Tiger: first impressions: Mail, Address Book and iCal (and, indirectly, Spotlight)

Most faithful readers of this blog will know that I'd had it up to here with Microsoft Entourage months ago. Other than its cool correlation between address book contacts, e-mails and calendar events, it had nothing going for it. Not search, not (surprise) interoperability, and not usability. Especially not usability. This is why, with Tiger's promised Spotlight search capabilities, along with improvements in Mail and Address Book, I had determined to switch away from Entourage once and for all.

The thing I was most concerned about transferring from one program to the other was my contact list. The new version of Address Book has the capability to import contact information from a tab-delimited text file, which is (go figure) the only way Entourage will export its contacts. God forbid Microsoft should write software that will play well with others. Anyway, I figured that once I exported the information, only half the battle was done; getting the fields to match correctly in Address Book would be the real challenge, I thought. It turns out, though, that Address Book is smarter about field-matching than is Outlook 2003 for Windows. With a few corrections here and there, I was able to get my contacts loaded into Address Book with a minimum of fuss. Note, however, that even though I matched up the birthday fields properly during the import process, none of my contacts' birthdays were imported properly into Address Book. I had to put in the birthdays manually, but there were few enough entries that it wasn't a big deal.

Next, of course, is the actual e-mail transfer. I am once again pleased to report that it went off without a hitch. Mail imported my messages from Entourage and kept them in their respective folders, which made my post-import clean-up much easier. Previous versions of Mail have not been as smart or tidy about this. A note on aesthetics: I don't happen to agree with John Siracusa that the new version of Mail "got beaten with the ugly stick," but I'd have to say that with Mail, iCal and Address Book working so closely together thanks to Spotlight, it'd have been nice to see all three programs get the same type of facelift, so that they at least look unified.

On to iCal. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any easy way (that works in Tiger) to import Entourage calendar events and to-dos into iCal. However, iCal 2.0 has the nifty feature of automatically creating a calendar of birthdays from the information stored in Address Book. This is nice, but not fully featured enough--it's enabled by a check-box in the iCal preferences, but is not otherwise configurable; you can't edit the calendar, and there is no capability to set alarms for those events. Also, there is no likewise provision made for anniversaries. I can only hope they have plans to fix this inconvenience.

Finally, after I got all my information migrated over to Mail, Address Book and iCal, I tried a Spotlight search to see how it all worked together. I started Spotlight and searched for the name of one of my contacts. In the blink of an eye, it came back with documents containing that person's name, mail messages from that person (with the latest message on the top of the list, which I like), her card in Address Book, events and to-dos involving her, and even (this is the kicker) files I had sent to her over e-mail. How cool is that? I mean, wow!

And the coolest thing about all this, of course, is that you can save that Spotlight search as what's called a "smart folder", which will constantly update itself with the results of the search. I could come back 6 months from now and look for an e-mail I sent my friend yesterday, and I'd find it in seconds. Isn't that the best?

More to come...