Migrating an address book from Outlook Express 5 on Mac OS9 to Apple Mail

Recently I was tasked with an address book migration from a Microsoft Outlook Express 5 client running on OS9 into an Address Book application on Mac OSX 10.3 “Panther”. Needless to say, it wasn’t a straightforward task.

Outlook Express 5 on OS9 exports the contact details in a tab delimited format, which seems to be the only format. Apple’s Address Book in Panther supports only LDIF and vCard imports. There are several ways of doing that.
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10 new features of Apple’s OS X ‘Leopard’ – WWDC 2007

The WWDC is upon us, and more than 5000 attendees have piled into the auditorium. Apple store is down. Surprise. Steve went into the features of Leopard after guys from Intel, EA Games and id Software took stage.
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Apple previews OS X (10.5) Leopard at WWDC 2006

From what I’ve seen, Leopard is catering more to regular users, trying to make them in a simple Apple way to feel like Power Users (check out that widget builder, Time Machine usability through eye-candy, etc) – no MS-like dialogues to go through, etc. I like that. It means more “WOW!” from switchers resulting in a bigger market share for Apple.
On the other hand, Leopard does seem like a very unpolished product (the infamous FTFF and old-age brushed metal in iCal), that still has noticeable quirks that have been loathed by power and pro users for quite some time. Example: someone above has mentioned new stationery features in Mail. While stationery features have been around for quite a while, Apple seems to take it further by making them look more attractive and easier to use with other apps (I liked that iPhoto picture import and zooming). On the other hand, this type of features will breathe new life into crazy FFs and mail messages will explode in size (I am not sure how well Mail scales the size of a 1600×1200 picture, for example).
Also, having had a look at the cool iChat desktop sharing feature, I wouldn’t be surprised if it opens a new can of worms if not done right and Apple would have to release an iChat security update shortly after Leopard ships. But of course, not taking chances means not getting anywhere…
On the whole, I liked the Leopard preview only from a regular home user’s perspective, so let’s hope that the juicy stuff is yet to come…