It has been almost 2 weeks since I last posted, which can be blamed on a trip to the Turks and Caicos (more to come on that), quarter end, Grade 8 graduation (proud to say both boys made honour role), the sun finally coming out and of course, the new iMac 27”.

I have been playing with it for a couple weeks now and have watched about 40 podcasts on how MACs work. It is a unique experience as I play with a lot of technology and there are very few times that I am such a duck out of water. I found the whole transition quite perplexing as it is just so different and not without issue.

I would say the saving grace has been Parallels virtualization software. This is an amazing piece of work as it gives you a full Windows emulation as if it were a MAC, without the awkward looking window within a window. Simply click on the Windows application you want to launch from the tree and it shows up as if it were a MAC window (they call it Coherence).

Why has this been the saving grace? Because of Hotmail. It would seem that Hotmail works fantastic on an iPad and iPhone thanks to the Exchange integration (allowing for calendar, contact and full email-folder synchronization) but does not work on a MAC. Even with the new version of Office MAC and Outlook, it does not work and there is no IMAP support. So as this dawned on me I started to sweat about having to do a full family conversion to Gmail just to use the MAC. I have nothing against Gmail (I have a Gmail account that I use for personal business email), but I just do not feel like doing this right now. Maybe later when the sun isn’t shining, the pool isn’t open and the golf course is closed. But not now. Plus, the Windows Live mail client is the best in the market (Sorry Thunderbird).

Which is why I am using Parallels, the Windows Live Mail icon is docked and runs beautifully. It has also made it simpler for me to do some transitions like music and other things.

That aside, the iMac is just a beautiful machine with a few very unique offers like the magic trackpad which is amazing once you know all of the tips and tricks.