I did it. I think I’m finally giving up on Outlook and moving the core of my life back to Mac OS X. I’ve launched Outlook maybe a handful of times in the past week, just to copy an email over to Salesforce when I needed to do so. Other than that, I’ve been using Thunderbird 2 as my email client and I’m very happy with it. Folks are working on a Salesforce/Thunderbird link. The clincher for me? Thunderbird does a much better job with IMAP than Outlook does. It’s tons faster (running natively in Mac OS X helps) and it handles multiple identities like no other email client I’ve tried.

I’m now handling all my calendar stuff in Google Calendar. I considered Airset (which Eric uses and I maintain a calendar to keep family events in sync) and 30 boxes, but in the end Google Calendar seemed to be the best fit for me. I like that I can text a message to “48368” to add events, or see what’s happening in the next 24 hours. I would love if I could text “48368” with a request to show me everything on a certain day. For example, if I’m out and about, and I want to see what I have on the schedule for June 12 so I can figure out if it’s okay to schedule an appointment at 3 pm, it would be great if I could figure out a way to see just that day on my phone. I am not happy with any of the utilities I’ve tried to sync Google Calendar with my Blackberry’s calendar. Right now I’m using Spanning Sync to sync to iCal so Missing Sync can do the rest but iCal has annoying duplicates and I can’t figure out why. My hunch: OS X sync services is still no joy. I’d rather get my calendar over-the-air and give up on syncing it. The only thing I really need to sync is contacts. I don’t need to see my whole calendar on the Blackberry. I just want to see certain days when I need to see them, and I need to know what I have to do next and where.

I’m trying Toodledo for task management. You name the online task management application, I’ve tried it. None feel right. Toodledo seems to be striking a nice balance between simplicity and features that may stick for me. It has a very, very good mobile interface. I have this bad habit of thinking of tasks I missed while driving. This morning at a red light, I was able to load up Toodledo’s WAP interface and add a task before the light turned green. It integrates well with Google Calendar and Firefox, too.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to be 100% Mac OS X. I still have to do all my Salesforce database processing, Quickbooks/Quicken in Windows. And there are websites that I have to use IE for. But so much more of my time now is on the Mac side than it was a year ago.