Microsoft Office 2011 Outlook for Mac catches up with Windows.

Posted on August 22, 2010

It’s been nearly 10 years since Microsoft last had a true Exchange compatible mail client, the much missed Outlook 2001. Office 2011 for Mac finally brings back a true replacement, not the crippled Entourage that we’ve been forced to use for the last few years.

Outlook 2001 used the MAPI protocol to talk to Exchange email and calendaring servers, and did so perfectly. Then Microsoft decided to release Entourage as part of Office X for OS X, which used the HTTP webmail protocol, and to be frank, was a pale shadow for the Windows Outlook client. I remember loads of clients who clung onto Outlook 2001, running in Classic mode, just because Entourage was so crap.

A few days ago I was asked by a local veterinarian to look into switching his office from PCs to a Mac based solution, with the sticking points being Sage and Exchange. Normally I’m quite cautious about these things, because whilst Macs have some distinct advantages over Windows, businesses run by process. If your computer system forces you to significantly change your processes, they can end up being expensive white elephants. Sage can be covered by Parallels or VM Ware. But Exchange? I’ve had plenty of pain over the years trying to get Macs integrated into Exchange server in a way that doesn’t disappoint PC veterans.

So like any good provider of Mac technical support, I decided to test first. I setup a remote support session, and configured Apple Mail, iCal and AddressBook to syncronise with the Exchange server. Then we setup a demo of Entourage 2008 to connect to the Exchange server. And then left the client to test.

Very quickly a problem reared its head. Neither iCal or Entourage would show the colour of appointments in the calendar, and the client uses colour coding. Not to be deterred, I decided to see if the soon to be released Outlook 2011 for Mac would solve this problem. Fortunately it does. Not only that, configuration is relatively painless as it does a lot of auto-discovery of the required settings, much like Apple Mail.

Whilst Office 2011 isn’t on sale yet, it will be within the next couple of months, and with a free upgrade from Office 2008 if you’ve bought it after August 2010. The future looks brighter for Mac users struggling with Exchange…

Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Ultra cheap refurbished Apple iMacs, MacBooks and MacBook Pros

Posted on August 21, 2010

UPDATE: If you look on Amazon and hunt around a little you can find good deals on Macbook Pro, MacBook Air, MacBooks or iMacs you can often find brand new ones for prices very close to what Apple are selling Refurbs at…

It’s been a couple of weeks since there have been really nice deals on Apple Refurbs, but there are some real corkers today. The 27″ iMac refurbs are particularly attractive in my opinion, as they are quite rare to find, and the i7 powered iMac has a really noticeably performance jump over the cheaper 21.5″ models.

  1. Apple iMac 27″ 2.8Ghz Core i7, 4Gb, 1TB, refurb – £1399 inc VAT and delivery.
  2. Apple iMac 27″ 2.66Ghz Core i5, 4Gb, 1TB, refurb – £1269 inc VAT and delivery.
  3. Apple iMac 21.5″ 3.06Ghz, 4GB, 500GB refurb – £749 inc VAT and postage. Very nice!! –
  4. Apple MacBook 2.4GHz, 2GB, 250GB refurb – £719 inc VAT and delivery.
  5. Apple MacBook Pro 13″ 2.4Ghz, 4GB, 250GB refurb – £849 inc VAT and delivery
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Improve performance of Macs with PPC chips

Posted on August 20, 2010

Older Macs used to use a type of chip family called PowerPC (PPC). You’ll probably know them as G3, G4 or G5 Macs. If you’re still using one of these machine, you’re probably noticing more and more that they feel very slow when you are using a web browser, or you have multiple browser windows or tabs open. Why is this?

Quite often it’s because of the plethora of banner adverts on web pages. These banners are made in Adobe Flash, and this makes your computer work a bit harder for every piece of Flash on display. This presents PPC Mac users a particular problem. Why?

  1. Flash Player for OS X has never been as highly optimised as it is for Windows. So if you have two identical computers, one running on Windows and the other on OS X, the machine running OS X will have to work harder to show the Flash content.
  2. Flash Player running on PPC chips is much slower than running on Intel chips. It’s something to do with being big-endian and little-endian if I recall. Think of it in terms of Intel chips reading left to right, PPC reading right to left. Flash Player is designed to read things from left to right, so if you’re using a PPC chip, it has to translate every.
  3. PPC chips are slow in modern terms. Even G5 powered machines have less grunt that a typical Core 2 Duo powered modern Mac.

So what can you do? The best solution I have found is only use Firefox for browser, and install the Flash Block plugin. This will block all Flash content, unless you click on it. Presto, instant performance boost.

Got performance problems with your Mac? Don’t want to spend a huge amount on a new Mac? Based near Bath or Bristol? Get in touch…

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WordPress security basics

Posted on August 16, 2010

I’ve just had an interesting little chat with a Web Designer based in Bradford on Avon about WordPress security. Due to valid concerns about the updates breaking his clients’ WordPress sites, he’s been advising them not to install the updates when asked. It’s a valid fear. Major changes to the WordPress API can break plugins, and badly designed WordPress custom themes may break if your web developer has hacked the WordPress core files.

But this is wrong in my opinion. Why? Because getting your site hacked will cost your business a damn site more time, money and customer goodwill then the small cost of keeping your site updated.

WordPress is probably the world’s most common web application, and as such is a massive target for hackers. If you consistently fail to update your WordPress installation it will get hacked eventually. It’s just the same as being a Windows user and not updating your anti-virus software. The nasty people will catch you with your pants down.

So what should you do? The process is quite simple.

  1. Backup your MYSQL database
  2. Backup your entire WordPress root folder ideally, or your wp-content folder at the very least
  3. Install the WordPress update,  or the updated plugin(s)
  4. Test the site for any problems

If something does go wrong, you can easily revert to your previous working version from the backups you have taken, or by contacting your web host and asking for them to restore from nightly backups.

  1. Delete the database
  2. Restore the database from your backup
  3. Delete your WordPress root folder, apart from the wp-content folder.
  4. Restore from your FTP backup, or download the full installer and reinstall from that.

If any of the above fills you with horror, Sweet-Apple provides an inexpensive and pro-active WordPress security service.

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Bulk updating prices in Magento e-Commerce

Posted on August 14, 2010

Keeping your product catalog up-to-date is always a bit of a pain. Whilst Magento provides you with a very sophisticated multiple product/attribute editing system, you can only do this on 200 products at most. So what do you do if you want to bulk update all the prices in your catalog? Well you could directly query the database. But Magento’s complex EAV database is kinda scary, so as a rule I prefer to use the existing Magento API.

$model = Mage::getModel('catalog/product');
$products = $model->getCollection()
   ->addAttributeToSelect( array('name', 'description', 'price') )
    ->addAttributeToFilter('someAttribute', 'someValue');

foreach ($products as $product) {
    /* @var $product Mage_Catalog_Model_Product */
    $product->setPrice(1);
    $product->save();
    print $product->getId() . " " .  $product->getName() . " " . $product->getPrice() . "<br />";
 }
Mage::app()->cleanCache();
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