Richard BF

Age is an odd thing, especially in this day and age. With information flowing at a staggering pace, it is now possible to live many different unconnected lives and experiences in quite a short amount of time. Contrast this with youth today who only think that they've lived it all. But old timers have been saying that since age was discovered I guess.

I don't think I've done as much as a lot of people in my lifetime, but I have done quite a lot of really interesting and fun things, including quite a few unrelated community ecosystems, which are worlds unto themselves and an entire blog in the making.

In the late 80s I took up guitar again and wrote a lot of music. I also spent a lot of time in recording studios in the early 90s and hacking away on 4 track recorders at home throughout much of the 90s. Its really interesting looking back on some of those songs, revisiting moments in history, because I'm so in a different place right now.

Here's a couple of things I was listening to tonight. I was in the combined schools choir in school in the upper registers, but fell in love with punk and spent the next 30 years trying to sing badly, something that's unfortunately set me back in recent years, but that's another story. Strangely my music usually wasn't punk.

I wrote Out to you (3.4MB) at a time when my world seemed to be crumbling around me, I still don't know why, but I still remember who. Never really one for lyrical subtext, this was written for my best friend at the time, and who has been ever since. It must have been written around 1994 or so, but this is a dodgey 2 track from 22nd June 1996, strangely using a Radio Shack PZM.

Rigor mortis (3.8MB) was written in 1991 while learning my way around Cubase. The vox samples are from the Australian film Bodywork. The instruments are all from a couple of Yamaha and AKAI samplers, I can't remember which.

I'll find our way home (3.4MB) is another dodgey 2 track with PZM, coincidentally recorded on the 23rd June 1996, but written probably around 1987-1988 or so. It's my favourite of all my songs, mainly because it had the most emotional impact at the time. Yes, it was for a girl. I don't really have a good recording of it unfortunately. The guitar is an old 12 string with only 6 strings and rattling tuning pegs. I still have the guitar, I don't have the girl.

Giddy was written and recorded on 11th February 1997 as a one off attempt to do a Gerling song. That was before they stopped being a rock band. Not particularly successful, but I like the recording.

And finally No place (3MB) is a silly little sampler piece from 2007. I was trying out Apple's GarageBand software to see how easy it was to use. It didn't seem that much easier than a professional sequencer, but not bad for 30 minutes of hacking around.

Apart from the last one, they all seem a lifetime away, almost unreal. Almost like I simply manufactured the memories. I guess because it wasn't really me, it was a different me, the angst ridden me.

Talk about Google keyword overloading. Anyway, the problem at hand.

There's a lot of information out there on how to convert Outlook to Apple Mail, with some Thunderbird along the way, but most are old enough to be out of date, but not old enough that people realise this.

The upshot is, just follow the steps documented at Migrate Mail Messages (Mac Thunderbird to Apple Mail version 4).

Now for the detail.

Apple's Mail application used to store messages using the popular mbox format, which is pretty much the most widely used mailbox format, except for in Outlook, which uses Microsoft's proprietary .pst format.

But around Mac OS X 10.4, Mail was changed to instead use the .elmx format. The different is namely that mbox files are pretty much an entire file full of the raw headers and text from every email in that mail folder; but .elmx uses parent mbox for each mail folder, but individual .emlx files for each message. Apparently in support of Spotlight, but I'm not sure.

This means that any import of mbox data may not work for OS X 10.4 and above.

On the Outlook side, .pst files are proprietary, and as far as I'm aware there are no non-Microsoft applications that can successfully parse these files. This will change, because Microsoft are currently working on documenting and open up the file format, as part of there open source promise. So the main (only?) way to export from Outlook is to write a program that asks Outlook directly for each email, and manually build mbox files. This is handled through the Windows MAPI interface, and requires Outlook to be running at the time so it can respond to the events being asked of it. Most programs that you buy for converting Outlook files, require you to have Outlook running at the time. They don't really parse .pst files, they convert them by asking Outlook to hand over its message objects.

How to convert Outlook to Mail 4.0

Thankfully, Thunderbird provides its own MAPI import of Outlook files, so launch Outlook first, then download and run Thunderbird, and select import from the file menu. This should leave you with Thunderbird containing all of your Outlook mail.

Next you need to copy the Thunderbird mailbox files over to the Mac, because unsurprisingly enough, the Mac version of Thunderbird uses the same file format, a slightly modified mbox format. Just copy all the files in c:\Users\[username]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\ over to the Mac and put it in /Users/[username]/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/.

You could now run Thunderbird for Mac if you wanted, but you don't need to if you're importing into Apple's Mail application.

Next step is to clean up the files so that Mail can correctly import them. If you import them as is, using Mail's File/Import... function, you'll end up with all the correct folders, but most of them will be empty. To clean them, you need to run the free Eudora Mailbox Cleanup. Don't be fooled by the name, it also cleans Thunderbird files and imports them into Mail. You can download it from here: http://homepage.mac.com/aamann/files/EudoraMailboxCleaner.dmg.

It's compiled for PowerPC only, so if you run it from Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), then it will prompt you to install "Rosetta", the PowerPC emulator for Intel Macs. Let Finder install Rosetta, and then copy the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner application from the .dmg image onto the desktop, as you need to run it from a read/write disk..

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is a drop application, so you need to drag the parent directory that you copied from the Windows version of Thunderbird, and drop it into the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner application icon. You'll get a prompt for the mailbox format, so select Mozilla/Thunderbird and click OK. It should then start converting all your mailbox data.

Once done, just run the Mail application and all your mailboxes will magically appear under your other mailboxes. If you click on them, most won't have any messages, so select each folder in turn and select Mailbox/Rebuild from the Mail menu. Your messages should now appear correctly.

You'd think that Apple would have this all sorted by now.

A little over six months ago I wrote a post titled MYOB - WTF is interaction design again?, in response to the frustration I was feeling over my ongoing battle with MYOB for Windows.

While that battle has continued, with neither of us giving way, I was very impressed that the MYOB team took the time, within 3 days, to find my post and respond. OK, it was just "call us", but still. And I never called anyway, so I only have myself to blame for the ongoing problems right? No, because as I said in that post, these are really obvious problems that any developer or tester worth their pay would discover. Which makes me wonder if MYOB are so under staffed technically that they've had to live with a really high level of acknowledged defects, but I don't buy that, because they'd have to be rolling in cash, seriously.

I don't want to call MYOB and have them show me workarounds for my problems, or promise that they're going to fix them. Just fix them!

Which brings me to my latest bunch of MYOB issues.

• The built in forms are crap. I don't know any other technical way to describe them other than just plain old crap. If one of my developers delivered these to me, I'd be questioning them whether they have any problems at home at the moment, or whether they have a medical condition at all. Here's a tip for MYOB: hire a contract form designer for two weeks, and have them provide some usable forms.
• The form designer is crap. For form design, its worse than Windows Paint is for graphic design. Here's just a few of its problems:
  • There's no way to pin an axis when moving an object. One of the key things with form layout, is lining up of objects on an axis, but in MYOB, you click to select and drag the mouse, and you've just got to hope it looks alright when you let go. You can then double click the object to see its left axis offset, close it, then double click the other object and type in the same left axis offset, but try doing that with a whole bunch of fields. Tip: add a simple shift key lock to the axis that isn't moved first by the mouse. This is how all layout programs work.
  • When you double click on an object, you can't select a position or size value and copy it to the clipboard. Likewise, you can't paste from the clipboard. Considering all the values are of the form xy.abc, its a pain in the arse to have to remember 4 or 5 digits, close a dialog and then double click open another one and then have to type them value in manually from memory. If you want to copy the left axis and the width, then good luck remembering both. Tip: make the clipboard work in EVERY text field in MYOB. And I do mean EVERY field, because it doesn't work in about half of them.
  • If you add a jpeg with the picture object, don't add any white, because white prints as cream. Which means that any logo with a white background will end up printing a cream coloured box around the image, instead of blending with the page. Also, nowhere in the documentation does it say which graphic objects are supported. From my testing, jpeg is OK, but has the lossy cream background issue, tif is OK for black and white but it completely mangles colours.
  • The print preview doesn't. i.e. what you see in the print previous is completely different line up wise to what's in the form designer!
  • The printing of a form with real data also bears no resemblence to either the form designer's view or it's print preview.
  • The customise forms window is modal, which means if you want to change a form, probably because you're tweaking the form and printing with real data is the only way to be sure, then you have to close and leave the form designer in order to get back into MYOB. This makes small tweaks to form painfully slow.
  • There's no way to line up objects other than by entering the position of the top left corner of an object, which means if your text field is right aligned, then you can't line up your objects without doing a mental calculation of xy.abc + de.fgh, where xy.abc is the left axis offset, and de.fgh is the object width. You then have to calulate the other object as well, and compare them, then subtract the difference from the object you wish to move, and enter that into the dialog. That's seriously insane! The workaround is to make both fields exactly the same width, and then put them at the same left offset, manually typing each. The problem with both of these methods is that you then can't line up the position of the first character in a right aligned text field, with the start of a left aligned field, which you definitely want to do if you're pinning fields to the left margin. Well, when I say left margin, I mean your manually chosen left indent, because the form designer doesn't show or support print margins, it doesn't even suggest that you leave margins.
• The process payroll screen shows an initial Select Pay Period panel, and none of the five vertically displayed fields are horizontally aligned, except for the two radio buttons which are on top of each other. The text field next to one of the checkboxes isn't vertically aligned either. But that's not the most annoying thing, its more the fact that: the pay leave in advance checkbox has a colon after it, which gives the impression that the pay start and end period is to do with paying leave in advance; and again the pay leave in advance checkbox only being enabled when you select to pay all employees and not just one. I should be able to leave in advance for an individual.

Here's one more tip: hire a contractor who knows how build user interfaces, and give them a month to just go over the line up and layout of all the various screens, and do mock ups for the refactoring of some of the more braindead wizard dialogs. The next build will just pick up the new layours, and the developers can then recode the wizards at a later date, based on the mock ups.

Having said that, here's a couple of the changes in the most recent version of MYOB:

• You can now record leave information when you process the payroll. Well, they don't say that you can only do that if you're paying by the hour, not a salary.
• New tax table validity tests. In other words, when MYOB supply you with new tax tables, they now validate that data to make sure its valid. Umm... I'd probably want it fixed at the source, but maybe that's just me.

I'm still seeking an adequate replacement for MYOB, preferably for the Mac, but I'll survive with a Windows application if the developers are professionals. If you know of such a replacement, then please let me know.