Apple

Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple has announced that the “best alternative” for consumers regarding digital music downloads is the removal of digital rights management. Implications from previous interviews have strongly suggested that he personally doesn’t like it and having the largest share of the personal music player market means it would be good for business too.

The music industry (and the movie/TV industry to a less extent) have to be worried by this. The sales from iTunes are now significant enough that if Apple threatens to remove DRM anyway then they would lose too much by not complying.

Ideally Bill Gates will announce similar feelings. Surely it’s good PR all round for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to be united solely to protect the consumer? I’m being a little hopeful perhaps…

I’m a Mac user (and proud). When it came to the ‘big switch’ there were several things that I needed: my documents, my music, my pictures and my internet (emails and bookmarks and so on). All of these were easily copied across using a cross over cable, no problems there - but shock horror, my emails were another story. Microsoft Outlook Express stores emails in a non-standard format which can’t be read by Apple Mail - disaster! It was then that I remembered once installing Netscape to test compatibility of my web site. Netscape had very nicely offered to import the Internet and email settings from Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Checking up on this I found that when it does this it stores the resulting emails in a standard .mbox format - which can then be read by any sensible email client. Wohoo! So the basic steps to import your emails from Outlook Express on Windows to Apple Mail on the Mac:

• Install Netscape on the Windows box.
• Allow it to import from your Outlook Express.
• Copy the newly created .mbox files to your Mac.
• Show Apple Mail where it can find them when it asks.

That’s it - yay! Ooo and make sure you remember to uninstall Netscape afterwards or your PC might become contaminated or something hehehe.