Switching to Mac Day 1: Mail, iCal, iSync

Next step I want to do is to transfer my contacts, set up my email and calendar, and sync my cellphone. Since windows doesn't have any good apps for those, I've been sing 3rd party freewares. I use Thunderbird with Lightning for my email and desktop calendar. I use an extension called Provider that syncs Google Calendar with Lightning's calendar. I use MyPhoneExplorer to sync my Thunderbird's contacts and Lightning calendar with my cellphone, thus indirectly syncing my google calendar with my cellphone. Of course, I want to duplicate the experience on the Mac. Alas, things have to be sacrificed to obtain the integration on the Mac.

First of all, mail. Setting up is quite easy, but apparently mail does not support SSL certificates with wildcards. My email server uses SSL, and its certificate uses a wildcard (*). First, mail keeps bothering me to check the certificate being authentic. The Mac help did suggest adding the certificate to the keychain, so I did, yet mail still bothers me. So after countless of searching, I found out the mail does not support SSL certificates with wildcards. I tried installing Thunderbird, but then Thunderbird doesn't sync with the OS' built in address book, and hinders me from syncing it with my cellphone. So I decided to stick with mail app, even though I have to click 1 more button every time I want to check my email.

Next, calendar. My plan is to sync Google Calendar with iCal and my cellphone. Well, gcal and iCal cannot do a 2-way sync without 3rd party app, and they cost money! IMO this is something that google can/should do themselves. I can subscribe a gcal calendar with iCal, but no syncing. I finally decided to export my calendar gcal, forget about it, and start using iCal exclusively. With Google being more involved with Apple on the iPhone, I do hope one day we will have a perfect sync between gcal and iCal, hopefully without a force upgrade to Leopard.

Syncing with my cellphone using iSync via bluetooth is very smooth. This is why I like Macs. I turned on BT on my cellphone, register it on my Macbook, couple clicks here and there and it syncs my address book and iCal perfectly. The ease of iSync is one reason I decided to accept mail's annoyance and give up gcal.