seeing the performance, but you can't downgrade easiliy). Would that not work? I emailed Pure customer service, which kindly confirmed that it would not. Only 32-bit.

OK, Win 7 came with both options. I wasn't sure I would be flagged as a pirate since I already had installed the 64-bit, but I tried; opened a new "virtual machine" under Fusion, and installed the 32-bit version alongside the old (they now appear as two different "computers"). Windows has not complained about double-install so far, and lo and behold: The Sensia upgrade installer downloaded. It needed a spcial USB cable, but I had one of that type lying around, so it went away and did install. Bliss, the rugby ball had become a radio again, and not the £250 doorstop I had feared.

Graphical radio
So, now that scare has passed, how does perform? Was it worth it? Yes, it was. The display is divided into three graphical panels, with an icon-based "application bar" at the bottom. On the left, a list of stations (DAB, Internet, Favourites, Search results, etc.) On bottom right, a panel with information from the station playing, and on top right a larger panel with application extras. For installing settings, searching, etc., you get an on-screen keyboard a bit larger than that of an iPhone, which is quite convenient.

The screen thus displays still pictures, but not video, this is a radio! Sometimes it hesitates when I switch apps, I may have to keep my finger steady a couple of seconds before it registers the station I want, and my butty index finger often selects the wrong item in the list. But on the whole, it is quite nice, the list flicks up and down pretty much like on your smartphone, and it definitely has the "Mac and iPhone feeling" of working.

Available DAB (DAB/DAB+) stations of course download on installation, and you can select 30 favourites (from among the 16 in this country...). You can also search internet radio (unlimited favourites) by the usual criteria of country, type, etc. and name. Its selection of available podcasts is good (I use our NRK as test, many podcast apps only list a few of theirs, while Sensia seems to have a full load), and you can save them among your internet favourites. You can search and administer internet radio directly on the screen, or create an account with "the Lounge" on Pure's website and organize your list on your PC/Mac. Apparently if you have several radios from Pure (I don't) they can share the same list of favourites. (Grace, my older internet radio, has a similiar web setup). I wasn't quite happy with Lounge's user friendliness, but if so, do it on the radio directly.

The third part, FM radio, was however a wash-out. The radio found only five or six of my dozen available stations, the rest merged into a sound soup (overlapping sound signals). Further, whenever you go from FM to DAB, the radio crashes and has to be reset. So, best forget about FM here and keep your old set around if you want to listen to stations not available on DAB or internet.

Extra functions
The radio is pretty enough to be in your living room (it really is a rugby ball, sitting loose on a stand), but I needed it as a bedside radio. So, I wanted an alarm clock, on the other hand, I don't like staring at a clockface when I wake up at night. Perhaps a special nit, but I was quite happy with Sensia's solution: When you turn the radio off, the screen goes completely black. If you want to know the time, just touch anywhere on the screen - I can do that, fumbling half asleep - and the time is displayed in huge numerals you can't miss, for three seconds, then fade away. Alarms, of course, are availble of various types. Easy to set, easy to forget to turn off afterwards.

In addition to radio, the Sensia can also play music transmitted over wifi from your Mac/PC (your iTunes collection), assuming of course that the PC has software for transmission. My older Grace as well as my TV should do this, but neither worked from my Mac. The TV manual said I should install something called a "Twonky Server" on the Mac, which I did, but it could not connect. Maybe there were other third-party options, but I left it at that, not terribly important. Sensia uses the same Twonky, and I mentioned its uselessness in my conversation with customer relations. They pointed me to a beta of a new version of Twonky, and lo and behold, this worked! I can now see playlists etc. from my Mac iTunes not only on Sensia, but also on the older Grace radio. But not on the TV, well never mind that. The Sensia can also play sound from the iPod, but only through the iPod's headphone connection, not the dock, so it does not charge the iPod.

Finally, the radio also sports some apps: thus Facebook, Twitter and Picasa, which I have not used, as well as RSS feeds (headlines only, not the underlying news pages). The apps occupy the upper right quadrant, but you can expand them to take up the full screen and give you some more detail. You can type messages on the onscreen keyboard, but I suspect it is not the most convenient place to update your profile. Most useful for this type of device is perhaps the weather report (from AccuWeather). Still, while nice, I don't think the apps should be your reason for buying this radio. But it shows what can be done with an internet radio with graphical interface.

On the whole, while the "iPhone interface" may be dismissed as a gimmick, it is a useful gimmick which makes the experience of dealing with internet radio much more pleasant, and would probably be more helpful in spreading the idea of "digital radio" than any PR campaign. For the moment, Sensia is the only one of its kind, and the price line probably indicates why. But I sure hope this is the way the industry will go. For the moment, I am very happy with the splurge, in spite of the occasional freeze and sputter.

***

UPDATE
In late June, the Sensia received a (non-optional) system update over the air, to version 4. It did install without problems over my previous system 2.4. The update includes some power-saving novelties, in particular that you can now choose its stand-by behaviour between a blank screen, as described and lauded above, and a permanent clock-face display, which may be preferable if you keep the radio in the kitchen or living-room. You can choose between different interface languages, and some icons have been upgraded. The FM reception seems better now, at least it can find ten of my thirteen stations, and with better RDS reception. It still crashes on return to DAB, however, but now only after a minute or two of DAB - then it freezes and then reboots (automatically). You can of course work that way, if you are OK with the two-three minute reboot wait. 

What will the Lion eat?

It will be hard to overlook that Apple has with big fanfare announced a new version of its operating system. Formally system 10.7, it is nicknamed "Lion", another big cat from Apple. What will this mean for unsuspecting Mac users?

It is major overhaul, and many will appreciate the new features brought to the Mac. For older users, the drawback that you can no longer use certain older program, such as Eudora or AppleWorks, will make you want to hold out as long as possible before changing to Lion.

Point One, do I need to change? Answer: No, not until you buy a new Mac. When you get a new Mac, it will only work with the new system. But until then, you can ignore all that follows, if you like.

However, if you use Apple's online service called MobileMe, previously .Mac and iDisk, then you may have to rethink. These services will run for another year, until the summer of 2012, then they will close down and be replaced with the new iCloud. Apple's small print says "some features" of iCloud will require Lion, without saying whether the service itself will be unavailable to earlier systems. Rumour mills point out that at least automatic backup (below) is not possible with older systems. That is likely to affect the current storage facility iDisk, and certainly any new feature of iCloud will require the new system. But it is not clear whether it will also apply to the existing synchronization of iCal, Safari and Address Book. Nevertheless, it is possible that if you want to use these, then you will have to upgrade your system software at the latest by the summer of 2012.

Point Two, can I upgrade to Lion with my current Mac, or do I need a new computer? By and large, if your Mac was bought in 2007 or later, you can install Lion on it, if it is much older it will not work. It looks at the processor chip inside, it must be of the type Intel Core 2 Duo [both 2 and Duo] or newer. This was introduced in 2006, my MacBook of the type "Late 2006" has one. You will see this information in "About this Mac" under the apple menu. It should also have 2 GB memory or more. Notice that you can only install Lion from the previous system 10.6 (Snow Leopard), check About This Mac to see what you now have. If your current machine uses system 10.5 or older, you must first purchase system disks for 10.6 (about $30, mostly), install it, and update it to 10.6.8, before you can install Lion.

Point Three, what is good and positive about Lion? From Apple's hype, lots and lots, this is a major new upgrade. Listening to their demo, it struck me that for "regular users", many of the novelties will just be confusing. If you use existing features like "Exposé" and "Spaces" (I use Spaces a lot), then you will be happy with the many new ways to organize your work. If you have never heard or cared about these, then most of the new stuff in Lion is also also likely to leave you cold.

A couple of things did however strike me as interesting even to the "regular user". One is that, for adapted programs, there is no more "Save" command. The program saves your typing and editing automatically and continuously. If you made a mistake and want to go back to what you had earlier, then you can call up an earlier "version" (a bit like today's Time Machine, if you have used it), have new and old side by side, and pick out what you like. That is useful.

       Another useful thing for some, certainly for me and perhaps others who work partly at home and partly at the office, is automatic syncing of documents. All your saved documents are stored at the Apple server called "iCloud", automatically, so you can just stop typing at home, get up and go to the office, and continue typing where you left off. The doc is automatically saved and synced, so that they are identical at home, at the office, or anywhere else that you sign onto iCloud with your account and password.
      Mind you, that will work only in programs that build in this feature, primarily Apple's own iWork program (word processor etc.). It is not known if e.g. Microsoft Word will join this system, as they are working on their own (paid) online service. Other programs from other companies may or may not work in this way.
       Middle Easterners may appreciate that Arabic is now a system language, so that Finder menus etc. will appear in Arabic. We'll see how far that is implemented.

Point Four, what is bad about the Lion? That is perhaps just as important to spell out, as Apple does not boast about that. And we will not know for sure until it is out. However, it seems fairly certain that you will not be able to use older programs under Lion. Older probably means software from before ca. 2006 or 2007. Such clean breaks happen at regular intervals: to keep a computer compatible with old software gets more and more complicated as time goes on and systems are renewed, so every few years, Apple cuts the cord and says, our system will not "support" (i.e., you cannot use) old stuff any more. The last break was the "Classic" (OS 9) software from the 1990s, which was dropped around 2007 or '08. This change here is more insidious, because Classic software looked quite different from modern software, so we saw clearly what is what, now it is much harder to recognize what will work from what will not. Some upgraders may not even have heard about the loss before they stare at their new computer which will not run their favourite programs.

In short, programs such as these will no longer work:
- Microsoft Word and Office 2004. (You need to upgrade to the 2008 or 2011 versions)
- Eudora email
- AppleWorks
- Canvas graphics program
- Freehand graphics
- lots and lots of games, small tools and stuff you may have installed years ago and has become second nature to your work habits.

Many programs are or will be upgraded (such as Word above) so you need just install a new version. However, the others I mentioned are no longer made or sold, and will therefore never be upgraded to Lion. You will then either have to find a different program that does the same job, or forgo the function altogether. (Remember: this will happen when you get a new Mac, as all of us have to do at some time in the future.)

Each one of us has a different set of software. If you are a recently arrived Mac user, then you are probably not affected, and can happy of mind upgrade to Lion. If you have been using a Mac for more than five-six years, then you will most likely have some or many non-upgraded or non-upgradable software, and should check this out before you move on to Lion.

How do you find this out? Well, the distinction is between "PowerPC" and "Intel" software. This relates to the processor chip in the Mac. These two are actually fundamentally different, and it is a bit of Apple magic that we have been using programs written for the old processor and the new together without noticing the difference. No more. So, you must locate what applications for "PowerPC" you have on your Mac. Quickest is to check here:

Go to About this Mac I mentioned above. There is a button "More Info", click on it. You get huge list with everything about your computer. Find and click on "Applications". After some seconds you get a long list of everything. Click on the heading "Kind", to sort the items for this. You will find three main kinds (in addition to obsolete "Classic", maybe): Intel, PowerPC and Universal. The last is fine, it works both on old and new, and is probably the largest group. But look at the PowerPC group. Most of these are meaningless names, they are support tools and invisible things, some may also refer to older versions that you have not deleted yet. But look through the names and see if you recognize software that you actually use and need. (You can also, in Finder, click on the icon for any suspect program, choose "Show Info", it will say: "Kind: Application ([PowerPC, Intel, or Universal]). The latter two are thus fine). If you see a PowerPC item, check if you already have a newer version installed (re-sort under name to find them in the list), or whether upgrades are available in Universal or Intel versions. If not, you will have a quandry to sort out, whether to hold out as long as possible with the system you have, or you want to prepare for the afterlife of that software already now.

(The webside Roaring Apps also has a large lists Mac applications and their compatiblity with Lion, so you can also check there.)

I suspect that for many people who have used Macs since the 1990s, the sorest point in this list is Eudora. A separate message will therefore deal with this: What do Eudora users do when Lion no longer lets them use their favourite email program?

From Eudora to... Eudora?

One of the best beloved programs on the Mac was the email program Eudora, originally freeware made by the software hero Steve Dorner, later commercially sold by the Qualcomm company. For generations of users, Eudora was our introduction to email, and for many it is still synonymous with "email".

Thus, although the latest version of Eudora (6.2.4) was released as long ago as 2004, many are still using this program and swear by it (or have not bothered checking out the alternatives). However, its epoch may be coming to an end. Eudora 6 is one of the applications that will no longer work under the new Mac system "Lion" (10.7). Even if you hold off upgrading for this reason alone, sooner or later your Mac will break down and you will have to replace it. Then Eudora will be no more. We can't forgo email, so we have to look into alternatives.

There are no lack of such, on your Mac you automatically get Mail (normally called Apple Mail in contrast to other email programs). Thunderbird is popular, some are forced to use Outlook, and there are many others. All do of course the same basic things of collecting and sending your email, although they differ in more advanced stuff as automatic filtering into mailboxes and the like. Which you choose is a matter for another column. I am here more concerned with those who may suddenly find that they are cut off from their old Eudora mail, because their new Mac will not run the program. What to do?

Well, the mail is not lost, of course. Eudora kept its mailboxes as "straight text files", so you find the "Mail" folder inside your Eudora folder, and just open any mailbox in any word processor you like. But then all text as well as technical headers of the mailbox will be one long document of text, not as individual email messages. How to keep the structure?

One option, and the easiest, is to import all your old mail into your new email program. Since Eudora was so common, many or most modern Mac email systems have an "import email from Eudora" option, certainly both Apple Mail and Thunderbird do. For those two (and even for importing into other programs), it may be also be useful to use the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner program. That is a small "applet" that prepares your old Eudora mail for importation, and then copies it into either of those two programs, so that you can just open the new program of choice and find your email. Often the Cleaner does a better job of transferring from old to new than the new program's own import options. (Notice that Cleaner does not run under the Lion system, so you must use it before upgrading.)

Some perhaps useful jargon: POP or IMAP
Another very useful option, if your email account is of the POP type, to change it to IMAP in old Eudora before you change. Then there is no importing required. These may be Greek terms to you, but put very briefly, they are two ways your email server handles your email: In the older POP system, your email is transferred from your server (your "email provider": your university or cable company, or whereever your email account is) to your Mac. Eudora lets you keep a copy on the server for a while, but the main mail storage is on your local Mac. In IMAP it is the opposite, your email is kept on the server. You may and normally do get a copy on your local Mac(s), but the "original" is on the server. In IMAP the structure of mailboxes and folders and stuff is also on the server and thus the same whichever computer you connect from, in POP it is only on your local Mac.

It is up to the provider which system it provides its email in, but many or most now support both options and allow you to choose. You can check which one you use now by going to the menu Special: Settings: Mail Protocol, it will have the options POP or IMAP. Check with your provider before you change that, if you go from POP to IMAP you may have to change the server address and other settings. You can then copy your existing local mail back to the IMAP server. If you do that, it will then be automatically available in whichever new email program you use. POP was most common before and is most likely what your Eudora is set up with, but check, if it is already an IMAP account, switching to a new email program is quite easy. It is also useful when you are not sure which email program you will be settling for, you can test several and switch back and forth with relative ease, as the mail is anyway always on the server.

Email in storage
However, you probably have accumulated lots of email and may want to make a clean break with your new program (thus also for the Imap option mentioned, it may slow down in particular if you have too many messages - more than a couple of thousand - in your In box, and some providers set a quota of how many MB you may store in your account on their server). This was my case when I switched a year or two ago to Apple Mail; I started out with a clean new setup, but still wanted to have access, of course, to my old email. I therefore kept old Eudora around, and opened it only when there was some old information I wanted from that period. That will then no longer be possible  under Lion, so I had to look at a new way to access this old Eudora email in a useful fashion (searching by date etc.)

A possibility recommended by some is to import old Eudora email into a "note archive" program, since I only want to read the email as an archive. One program some recommend is Eagle Filer, which imports Eudora email and presents it to you in the original structure of mailboxes and folders within folders (if you have such). That seemed to work fine, it imported fairly quickly. However, it could not understand the formatting commands in the emails (which you don't see in Eudora, but in Eagle Filer turned up as <blockquote type="cite" cite>Notice: </blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite" cite>1)Make note of..." with the real text mixed in, so it was hard to read. Also, a large proportion of the email had lost the dates, it was all "written in 1904", so it was not terribly useful.

I therefore put the Eagle aside, and since I already had the old mail in a separate mail program (old Eudora), I thought it would be easier to keep that idea, and just find a new program that could read old Eudora mail, but which would not be used for active email. Well, there was no reason to look far: There is actually a new Eudora, called Eudora OSE 1.0, and what would be more useful than to read Eudora email in a refreshed Eudora?

You may wonder why the detour, why not go directly to this new and upgraded Eudora at once? The reason is that it isn't really an upgraded Eudora, it is a completely different email program that has adopted the Eudora name. It is actually a version of the freeware email program Thunderbird (which is part of the Firefox package), but it has been modified to look and behave more like old Eudora, so that old hands should find it useful. According to web sources, its reception has been "less than enthusiastic", it took a long time coming (it is a freeware program, you don't pay, but noone pays the people who develop it either), it has suffered under various bugs and glitches, and it clearly differs in many ways from old Eudora. So, many people have not found it yet to be a worthy successor, and since I only use Apple Mail actively, I cannot either recommend or warn against Eudora OSE as an active email program.

But one thing it should excel in, is to import email from its older counterpart, so that was my second stop. Did it work? Yes, it did, although it took some time. The main problem seems to be the actual process of importing large amounts of mail. I had two different Eudora folders, one at home with a more reduced set of email, 20-30.000 emails or so, and the full archive on my office Mac, with 88.000 emails from 1991 to 2008, and sorted into I think about 600 different mailboxes. Sounds like a lot, but over seventeen years, things do pile up.

Method One: Eudora OSE's Import command
So, I started at home. First I installed Eudora OSE. Since it is an email program, it must have some mail account to refer to, but I wasn't going to use it for new and current email, only for old storage. Thus, I set it up for an old passive mail account I had, and set "never check for mail". You can probably just write in a spurious account or wrong password, as long as you set it to not check that account.

Then, I used Eudora OSE's own Import command and asked for Import from Eudora. It selected correctly the old Eudora Mail folder, and trundled along importing them (it has to change the structure of the mailboxes, so some internal work is needed). But when it finished, it just stopped with a blank dialogue, with a "Next" button greyed out. On force-quitting (after waiting an hour), there was now a "Eudora Import" mailbox, but it was empty, and I could neither delete it nor do anything with it. This corresponds to reports from other users, so this is clearly a common situation. I guessed that size mattered, so I went back to old Eudora Mail folder and moved most of the mailboxes out of it to another folder, leaving only a few items behind, then tried again (evidently, old Eudora was not running at this time). This time it worked: A "Eudora Import 0" folder appeared in the "Local Folders" hierarchy, with the mail I had left there correctly structured. Then, I went back and switched in another set of mailboxes into Eudora Mail, and chose Import again in OSE, which put it in Eudora Import 1 (In, Out, and Junk are recreated, so you get new empty ones for each import folder).

By thus taking the import in steps, I was able to import all of it. However, Eudora OSE was not done: At once I opened it, it started to "index" the mailboxes, and this it kept on for a while. Anyway, I did not want them in the Import 1...n subfolders, so I selected all mailboxes and dropped onto the Local Folder icon in the hierarchy, which again worked fine; now I had the old structure in place in the new program. However, it then started indexing again the same mailboxes it had already indexed before. Indexing is useful, but takes both time and place. My original folder was about 500 MB, but after the index, the hard disk reported about 2GB less space than before. Maybe it will be reclaimed later, and who counts hard disk space any more.


Method Two: Using Eudora Mailbox Cleaner
Spurred on by this, I tried it again at the larger mail folder at the office. Would Eudora Mail Cleaner work better and avoid having to import bit by bit? Cleaner has two "to" options, Mail and Thunderbird, but as I said, Eudora OSE is esssentially Thunderbird, and in fact it keeps its mail in [user] Library: Application Support: Thunderbird. So letting Cleaner import my old mail into Thunderbird would let Eudora OSE access it? Yes, it did. Cleaner did a good job of it, so after it was finished, I fired up Eudora OSE, set it up with the spurious account, and there my structure was in "Local Folders": Again in (a single) Import folder, which I could drop onto Local Folders to get them one step up in the hiearchy (and thus directly under the "Mailboxes" menu, as in old Eudora).

So it trundled on indexing my 88.000. And went on and went on. And stopped. I tried opening a folder to read the mail in it, but no go. Then wait. Then tried another folder, and nothing happened. And then again; the menu line did not budge. But after a bit, I got the list of the first folder I had asked for. All correct, but it had spent this time working on it. So, I went home to leave it indexing overnight. The next morning, it had just stopped. Quit, restarted, and it started indexing again where it had left off, so at least it had not been lost yesterday's work. But it was still quite unresponsive. A bit later in the day, when I checked back (it had stopped a couple of times, but begun again on quit and restart the program), it had frozen, and now it would not restart even after a force-quit. A Crash reporter reported that there was nothing to report. Again and again each time I tried to start the program, so Eudora was apparently lost.

Well, what to do. Again, the email folder was really in a Thunderbird folder, so maybe Thunderbird, the original program, could access it. Download and install. Looks different from Eudora, and happily was so different that it was not affected by Eudora's crash: It opened, and as expected did find and use the mail folders as it should be. However, it was still fairly unresponsive. Unlike Eudora OSE, Thunderbird did not tell me much of what it was doing, but it was clearly doing something of its own. I found that opening a separate Tab in the mailboxes window (Th-bird has such tabs) was useful, keep a welcome message or something in the other tab and switch to that, then back to the mailbox, and there the mail was listed in place. Go to another mailbox, nothing. But click in the other tab and back, and you could read it.

Well, OK, not useful if I must do that for 600 mailboxes. But perhaps Th-bird had cleared up Eudora OSE's problem? Quit one and start the other, and correctly: Eudora OSE came up, and went back to its indexing spree. But at least this time it eventually finished. And now it works, I can get to all mailboxes, and all spring up at once with the content in place.

Good thing: As far as I can, everything has survived. I have not checked every mailbox, but I have not found any mail missing yet (I still have old Eudora and can check if need be). All dates seem to be in place, unexpectedly good (attachments had been moved years ago, so I could not check those). Status had been lost in some mailboxes, so that all mail was marked incorrectly as Unread, but I can live with that. Many messages have even retained their original status of "Forwarded", "Replied to", etc. Eudora OSE is probably not as versatile as old Eudora, but as an archive it will do, as far as I can see. I am not in a hurry to switch to Lion, so I can still get to my old mail with old Eudora, but I will have this year or so to try out the new one as my archive reader, and can compare and check if I find problems.

One thing that was probably linked to my crashes as cause or effect, was many duplicated empty mailboxes. These appear in particular in mailboxes with punctuation in their names, in particular slashes (/) and periods (.). The first is obvious, Eudora 6 allowed slashes in mailbox names, but they interfere with the file name system in OS X, and even Apple Mail has problems with a mailbox called "London / Paris". OSE renamed it "London:Paris", with the content in place, but then added another empty "Londo5673abd980" mailbox. The same with mailboxes with periods like "Berlin, etc." The comma seems to be fine, but the period causes it to create a spurious "Berli098sdf" alongside the correct "Berlin, etc.", this with its period in place. So it is a good idea to rename any such mailboxes in old Eudora before the transfer, whether or not it affected my problems (which I'm sure were mostly size-related), it does not hurt to avoid punctuation in mailbox names. Removing the empty mailboxes was no problem, and was a once-only operation.

So far, it seems to work, then. The main problem is the transfer itself, and if your mail archive is large, you may have to struggle a bit. But it seems to get there in the end, after jumping through variuos hoops, and as far as these first impressions go, it seems that I can use new Eudora as a full replacement for old Eudora in the limited function I had for it, as a reader of old mail. Whether it can replace old Eudora also as an everyday email program for new and current mail, is not something I have tested, but which probably depends both on how advanced your setup is, and on how patient you are to have mistakes corrected (and willing to experiment to get around issues like we have discussed above). Apple Mail of course has Apple's mighty programming machine behind it, but Eudora OSE does benefit from its closeness to the better supported Thunderbird, even if the OSE program itself is likely to have some bugs left in it.

Make your own newspaper

Over the last few weeks, I have increasingly been forced to have opinions about various stuff Middle Eastern. Not just historical, but "have you followed the cables this morning?" Well, no, I'm not a journalist with access to Reuters and AFP. OK, you can read online newspapers for up-to-the minute stuff, but I have shied away from that, most of them just look so awful (in particular Norwegian ones, they must have made a conspiracy to make them all unreadable).

However, pressed by need, I have looked into this notion of "making your own newspaper". If you are interested in the Middle East, here is how I do it:

In Safari, go to the newspaper you trust and would like to have as a source. Navigate to "World News" and see if there is a tab saying "Middle East" in the menu. Go there, and then look in Safari's address field, notice if the icon "RSS" appears at the end of the line. If so, that page "feeds" news or headlines which you can subscribe to. If you see it, select the item under the icon (either "RSS" or "Atom", they work the same way). You are taken to the feed page, where you see just the text of the news items, as it appears in the feed.

You can subscribe in various ways:
- You can create a bookmark for that newspaper's RSS page, the one you are in now. Then you can later manually go back there, and you will have an updated list of Middle East news that appeared in that newspaper. Some journals post the full text, others just a line or two, with a link to the full item. Safari lets you do stuff like sorting the items on the page by date and title, how much of the story you want to display, etc. You can also search within the articles. If you save several feed bookmarks to one Safari folder (sub-menu), you can display all items from all feeds on one page. (Firefox etc. do things a little differently, but also provide special RSS functions)

- You can also instead read it in Mail. In Safari, go to a feed page you like, and click "Subscribe in Mail". Mail will then display a mailbox header "RSS", and you will find your newspaper feed in there. Again, just the text, and either the full text of the news article, or just a link to the newspaper's web page so you can scan and read what seems interesting. One advantage with getting them in Mail, apart from the fact that you are being updated continuously without any action on your part (but can ignore the RSS mailbox until you are ready to check it), is that you can use regular Mail actions on them. E.g,, you can set up a Smart Mailbox to read simply "All of: Message is of type RSS; Message is Unread", to get all new items collected; or "Message contains: Kuwait", to pick out just those news items that concern your particular area of interest (if the keyword is listed in the headline or teaser that is sent to you).
You can choose to get news feeds appear in your Inbox, and it looks like emails (except for a blue header on all items), but technically it is not, the items are not sent through your email provider, but directly from the newspaper website to Mail. Therefore, if you have set up Mail to synchronize between e.g. home and office Macs with an imap account, these RSS feeds will not synchronize (but the smart mailboxes will: so they will be empty on the other machine). You can of course set up subscriptions to the same feeds at home, but the read/unread status will be separate on each machine.

- To synchronize, you may instead want a separate news reader that does that. There are probably several solutions, but one that seems almost standard is Google Reader (reader.google.com). You need a Google account for this, I believe, at least I hooked up with mine. You then add feed subscriptions (addresses from the feed pages you've found), and Reader will then collect news items from them. You can see each feed (each newspaper's stuff) separately or together, as a list or the full items; you can see just new (unread) stuff or all stored news, you can search (from the newspaper's archive, long before you subscribed if available), and you can do stuff like mark and share individual items. As this is all stored on Google, it is all synchronized whatever machine you read from.

- This is also convient for iPhone / iPad consumption. There are many RSS apps, and most of them synchronize with Google Reader. I use one called Reeder (about $3). You organize the subscription of sources etc. on the web in Google, in the app you just sign in with your gmail name when you set it up. Then, whenever I open it, it collects new items (just unread or all, your choice) from Google Reader and displays them, so you can just continue where you left on on your Mac. Thus, web and iPhone works well together with Google Reader. You can of course also combine Google and Mail subscriptions, but then the read/unread status of the items will be separate, of course.

In sum: I now susbcribe to about ten international journals who have Middle East pages: Guardian (I think the best in number or articles), New York Times, CNN, BBC, Independent, Le Monde, al-Jazira, al-Masri al-Yawm. In the current crisis, that provides about a hundred articles a day on Middle Eastern stuff, hopefully that will become more manageable when the conflicts simmer down. Of these Guardian and Masri al-Yawm provide full-text articles I can read (or skip) directly, the others provide links which makes it quick to run through the list and pick out those worth reading. I end up reading more of the Guardian stuff, however, because it is just there. In any case, with these sources, I get a pretty complete overview of what happens as it is reported. So, using this stuff, it is starting to feel like I really do have a fairly good in-depth personal journal of Middle East.

The key is of course that your interest coincides with the newspaper / news source's organization, so that there is a separate RSS feed for the area of your interest. There are probably not separate feed pages for "butterflies" or "vikings". You would then have to find the closest general source, and use searches or smart mailboxes or similar to pick out your particular interest, if that works. And, of course, proper blog systems always do automatic feeds (thus also this one), so you can also use the same procedure to follow new items on blogs you find interesting.

The Middle East feeds I currently follow:

The Guardian
 
New York Times

Al-Jazeera English (Middle East)

BBC News 

CNN.com

LeMonde.fr

The Independent

Al-Masry Al-Youm: News from Egypt