I have a dirty secret.

I have an Exchange server and I like it. A lot.

I started down the road to an Exchange server with the introduction of DirectPush on Windows Mobile (I've talked before about how well DirectPush works, so I won't go into that here). DirectPush required me to have an Exchange account, which I got through 4SmartPhone.net. This all worked well, except that I have several email accounts, and 4SmartPhone.net will only retrieve and forward mail from one. Further, with the outrageous GPRS pricing, I'm completely unwilling to pay to ship spam over-the-air, and their anti-spam protection was letting too many slip through.

Coincidentally, I realized that I had a perfectly good (if slightly underpowered) test server running Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003.

First off was to find a way to grab the email out of my various POP accounts and forward it to my Exchange account. I ended up using GetMail 4 Hotmail running as a service (to start out with, at least). This utility periodically grabs email out of POP accounts and forwards them to the appropriate email address via SMTP (i.e. the local Exchange server). The only complaint I have about this methodology is that I have to regularly remove the messages from the POP servers myself. I'm looking at using Fetchmail instead. For the time being though, it's working well.

I set up Spam Assassin to perform spam filtering; using the excellent SpamAssassin Sink to integrate it with Exchange. It was reasonably easy to set up, although I have to find a better way of updating the Bayesian tokens than running batch scripts manually.

Finally, I turned on DirectPush. I've set up Blackberry BES servers before, and the difference in configuration is night and day. Basically you check a checkbox and you're good to go.

I've been running this configuration for a few weeks now in parallel with my "normal" mail configuration (i.e. a mail client contacting various POP servers). I've had nothing but success so far (I received all of my email while at the WWDC on my JasJar via Cingular wireless) and I have vastly less spam delivered than I would normally get through Apple Mail.

Once I get the Pop->Exchange procedure running to my satisfaction, I expect to switch over completely.

Suggested reading:

(P.S. I like Entourage, too)

I thought I took pretty good notes at the WWDC but, as usual, what made sense when I wrote it didn't make sense when I read it. Actually it did make sense, but it wasn't anywhere near complete enough. Note to self: take longer better notes next time.

One of my Cocoa apps was (recently) crashing in obc-msgSend. Upon seeing this, I was delighted to remember a specific bit of one of the developer sessions which talked precisely about this. I gleefully turned to my notes and sure enough, learned that crashes in obc-msgSend are a sign of prematurely deallocated objects, and I should set MSZombieEnabled [sic] to find them. Sadly, I neglected to expand on the "MSZombieEnabled" thing or, in fact, spell it correctly.

Happily, thanks to the power of Google, I found what I needed in this wonderfully complete article on, you guessed it, debugging retain counts (complete with where to set NSZombieEnabled):

Big Nerd Ranch Weblog >> Debugging retain counts

I admit to using XFire on a semi-regular basis, as well as other less specialized IM systems. I was, therefore, delighted to see Xblaze - a plugin for the popular Adium IM application.

Xblaze encouraged me to switch from my normal configuration of iChat and MSN Messenger to a consolidated Adium setup, which is pretty handy - simplification is better, right?. Now all that's left is a Skype plugin, and my setup will be complete.

This was the tag line and message of this year's WWDC. Unsaid, but implied, was the message "pay no attention to Vista because Leopard will still outdo it". I suspect that Apple knows its history and remembers more than 10 years ago when another new version of Windows was on the way. Windows 95 succeeded in distracting attention from the Mac by duplicating (more or less) it's unique interface, even though a large number of people at the time mocked the Mac's cutesy desktop look-and-feel. Of course, those same people crowed the benefits of this UI once Windows duplicated it.

I've used the Vista beta and it's nice. It's still nowhere near as intuitive as Mac OS X: it seems that Microsoft has attempted a mostly superficial copy of the interface rather than any real ground breaking usability improvements. And it still has the dreaded registry. And an unbelievable number of inscrutable popup warning and confirmation dialog boxes.

Vista will however, distract quite a few people (and of course, the mainstream media) because of its superficial similarities to Mac OS X. And perhaps this is the genius of Microsoft at work.

From a developer's point of view, Mac OS X is vastly superior in its capabilities to Vista or any earlier version of Windows. The abundance of amazingly powerful APIs that are easy to use (think: CoreImage) and free development tools make it almost a pleasure to develop for. Except for the whole Cocoa memory management methodology, of course.

So Apple is mostly right. Mostly. From a technical point of view, it's assuredly easier to accomplish a task (and in a more elegant and satisfying way). Apple loses on the business attraction of developing for the Mac; lets face it, a 5% (or 10% or 12% or whatever the current claim is) market share isn't anywhere near as attractive as the 90 some-odd percent market share of Windows. And the market share, or rather the perception of market share, not the technical merits, will ultimately determine if this is the right platform or not.

As an aside, the question of percentages still needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the vast majority of installed Windows software is pirated. People affluent enough to purchase a computer in the first place go to great ends to steal a $20 piece of software (the lengths that some people will actually go to to try to steal our software is mind boggling; one day I'll list some of the better ones).

So whether or not the Mac and its associated peripherals is, in fact, the "right platform" remains to be seen. If market share continues to increase, developers will have both a compelling technology platform as well as a compelling business platform. Lets hope that Apple remembers Windows 95 and is ready for it.