Based on some of the questions asked at the Genius Table at the last MacGroup meeting, it sounds like people are a bit confused about iCloud and whether or not they should move from MobileMe. Since that trip is one way if you take it (no going back), you best be sure that’s what you want to do before you take the plunge.

First off, if you want to sync your calendar and contacts with your iDevice (iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad) on iOS5, and you aren’t running the most current version of Lion (10.7.2), then you should not move to iCloud. Stick with MobileMe. There is a work-around for your calendars if you are on Snow Leopard, and you can always use any IMAP client for mail, but your contacts will not sync via iCloud without Lion.

If you want to use a mail client besides Apple Mail, just use the information in this Apple Knowledge Base article to set up your mail client. You must use a client that understand IMAP – no more POP mail (and that’s actually a good thing).

If you want to sync calendars with a Snow Leopard (10.6) machine, you can go into iCal preferences and then Accounts to create a new CalDAV account. Click the plus sign at the bottom for a new account, change the type from Automatic to CalDAV, and fill in your whoever@me.com username and password (make sure you use the “@.me” after your name).  For the server, use p02-caldav.icloud.com. You may get a dialog box like this one:

Select the iCloud server, click “Create,” and you’re all set. Leopard (10.5) supposedly supports CalDAV, but I couldn’t make it work.

A better alternative might be to switch to Google for your contacts and calendar syncing. Leopard and Snow Leopard both support this natively (Leopard with 10.5.3, and all versions of Snow Leopard).

Don’t forget that MobileMe will continue to work until next June. So you don’t have to rush into anything. Maybe you’re planning an upgrade to Lion in a few months. If so, you might just want to sit tight with MobileMe until then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkID1qzR6A

I admit to being an early adopter, one of those with a need to be on the cutting edge of everything, so of course, I downloaded OS X 10.7, aka Lion, bright and early Wednesday morning. Now, even though I like to be on the cutting edge, I don't like to bleed, so I did do my prep work. I used SuperDuper to create a clean, bootable backup, and yes, I even used it to run the computer to be sure that it truly was bootable. I will also admit that I was installing it on my MacBook (2008, 2.4 GHZ, 13" Core 2 Duo), my backup system, not my iMac. That's my business machine, and I can't afford to have it out of commission.

It took about 40 minutes to download the installer, not bad considering how many copies were being downloaded. It opened automatically when it finished downloading, but that was it. Instead of giving it the go-ahead to install, I followed directions found on a couple of other sites and created an installer DVD and also a flash drive installer. Easy. When those were finished, I went ahead and installed it. Took about 45 minutes.

The first headache, at least for me, was that Spotlight was re-enabled and was trying to index the drive, hogging memory and processor. Now, I've never been a fan of Spotlight, so it had been disabled. Finally used Lion Cache Cleaner to disable it again. Much better. Now, this MacBook has never been a speed demon, but it crawled with Lion and only the stock 2 GB of RAM. I did what I should have done a long time ago and ordered more memory. 

A couple of days later, new memory installed, I had to admit I liked what I saw. It's faster than my iMac that has a faster processor and the same amount of RAM. Yes, I'm getting antsy to try it on the iMac, but I'll follow Terry's suggestion yesterday, and install it on an external drive first. Just in case. 

So far, after tweaking settings on a few things, I have no complaints. Nothing that I use seems to be broken, other than some old games that I knew were goners. Safari is faster, ditto iPhoto and iWeb. Word and Excel seem to be working. Full window viewing is nice. There are times when I like to get rid of the distractions. Being able to resize a window from any edge is very nice. I remember having a utility that let me do that in the days before OS X. One thing I do miss is the stupid little oval in the upper right corner. You know, that little thing that hides or shows the menubar or sidebar? Come on, Apple. Give it back. It's annoying when you want to close a disk image that only gives you a window and no sidebar with and eject icon.

More next week, after I've had a chance to play with more apps. 'Til then, if you are tempted to upgrade, don't forget to back it up first. And be sure the backup works. Oh, and the DVD I burned with the installer. Worked like a charm on my daughter's MacBook.

Those of us who have the unfortunate need to be on the cutting (bleeding) edge of technology are now counting down to the release of OS X 10.7, aka Lion. As with any major upgrade, some software will fall by the wayside. In this case, all PowerPC apps are going away. There will be no more Rosetta to run them on the Intel architecture, so if you have something that you absolutely must run and it only runs in Rosetta, then you are either stuck where you are or you need to find something else. I'm still using Quicken 2007 for my banking needs, but it's PPC so it needs to be replaced. I've heard negative reports on the current version, so I'm currently looking at iBank 4. (More on that next week!)

IF you have a Mac that will run Lion (Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 or Xeon processor) and want to upgrade, it's time to start looking at your installed software to see what will work and what won't. You can do it with System Profiler, but I found a nice piece of freeware that does a nicer job, ArchDetect. It's faster, and it only scans what you tell it to scan. System Profiler is slower because it scans every drive attached. The only way to stop it is to unmount your extra drives.

With System Profiler, click on Application, then when it finishes scanning your drives (yes, I have 3 backup drives attached to my iMac), click on Kind to sort so you can see how many Power PC Apps you have.

With ArchDetect, the default setting is for the main Applications folder and the Applications folder in your home directory. If you have apps in other locations (like games in a Games folder) you can add them to the list to be scanned. By default, the resulting list will be "All" applications, but you can change the view to just Intel, Universal or PPC. Additonally, it will also show the location of each file, something System Profiler does only if you click on each entry. Neither will print an easy to use reference document, unfortunately, but you can't ask for miracles from free software. 

When Lion is released, I'll install it on my MacBook first (after doing a cloned, bootable backup, of course)  and run it there for a while to see if it breaks any of my Intel or Universal apps. Once I'm satisfied that I can run everything I need, I'll install it on my iMac. What am I losing besides Quicken 2007? Mostly games. I'll miss a few, but I'm sure others will replace them.

Apple is known for making products that are easy to use. One thing they make almost too easy is the ability to Migrate your older computer to your new one. The Migration Assistant is a dream come true for anyone upgrading their Mac. You can either connect your old Mac to your new one using a cable or Migrate from your Time Machine or clone backup. There is one problem with this great feature though. I've been migrating my notebooks from one to the other for as long as I can remember. I went from the early PowerBooks to the MacBook Pros and have had several models of those. Each time I have successfully Migrated from the old computer to the New one and while I haven't had any major issues, I have been wondering for the past couple of years "just how much old baggage do I really have on this thing?" Like anyone I've installed software and deleted software, created documents and forgot about them, downloaded stuff and never trashed it when I was done. Unfortunately back in the day most Mac apps didn't have uninstallers. So you were on your own or had to use a utility to find all the various pieces to discard. Guess what? I didn't really do a whole lot of that. It was evident in my Applications, Library and Preference folders. It was like walking through an attic seeing files and folders for Apps that I hadn't used in years (ie. AppleWorks). I was seeing preferences for older versions of Apps that wouldn't even run on my current system if they were still installed.

If you took everything out of your garage, basement or attic would you put everything you just took out back in again?

It's (Past) Time To Start Over

The last time I started over, which means wiping the hard drive clean and installing everything fresh was back in the late 90's when I was forced to. I had my first major hard drive crash with no real backup to speak of. I remember it like it was yesterday (I still have the scar). I came home one Friday afternoon in the summer of 1998 and there it was, my Norton Utilities 4.0 diskette had arrived in the mail. Although there was nothing wrong with my PowerBook, I decided to pop the disc in and do a check. Some preventative maintenance if you will. The software reported that there was a problem with my drive and I opted to let it repair it. About half way through the repair process the progress bar froze. I let it sit for a couple of hours and still had no movement. I decided that it was in fact frozen and I rebooted.

I got the lovely flashing question mark which meant that my operating system was toast. I jumped in the car and drove to a local computer store to get some recovery software and I was able to recover about 10% of my data (at random). There was no choice at that point but to reformat and reinstall everything. For the next few months I would go to launch a document and remember, "oh yeah, I lost that in the crash." Needless to say I've been a fan of backing up ever since and have never touched a Norton product  anymore  

This time I wanted to start over on my own. I wanted to backup my drive, reformat it and install ONLY the software that I currently use and the documents that I currently need. I actually did three backups. I did my normal Time Machine backup, I updated my clone backup (using SuperDuper!) that I normally travel with and I made a second clone backup to store on the shelf for the next 6-12 months as a just in case. After all the backups were done I de-authorized iTunes and a couple of other Apps that were authorized to my specific system. I booted with the Snow Leopard disc that came with my 2010 MacBook Pro and used Disk Utilities to reformat my boot partition. After that I reinstalled the OS from scratch and told it NOT to copy/migrate anything over from the backup. It was both scary and exciting at the same time. It was like getting a New Mac for the first time all over again.

You spend months if not years tweaking things

The thing that I was most concerned with was losing all those little preferences that I had set over the years and tweaks to my system. I clearly put way more value on this than I needed to. After the OS was installed and I ran all the system updates and then I proceeded to install fresh copies of the software that I use every day. I installed a few drivers from fresh downloads for things like my Xerox printer and my Wacom tablet. I setup the preferences as I went along and it wasn't bad at all. I then plugged in one of the clones and copied over all of my music and photos. I also copied over my current work in progress from the documents folder, not the entire Documents folder. Since I sync to MobileMe, my calendars and contacts came down just fine into iCal and Address Book.  My email accounts are iMAP based so I did't have to worry about missing any new mail in this process. I did copy over my old Mail folder for the archived mail. 

The saviors

The biggest savior in this process was 1Password. I didn't want to bring over the old system Keychain file as I knew it had a ton of outdate stuff/certificates in it. However, there was no way that I was going to remember all my passwords on the sites I'm registered with. I reinstalled 1Password from a fresh download and then used my FREE Dropbox.com account (which I also reinstalled their software fresh) to sync back over all my 1Password passwords and logins. It just worked! 1Password also made it MUCH EASIER to do my software reinstalls because I also use it to store my Software Serial numbers. Everything in one place!

A very pleasant surprise – Time Machine picked up where it left off. I backup via Time Machine to my network OS X Server. So I'm not plugging in an external drive to do it. I know that Time Machine in the past wasn't very forgiving if you reformatted your drive and wanted to backup again. In most cases it would want to start a NEW backup instead of reusing the old one. However, by keeping the computer name the same, Time Machine was able to continue using the same backup data (sparse file) as before. Granted it took all night to figure out everything, make enough room on the drive, etc., but now I have the ability to go back to December 17th (my oldest TM backup) and grab anything I may need without plugging in one of my clone drives. 

The Bottom Line

I figured this process would take about a week to get everything back to the way I like it Actually it only took about a day and a half! When I started the process I had about 60GB's of free hard drive space. Now I have about 200GBs of free space. This is largely in part of not reinstalling a bunch of Apps that I never use and not copying over gigabytes of documents that were several years old. I still have all the photos and music/movies I had before and to this day I'm not missing anything. I thought I would be tethered to that clone drive for several days dragging stuff over as I needed it, but I was able to disconnect the drive by day three.

I'm finally past the thing that I dreaded doing for so long figuring that I never had the down time and it feels great. My computer is more responsive and it's Awesome knowing that I'm not dragging around so much unnecessary crap. While I probably will Migrate here and there in the future, I definitely won't ever go this long again without starting over! If you have been migrating from computer to computer for two or more systems, it's probably time to consider a fresh start. I would like to go to an every other computer Migration to Fresh Start ratio. 

As you may know, Microsoft released the latest version of it's Mac Office suite a few days ago, Office 2011 for Mac. It comes in two editions, one for home users and one for business users. The business version comes with Outlook, replacing Entourage as the Mail/Calendar client.

I picked up the business edition, hoping Outlook would be more like the version on Windows, and it is. The look is similar, but not the same – like the other programs. Also, Microsoft says they have worked to make any compatibility issues go away.

So Outlook and the promise of the return of Visual Basic scripting (I don't use it, but documents I get from work do) were my main reasons for upgrading. I was hoping that the speed of the programs wouldn't get any worse (launching Word or Excel 2008 means going to get a drink and coming back to it being almost ready on my quad core MacPro).

The big surprise – the new Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook open up fast. They're ready to go after just a few seconds! This is a welcome improvement – I no longer dread having to use these programs (and because of work, I do – Pages and especially Numbers just won't cut it for many documents at work). 

One tip though – after installing Office 2011, but before running any of the programs, open Font Book (in your Applications folder), select all the fonts, and then click on Edit->Resolve Duplicates. For some reason, some duplicate fonts got installed on both of my systems, and some stuff stated looking pretty weird in Mail and other programs. Resolving the duplicates seems to have cleared up the strange font problems I had.

I haven't had a chance to use the programs extensively yet, but so far, they are definitely an improvement, at least for me, over 2008. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROQVSPsV2kg

Some of you might recall my post from February 24 ("Goodbye Yellow Brick Road") where I described my dumping of Quicken as my home finance program of choice. At the time I switched to iBank, then up to version 3, and while it wasn't perfect, it was the best fit for my needs (one of the big ones being that I still need to print checks). There are quite a few other programs on the market, but many of them think checks are a thing of the past and so won't work for me. Also, in light of Apple's new stance on Java (short version – it may be dead), I'm glad I didn't switch to one of the Java-based finance programs. (I do hope Oracle takes up support, because I have a great Java database access program that I use all the time).

So what am I writing about? iBank released a paid upgrade to version 4 recently. I downloaded the trial, ran it for a short time, and paid for the upgrade. I wish I had put it through more transactions though – because after paying for it, I found out I couldn't stand it. For a company that is trying to capitalize on angry Quicken users who are riled up about losing features ("www.thequickenkiller.com" goes to the iBank page) they seem to have picked up some bad habits from Intuit (the makers of Quicken).

They took away their unique reconcilement (dragging and dropping transactions to reconcile). I liked it, and just wanted it tweaked, but apparently many others didn't like it. But then they took away the ability to filter your transactions by date (they had nice filters like "this year", "last 90 days", etc.). Now you have to load your entire history. And thattttttttttttttt'ssssssssssss reallllllllyyyyyyyyyyy slowwwwwwwww when you have several years worth (no, I don't want to archive it!).

Then they added a feature that allows you to open an account in another window (yay!). Now I can see transactions in two accounts at once, and it will be easier to move those that I put in the wrong account. Or not. You see, if you are in one of the secondary windows, you can't delete, cut or copy a transaction. OK, it's a new version, so it's a bug, just report it. Guess what? Say it with me now: "It's not a bug, it's a feature." Yup, a *feature*. Who would want that?

I have a ton of accounts (mostly old and closed) so I use the "hide" feature to keep them from showing in my list. One of them is my mortgage. When I tried to pay my mortgage, I couldn't select the account from the transaction drop down because it's a hidden account. Yes, another "feature." Swell.

So with the direction the software is headed – "features" that make it less useful to me – I decided it was time to take another look around. iBank was still the best of the field – until Quicken Essentials for Mac finally added check writing back in. So I decided to give it a try (no free trial, but a money-back guarantee).

I bought a copy, downloaded it, and ran into a bit of a roadblock. Quicken comes with a converter to read your old Quicken for Mac files,  your MS Money files, and Windows Quicken files. iBank can export to QFX format – but the new Quicken doesn't read it. Fortunately, the old one – my 2006 version – does. So I imported the transactions from after I stopped using Quicken 2006 into the program, and spent a good couple of hours cleaning up stuff that didn't quite come over OK. Then I let Quicken Essentials import my old Quicken 2006 files, and I had maybe another half-hour of cleanup to do.

But this version of Quicken is – quick! It *can* filter out to just the last 12 months (and other ranges).. It can open multiple windows and each one can do anything the other ones can. It can write checks. It backs up to MobilMe (not automatically like the old Quicken, you have to invoke it). iBank does to (and automatically) but only compresses the file – it doesn't encrypt it. Quicken encrypts the file first. 

So yeah – i"m back using Quicken. Even if iBank fixes their issues, I think I'll stay with Quicken (unless they start taking things away again too).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP5g9VZjxrI

(No, it's not you – the video is not of this song in particular, just in-concert clips,  but this version has the best audio of the lot, and while fuzzy, wasn't filmed with a handy-cam from 2 miles away…)

My MacPro had been getting sluggish lately. It seemed like every time I wanted to do anything with disk, that ti took forever.I checked the specs on the hard drive, and they seemed to be OK – 3 GB/sec transfer rate, 7200 RPM rotational speed, 32 MB buffer – all pretty good specs.

There's more to disk drives than just the numbers. I'm sure it didn't help that my 500 GB hard drive was filled to around 450 GB used. I was thinking of getting a new system, but the CPU-related activities didn't seem to be that bad, just disk. So instead, I picked up a new 1 TB disk drive.

Actually, I picked up a couple of disk drives. Since this was my boot disk, I had a 1 TB drive as a Time Machine backup. By moving to a 1 TB drive, I would need a 2 TB drive to adequately hold my Time Machine backups ( a good rule of thumb for TM drives is to double the size of the drive to back up). So I needed to pick up another external as well. 

The specs on the new drive are identical to the old except for the capacity. Yet, looking at this chart, you can see that the original drive in the MacPro is almost at the bottom of the chart. The new drive is up towards the middle. (I just stumbled on this chart today – looks like the company that posted it sells PC benchmarking software. So you might want to check the numbers out before your next disk purchase.)

It certainly shows on my MacPro. My boot up time has been cut in half, and disk operations no longer seem to take an eternity. So for the cost of a couple of disk drives, I may have bought myself another year of life with my MacPro.

It did take a long time to copy all my data around – the original boot drive to the new one and the old Time Machine to the new one. As a hint, if you want to preserve your older TM backups, first do a final TM backup, then turn OFF Time Machine you can do this in System Preferences). Unmount the drive, then re-mount it, and use Disk Utility to "restore" the old TM  drive to the new one, or use SuperDuper or some other disk cloning utility to copy your TM backups.  The unmount the old drive (or re-partition it to destroy the old data) and turn TM back on. In my case, Time Machine decided to do a new full backup (probably because I had already replaced the boot disk). But it still has my old backups available, which I verified by using Time Machine to look back a month for some files. 

Changing a disk in a MacPro is pretty easy. However, in some Macs, like the iMac, it's much more difficult, and you should consider having it done professionally if your going to change out your disk. 

OK, we've talked about using Migration Assistant for setting up a new (or new to you) machine. But what else can you do with it?

Well, nothing says that the machine has to be a new setup. What if you want to add a user from another machine?  Maybe you're selling a family member's laptop and don't have a replacement yet. You can use Migration Assistant to bring over that user and all the data in the home directory. Later, when you get another machine, migrate it back.

There's also nothing that says all the data has to come from one machine. You can use Migration Assistant to get data and programs from as many machines as you'd like.

I've been asked what "Other Files and Folders" transfers.  If you have any directories created outside the normal areas outside of the User directories and the OS directories), this option will grab those files.

For example, I use software call "Fink" (no, really!) to install Unix and Linux open source software (there's another good system, too, called "MacPorts," and I'm sure readers will bring up others). Fink by default puts all its software in the directory "/sw" so that it's easily contained and can be moved/removed or whatever. Checking the "Other Files" option will grab directories like this one and migrate them to your new system.

If you are keeping both machines (the new and old) then make sure you change the name of the system in System Preferences/Sharing (or you'll wind up with  "Jack's MacBook 2" or some such name). 

Another tip: if you do have a previously owned machine you are setting up, you should wipe the disk clean and install the OS yourself. Why?  Well, you don't know what kind of time-bombs are lying in wait on that system. Maybe the person you bought it from tried out some software and didn't like it, so they threw it in the trash. But that software may have installed things in other directories you don't know about, and when you go to put in a patch a year from now, surprise! Your system is messed up. Even if the stuff left over is benign, why let it take up space? Whack the disk during the install and you won't have to worry about any time bombs.

I've used Migration Assistant with every new (or new to me) machine I get – it's just too easy to transfer over all my programs and data. I've done PPC to PPC, Intel to Intel and PPC to Intel and haven't had any problems. So don't make moving your data harder than it has to be by doing it manually – use this tool that's already on your system.

So you've picked up a new Mac (or new to you, anyway) and now you want to get all your music, photos, applications, and settings on your new system so it's comfortable, like your old one. This comes up on the iBBS occasionally, and people start asking about how to move their iPhoto library or their iTunes library.  What they may not know is there's an app for that! If you have a brand new Mac, after you turn it on and register, you may see it come up (and maybe you send it away without a second thought). It;s also in the Utilities folder. This program is called Migration Assistant, and it will transfer all your important files and programs automatically to your new Mac.

This is the first screen – nothing much to do here but hit "Continue." You'll be asked for an administrator login and password (even if you already are logged in as one).

Here's where you choose your source. You can hook your older Mac up directly (via network cable or firewire cable, if you have a firewire-equipped Mac). My preference is shown here – from an external disk (remember those backups Calvin's always on about – here's one place where you can use them!). You can use a Time Machine backup or a clone disk made with Disk Utility, SuperDuper!, CarbonCopyCloner, or anything else that makes a bootable disk. I like this because it means zero chance of anything happening to your original system, as you aren't even connected to it.

If you've got more than one eligible source disk hooked up, you'll be asked to choose. If you have no eligible disk connected, you'll be asked to hook one up.

The Assistant will then look at the source disk and let you know what's available and how much disk space it will take up. (This can take a few minutes.) Note that I don't have enough room to copy my backup disk over my main disk, so I can't continue unless I clear off some space or copy over less info. 

Notice you can copy over just certain users (or no users), certain settings, but no choice on Applications – it's all or none.  If you have applications like iTunes or Adobe Creative Suite that require you to authorize them, I suggest you de-authorize them before migrating and re-authorize them afterwards.  Some of the program use specific hardware items (like the unique hardware address of your ethernet adapter) to create their authorization files, and so won't work on a different machine. 

Once you've selected your items to migrate, click continue. You'll get a progress bar with a sometimes mildly-accurate estimate of the time remaining. Firewire transfers will be faster than ethernet, which are faster than wireless. So depending on how you're connected and how much data you're bringing over, this can take quite some time.

If this week is Part 1, there must be a Part 2…

I'm sure that some of you are looking forward to that new Mac in a few days. Migrating from an older system to that new one can be a painless process. I just helped a friend set up a new 27" iMac, set up his old Intel iMac for his wife, and finally set up and move her old G5 iMac to their business showroom — all in about 2 and a half hours. In this case, we were able to work from Time Machine backups, so that I could work on all three computers simultaneously.

The first step was to check the backups. Both house computers had finished successful backups within 5 minutes of my arrival, so I was able to just shut down the systems and disconnect the drives. The new iMac was moved into position, Time Machine backup connected, and we started up. When a new system starts for the first time and the registration screen is out of the way, you are presented with the opportunity to transfer settings, documents and applications from another computer, a backup drive or a Time Machine backup. We selected Time Machine and set it to copy everything.

We then moved the "old" iMac to the wife's desk, and connected her Time Machine drive. We could have done a clean system install and started by reformatting the hard drive, but we decided to just migrate her files instead. I went to System Preferences > Accounts and created a new identity, and logged into that identity. I then started Migration Assistant (in the Utilities folder) and let it start copying everything from her TM backup.

While those two iMacs were chugging along, I started the cleanup on the G5, deleting old files and secure deleting personal data. When that was done, I set up a new, clean account, then deleted her old account from the System Preferences. We moved it out to the showroom, and set to work setting it up. No critical files are kept on the showroom computer as it is used primarily for printing shipping labels, so we haven't been doing backups. We still needed to transfer things like settings, bookmarks, printer drivers, so we once again ran Migration Assistant, which walked us through connecting the old computer in Target Mode using a FireWire cable.

By the time that was finished, computer #2 was also finished. We restarted it, and breathed a sigh of relief that all was functioning as expected. At this point, we had to open the Time Machine preferences and reselect the backup drive. It then gave us the option of erasing the backup and starting over, archiving the backup and starting over, or just continuing with that backup. We took the third option, and all is well.