My transition to being a Mac user has mostly been positive – extremely positive. But, I am frustrated by the lack of a comprehensive productivity app – one that handles email, calendar, contacts, and tasks effectively. Since I come from the Windows world, people have suggested Outlook 2011 for Mac. I really would like to use this – it’s actually quite a nice interface – but, unfortunately, it can’t sync with Google calendar or contacts or tasks. Email is great, but I need more than that.
I have also tried using Thunderbird/Lightning. Its not too bad, but the lack of an offline calendar is problematic.
Now I am on to the native iCal, Mail, and Address Book apps on the Mac. The interfaces are nice and generally superior to Thunderbird, but there is still a big lack in functionality. A few examples:
- Can’t easily turn an email into an event or a task – I would like to click on an email item and send it to iCal, for instance. Thunderbird had this, and it was pretty handy.
- While the Address Book app in Mac OS X now supports native syncing with Google contacts, you’re limited to a single Google account. This doesn’t work for me, having both a personal Google account and a Google Apps account for work. So, I had to move all of my work contacts to my personal account. Oh, and, the only contacts that will sync are those that are on your My Contacts folder. Kind of a pain.
- Interoperability is horrible. For example, I was trying to email a contact to someone and ultimately had to (1) search for the contact in Address Book, (2) export as a vCard, (3) switch back to my email, (4) add an attachment and find/select the exported vCard. You can do this in a single step in Outlook.
MS has said that they will be offering Google Calendar sync later this year; I’m anxious to see what they come up with…
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