One of the huge benefits of having moved to San Francisco last fall is that I get to attend all the neat things that are hosted here. This week was the Macworld Conference and Expo 2011 at Moscone West presented by IDG. While it seemed like a smaller vendor showing than I’ve seen or heard of in the past, there were still plenty of great things to see. OmniGroup had a huge booth where they hosted Q&A sessions and product session; HP, SMART, Fujitsu, Nuance, HyperJuice and others also had a big showing but Canon, Adobe and others were no shows. But, on the upside, Macworld (the magazine) had many of their editors and staff on stage at Macworld Live to host a few panels, including a great one on ‘Future of the Mac’ with John Gruber. I’ve posted the photos I took onto Flickr and added them to the event pool.

Tomorrow, the wireless arm of Verizon will announce at a press conference in New York City that they will begin a CDMA version of Apple’s iPhone 4. This will end forty-two months of exclusivity in the US the device has had with AT&T Mobility. It will mean that Verizon is able to stem customer defection to AT&T for those wanting iPhone, will increase ARPU and data adoption, and cost AT&T in subscriber growth and post-paid customer churn. But that’s not what makes this announcement interesting. iPhone is important for many reasons, but it unique insofar as it has revealed quite a bit about the carrier relationship with subscribers and handset makers that was never a point of focus when the market was filled with dime-a-dozen flip phones and clunky email devices.

It’s rumored that when Apple first set out to partner with a US mobile carrier for its first foray into making a phone, it went to Verizon Wireless. This partnership was, of course, not to be — but why? It’s a story of control. Both Apple and Verizon are notorious for their need for control. Verizon has never seen itself as one to be a dumb pipe or merely a service provider. Nearly every device that has been released for use on their network has been branded and customized through and through to offer an experience that puts its services from and center (e.g., VCAST media stores, branded LBS products, mobile web), often at the expense of ODM (original device manufacturer) provided functionality. Even basic messaging products were rebranded to fall in line with their TXT/PIX/FLIX unified branding strategy. Smartphones were no different, and even presently sold handsets have undergone the same treatment where devices include the Verizon suite of “value-added” products that lead back into its walled content garden. iPhone, in all its iterations with AT&T and across the globe, are not this way. Software update schedules and functionality are managed by Apple and the carrier interference ends at the network backend for things like Visual Voicemail.

But it’s unfair to place Verizon under such scrutiny for how they managed their phone lineup and the device software. AT&T is in many ways the same with their Media Mall/AppCenter and similarly branded services. Sprint and T-Mobile too. But on iPhone, this wasn’t the case. Even when AT&T brought some of their services like its cobranded TeleNav offering to iOS and Family Map, the devices weren’t permitted to be preloaded on the device, but rather had to be downloaded from the App Store.

The phone is pristine from the consumer perspective, as though it managed to make it out of the wild without any battle scars from the carriers. iPhone bears no carrier marking on it to mar the clean design, and the software is all Apple. And it is this that defines the experience that smartphone buyers allude to when they express interest in iPhone by brand rather than fully articulating what about it is better. It has been doubly vexing for competing carriers to fully counter the demands by subscribers for why it isn’t available on their network. That is, because Apple has marketed it in a way that is carrier independent. They promoted an experience that customer’s could expect but didn’t tie it to their launch partner. It’s a phone that happened to be on AT&T, but it wasn’t an AT&T iPhone. For most, they thought it was like an iPod in that sense. CDMA, GSM, EV-DO Rev. A and HSPA+ are not things the average consumer worries about, and they shouldn’t have to.

In that sense, iPhone was a revelation about how Americans bought phones and how they carrier model was subject to change. Before this device, customers didn’t take the time or ever need to know that the BlackBerry 8310 was an AT&T exclusive with GPS but the 8320 had WiFi on T-Mobile, and that Verizon had the 8330 which had an unlocked location radio. They just walked into their carrier’s retail location when their two year was up and saw a BlackBerry there and were satisfied. It was around the time of the iPhone debut that phone exclusivity because a big deal in the US. Verizon scrambled to find something that would appease customers; this ended up being the colossal dud known as the BlackBerry Storm and Storm2, both exclusives to them in the US. AT&T currently holds an exclusive on the BlackBerry Torch for the time being.

And then there’s Android. While this deserves an article in and of itself, it’s necessary to briefly touch upon it. After the failure of the BlackBerry Storm to satisfy customers wanting a touch screen device on Verizon, they bet the farm on Android, Google’s iOS competitor that had been first commercially released in the G1 on T-Mobile. In October of 2009, Verizon, Motorola and Google announced the Droid A855, the first successful Android based handset to fall into consumers’ pockets. It was fully featured at the time, had strong branding licensed from LucasFilm, and an healthy advertising budget. Droid from Verizon was truly the first device that was at least 70% as good as iPhone, and for most people that was enough. But the interesting data point from here relevant to the carrier discussion is how Droid for Verizon was introduced in marketed.

DROID. When you read that, you knew it meant Android but you thought Verizon. And that’s how the story gets interesting. On marketing material and ads, you see the device but you’re shown it as though it was a Verizon product. It’s not the Motorola A855 Droid. It’s Droid on Verizon (from Motorola). And it was smart, because the Droid branding was not for just one device, it was for an entire class of phone that evolved with a new model every three months. But Android as an OS and concept became popularized as Droid even if it wasn’t on Verizon. And better yet, it worked because if you were to poll a random sampling of the public, a significant percentage would tell you that Android is a Verizon product. It’s epitomized by the launch event for the original Droid device in which the corporate logos were arranged, from left to right: Verizon, Motorola, Google.

You can’t count on that happening this time around. iPhone is not a Verizon property, it’s an Apple device that will run on Verizon’s voice and 3G data network. It will not be an LTE-capable device. It will not carry a Verizon logo, a checkmark, or a red and black splash screen before boot. Verizon knows this, and it’s why they’ve spent so much to differentiate themselves through marketing to position themselves as the market leader in reliability and overall coverage because the differentiation will not be on the device level. Even when it was taking on AT&T and its most popular device, it never sought to convey that the iPhone was a bad product (save for the ill-fated iDont ad), it was that it was on a sub-par and over-saturated network. That will change tomorrow.

And things just got a whole lot more interesting for Android ODMs that were relying on people who won’t or can’t leave Verizon, who now can get the device they actually wanted.

Keeping your data organized is hard. Keeping your data organized across many devices is harder.

Today, I’m going to show you how to keep your calendar, contacts and email in sync across devices using Google as the glue. As a bonus, I’ll even tell you how to have your files and notes everywhere too. Be advised that some of the puzzle pieces here are subscription based and cost money — things that work well usually do.

My data is stored across three applications on OS X: Mail, iCal and Address Book. They’re simple, fast and to the point. Email is painless to access across devices because of IMAP and its quick using IDLE, but calendar and contacts get tricky. Address Book is unique insofar as it has built-in support for Google syncing out of the box. It does, however, have a knack for forgetting to continue syncing after a while. iCal is the big one for most people and there are ways to rig syncing for free using CalDAV and tools like Calaboration. It quickly becomes a mess and is beyond most people; be sure you have backups of your data before trying.

With your Gmail or Google Apps email account, you’ve already got Google Calendar and Google Contacts. With these, you’ll be able to access contacts and calendar using any web browser, as well as push syncing on Android smartphones and iPhone.

Getting your data into Google’s cloud services is simple with the help of Spanning Sync. It installs on your Mac(s) as a preference pane that coordinates hourly syncs to Google of your iCal and Address Book data. Pricing is fair at $25/year or $65 for a lifetime subscription. Their pricing model is per Google account rather than per device which is a plus if you have more than one Mac.

Prior to starting your first sync with this, it’s always a good idea to backup your data. You can do this in both iCal and Address Book easily by going to File > Export > Archive in each program. Syncing can get messy and having backup takes a few seconds and saves hours of headaches.

Go ahead and start your first sync, it’ll take a while depending on how much data you have. Upon completion, explore iCal and Google Calendar and make sure events are linked to the correct calendars and that any recurring events are as they should be. For your contacts, compare the number of contacts in Google Contacts to the status bar’s count in Address Book. Everything matches up? Great. We’re half way done.

With respect to mobile devices, I have two to worry about: an iPhone 4 and a Droid Incredible (Android 2.2). Since we’re in the Google ecosystem now, the Android part of the equation is simple. Log into the Gmail or Google Apps account and enable syncing for all three categories (Calendar, Contacts and Mail). You’re data is set once you see the icon disappear in the notification bar.

Now onto iPhone. Most people are syncing their Gmail and Google Apps with iPhone incorrectly, perhaps because they don’t know there is a better way. Google has licensed Exchange ActiveSync from Microsoft and uses this as a simple way to get comprehensive PIM syncing working on iOS as part of Google Sync. What you’ll need to do is set up a new mail account in iOS 4. Select “Microsoft Exchange” as the type, use your Gmail username or full Google Apps address as the username, leave the domain blank and use “m.google.com” as the server address and you’re set. Ignore any certificate warnings that pop up and ensure SSL is checked. Give it a few minutes and your data will be synced to iPhone as well. One benefit you’ll notice about this method for accessing Gmail, other than it now syncs your contacts and calendar too, is that mail is now delivered via push instantly. Nifty.

Here are some other steps you may or may not need to worry about. If you have multiple iCal/Google Calendar calendars, you’ll need to manually turn on syncing of these for iPhone as by default, only your initial Google Calendar gets access via Exchange ActiveSync. Go to m.google.com/sync on your iPhone, tap on “Calendars”, and add a checkmark to those you want on your device. You’d also want to disable syncing of your contacts and calendars when linked to iTunes since that will have been obviated by over-the-air syncing. Lastly, for Google Apps users, Google Sync needs to be enabled in order for this to work. You can do this by logging into your “Manage this domain” control panel, clicking on “Service settings” and then “Mobile”. Check the box next to “Enable Google Sync” and you’re set.

One more thing about iPhone and Google via Exchange. When you add new contacts to iPhone, be default it will save them to the phone only in its own address book. Go to “Settings”, “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”, scroll down to “Default Account” and change it to your Exchange ActiveSync account.

That’s it. Your contacts and calendar and mail are all syncing over the air, accessible across your Macs, on the web, and on your mobile devices all the time. Changes on one reflect on the other and you don’t have to worry about plugging in your iPhone for anything other than adding music and updating podcasts.

I’ll cover text capture and file access later this week, but it’s easy: Simplenote for web and iPhone, Notational Velocity for Mac and Andronoter on Android. Don’t touch Evernote with a ten-foot clown pole.

What’s even more shocking is that it all works together flawlessly, links to an online service to share and compete with others and is completely reasonable in price. It may not be a personal jetpack or teleportation, but sometimes you have to take what you can get. With respect to Apple in this scenario, it’s a testament to the restraint to adopt and innovate new and existing technologies to make complex ideas into simple and compelling features for the end-user. It’s not about being first to market or designing a device that wins on a spec sheet alone; it’s about offering features that translate into practical usability.

And speaking of usable futuristic technology gone mainstream, how about that iPhone 4 FaceTime ad? Or Face/OffTime, if you will.

…and, “What is Newton?” circa 1994.

Luckily, this week – Apple decided to offer a matte “anti-glare” display option on the 15″ MacBook Pro. I purchased one Friday night from the Apple Store and am posting a few pictures here since it seems to be mildly elusive and CTO MacBook Pros from the website haven’t shipped yet. Thus far, I’m really enjoying it. Take a look below.

It looks very similar to the pre-unibody MacBook Pro. Wider bezel than the 17″.

You can find more pictures over on my Flickr photostream.

I won’t begin to claim that Apple reinvented the music industry or make any sweeping claims, but it must be acknowledged the impact that this company has had on the the creation and consumption of music. With iTunes + iPod, Apple introduced a new and simple way for the younger generation to experience their music. Physical media was obviated through the digital distribution channels that were created through the iTunes Store. As of the last reported quarter, Apple has sold over 170,000,000 digital music players worldwide. Other consumer electronics manufacturers attempted to break into the market for digital music like Rio, Creative and iRiver – yet Apple succeeded because of attention to ease of use and aesthetics. As of January 2009, nearly all tracks on the iTunes Store are free of DRM. OTA song downloads to mobile devices is now possible without a premium price.

Apple, on the both the professional and consumer level, has simplified the creation of music. Through applications like Logic Studio (acquired IP) and the in-house developed Garage Band, creating music from pre-recorded loops and real instruments is approachable to the masses. Through the iLife suite of applications, Apple did not position Garage Band as a niche product – by offering it for free on each and every OS X machine, it took the position that music is not an exclusive art. The latest edition offers interactive lessons from renowed artists to extend this metaphor to helping anyone take on an actual instrument. No other company has done anything of this magnitude (reference the next entry).

I want to take a bit of time to really nail down the problems that Windows has with usability and UI design that seem to never be addressed, or just seem to get worse with each revision. This is not meant to be the usual Windows v. Mac argument that happens so often — rather, it’s a summation of the fundamental interface issues that plague Windows and prevent it from being a truly usable operating system.

One thing that OS X, and iPhone in particular, have demonstrated is a full understanding of the spatial relationships that must exist in computing. While the animations and visual effects present in Mac OS make for a great in-store demo, they serve a greater purpose – they’re visual cues that show where windows emerge from and move away to, as well as establish relationships between the windows themselves. Perhaps the quintessential example of this is Exposé. When using Exposé, you can easily view the desktop, all application windows, or just the windows related to the foremost application. It’s a useful feature that is implemented perfectly. When invoking the ‘view desktop’ key, all windows visually slide to the corners of the screen and the corners dim to reflect the temporary view scenario.

Viewing all windows or a single application’s windows dims the background, bringing focus to the windows you called upon. Each window slides into view so you know where it came from and where each will return once you’ve completed the interaction. Exposé takes a difficult UI design issue and offers an elegant and simple solution that works better than in any other OS I’ve seen to date. Minimizing and maximizing windows to and from the dock illustrate the same concept of spatial relationships and managing lots of individual windows in a graceful manner.

In the same vein, Windows suffers from one key UI design flaw – it is incapable of hiding applications. Windows offers no way to simply “hide” an application and its windows, nor does it offer a simple way to minimize a single window. This is crucial to being able to use more than a handful of applications at once and maintaining an uncluttered workflow. For example, say I’m using three Microsoft Office programs, Firefox, iTunes and Skype. In this scenario, each application has two windows open, so we have twelve windows in total. I want all of these applications open, but not all of them are relevant to the task at hand, so I’d generally have to minimize everything in Windows and rely on Alt+Tab to let me work. The taskbar would be full of individual windows squished together and navigating around is just plain cumbersome. Vista made this slightly easier by adding window previews into the application switcher, but the UI problem remains. Mac OS and other desktop environments have solved this long ago by allowing one to simply hide an application and all related windows, via menu item or keyboard shortcut, such that they aren’t visible until called upon from the dock and won’t show up in Exposé. It’s a simple idea that makes using ten to fifteen applications at a time extremely easy. Without this, Windows remains particularly unwieldy when the information you need is scattered in different programs and you have five or more Explorer windows open.

Which leads us to the culmination of the problem: Windows wasn’t originally designed to multitask effectively. As it stands, Windows retains the antiquated taskbar that lives at the bottom of the screen which becomes nearly unusable once you amass more then six windows open at a time. Some developers have tried to get around this problem by offering the option to minimize to the system tray, but it still reflects a generally poor and ill-conceived interface design. The answer to this is not increasing screen real estate as many suggest – this only encourages continuing a poor design paradigm from Microsoft. Windows has never had a great way to organize and present multiple windows. When Windows 95 came out, the taskbar and Start menu were revolutionary as a way to keep different processes in check and accessible quickly, but the flaw in the ultimate utility of this was exposed when protected memory and powerful computers made multitasking possible and painless. In its current form, the threshold of how many applications one can use at a time quickly is rather low. Some may argue it’s that there isn’t a need to keep programs open, but that is an idea borne of the usability limitations inherent in Windows.

And this speaks to the general problem that Microsoft faces today – they’re unwilling to innovate. Microsoft has such a large install base worldwide that breaking compatibility and instituting a more functional UI would draw ire from business customers and users that are set in their ways. Apple faced this same issue with the transition from OS 9 to OS X but they solved it in the most logical way they could which was allowing users to continue to boot the older OS for legacy applications. The reason that I feel this isn’t such a big problem for Microsoft is their success in the virtualization market. With Windows Server 2008, they included Hyper-V which is their superb virtualization environment where you can create virtual machines and run any x86 or x64 OS you wish. If Microsoft truly wanted to fix Windows and create a 21st century OS, they would redesign Windows and offer virtualization of Windows XP and Vista environments for older applications that haven’t been updated. This is the way enterprise has dealt with the interfacing with older database systems that don’t fit in their current infrastructure and it’s why Citrix is company with yearly revenue measured in the billions of dollars. Microsoft has demonstrated that they try to keep backwards compatibility when they can, but programs still break between revisions of Windows yet and there is little payoff in terms of security and usability. To put it plainly, Microsoft needs to quit ‘half-assing’ change and pull an Apple.

I’m disappointed with Apple. I’ve been using their machines since I was four years old and have been buying them personally for the past seven. It has been my preferred platform of choice and I’ve never been unhappy with the hardware choices available to me until now. I see a glaring hole in their portable line-up, a small prosumer notebook. This void had been previously filled with the 12″ PowerBook but has never been replaced since its discontinuation in early 2006. One might suggest the MacBook Air as it’s successor, but that’s not paying attention to what the 12″ PowerBook was – a small, lightweight notebook that made almost no compromises in performance and connectivity to achieve it’s minuscule footprint. I do not mean to suggest that there is not a spot in the marketplace for a thin and light MacBook Air, however it’s clear that Apple is leaving money on the table from consumers like myself searching for that elusive perfect computer in a perfect size.

But I have a dream. A dream where there is a speedy and capable notebook running Mac OS X that fulfills these wants and needs. All Apple needs to do is build it. I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up spec. sheet of what this computer should be. I give you, the perfect laptop…

MacBook Pro (13″) – Coming Soon from Apple

• 13″ 1440×900 LCD (LED-backlight)
• Discreet Graphics (Dual-Link DVI)
• Intel Core 2 Duo (Montevina)
• 2-4GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM
• 64-128GB Solid-State Disk
• Gigabit Ethernet Networking
• 802.11N Wireless Networking
• Integrated Sprint/AT&T WWAN
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• iSight Webcamera
• Backlit Keyboard
• 9-Cell Battery*
• SDHC Reader

This would not require a feat of engineering, although I’m certain that Apple could work their usual magic and include some tremendously innovative features in this notebook. These features exist in many notebooks available today (such as the Sony VAIO SZ, ThinkPad X200/300) but prove to be flawed choices as they do not run OS X and lack the polish I expect from a laptop, which is why I’m an Apple buyer in the first place. An optical drive? Who cares about an optical drive? The world’s thinnest notebook? I don’t need it. Simply put, I want a small and powerful laptop that can handle a long day of on-the-go use and be backed by the operating system I can’t live without.

* To keep with the svelte and clean design of Apple notebooks, a smaller battery can be included and the larger 9-cell high-capacity battery would be left as a CTO option.

In some basic testing with the HDTune benchmarking utility, the Samsung drive performed admirably. With an average read speed of 67MB/s and a peak speed of 88MB/s, the drive offers about twice the performance of a standard 5400RPM SATA laptop hard disk. Where the drive really shines is the almost non-existent access times on your data. In this test, the average seek time was 0.3ms where a traditional notebook is comes in at 15-20ms (or about 50-60x slower). Read/write performance also does not suffer from the pitfall that platter-based drives do, which is that information reads at the same speed regardless of where the data is physically on the drive.

The file read/write benchmarks told the same story as the standard read test. When using the 64MB file size, the drive offered consistent performance peaking at about 100MB/s reading data and 90MB/s writing. Comparing this to the tests of the reference Seagate hard-disk drive, it was consistently more than twice as fast as the traditional drive peaked at 40MB/s (HDD benchmark charts are provided at the end of the article). Boot times are not a terribly relevant or accurate way to gauge a computer’s performance, but since gamers/nerds are always clamoring for them, I’ll include them anyways. With the SSD, a the laptop booted to the Windows login screen in 34 seconds and at the desktop with all startup items loaded in a total of 39 seconds. With the HDD, those same tasks were completed in 46 seconds and 58 seconds respectively. Both of these tests were with the same drive image running Windows Vista on an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz notebook computer.

As for the SLC vs. MLC debate referenced earlier, it’s all a matter of cost. The best performing SSDs on the market are SLC drives. SLC drives offer better performance, lower power consumption and a longer-lifespan (100,000 write/erase cycles per sector as compared to 10,000 cycles on an MLC drive). MLC (multi-level cell) drives are cheaper to manufacture and are quickly becoming popular because of the lower price point. The lifespan argument loses its utility when one takes into account that 10,000 write/erase cycles is averaged/leveled out through the drive’s own firmware so the same cells aren’t constantly being rewritten (and since SSDs have a near-instant access time, there is no ill-effect on performance). Also, the useful life of a consumer notebook computer is surely less than that of the drive. In either case, a solid-state disk can greatly enhance the performance and battery life of a notebook, but it does come at a hefty cost.

Seagate HDD Benchmarks

While OS X 10.4 and 10.5 have built-in support for ExpressCard and USB 3G networking devices, it does not give you all the features of the card nor the ability to complete the initial service activation. Earlier this year, Sprint began to offer companion software and drivers for their EV-DO equipment for OS X users called “Sprint SmartView”. The software gives you access to more detail about your usage, what network you’re connected to, and GPS services (which we’ll get into later). With this software, you can now complete data card firmware updates and activate service obviating the use of virtualization of Windows or borrowing a friend’s computer for that. My only real issue with it is that doesn’t act like a Mac application, as you can tell immediately when it installing a desktop shortcut (not a dock shortcut, a desktop shortcut) and by the various interface inconsistencies. Otherwise, it’s a pretty good step by Sprint – you can download the SmartView software here – Sprint Downloads.

However, GPS is the main point of this post. With the new connection manager comes the ability to use the A-GPS functionality of all Sprint EV-DO cards to locate yourself. To use the basic location function, launch the SmartView software and click on the “GPS” drop-down and it will acquire a signal and locate you. You can click the shortcuts there to find yourself on Google Maps and each icon will take you to a different search such as restaurants and Sprint locations near you. Neato. But the most useful function of this would be to get directions and track yourself. Since the software will create a NMEA port on your device that will pipe the location data into another program that can use it. For this tutorial, we’ll use Google Earth since everyone loves Google Earth. The only sticking point here is that to use GPS, you’ll have to subscribe to “Google Earth Plus” which is $20 a year – $1.67 a month, don’t be cheap, pay for it.

To enable NMEA output, click the icon that resembles a ‘play button’. Now, launch Google Earth Plus and wait for it to load completely and log-in. Now go to the “Tools” menu and  and select “GPS”. This will bring up a settings window like the one pictured on the right. Click on the “Realtime” tab and select “NMEA”. From here, you will want to check the “Automatically follow the path” radio box and choose how often you want to poll the card for new location coordinates (six to ten seconds works well). Click “Start” and you’ll see Google Earth pan to your current location and follow you as you move in your car and of course this works on the go as your EV-DO service is more than sufficient to pull down the maps/satellite imagery on the fly.

Google Earth Plus with Realtime GPS

Now you’re ready to use this to get directions and find businesses around you based on your current location anywhere you go with your Mac laptop. Don’t forget that you can also track a trip by saving your path in the “Places” menu. The GPS function does not eat much of your battery, however, Google Earth can be CPU intensive at times, so it might be advantageous to bring a charger or second battery along with you.

Have questions? Leave them in the comments and I’ll try update the post.

When using the visualizer on a current Intel-based machine, the visualizer operates fine (ignoring the fact that it hasn’t changed since 3.0) and is mesmerizing as always. However, could somebody give me a reason why a task that was a cake-walk for a 500Mhz G3 from seven years ago is consuming 126% of the available CPU cycles from a Core 2 Duo portable?

(click to view full-size)

Are they running the old visualization code from the PowerPC version in emulation? What on earth can make this so taxing on the CPU? For reference, I’ve embedded the thirty-second spot Apple ran in 2001 for the iMac G3 – great ad by the way.

In order to watch a few events of the 2008 Olympics that I wanted to see from nbcolympics.com, I was forced to install Microsoft Silverlight on OS X. I had resisted for quite a while, but I guess the Beijing Olympics are the huge foot in the door that Microsoft has been looking for. After installing, I was pleased to see that there is a whole freaking tab just for digital rights management. I’m glad that the competitor to Adobe Flash makes it clear out of the gate what it’s about – keeping the content provided in control and a user experience second. Kudos.

This morning, I was looking for a Quicksilver-inspired Windows application to use in my coming experiment (details to come soon – I have to check with Amnesty International to verify whether or not it falls in the realm of torture), and I found a new one that tries in their own special way to do the same. Dash is one that really caught my attention as it seems to best capture the basic nature of Quicksilver’s search, but it led me to another facet of the Windows developer problem which is how they market their software. Take a look at the seven reasons they suggest I use Dash at their product page. Item two on that list (because everyone loves reading lists) is “Reduce Repetitive Stress Injury”. Seriously, go look, I’ll wait… Rather than the pithy “act without doing” tagline adopted by Alcor, the developer of Quicksilver, Dash takes it in the opposite direction and is positioning this as a marvel of modern medicine. I say this in jest, but the problem is that it’s not addressing a problem they can solve or the strength of their product – it strikes me as something they pulled out of their butt to fill the empty space on the site.

And then there’s price. Dash is set at $50.00 except if you purchase now, you can get their “pre-release offering price” of $19.95 saving you $30.05. Let’s skip right past how this is on par with infomercial level “buy in the next thirty minutes and get a second free!” silliness and look at how it’s they’re establishing value. Software isn’t designed to be inexpensive and offering excessive discounts can make it seem as though you’re diminishing the worth of a product; a great example of this is Transmit from Panic Software for the Mac – it’s an FTP client, but it’s billed as the FTP client. As such, Panic doesn’t discount the software to entice those who undervalue what they offer, which is a fantastic user experience and just well-designed software. Cyberduck and Fugu are free, but I saw the value in the product that made $29 palatable. What the makers of Dash are doing is, in my opinion, either mispricing their product or using used car salesman tactics to win over customers. Ignoring the fact that Quicksilver, a vastly superior product to this knock-off, is completely free – Dash is selling an application at their ‘regular price’ that pushes it into the range of what full-fledged productivity apps cost. Launchbar, a product similar to Quicksilver for Mac is priced without the gimmicks, at $19. Fair.

I could continue, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll end this here. Windows developers and software vendors have so much to learn from the Mac developer community about creating better applications, but even more importantly, about marketing. If it can be summed up in a sentence or two, it would be this – stop selling simple consumer apps the same way Microsoft and Oracle sell enterprise CRM software. Home users don’t want to see how many different ways you can say the same thing on your “features” page, they want to see you solve a problem they have and do it elegantly.

Early last week, the same problem occurred again – however I do not have the luxury of a recent backup to revert to. My most recent was from the beginning of June and I had made significant changes to the entries in the database since then. I emailed customer support from the Wallet developers and ten days later, I’ve heard absolutely nothing. As such, I’ve spent the better part of a day resetting various passwords via e-mail and reentering data into my new password/data management application of choice, 1Password.

1Password takes a much more logical approach to storing this data. It uses the existing secure keychain feature of OS X and repurposes that in a powerful interface. In my week of toying with it, it has worked quite well and is looks like it will be far more flexible a solution than Wallet for organizing and securing data. To migrate the old backup over, I exported the database as a tab-defined text file and imported it into 1Password. A cursory amount of reformatting of the data fields and notes and I’m good to go. My only concern is the GUI isn’t as pleasing to the eye as most other applications for OS X, but it could look like Lotus Notes on OS 9 for all I care as long as it works reliably.

My advice is that other Wallet users out there either keep ridiculously frequent backups of their database or to switch over the 1Password. I have no regrets at all about purchasing 1Password which is more than I can say about Wallet.

Fix it, Apple.

On the other hand, I’m not having nearly as bad a time as most others are reporting with the new software and third-party applications. I’ve only had one random crash which happened with the WHERE application, but otherwise it’s been smooth sailing. The finance application from Bloomberg is fantastic – it gives charts and stock quotes alongside their news headlines in a simple and speedy interface. It’s one of the few that doesn’t seem to be simply a mobile-optimized website as its own application (I’m looking at you – BofA Mobile Banking). Here’s hoping that iPhone 2.1 software is released with a slew of bug fixes before I buy my iPhone 3G.

‘iPhone Dev Team‘ released the latest version of their Pwnage Tool yesterday which meant that I could finally upgrade my iPhone 2G to the 2.0 firmware. With the 2.0 firmware comes the biggest addition, the App Store – which allows third party applications developed through the iPhone SDK to run on users phones. Free and paid applications are available and the starting line-up of software is actually rather good.

Thus far, I’ve installed AIM, AOL Radio, Bloomberg News, Bank of America Mobile Banking, Evernote, Facebook, Mobile News by AP, NetNewsWire, Pandora, Remote, Twitterrific, Where, Whrrl and Yelp. In the short time I’ve played around with it, it seems that Bloomberg, Pandora and Remote will be the most useful. Bloomberg’s application offers a better way to interface with their news stories and market data (with support for landscape charting!). Pandora is a user-friendly client for the Pandora online radio service which works wonderfully. Lastly, Remote is an application from Apple that allows one to remotely control their iTunes library or Apple TV from the iPhone.

The firmware itself has been rather stable albeit a bit more sluggish that 1.1.4 but I assume that will be fixed in time. This software update will hold me over until I can buy the iPhone 3G (16GB white, yo).

It’s a pretty easy fix although.

Open ‘Activity’ Manager and show all processes (even root)
Quit the process named ‘ps’ (you will be asked for admin privileges)

You should do this while the PwnageTool is open. Also, you will need to ensure the folders \<user>\Library\iTunes\Device Support and \<user>\Library\iTunes\iTunes Software Updates  exist on your machine.

To be quite honest, I’m not certain what the ‘ps’ process does and you should always take cautiou when fiddling with processes on your machines; however I have used this will no ill effects however I did restart once I finished ‘pwning’ the phone. Good luck!

EDIT (7/21): This bug has since been fixed in version 2.0.1, read here.

You’ve most likely used Commnand+Tab to switch between applications on your computer, but a similar shortcut, Command+` (the key next the ’1′ key) will switch between application windows. This is quicker than using Expose if you just want to keep flipping back and forth between two large spreadsheets. Continuing with the window management theme, perhaps the most powerful shortcut is Command+H – hiding an application. OS X allows you to hide all and application’s windows until you call bring it back from the dock or by switching to it via Command+Tab. The main use of this is to keep your workspace clear and so that you don’t have to worry about how much you have open at any one time – for me, I have about ten to fourteen applications open at one time, some with multiple windows. Without using Command+H to hide some apps, using Expose would be unwieldly. Another related shortcut is Command+M which minimizes the foremost window. This is convenient if you want to leave some documents open but are otherwise distracting to your current work.

When you have multiple windows associated with an application open, you can close the current one by typing Command+W. This works in the Finder or just about anywhere else. This shortcut, combined with the four others previously mentioned tackles most of the common tasks related to window management in OS X and once you get used to them, will make you more efficient and quicker. The point of using keyboard-based shortcuts is to reduce your reliance on the mouse which in almost all cases is disruptive to your concentration and workflow.

In the next howto, I’ll take on the most useful and powerful application for OS X ever made – Quicksilver.

To do this, create an Automator workflow that starts with “Get Selected Items” so that you can simply highlight a few PDFs in Finder and execute the Automator action on it. Next, choose the “Set PDF Metadata” action and find some field to manipulate. I chose to do “Content Creator” since that doesn’t impact the document at all. Now, save the workflow as a plug-in for Finder. This action achieves the same result as opening the document in Preview and using “Save to PDF” from the Print dialog box.

Now when you want to ‘optimize’ these sluggish PDF documents, you can just select them, right-click and run your Automator action which will overwrite the existing file. It does lead to a file that is 1.5x the file size though.

I’ve included my Automator workflow script to the post for reference. Enjoy.

Automator Workflow – Optimize PDFs (place in /Users/<you>/Library/Workflow/Applications/Finder)