Step 0 – Presumptions

For this set up I am assuming you do the same as I do and don’t use me.com for email. We need to edit the folder used for Drafts to get the Notes to work and  this would obviously interfere with normal usage if you actually wanted to save an email as a draft email and not as a note!

Step 1 – Add Your iCloud Account to Thunderbird

Create a new mail account manually using the following details:

Type: IMAP
Server: p01-imap.mail.me.com (you can also use p02... or p03...)
Port: 993
Username: first part of your me.com email eg for fishface@me.com enter fishface
Connection security: SSL/TLS
Authentication method: Normal password

By now you should be able to see your Notes folder and any iOS notes will be shown as emails in this folder. If the Notes folder does not show up then right-click (or ctrl-click on Mac) the account in the left-hand pane and select ‘Subscribe’ then make sure that the ‘Notes’ folder is ticked (or ‘checked’ if you’re an American)

Step 2 – Make the Notes Folder Editable

By default, and for obvious reasons, you can’t edit an email that is already on the server. You can, however, edit Draft emails. If we set our Notes folder to act like Drafts then we will be able to edit the emails/notes within the folder.

To do this go to the account preferences by right-clicking (or ctrl-clicking on Mac) the xxx@me.com account in the left pane (as per Step 1, above, for subscribing to the Notes folder) but this time select ‘Settings…’ from the context menu. In the account settings select ‘Copies & Folders’ and then scroll down to ‘Drafts and Templates’. For ‘Keep message drafts in:’ you need to select ‘Other’ and then select the ‘me.com’ account and the ‘Notes’ folder.

This means that if you ever save an email (or note in our case) on this account then it will save it to the Notes folder. You can also double click any email/note in the Notes folder and Thunderbird will allow you to edit it.

You may also want to go to the ‘Composition & Addressing’ settings and untick (uncheck) the ‘Compose messages in HTML format’ option. This isn’t required but HTML in the notes can sometimes cause strange things to happen (see ‘Known Issues’ section near the end).

Step 3 – Enable the Apple-Specific Mail Header

For the Mac Mail app to ‘detect’ that they are notes and not emails the notes have an Apple-specific header in their source:

X-Uniform-Type-Identifier: com.apple.mail-note

The Mac Mail app then knows to show these as Notes and the iDevices check this folder then import the emails as notes in the Notes app in iOS. Having an email in the Notes folder alone is not enough for it to be treated as a note, it needs the special header. The simplest way to add this is to create a custom header option in the ‘to/cc/bcc’ dropdown area of the compose window. To do this go to Thunderbird Preferences then select the ‘Advanced’ tab and then ‘Config Editor…’. Accept the warning about dragons as shown below:

In the preferences list that is now shown enter ‘mail.compose.other.header‘ into the filter at the top.

Double-click the ‘mail.compose.other.header‘ line and enter the string value: X-Uniform-Type-Identifier and press ‘OK’.

Step 4 – Compose Your Note

Now, when composing a new email/note, you will have an extra option in the ‘to/cc/bcc’ dropdown box for ‘X-Uniform-Type-Identifier’ as below:

And enter com.apple.mail-note for the value. Note that you do not need a ‘to’ address and if you enter one it will be ignored in the Notes apps. Once written it will look something like this:

When you have composed your note you need to save it and NOT send it! Trying to send it will give an error anyway as there are no recipients. To save it either click the ‘Save’ icon and then close the window or click to close the window and you will be prompted to save it as a draft. Saving it as a draft will save it to the iCloud IMAP Notes folder – which is exactly what we want. You will then see the note in Thunderbird and, if you open your iOS Notes app, you will also see it there:

Step 5 – Editing Notes

If you edit the note in the iOS Notes app then the subject will automatically be changed to the first line of the note text, in our example the subject becomes ‘Here is a note, written in Thunderbird!’. This is shown in both the Notes app and Thunderbird below:

To edit a note in Thunderbird simply double click it to bring up the compose window again and close/save it to save it back to the Notes (Drafts) folder. If the note does not appear in the iOS Notes app then you may need to close and reopen the app or edit the note in Thunderbird again to make sure you have added the X-Uniform-Type-Identifier header value as com.apple.mail-note.

Known Issues

Editing in Thunderbird is where some anomalies can occur. We set the iCloud account to use plain text (we turned off HTML email as an optional part of Step 2) and Thunderbird does honour this – if you view the message source you will see the content type header says:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1;

So double-clicking on a note to edit it will bring up the plain text editor without all the HTML formatting options such as bold and text colour etc. But notes that are either created or edited in the iOS Notes app are marked as being HTML emails with the header:

Content-Type: text/html;
	charset=utf-8

This means when you double-click to edit the note in Thunderbird you get all the HTML editing options. It also means that HTML headers are added to the message itself. For the note itself this is not an issue – it displays correctly in both Thunderbird and in the iOS Notes app. The issue relates to the subject header. Because the iOS Notes app insists on using the first line of the note as the subject i means it also copies some of the HTML code. While the HTML code itself is not shown in the subject it does show blank characters in its place making the subject indented as below:

If this happens to one of your notes then the quickest way to fix it is to open the note in the iOS Notes app, tap in the note to bring up the keyboard, tap and hold on the text, tap Select All, tap Copy, then tap the ‘delete’ key. This will have copied the text for the note and given you a blank canvas. Now you need to put the text back, which you do as follows: tap and hold the text area, tap on Paste and then tap Done. Now, go back to the list of notes and the subject should be back to normal.

Any Other Issues?

I’ve not come across any yet… But feel free to comment with any issues you have if you use this method (surely there can’t only be me that uses Thunderbird and iCloud Notes?!) or if you have any tips & tricks to add!

In 2003, a couple of years after I finished uni, I started using a little-known browser called ‘Firebird‘ – this was at version 0.6. By the time it went public with version 1.0 it had been known as ‘Firefox’ for some time. It has, since then, been my browser of choice. I’ve grown up with Firefox and even remember the excitement of it hitting version 1.0!

So in late 2003 when I discovered that the same team who made Firefox had been working on an email client, known as Thunderbird, I jumped at the chance even though it was currently at version 0.5. Again, I feel like I grew up with Thunderbird and it’s been my email client of choice for the best part of a decade. When I switched from Windows to Mac for my day-to-day work in late 2008 it was stupidly simple to shift all my history, settings and plugins for both Firefox and Thunderbird from my Windows machine to the MacBook Pro – oh the joys of cross-OS software! Because it was so easy to transfer I stuck with both Firefox (for web browsing) and Thunderbird (for email and newsgroups).

I’ve used both for almost a decade and, as such, I’ve got used to them. While I do use Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer to test websites, my day-to-day use is powered by Mozilla. I just don’t get on with the Mac Mail app either although I can’t quite put my finger on why…

So, going back to the Notes on iPhone/iPad, these were recently shifted over from me.com to iCloud but worked in the same way – they could be synced across devices. These last few months I’ve been using Notes more and more and wanted to be able to edit them on my MacBook Pro (and possibly even my Windows computer). The Mac Mail app handles Notes as part of the email account so it got me wondering if I could do the same but using Thunderbird. Thankfully, after a lot of fiddling, trial and error and some lost notes, I have got a working solution. This works on both Mac OSX, Windows and Linux (basically any OS that you can run Thunderbird on).

So, how is it done? Put simply, the Notes are essentially emails stored in a specific ‘Notes’ folder in the me.com IMAP mail account on Apple’s servers. These need to be ‘detected’ as being Notes (rather than regular emails) and need to be editable. The next post will detail how you can achieve this in Thunderbird:

How To: iCloud Notes in Mozilla Thunderbird

I had one slight issue though. The ‘SuperDrive‘ has been very temperamental over the last year or so and 90% of the time spits out any DVD inserted, but works perfectly fine reading and burning CDs. I tried about 5 times to boot from the DVD but each time it spat it out and booted into the normal operating system.

I knew from previous conversations with @DarrenGriffin that you can create a bootable USB stick with the Snow Leopard installation files on it quite easily and that it has the added bonus of being far quicker than the DVD. So, that was my plan. A quick Google for ‘install Snow Leopard from USB stick’ brought up a tonne of results and it did indeed look very easy:

1. Insert memory stick (8GB is big enough)
2. Use Disk Utility’s ‘Erase’ to format the drive as ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
3. Click ‘Restore’ tab
4. Insert Snow Leopard DVD
5. Drag the DVD image to the ‘Source’ field
6. Drag the newly formatted USB drive to the ‘Destination’ field
7. Click ‘Restore’ and wait for it to do it’s job
8. That’s it. You have a Snow Leopard install disk on a USB drive.

As you can imagine, I struggled on part 4… I couldn’t actually use the Mac to create this bootable USB drive because I needed to be able to use the DVD! The mighty @DarrenGriffin suggested I use another machine to create the bootable USB drive to which I replied rather abruptly (and possibly rudely [apologies mate!]) “I only have a Windows machine, surprisingly there aren’t many guides for using Windows to create a bootable Mac drive…”. He then mentioned about ripping an ISO image and transferring it to the Mac… Oh yeah, why hadn’t I thought of that…?

So, up to the Windows machine and I inserted the DVD expecting it to tell me it couldn’t read the file system. However, it didn’t, although it did load up a Windows section of the DVD (for installing Bootcamp etc). Having fired up DVD Decryptor to create the ISO I saw that the volume was called ‘WindowsSupport’ and wasn’t as large as I was expecting… Still, I went ahead and ripped the ISO onto a 320GB FAT32 external drive (as I knew both Windows and Mac could use FAT32). I was happy to see that the full 7GB or so had been ripped and not just the ‘WindowsSupport’ volume. I was slightly onfused though when I saw 3 files – SnowLeopard.MDS, SnowLeopard.l00 and SnowLeopard.l01 when I was expecting a single SnowLeopard.iso. The .l00 was 4.29GB and the .l01 was just over 3GB. At this point 4.29GB should have rung a bell, but it didn’t.

So, back to the Mac and I connected up my external drive and attempted to use these files for the restore ‘Source’ (part 5 above) but it wouldn’t. I needed an iso image, not 2 .l0x files… Google was a little bit helpful and suggested a few different apps that would join the files together. Neither of these seemed to work though as they claimed files were missing. I renamed the files as SnowLeopard.iso.l00 and SnowLeopard.iso.l01 as a few sites suggested it would work this way – it didn’t. Then I stumbled upon a Terminal command line that was so simple that it couldn’t have been true…:

cat SnowLeopard.l00 SnowLeopard.l01 > SnowLeopard.iso

The ‘cat’, I presume, comes from ‘conCATenate’ meaning ‘to stick together’ as opposed to a snow leopard being a cat. I ran this and it seemed to be working – I could see in Finder that it was creating SnowLeopard.iso and it was gradually getting larger. But then it stopped and said it couldn’t create the file. For once though it gave a valid reason: FAT32 cannot do files larger than 4.29GB. Ah, yes, so THAT was why 4.29GB should have rang a bell earlier! I needed to transfer the files to the Mac itself where the file system could handle the full size files. Slight problem though, I only had 9GB free space on my drive – just enough for the source files but not enough for the finished file as well. What followed was an immense session of transferring files across the network to the other computer, a healthy purge of thousands of old emails and the fulfilling removal of lots of unused apps and old files. In the end I freed up an extra 22GB, giving me 31GB spare in total. More than enough! Running the ‘cat’ command again worked a treat and resulted in a single ISO file that Disk Utility allowed me to restore onto the USB drive. Shortly after I had a bootable USB version of the Snow Leopard install disk.

I shut down the Mac, inserted the USB drive, started the computer and held down ‘c’ on the keyboard and after a short time I was greeted with the OSX Snow Leopard install screen. I hit ‘utilities’ in the top menu bar, chose Disk Utility and ran the repair on the main volume. After about 10 minutes it reported that the errors had been fixed. Result!

So, now I have a fair amount of free space on my MacBook Pro, an error-free file system and a bootable USB version of Snow Leopard. Not bad for a nights work! It’s just a shame that in the coming weeks, when Lion is released, the majority of this work will be redundant as Lion is download only and doesn’t require bootable media…

So, how do I listen to my music while I’m working? MediaMonkey doesn’t work too well in WINE, it’s OK in Parallels but running a 2nd OS solely for music isn’t ideal…

For a while I used Spotify. I was using it ‘wrongly’ apparently though as I used to listen to albums I already owned rather than for discovering new music. They have recently limited the free version to only play a track a maximum of 5 times so my use has been severely affected.

I’ve been hunting for a method to play music on my MacBook Pro that doesn’t involve iTunes. Someone mentioned Airfoil for streaming music across a network which sounded OK but I would have to physically go to the computer to change tracks / playlists… Then I discovered MonkeyTunes which, put simply, allows you to use Apple’s Remote app on iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad to have full control of MediaMonkey. Sweet!

So, now I have my MacBook Pro running as an Airfoil ‘speaker’, the windows machine running as the Airfoil source and I use my iPhone to control it all. I can also use my Android phone as the remote too, or my iPad.

Another bonus is I can install the free Airfoil speaker app onto my old iPhone 3G and stream it to that if I wanted to connect that to my stereo or the dock when I have guests and the MBP isn’t loud enough.

I’m pretty chuffed! So even with iOS 4.3 allowing HomeSharing of iTunes library, I can still use MediaMonkey for my music AND have all the benefits (and more) of that being shared across handheld devices and computers!

The only thing that annoys me is I didn’t discover all this 2 years ago…

P: forgot to tell you i found an MS update the other day that adds DVD and ISO burning to WinXP. Installed it to old PC but not tried it yet..

M: cool

P: also Nero 9OEM for £3

M: i have win7 now. it’s the future
M: cos it’s a bigger number

P: sorry nero isn’t the update…
P: i’ve got 7 too but other PC is XP

M: though really win98 should be the best

P: i liked windows word 5

M: how come, right, my windows is windows xp but word tells me it’s 2003?

P: what version of word?

M: it’s windows xp
M: so it shoudl be word xp but it says word 2003
M: so does that mean i’m actually on windows 2003?

P: probably.
P: word XP was 2002

M: damn – my printer’s nt compatible with windows 2003

P: can’t you incrrease the gigabytes?

M: it needs windows USB – apparently won’t work without that version
M: i have 1gigibytes of memory – is that enough? will i run out of space?

P: how many photos do you have in words?

M: think most of them go in there – words is the one where it shows a small version of the pictures, isn’t it?
M: can i delete the small pictures from there as it’s only the full size versions i’m bothered about

P: why does my broadband not make my PC faster?

M: ah, i know this one
M: it depends how many other people are using facebook at the same time. you see it’s only “up to” 8megagigabytes
M: which means you won’t get that full amount – AND even if you DID get the full 8 your hard drive is 250gigabytes so the 8 won’t actually increase your current computer

P: ah so if i’m downloading a game how many emails can i recieve

M: i don’t think you can get emails while a game is downloading?

P: my friend said you can because of the width of the bands and stuff

M: it would probably give you a virus as the email would mix in with the game anyway.
M: i woldn’t risk it.
M: unless it was a really fast game
M: then you could download the game before you even had chance to log in to aol webmail

The sad thing is, a lot of the statements here are things we hear real people actually saying…

Basically, in my proper computing years I’ve generally been a Windows user and had no major issues with it. I wasn’t OS-ist (I even have friends who are black, erm…, I mean who are Mac users) I just used Windows.

At the end of 2008 one of my bosses gave me his MacBook Pro (see here for proof: “…5 years later I’m on my third MacBook, one has been passed on to a colleague…”) as my Windows laptop was ageing rather badly. OK, I pestered quite a bit too to see what all the fuss was about Macs!!

Well, seeing as I sit at my laptop around 6-10 hours every day depending on workload it gave me plenty of time to ‘learn’ how to use the Mac. It was pretty straight forward and only a handful of Google searches, emails and MSN messages were required to get me knowledgeable about the basic, every day functions. 16 months on and I’m still probably classed as a newbie though but can do most things I need to do.

OK, so why the big divide between Mac and Windows users? To be honest, I don’t know but I think for most people it is largely how they were brought up. If you’ve been brought up using a Mac then you will prefer a Mac, ditto for Windows. The same is true, in my opinion, of TomTom and Garmin SatNav’s – in general users prefer the company they were ‘brought up’ with. Now, that’s not to say that allegiences can’t be switched – I was a Garmin man but have recently started using TomTom more and more. Likewise Griff tells us he moved from being a Windows user to a Mac user and hasn’t looked back since. With regards to operating systems I am still somewhere in between.

Both have their pro’s and cons. It’s pointless, in my opinion, just to say one is better than the other. You could make the same poor argument about which is better between a Ferrari and a Fiesta. Well, it’s a Ferrari, isn’t it? Well, no, actually, as I was referring to which is better for parking in a tightly packed car park in a busy shopping centre – in which case it would be the Fiesta. Which is better: Mac or Windows – well, what do you want it to do? For design work the Mac seems to do better – perhaps due to it’s better memory management when multiple programs are running. But for ease of networking I found Windows wins hands-down. Sharing files from a Windows machine took a matter of seconds and I could access them with read and write permissions from the Mac. Sharing files on the Mac took about 45 minutes with a lot of Googleing and faffing about in order to be able to access them with both read and write permissions through Windows.

I find the Mac is less customisable in terms of digging deep into the settings but then this does have it’s plus points. Less variation in settings means better overall compatibility. Also, Windows NEEDS more settings as the hardware it is running on can differ greatly. OSX runs on Apple Macs and Apple Macs alone. Apple know what hardware is in one of their machines from the outset and so the OS can be tailored directly for that. Windows needs to run on pretty much any hardware and that hardware is not designed nor built by Microsoft. Apple have the advantage there but this also shows that Windows is actually very versatile.

Regarding software I’ve found that you can find a Mac version of most Windows software and vice versa. The only real software issues I have with Mac are the lack of music library/players. iTunes is bad. I’ve fallen out with it after it failed to tag my mp3′s correctly and then wiped 10,000+ of my tags and artwork from all my files. So I now use MediaMonkey again in Windows but no similar software is available on the Mac. CD/DVD burning software is lacking for Mac too – OK I could use iTunes to burn a music CD but what if I need to burn 10? You need to keep going back and setting up the whole process 10 times. In Windows, even the most basic CD burning software will ask how many copies you want and then simmply tell you when to insert the next disc…!

So, in conclusion, which is better? Windows or Mac OSX? Microsoft or Apple? Meh… I like ‘em both and I’m happy to stay in No-Man’s Land for a good while longer!

PS – I want to point out that this isn’t simply a counter post to GriffBlog; I’d actually started writing this 3 days before his was posted! I’ve just been too busy to get it finished and published…

I like my music and I’ve been using Collectorz.com Music Collector for about 7 years now. MuC (as it is often referred to) is a fantastic piece of Windows and Mac database/collection software specifically for cataloguing CDs, LPs etc. It has a tonne of features that can be viewed via their website (I’m blogging this on my iPhone so am too lazy to fully review it!) but earlier today their ‘clz music’ app was finally added to the AppStore. So I bought it!

Now, instead of having to export my collection to HTML, format it, split it into groups by letter, upload and update the search database I can simply export it to my iPhone and view/search from there! It’s great! No more will I be rummaging around Discovery (local 2nd hand music shop) and end up buying a CD I already own (yes, I’ve done it a few times) or cursing the shopping center for no GPRS signal to check my collection online…

Oh, they also have software for movies, comics, books, photos most of which have iPhone apps to go with them.

I’ve also been playing with ‘Remote’ for the iPhone which works really well. Just to have the iPhone sat next to me to switch tracks without having to keep switching to iTunes itself – it’s really lazy but could be handy if I ever connected the laptop to the stereo for parties. Which I might now it works properly!

—————-
Now playing: Nerf Herder – Easy Mark
via FoxyTunes

Now, on the desktop I can use FoxyTunes to control my music and add ‘currently listening to’ links to blog posts etc but on the Mac I can only do that with iTunes as there is no Spotify support in FoxyTunes. A bit of googling tells me that the Windows version of FoxyTunes can control Spotify with a bit of fiddling but this does not work on Mac OSX.

So, what I’m after is anyone who can tell me a way to get FoxyTunes to work with Spotify on the Mac! Either that or for FoxyTunes developers to add Spotify support officially!

*EDIT: just to clarify, the networking ability of iTunes is poor – not the networking ability of the Mac Book Pro!!!