So, I finally broke down and ordered myself a 15″ MacBook Pro from MacMall.com on Tuesday last week, and it arrived the next day (!) … and I’ve been installing apps and migrating my data over to it since. I guess you can officially call me “a switcher” as I’ve moved all my data off my old laptop onto this new one, and the old one is going to get reformatted and will become my wife’s.

Part of switching to a Mac means looking for new blogging software. I previously used BlogJet 2.0 on Win32, but now I’m trying out ecto 3 beta for MacOS X. I definitely think it’s going to take some getting used to but I can already tell it’s much better than BlogJet was. However, I can definitely see needing to customize ecto to my liking before I can feel really comfortable using it.

Have you switched recently? Got any good tips that I might want to know about? Things to avoid? Tell me about it in the comments …

del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since July 28, 2008 at 09:00 AM:

• Coriolis Systems :: Products :: iPartition
  Similar to PartitionMagic, but for MacOS X. Looks very nice for $50.
  Tags: software, tools, apple, osx
• How to Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 under VMware Fusion
  Tags: blog, vmware, ubuntu, osx, howto
• Gretag Macbeth – Color Checker for Digital Photography Color Management
  Tags: product, photography
• How to Write an LMHOSTS File for Domain Validation and Other Name Resolution Issues
  Tags: reference, microsoft, windows, networking
• Nation-Building: transcript and word cloud of Obama’s acceptance speech
  One thing is clear: Obama has an A+ speech-writing team. I’d actually like to see him win–but I fear he’ll get assassinated if he does.
  Tags: blog, us, politics, obama, speech, transcript
• DriverPacks.net > DriverPacks > Intro
  Slipstream driver support for all kinds of hardware in WinXP setup CDs.
  Tags: software, tools, microsoft, windows, drivers
• mortonfox: Of phones and time
  Morton Fox shares his implementation of timegm() written in Vim script. Slick.
  Tags: programming, vim
• WWdN: In Exile: when you dressed up sharp and you felt alright
  Wil Wheaton recalls his first Rocky Horror experience, and urges everyone to sign the petition to STOP MTV FROM DESTROYING SOMETHING SACRED!
  Tags: blog, wil-wheaton, rhps, movie, mtv

In replacing my aging Dell C840 laptop with a new MacBook Pro, I need to switch from using Pidgin to using Adium for IM. Since they’re both based on libpurple underneath, I figured there ought to be a way to migrate my settings from one to the other. As it turns out, it might be possible.

Your libpurple settings are stored in %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\.purple on Windows. Similarly, they’re stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/libpurple on OSX. If you simply replace the blist.xml and accounts.xml that Adium creates with the ones from Pidgin, that should work, right?

Wrong!

Adium’s preferences are stored in plist format which, can now be easily edited since 10.5 (Leopard), even through AppleScript. Luckily, there’s even a simple utility called plutil that can convert from XML to binary plist format.

It would be pretty straight-forward to write a simple script that parses the libpurple XML and wrote out the appropriate plist XML then use the plutil tool to convert to plist binary format – but, I’m feeling lazy and only have about 10 accounts to migrate, so I’ll just do it by hand. Of course, there’s more to migrate than just accounts (old chat logs, etc.) but it’s not enough to overcome the inertia of my lack of caring to do it right now.

Tags: Windows, Pidgin, MacOS X, Adium

It was only a few months ago that Brad linked to Twitter Karma over at DownloadSquad, but a few days ago Christina surprised me by putting Blackbird at number 5 on her list of 10 awesome BlackBerry apps. She writes:

Blackbird — I used to use Twitterberry to update my Twitter status from my phone, but now I’ve switched to Blackbird. The interface is cleaner and it feels faster. I miss the user icon pictures from Twitterberry, this is still my favorite way of using Twitter.

Man, I love those DownloadSquad bloggers! Thanks for the love, Christina.

Tags: Blackbird, BlackBerry, free software