David Alison's Blog

Upgrading to Snow Leopard

2009-09-01T13:30:00.006-04:00

The UPS truck pulled up yesterday and delivered my family upgrade pack to Snow Leopard. Though I'm a software developer I really stick to the web side of things and have not participated in any of the developer versions of Snow Leopard. As a result, I've only done modest reading on it and I am approaching this upgrade as many consumers would.

Rather than jump in with both feet, I decided to upgrade my MacBook Pro first, holding off on my primary machine (a Mac Pro) until I had seen which applications are compatible.

Application compatibility? Doesn't everything work?

Well, no. Most general purpose applications run fine - the majority for me did in fact. It's those little extensions that I've become hopelessly addicted to that can cause a problem. My biggest concern with Snow Leopard was whether or not I would have to change the way I work if one of my applications suddenly stopped working.

Since Apple released Snow Leopard ahead of schedule it apparently caught a number of independent software developers off guard and unprepared to release updates to their software.

The other thing I was interested in was the performance improvements. I wanted to see if on a real world Mac I would see any real bump in performance. Armed with the trusty stopwatch feature of my iPhone I ran through a number of different boot ups and application loads both before and after the upgrade to see how things changed.

The measurements I took are by no means scientific - it's difficult to get sub-second timings down when you are poking at a virtual button on an iPhone to record times. That said, I did record the duration several times to ensure they were always in the same range. If not, I'd record a few more and come up with an average. The goal was not to say "This is X seconds faster" but to get a rough feel for performance improvements.

Installing Snow Leopard

The installation of Snow Leopard was pretty simple. Pop in the DVD, launch the installer, select the hard drive to install it to and let it run. Mine estimated 45 minutes but it actually ended up being an hour before the reboot sequence required me to step in and do anything. If you are installing this and you get the estimated time up, use it as chance to run errands because it will be a little while.

Once installed I got a very un-Apple like message window:

Where is System Events.app? Sheesh, I don't know, that's not something I normally run or even care about. This was a modal window (parked on top of everything) so it clearly wanted me to figure it out. I didn't see it in the list so I clicked Browse and hunted around for it. I used my other machine to Google up the location of said file and it turns out it's located in:

/System/Library/Core Services

I navigated there, selected it and from that point on I was in Snow Leopard. I know if I asked my wife to do this installation on her Mac and she saw this message she would be yelling out "DAVID!!!" right about now. If not, she would probably just click Cancel in frustration, and I'm not sure what the impact of that would be.

Application Compatibility

With Snow Leopard fully installed I set about trying my different applications. The first thing I noticed was that my iStat Menu was missing. Turns out they'll need to issue an update to make it compatible with Snow Leopard. Next up Xmarks was MIA from my menu bar as well. Neither of these were mission critical for my work flow so I'm comfortable waiting until patched versions are available (which both indicate they are working on).

The only application (so far) that has had an impact on me is 1Password. Without going in to too much detail I'll pass you along to the page they have provided to sort through the best way to get 1Password to appear in Safari. For now I'm using Firefox, which doesn't have the 1Password compatibility issue.

For you devs out there, be aware that if you are normally running an instance of MySQL you'll need to download the 64bit version and reinstall it. As a Ruby on Rails developer MySQL is vital to my local development activities. Here's a helpful post from Stack Overflow that provides some guidance. It will take me a while to really test out my other development related applications.

Performance Improvements

One of the things everyone seems to be saying about Snow Leopard is that it's faster. It clearly is a smaller OS, since it actually gave me back 17GB of disk space. Snow Leopard "felt" quicker but I wanted some real world numbers to validate that for me.

The Mac I upgraded is a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. I've got a 200GB HD and upgraded the memory to 4GB. It has always been a pretty snappy machine so I actually did need the stop watch to see if there was real improvement.

Action	Leopard	Snow Leopard
Start to full load	1m 37s	1m 3s
Shut Down	10.5s	4.5s

This was a pretty clear improvement, both on the front and back end of the start up / shut down process. I actually found that because I had a number of extensions I needed to go into System Preferences and activate many of them by clicking on their icon in the Other section. Examples were Growl and SteerMouse. Once those extensions were loaded manually (and set to auto-load) my boot times improved to what you see above.

Next up I started loading applications. Here were my results:

Application	Leopard	Snow Leopard
Safari (1st time)	3.4s	1.6s
Safari (2nd time)	<1s	<1s
Text Editor (1st time)	1s	<1s
Text Editor (2nd time)	<1s	<1s
iPhoto (1st time)	13.5s	10.4s
iPhoto (2nd time)	1.9s	1.8s
iTunes (1st time)	9.7s	5.1s
iTunes (2nd time)	1.8s	1.5s
Pages (1st time)	12.9s	10.1s
Pages (2nd time)	1.5s	2.0s
Firefox 3.5.2 (1st time)	18s	15s
Firefox 3.5.2 (2nd time)	2.2s	2.4s

So, generally I saw a modest improvement in application load times. I've only just started playing with Snow Leopard and I'll likely have more observations coming soon. While I'm generally happy with the upgrade from a performance standpoint and love the strategy Apple is using for this, I'm holding off upgrading the Mac Pro until I have a better handle on which of my development tools need upgrading / patching.

How about you? Did you notice similar improvements in performance? Found a site that can help identify Snow Leopard compatibility? Drop a note in the comments!

I hate my Mac!

2009-08-12T09:00:00.001-04:00

I was chatting with some friends yesterday, some folks I hadn't seen in a while. As they were getting ready to leave Donna looked over at my MacBook, propped open and sitting on a table.

Donna: "Ugh. Macs."

She had a disgusted look on her face, as though something unpleasant had just been released into the air. This caught me a bit by surprise. You see, Donna had called me earlier in the year because she wanted to replace an aging XP based laptop and knew I was a happy Mac convert. I talked with her for a while about the benefits of a Mac, telling her about why I liked it and what she could look forward to.

Since switching over to Macs I'm very careful about promoting them to others and my description of them to Donna fell right along those lines. I don't get irrationally exuberant; when switching to Macs from long time Windows use I recognize that attitude and approach is critical to being happy with a new personal computer. I'd rather people be happy using their computer, whatever it happens to be.

Donna: "I hate my Mac! I wanted to take it back it's so hard to use!"

David: (shocked look on face)

Donna: "Nothing works the way I expect it to!"

I couldn't just leave it there so I started to probe a bit. What didn't work the way she expected? Was there something specific? Have you never read my blog?!?

Donna: "When I try to open files from work they simply don't... work. And if I make changes I need to convert my files so that people back at the office can use them!"

This sounded bizarre. Well it turns out when she bought her Mac the sales person at the Apple store talked her into getting iWork. He told her she could open and use all of her MS Office related files with iWork so that's what she went with. Though they sell Microsoft Office for Mac at the Apple store, this particular representative apparently wanted to push iWork.

iWork is not MS Office

Since I run my own company I get to define the standards and I'm using iWork. It's a nice, elegant suite with a great word processing application (Pages), innovative presentation software (Keynote) and a barely serviceable spreadsheet (Numbers). As long as you're not doing anything too complicated with Numbers it's fine, though it's still a pretty rough application. Don't believe me? Try building up a fairly complex formula and using help to determine what certain functions do. It's a major stumbling block.

If Apple is serious about making iWork a contender against MS Office one of the things they will need to do is some usability testing on recent switchers using Numbers. If your knowledge of spreadsheets was built up or refined using Excel then you're in for a rude awakening when you try to be productive with Numbers. More than any application I've used on my Macs, Numbers requires huge pauses when I'm trying to create new spreadsheets that are more than simple ledgers.

While word processing interfaces are pretty well standardized there are a number of interface "innovations" that have made their way along from the ancient days of spreadsheets that have been ingrained into the way people work. In Excel on Windows if you want to copy and paste a series of cells you select them, Control-C (Copy), then move to the cell you want them inserted and press Enter. I personally hate that Excel has modified one of the most common behaviors of the operating system user interface (Copy and Paste), yet that's what people use. It's also something Donna stumbled on.

Donna: "Copying on the Mac doesn't work right. I can't copy and paste like I used to!"

As our discussion carried on it was becoming increasingly clear that Donna didn't hate her Mac, she hated iWork and the empty promises that it would work with her existing files.

Donna: "When I get a file from work I open it and then I have to "share" it back to a DOC file or Excel spreadsheet. I can't just save it like I used to. If I forget then people at work complain to me that they can't open my files."

It was then that it started to become clear that she had transferred her frustration with iWork over to her entire Mac experience, painting it all with the same brush. When I tried to steer the conversation away into other areas she grudgingly acknowledged that photo management, web browsing, e-mail, etc were easy, though it was clear her frustrations with key work related tasks had poisoned her approach.

I suggested that she go out and get a copy of MS Office for her Mac. This is actually the approach I had to take with my wife when I switched her over from Windows. Her school uses MS Office and while I tried to get her to use iWork she just didn't feel comfortable with it; too much change at once. I also told her about the One to One classes that Apple offers through the Apple stores; hopefully she can sit down in that environment and get answers to her questions.

My parting thought with Donna was that attitude was everything when changing to something different, whether it's a computer, a job or a relationship. If you find yourself looking for everything that's wrong you will doom that change to failure. It's OK to be skeptical and question things but when it switches over to a "this sucks" it may just be time to move on.

Hopefully Donna will be able to enjoy her Mac the way I and my family have enjoyed ours.

TNT doesn't like Mac users

2009-07-29T08:00:00.004-04:00

I was sitting on the couch the other day and relaxing when my wife yelled to me from the other room:

David! My Mac's not working!

I love those highly specific descriptions of a problem. I asked for a little more clarity.

I'm trying to watch a video and it's not working!

I dragged myself off the couch and over to my wife's MacBook. She was on the TNT site and trying to watch an episode of Raising the Bar. She would click on "watch a full episode" and a blank screen would appear where the viewer normally would be.

It was not immediately apparent what the problem was. A poorly installed codec? A broken web page? I rummaged around for a little while and found that the TNT support site stated that they didn't support Macs for viewing their shows. Why? Here's what the support site says:

TNT.tv would like to apologize for not being able to accommodate Mac users.

The issue is related to the Windows Media Player, specifically video with Digital Rights Management (DRM). This is because the WMP for the Mac is not supported directly by Microsoft . Our agreement with the studios that produce the shows stipulates that their content be protected (full episodes) from piracy with DRM software.

Additionally, WMP is more universal than other platforms like QuickTime and Flash Video for distributing protected content.

What they should have said was "We're really sorry that we didn't put a little Javascript up front to detect a Mac and indicate to you that we don't support your platform. No, we'd rather that you waste your time trying to figure out what the problem is first, then search through our support site to learn this little gem."

I also love the statement that WMP is more universal than other platforms "like QuickTime and Flash". WMP is more universal than Flash Video?!? Um, no, it's not. According to Stat Owl, Flash content reaches 94.66% of internet viewers and Windows Media Player has a 73.9% market share (June '09 stats).

That leaves over 21% of the population that can watch Flash based video unable to view TNT's content. That's over 65 million people in North America. Apparently TNT is all full up on market share and doesn't need access to that demographic.

I didn't share all of this with my wife of course. I simply told her that she couldn't watch any TNT shows because their web site was broken. Sure, I could have loaded up Windows in a VM, fired up Internet Explorer and watched the video or maybe even found some solution to this little problem from a technical standpoint. In the end though I'd rather just mark TNT as a fail, write a rant about it and tell my wife to find something else to watch.

The application Mail quit unexpectedly - GrowlMail problems

2009-06-11T09:00:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite–yet least mentioned–free utilities is Growl, a universal notification service for Mac that lets applications notify you of events. Now instead of each application deciding on how they want to present notifications for things like new mail, incoming tweets, etc. you can control it in a single place, assuming the application supports Growl or an extension has been written for it.

Such is the case with Mail.app. Though Mail.app is not written to support Growl the developers for Growl have created an "extra" that can provide that functionality. I've been using this setup for a while now and have been quite pleased with it.

After upgrading to Safari 4 I suddenly found that Mail.app was crashing on me as soon as a new e-mail came in. Here is the error message I was getting:

Which was followed by:

Reset and relaunch had no effect - Mail.app just crashed again. It turns out that an error has been introduced into Growl after upgrading to Safari 4 that creates this crash. There are two solutions to this problem:

Solution 1: Change Mail.app notification to Summary
The problem for Growl is when individual e-mail notifications come in; that's what is causing the crash. If you don't have any new e-mail (which causes the crash) you can load up the Mail.app preferences and switch to the Growl tab, then change the setting to summary mode:

If however you can't load mail up to get to that setting you can accomplish it by changing it through the terminal. Load up a terminal window and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.mail GMSummaryMode -int 2

This will change the setting for you and allow you to load up Mail.app. The downside to this is if you still want individual mail message notifications. For that you can use Solution 2.

Solution 2: Install Growl Beta 1.1.5B2
There is a beta version of Growl that addresses this issue; you can grab it from the Growl beta page. Just download the DMG and install the latest Growl package AND the newer Mail.app extension (in the Extra folder). This is of course beta software but I've been running it for a while on two of my Macs and it's been running fine so far.

If you have any work-arounds on this please drop a note in the comments. I was able to find most of this information but it was a bit scattered. Hopefully people searching when they get the error will find this helpful.

Book resources for learning Ruby on Rails

2009-06-08T10:15:00.002-04:00

I've now been using Ruby on Rails for a little over a year and have found it to be a fantastic environment to build web based applications. The last year has not been without some serious pain and learning curves and while I hardly consider myself a master of the environment I've found a number of resources that may help you if you are considering using RoR as a development platform.

Sure, you can access nearly everything you need to learn RoR online but I am personally still addicted to the dead-tree model of learning. If you are like me and prefer buying books then read on. In the last year I've bought 10 books on various Ruby/Rails topics and what follows are the ones I've gotten the most use out of.

NOTE: Ruby on Rails is a constantly evolving environment and the information below is really relevant for early June 2009. Things can change in the Rails world relatively quickly. It's a good idea to stay up on Rails developments by following the Ruby on Rails blog at a minimum.

Learn Ruby First
Before you rush out to buy a Ruby on Rails specific book first you need to learn Ruby the programming language. If you've been writing applications in C/C++/C#/Pascal (like I had) then Ruby is a relatively easy language to learn. Since it is open source getting a copy of Ruby is usually just a matter of downloading it to your machine and running it. Mac users have a big advantage here because Ruby is bundled in with Leopard.

Though you can get up and running with Rails while having a very modest knowledge of Ruby I can't stress enough that you should take the time to understand Ruby before you dive into Rails. Why? Because building a basic application with Rails is so easy that you will be tempted (as I did) to just start building. If you haven't really learned the Ruby language you will take a lot for granted and not understand why things work the way they do. You will copy and paste code rather than write it and when you do write it you will likely not write it well.

The book nearly everyone talks about for learning Ruby is "the PickAxe book" by Dave Thomas: Programming Ruby. Dave Thomas has a great conversational writing style. He makes learning Ruby almost story like, walking you through code samples while providing deep coverage of the Ruby language. At 1000 pages (3rd edition) there is a lot of material here, including a reference for the core Ruby library.

If you want to become adept at using Rails you do not need to read the book cover to cover but should get through Part I before you start doing anything of significance.

Rarely do I count on a single text book to provide my knowledge of a subject and that's the case with Ruby. Based on a blog reader recommendation I also picked up The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton. Though it's nearly interchangeable with the PickAxe book, Hal Fulton has a very different writing style. Rather than weaving a story I've found The Ruby Way to be more reference like. While I started learning Ruby with the PickAxe book I find myself grabbing The Ruby Way more often now when I need to explore an area that I don't understand as well as I would like.

Both of these books are excellent resources for learning about the Ruby language and I recommend having them in your library.

Rails References
Once you have got a good grasp on the Ruby language you can dive into Rails. Once again I have two books that I turn to frequently. One is for learning/getting started, the other is a desktop reference.

While you can find lots of excellent quick tutorials for getting your first Rails application up and running quickly on the web (such as Sean Lynch's excellent tutorial for Rails 2.0) it can't match the depth of a book. Agile Web Development with Rails (AWDR) by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson is a good way to walk through building your first Ruby on Rails application.

The authors use a step-by-step style to build up an online bookstore, providing side roads and discussion points along the way. Some of the core philosophies of Rails are mentioned here (like DRY), though they don't go into a lot of detail. I personally found that good; what I was looking for was a relatively light-weight book that takes me quickly through building an application so that I could see results. AWDR does that and starts to show off some of the cool things you can do in a Rails application.

If you are going to use Rails for anything other than playing around you need a good reference book that helps explain things in more detail than AWDR. By far my favorite Ruby on Rails book is The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez. This book is not by any stretch a book for helping you get started with Rails; instead The Rails Way covers how things really work inside of Rails. Want to understand what's really happening with a Controller? How routing works? How to really leverage ActiveRecord? Get this book.

Obie has created a great desktop reference that you can pick up and dive in at just about any point. You don't read The Rails Way cover to cover; you keep it handy and pop it open when you need to know more about something you're working on.

So there you have it, four great books on Ruby and Rails that will help you get started building applications in that environment. As I said at the beginning, Rails is a rapidly evolving environment and it's difficult for books to keep up.

Got a book for Ruby or Rails that you really like? A web site with excellent tutorials? Please drop a note in the comments and share.

10 little known Mac utilities

2009-05-07T09:10:00.000-04:00

When I blog about applications that I've found I generally wrap up my posts with an open invitation to readers: Got any you like? Many folks have been generous and shared links and applications that I've used to expand my virtual toolbox and make my Mac experience more fun and productive.

This time I turned that process around a bit and used Twitter up front. I put out this question: Looking for cool little Mac utilities that nobody knows about... I promptly received replies from a number of people with some cool applications that I had never heard of or tried using. After culling through the list I've pulled out 10 that I felt looked pretty cool. I've included the Twitter name for the person that made the suggestion in case you want to start following them.

EasyEnvelopes

Need to quickly print out an envelope for someone in your address book? EasyEnvelopes from Ambrosia Software has a free Dashboard widget that does just that. When you want to print out an envelope you activate the Dashboard, start typing the name of someone in your address book, select them and then click on the stamp and you're printing your envelope. Simple, easy and free. Suggested by Jonathan Bernstein.

SoundSource

Do you have multiple input and output devices for sound? Need to quickly alternate between a plug-in microphone like the Blue Snowball (my favorite) and a MacBook's internal microphone? If that's a common task for you then Rogue Amoeba has a free menu utility called SoundSource that lets you switch inputs and control input volume without having to load System Preferences. Suggested by JT and Marieboyer.

Jumpcut

I'm a copy and paste fiend, grabbing text from various sources and blasting them into my documents and blog posts. Having a clipboard buffer means I can selectively go back through my "copies" and paste in what I want and that's just what Jumpcut does. Small, very efficient and available as open source (MIT license), this was also suggested by Marieboyer.

Pacifist

If you want to inspect the contents of Package files, disk images or ZIP files you have downloaded to see the contents then Pacifist is a slick way to quickly see what's going on under the hood. Pacifist can also inspect a damaged application—especially one installed by OS X—so that it can be repaired without reinstalling everything. It's available for $20 in shareware form from CharlesSoft. Suggested by Ast A. Moore.

TimeMachineEditor

I'm a huge fan of Time Machine, even though the dorky Time Machine Errors still haunt me. That said, sometimes you don't want Time Machine to wake up and back up your machine every single hour. Maybe you're doing some massive file moves and you want Time Machine to take the afternoons off. TimeMachineEditor, a free utility, is a simple application that merely updates configuration settings. Open it, set it, quit it. Suggested by Doug Smart.

OmniDiskSweeper

I like Disk Inventory X, an application I wrote about last year, and several people suggested that again. While I like that tool and the visual display is helpful, sometimes you just want to see a list of files and folders by how much space they take up. Enter OmniDiskSweeper, now a free utility from The Omni Group. It provides a drill down view that's similar to the Finder's column view. The key difference is that it's sorted by the size of the files and folders. Great for quickly finding and pruning out large files that you don't need any longer. Suggested by Marieboyer (yes, she had several excellent suggestions).

MacLoc

If you work in a corporate environment (or have kids that like to play with your keyboard at home) and want to quickly walk away from your Mac without logging out and shutting down your applications, MacLoc can help. It's a free utility that leverages the fast user switching feature of OS X so that you can secure your Mac by activating it and walking away. When you come back you will be presented with the system login screen. Once logged in everything will appear like it did when you left. Suggested by Nicholas Leask.

Caffeine

You fire up Hulu or YouTube and settle in to watching something interesting when after 10 minutes your machine's screen saver kicks in. Frustrating. What you need is something that will keep your Mac awake for a predetermined amount of time. Caffeine, a free utility from Lighthead Software, does exactly that. I'll admit, I had heard about Caffeine before but never bothered to check it out until now.

Add it to your menu bar and activate it when you need to keep your machine from falling asleep for 5m, 10m, 15m, 30m, 1H, 2H, 5H or until your turn it off. All the benefits of a strong cup of coffee without the shaking. Suggested by Paul Thompson.

Paparazzi!

If you have ever needed to capture a screen shot of a web page you know how difficult it can be if the page is taller than your screen. Paparazzi! is a handy little utility for grabbing the entire contents of a web page. Want to capture that forum thread or blog comments into a single image? Paparazzi! can take the shot for you. While it doesn't work with Flash based graphics it can handle most other types of page elements. Suggested by Alo Lopez.

TubeTV

Even though my iPhone supports YouTube, there are lots of times that a video I want to watch is on another service (blip.tv, among many others, is becoming popular). What I would like is the ability to download a really long keynote address from a conference, plant it on my iPhone and watch it while I'm flying or in poor 3G areas. TubeTV is a free application—donations requested—from Chimoosoft that can open a web page and convert Flash based video to a local copy, then further convert it into a rendering option that can be dropped on an iPhone. The conversion can be slow for long videos but if you want to take that video with you this is a nice option. Suggested by Rahil Dowlath.

There were lots of other suggestions, some that I've written about before like Disk Inventory X. Others—like SuperDuper—I've seen discussed quite a bit so I didn't include them in the list. There is also one that I didn't include that I downloaded and found quite amusing on my MacBook Pro: Oriol Ferrer's Liquid Mac. Thanks to Alo Lopez for making that suggestion!

Got an "unknown" application that didn't get included in my list above? An undiscovered gem waiting for people to find? Let us all know by dropping a note in the comments below.

Remembering those shortcuts easily - KeyCue

2009-05-02T15:38:00.000-04:00

The best part about writing a blog where I talk about Macs? People give me some great tips in the comments and yesterday's post on apps for making users more productive was no exception. While I love the shortcuts available on my Mac I often overlook many of them because I don't know what they are and they aren't always obvious.

Fortunately DCBrit stopped by and mentioned KeyCue, an application that can quickly display all of the keyboard shortcuts for the application you are currently running. You simply hold down the activation key (defaults to Command) for a few seconds and up pops a dynamically built list of all the shortcuts for that application. Here's what it looks like for TextEdit:

It really is a simple application but can quickly help you learn those key combinations, making you much more productive on your Mac. It's normally $26.99 but MacZOT is running a special on it right now for $14.99 through May 3, 2009.

If you want to learn all of the keystroke combinations available for your applications I recommend you give KeyCue a try.

4 Mac Apps that speed YOU up

2009-05-01T08:25:00.001-04:00

Many people are obsessed with speed and I happily include myself in that category, at least with respect to the performance I get from my computer. Whether it's a faster processor, more memory, a quicker graphics card or a new high-speed hard drive, upgrading to the latest and greatest translates into getting things done more quickly.

It's not enough to just throw hardware at a problem, sometimes you have to optimize yourself. Of course I can do this by inhaling a rather large quantity of coffee first thing in the morning but what I'm talking about is finding applications that can improve how you use your computer. Though Macs have incredibly high usability right out of the box, over the last year I've found 4 applications that have really helped me improve my efficiency on my Mac. I've tried quite a few but these are the applications I've stuck with and found most valuable to me.

1Password
Like many people I spend a lot of time in a web browser (actually both Safari and Firefox). It seems that each site has a different cookie policy and password standard and each browser has different reliability when it comes to remembering my login credentials. You want to lose time during the day doing something that doesn't add any value other than challenging the Grey Matter to a memory exercise? Try remembering the username and password for every site that requires it. Think about the amount of time you waste when you try to log in and try every variation of a password you can think of, or waiting for a password reminder to come back to you in e-mail.

Then think about the repetitive forms with your contact information that need to be filled out and the purchase sites where you have to enter in your credit card details. Finally toss in those times when you need your frequent flyer number or child's social security number or application's license code.

1Password does a fantastic job of handling all of this for me. It plants itself in the toolbar of my browser and makes logging in to a site a one or two click affair. It will offer to remember my login credentials the first time I use it and then it retains it after that. Now when I hit nearly any form I can just tell 1Password to fill it out for me and it usually completes most of the common fields without any typing on my part.

Now that I have it synchronizing my 1Password data automatically through DropBox (which is a free service), both the Macs I use on a regular basis are current all the time. It is seamless and completely wonderful.

I realize I sound like I'm gushing about this application but it's one of those "you have to try it to appreciate it" types of things. It's also one of the few applications I immediately bought a family license for and put on my wife and kid's Macs. At $39.95 (single user) and $69.95 (family 5-pack) it's not the cheapest utility you can buy but well worth the money.

LaunchBar
I have a confession: I am a keyboard junkie. I'll use an easily remembered keystroke combination over a mouse movement every time. It was for this reason that one of the first features in OS X I became enamored with was Spotlight. The ability to hit Command-Space and just type in the name of something and launch it by hitting Return was excellent.

The issue was that Spotlight had some issues about the time I was starting to really use it and I ended up trying out QuickSilver. While QuickSilver was great I started to see some minor issues with it and at the time the author of QuickSilver was indicating he was walking away from the project (that has since changed I believe). It was at this point that I started playing with LaunchBar and I've been hooked ever since.

LaunchBar makes it really fast to get to the application I want, whether it's running or not. Command-Space (I moved Spotlight to Control-Space), type in a couple letters and hit Return. It's much faster than Spotlight and allows me to do more than just launch an application. It also learns my personal shortcuts so that when I want to launch Pages I hit Command-Space, PG, Return and it's up and running.

Since it can also use what I type to search my address book I can find a person by typing part of their name, then hit the right arrow button and select and e-mail address, press Return and I've got a new mail message addressed to that person and ready for writing.

I use Skype for my phone calls and have installed some LaunchBar scripts to control it, allowing me to just navigate to a person's phone number through LaunchBar and hit Return; Skype dials them for me.

Though I can get by with Spotlight on a Mac that doesn't have LaunchBar installed, my productivity takes a bit of a dip. LaunchBar is €24.00 for a single user version and €39.00 for a 5 user family license.

Spaces
I run lots of applications at the same time (right now I've got 16 running). Even with dual screens I like being able to arrange my application windows in a very structured way so I always know where to look for things. Spaces give me the ability to set up those work spaces and jump between them very quickly. The alternative is a bunch of windows that are either layered on top of one another or minimized down to the Dock Bar. I have found that jumping to a Space that contains the apps I need set up and ready for use saves me a lot of time throughout the day.

I've written quite a bit on how I've set up Spaces to optimize my daily routine. Though it's included in OS X and could really just be considered a part of the Mac experience I've observed a number of Mac users that never bother to. If you haven't already, give Spaces a try.

SteerMouse
Though I'm a keyboard first kind of person there are plenty of times that I switch into "mouse mode". Usually this is when I'm browsing through information on a combination of web pages, links from Twitter, and from NetNewsWire. This is when I want my mouse to be more than just a 2 button hockey puck with a scroll wheel and go for heavier duty mice that have multiple programmable buttons.

Logitech is my mouse vendor of choice and while I love the hardware they produce the Mac mouse drivers they put out have been horrid. Fortunately SteerMouse has come to my rescue. It allows me to define custom actions on all of the buttons on my Logitech Mx510 mouse. While I would prefer that Logitech make serious efforts to improve their drivers I'll happily pay the $20 for SteerMouse because it makes my mouse that much more functional.

So there you have it, the four applications I use constantly to optimize the way I use my Mac. How about you? Got an application that helps you perform at your peak? Drop a note in the comments and share.

TweetDeck vs Nambu vs Tweetie

2009-04-27T09:00:00.001-04:00

I've become quite attached to Twitter lately, as several of my blog posts will attest. I use it for a wide range of things; a source of news (technical and non-technical), to chat with friends and share things I find of interest, to ask and answer questions on Macs, Ruby on Rails, etc. and finally to banter about my favorite sports teams (Redskins and Caps, thank you very much).

Given this wide range of uses I tend to be accessing my Twitter feeds throughout the day and the web interface simply doesn't handle things the way I need it to. As a result I use a custom client to access Twitter. A custom client presents Tweets in their own interface, accessing the data through the Twitter API. You drop in your Twitter username and password and the custom client takes over from there, presenting you with a view of your Tweets and the ability to create them as well.

Over the last few months I've tried a number of different Twitter clients for my Mac. First it was TweetDeck, an Adobe Air based client that does a great job of breaking Tweets up into separate and configurable panels. Next I tried Nambu, a native Mac OS X application that showed some real promise. Nambu leveraged many of the same UI elements that TweetDeck did, but it was packaged into a much more Mac style application. Finally Tweetie was released for Mac recently. A popular iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie has a graceful interface that puts a different look and feel on Twitter than TweetDeck and Nambu do. Each of these applications has strengths and weaknesses, which I will try to identify below.

TweetDeck

Strengths: Multiple panels that can be customized and filtered. Ability to create a search panel that persists between sessions. Can auto-complete user names when composing Tweets and addressing to people. Group support. Can also update FaceBook status.

Weaknesses: Uses a lot of memory. User Interface looks odd next to other Mac applications. Can leak memory (though that is reportedly fixed). Font size cannot be set and panels cannot be resized; you only have two sizes for panels. Only supports a single Twitter account.

Summary: TweetDeck is great for people that follow a large number of folks and want to break up their Tweets into custom groups. If you can get over the fact that TweetDeck does not look like a native OS X application it's a nice Twitter client and is used by an extremely large number of people. It includes lots of little niceties to make creating, replying and ReTweeting posts very simple.

I like that I can click on a person in a list and quickly see their profile and that each Tweet contains virtually all of the information available. Want to know what a Tweet is in reply to? Click the "...in reply to..." text on a Tweet and it loads up the original Tweet in your web browser.

The reason I started looking around at other clients after I had been using TweetDeck for so long was the fact that I wanted something that actually looked like a Mac application. That and the memory leaks in TweetDeck meant you couldn't leave it running for days at a time without it continually chewing into your memory pool. Even with these issues it is a very capable Twitter client.

Nambu

Strengths: Native Mac application. Has three different view styles including the panel view that TweetDeck uses. Auto-complete for user names when writing a Tweet. Remembers any panel or search you create so that it can be called up later. Ability to create groups of users. Multiple account support.

Weaknesses: In beta and it shows; memory is burned up quickly and Nambu requires restarts fairly often (daily). The pop-up menus within a Tweet and user profiles can take a very long time to display. Not all of the details on a Tweet (like what it is in reply to) are available.

Summary: I like that Nambu gives me so many viewing options, allowing me to tailor it to meet my needs—and screen real estate demands—very well. The fact that I can control (to a degree) the size of the font means I can squish a lot more Tweets into a single page with Nambu than I can with TweetDeck. It also does something that TweetDeck does not do right now: update the Dock Bar image with the number of unread Tweets.

It's pretty clear that Nambu will strive to be a one-stop social networking application. Though it is disabled in the current beta there are placeholders for FriendFeed, Identi.ca and Ping.fm. If your goal is to keep everything on the social side in one place then Nambu may have an answer for that in the long run.

Nambu is still a relatively young application and it shows in performance and stability. Once Nambu matures a bit, the memory leaks are fixed and the menu performance improves it will be a strong contender to virtually any of the tasks people use TweetDeck for now.

Tweetie

Strengths: Native Mac application. Extremely stable and quick, very resource efficient. User interface is very powerful, especially for navigating across "conversations". Keyboard friendly for nearly all navigation and input. Tear off search windows provide great flexibility. Multiple account support.

Weaknesses: Doesn't provide user name auto-complete. No support for Groups. Keyboard navigation within Direct Messages is quirky.

Summary: Tweetie for Mac is a completely different take on dealing with Twitter than either TweetDeck or Nambu. The level of polish and finish on Tweetie is immediately apparent and the smooth UI transitions and keyboard shortcuts make it easy to become comfortable quickly.

The inability to place people you follow into a group so that you can more quickly pick out their Tweets is a shortcoming, as is the fact that searches are not saved across sessions. The keyboard shortcuts simply stop working when you are in the Direct Message area and have replied to a message.

By far the most powerful part of Tweetie is the ability to navigate your way through conversations. If you see someone you follow respond to a person that you don't follow you can quickly jump to that string of Tweets. It makes reading Twitter feeds much more conversation friendly. Not only can you jump in but Tweetie maintains the context you are coming from so you can navigate your way back out to where you started.

Which one is best for you?
From a functionality standpoint TweetDeck and Nambu are on pretty equal footing. If you follow a large number of people that generate a lot of Tweets, you will appreciate the ability to break your key followers up into groups that you can monitor more easily. I've had people follow me on Twitter that have thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—of people THEY follow. Clearly no one can even use a Twitter timeline that contains that much traffic so that grouping and filtering feature both TweetDeck and Nambu have would be critical.

I'm hoping that once Nambu comes out of beta it's performance will pick up and the memory leaks will be eliminated. Until then TweetDeck is a lot more stable, though if you have multiple Twitter accounts Nambu is the better option.

If you don't follow a huge number of people and can get by without the group functionality then Tweetie is an outstanding Twitter client. The user interface is simply fantastic, looking and feeling like a native Mac application. It is currently available for $14.95 through May 4 ($19.95 after that). I am personally using Tweetie now; the other features have made me forget about the lack of groups and I don't really follow that many people.

The competition for Twitter clients is great for all of us. As the software developers keep innovating we will continue to get some really interesting options when it comes to working with Twitter. Keep in mind that this review of these applications was based on the state of them on April 27, 2009. Both TweetDeck and Nambu are listed as being in Beta. Updates can come quickly.

I've done some previous blog posts on both TweetDeck and Nambu that have more detailed information. If you want to learn more about Tweetie I highly recommend that you watch Don McAllister's excellent video tutorial on it.

Got a Twitter client you really like? Drop a note about it in the comments and share what you like and don't like about it.

OpenDNS, a great free way to speed up the interwebs

2009-04-24T10:20:00.001-04:00

Last night I was doing some research and went to pull up the Ruby On Rails site. Unfortunately when I did I could not connect. My DNS server wasn't resolving it properly. Assuming it was Verizon's problem I embarked on a long and ultimately fruitless attempt to find out why rubyonrails.org was not resolving. While doing this I tweeted about it and suddenly got responses from people explaining that there were some problems with that domain name. It wasn't the Verizon DNS server after all.

So Twitter helped me out, but that wasn't the end of the assistance. Chad Hohner (@hohner) told me about using OpenDNS, something that will help improve network performance (at least as it relates to name resolution). I figured it was worth a try and changed the DNS on my Mac Pro to using OpenDNS's servers. The performance improvement for me was dramatic, so much so that I changed back to the Verizon servers, flushed my DNS cache and started testing different sites. I then switched back to OpenDNS, flushed my DNS cache again and timed page loads.

The difference was stunning. On some sites I saw little or no improvement, especially on the very popular sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. It was when I started visiting lessor sites that I saw a performance improvement of up to 28%. This was a dramatic improvement, takes seconds to do and costs nothing.

Do it now, watch the difference
You can try it out quite easily on a Mac right now; nothing to sign up for, just update your DNS settings to use OpenDNS's servers. Fire up System Preferences / Network and select your primary ethernet device.

Click on Advanced, then add these two servers into the DNS section:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Once they are added in, close it out and open a terminal prompt and flush your DNS cache. I believe System Preferences does this automatically but just to be sure you can enter this in a terminal prompt:

dscacheutil -flushcache

At that point you are using the OpenDNS servers. If the performance looks good then you can also set up your router to hand out those DNS settings to all of your machines. OpenDNS has pretty detailed instructions for how to handle it. I did that to my Verizon router and now all of the machines in the house are operating much more quickly.

OpenDNS Services
There's more to OpenDNS than just offering a free DNS service. They also offer content filtering and parental controls, which will allow you to set high level filters on the types of sites that your machines can access as well as specific categories that will limit access.

This is handled by signing up for an account (again, free) and optionally installing a small menu bar application that will maintain your IP address with OpenDNS. I installed this little notifier in a couple of minutes on my primary Mac Pro since it's always connected to this network.

Is it really free?
I was curious about how OpenDNS was able to provide these services for free and did a little research. It turns out that they make their revenue on ads that are displayed if you enter a domain name that is incorrect. If you never fat-finger a domain name then you'll likely never see the ads, but enough people do that it generates the revenue needed to power this service.

There are two things I really got out of this little experience:

1) OpenDNS is very cool and I highly recommend that you try it out

2) Twitter continues to provide a really valuable resource for getting information quickly and easily. Thanks again Chad!

Got a tip for speeding up your network connection? Please drop a note in the comments! And as always, you can follow me on Twitter.

Baby Shaking Apps and Other Challenges for Apple's App Store

2009-04-23T10:30:00.003-04:00

My wife and I were going through our morning routine, eating breakfast and reading the newspaper when suddenly she said "I can't believe Apple!". We share many core beliefs—especially on politics—so I usually give her a nod, offer a "Yup" and continue reading my section.

Me: "What about Apple?"

Wife: "They have a shaking baby iPhone application!!! This is outrageous!"

Me: "Honey, Apple didn't make that application."

Wife: "Well they had it in the App Store. That's just stupid."

I completely understand that Apple is generating some significant revenue from their App Store sales and that it has become a major part of their strategy moving forward. The problem as I see it is that Apple is putting itself in a very precarious position. Instead of just worrying about whether or not the application will break an iPhone, chew up resources, etc. Apple now has to worry about the content.

The problem as I see it is two-fold: Apple is now associated with the content of applications that run on an iPhone. The second is that Apple is setting a precedent that will carry forward as small devices like the iPhone get more powerful and start to merge with traditional desktops and laptops.

Being Associated with Content
Since Apple is essentially taking responsibility for the content on the iPhone they are putting themselves in a no-win situation. Clearly a shaking baby application is egregious to virtually anyone, but what about other topics. The US alone is a highly polarized place with issues like gay marriage, torture, bail-outs, taxes, etc. provoking strong arguments. Throw in the fact that Apple is a global company and now you have to police these issues in every country you want to sell into.

Now try to apply a rule set that works for the people sitting in the Apple App Store review area. Every single app needs to be approved and the rate will only increase. Mistakes like the Shaking Baby app will happen again and again.

Apple has crafted this brilliant company image, spending billions of dollars on stores, training, application standards, etc. and now a minor mistake by the guy or gal down in the App Store review area makes headlines everywhere and it's directly associated with Apple, not the author of the application.

The Orwellian Future
This is today's problem. What about tomorrow's? Portable devices are becoming more and more powerful. It won't be long before we'll see the technologies start to merge and iPhones will be just as powerful as a laptop or netbook class machine. As this merge happens how will Apple distinguish between applications that are specific to the iPhone and those that run on a more traditional machine?

Can you imagine a day when Apple has to authorize any software that is installed on your Apple device, including what today is your Mac? Technology advances mean these products will converge in the near future and Apple will need to live with the standards (and revenue streams) they have come to depend on.

How can Apple solve this problem?
There are numerous solutions to this issue, all with strengths and weaknesses. Apple could stop worrying about application content entirely and focus on highly objective measures like memory usage, stability, etc. They could have a class of applications that have been rated for content and others that have not. They could even license out the deployment of iPhone applications to other companies, allowing those companies to be responsible for the content.

Rest assured though, this is going to become a bigger problem down the road. Can you imagine if the developers of a web browser were responsible for the web pages that were viewed through them? This is effectively the role that Apple has staked out for itself.

What do you think? Is this really a problem that Apple needs to figure out?

Keeping those bookmarks synchronized

2009-04-17T10:45:00.000-04:00

I'm torn. On one hand I like Firefox because of the incredible array of add-ons, especially for developers building web applications. On the other hand I love the performance I get from Safari and with the release of the version 4 public beta many of the new features. As a result I find myself jumping between the two browsers all the time, often keeping both open (one for browsing, one for my current web development project).

Compound this with the fact that I have two Macs I use frequently—a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro for meetings and travel—and my bookmarks are all over the place. I even have Firefox running on my Ubuntu workstation and would like my bookmarks there too. Fortunately I found a great solution for this problem: X-Marks.

Though it started out as an add-in for Firefox they recently changed their name from FoxMarks to X-Marks and have started adding more browser support. They now have a Safari add-on and this has solved my little bookmark problem.

X-Marks is backed by a free online service that stores your bookmarks so that you can access them from anywhere. The privacy policy indicates they protect your bookmarks but do aggregate bookmarks anonymously, which is where their business model comes in. They also have settings in the Firefox version that allows you to control their add-on providing recommendations when you view a site:

These settings can add an additional icon to your URL bar that presents a list of alternative sites that match up with the site you are looking at:

Since Safari doesn't have the built in extensibility that Firefox does the Safari version is handled by a custom application that loads at startup and plants itself in the menu bar, providing the ability to Synchronize on demand:

Working between multiple machines on multiple browsers is much easier with a tool like X-Marks. They also support IE so if you have a Windows machine at the office that's tied to IE and you have a Mac at home you can keep those bookmarks synched up.

Now if I could find a free/low cost service that would keep my 1Password data securely synchronized between my machines (and not the Mobile Me service thank you very much), I'd be a very happy camper. Got one that you can recommend? Have a better bookmark synchronization tool? Please drop a note in the comments.

Two tips for Tabbing your way through a Mac

2009-04-15T09:20:00.000-04:00

When I switched to Mac from Windows I had an adjustment period. The window model is a bit different, the menu is in a different location, the Dock Bar != the Start menu, etc. Those all took a little adjustment period but I quickly overcame them as obstacles to productivity. By far the longest adjustment period involved the use of the keyboard and more specifically the use of the Tab key.

For all of the keyboard power of a Mac (shortcuts are virtually everywhere) the Tab key seems to be forgotten on most Mac keyboards, yet that is probably the most used navigation key on Windows. Here are a couple of tips for making your Mac keyboard experience leverage the Tab key:

Enabling Tabbing
The first thing you will want to do is to enable tabbing in dialog/pop-up windows. For some reason Apple decided to make that an option you need to manually enable in order to tab your way through all of the controls on a modal dialog. You can change this by going to System Preferences / Keyboard & Mouse / Keyboard Shortcuts and enabling full keyboard access:

This means that when a pop-up dialog is presented you can hit Tab and Shift-Tab to quickly navigate the controls. When a button is highlighted you can hit Space to activate (or click) that button. The alternative is that not every control is a Tab stop.

Safari Tabbing
Again, unlike other applications (Firefox on Mac for example), Apple does not think all of the items on a web page should be a tab stop in Safari. Hyperlinks as an example—which are often used as buttons in some web page designs—are passed right over by default.

You can change that behavior in Safari by going to Preferences / Advanced and checking on the Universal Access setting for the Tab key:

This will allow you to tab through all of the elements on a web page, much like most of the other web browsers out there.

Given the keyboard power that Macs have—something I found quite surprising after I switched—I'm not sure I understand why the Tab key has been relegated to "optional" status by Apple in these cases. For people switching to Mac from Windows it's a really good idea to make these two setting the default option; it sure would help with the adjustment period.

Got a tip for enhancing the keyboard experience of Mac users? Please drop a note in the comments!

Nambu makes Twitter feel natural for Mac users

2009-04-13T09:25:00.001-04:00

For a while now I've been using TweetDeck to access my Twitter account. While I love many of the features that TweetDeck has made popular I always struggle with the UI. Though it's quite usable the fact that it's built on top of Adobe Air means it doesn't look quite right on my Mac's OS X desktop.

I've tried a number of different Twitter clients for Mac but none worked quite as well as TweetDeck did for me. Then along came Nambu, which is still in beta. Nambu looks and feels like a normal OS X application. The design is similar to TweetDeck in some respects but has some key enhancements that make it much more powerful.

Multiple Twitter Accounts
I have two Twitter accounts that I use: dalison and sharedstatus. The former is my personal account where I ramble on about my blog, Macs, sports and things I find amusing on the Interwebs. The latter is an account for my main product and I use it to announce features and generally cover business related topics. Fortunately Nambu supports multiple Twitter accounts and allows me to keep on top of my feeds for both quite easily in a single interface.

Multiple Views
Nambu has three basic views: Combined, Sidebar and Multi Column. The Combined view is a complete feed from all of the people you follow in every account you have added to Nambu. I don't use it because the noise factor is quite high. The Sidebar view is a little more functional and for people that are screen real estate constrained (working from a 13" MacBook for example) may be a good solution.

For those that are lucky enough to have lots of screen available the Multi Column view is the place to be. For the same reason I like TweetDeck, the Multi Column view allows you to set up multiple panes to watch key feeds, including search results on a specific topic.

Another advantage of the Multi Column view is the ability to create groups of people you are currently following. If you tend to follow a lot of people but want to create a view that includes only selected people so they don't get lost in the noise then you can create a group and display a panel with their feeds.

Unread Markers
While TweetDeck can handle unread markers it doesn't update the Dock icon, something that a native Mac application like Nambu can and does. There is even the option of limiting the unread counts to all of your views (which can be quite high) or to just messages that are sent to you directly.

Support for more than just Twitter
As of right now Nambu supports Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca and Ping.fm. Much like Adium supports multiple chat services (AIM, Google Chat, etc.), Nambu is a striving to be a collection point for social media services. I personally don't use the other services so I have no idea if they are well serviced in Nambu.

Beta Software - Bugs On Deck
While I've generally found Nambu to be stable it is beta software and as a result has some bugs. Updates are coming out quite frequently and many people are reporting that the most recent update (1.1.8) is crashing quite frequently, though I've been running it most of the morning and it has not crashed on me. If you decide to try out Nambu you should also follow Nambucom on Twitter; they are providing pretty regular updates and that seems to be the best vehicle for getting questions answered.

There are a number of existing Mac specific Twitter clients available right now with more coming along all the time. This space is going to get highly competitive for a while which is outstanding for Mac users. If you have a Mac specific client for Twitter that you really like please drop a note in the comments and share.

My top 5 ways to make Twitter better

2009-04-09T12:25:00.002-04:00

I'm finding myself using Twitter more and more these days and not for putting out tweets about what I'm doing at the moment. Twitter is slowly replacing my RSS reader as my vehicle of choice for news I care about, whether it's general, technical, Mac specific or sports related. I've used it to promote my new company (SharedStatus), chat with friends about topics I care about, help people with Mac and Ruby on Rails specific questions and generally build up a network of people I like to chat and network with. I can ask a question on Twitter and usually get an answer almost immediately.

For these and lots of other reasons I've found Twitter to be a great addition to my online experience. While I really like Twitter I know it can be improved so here are my top 5 features/changes for making Twitter better:

1) Make ReTweets fundamental
ReTweets (usually abbreviated RT in tweets) are likely the most powerful networking component of Twitter. When you find something of value you RT it; if you want people to know about something important to you then you want people to RT it to their followers. Entire sites have been made to talk about the value of ReTweets. So why doesn't Twitter have a built in ReTweet mechanism? Something that allows me to ReTweet without having to chew up the actual content in order to do it?

Much like the old campfire story that changes as it goes around the fire ring, ReTweets tend to become more and more abbreviated as they progress because people like to keep the original authors and forwarders in the loop. Since many RTs tend to have links in them the content is already at a premium. I'd like to see the RT path broken out separately from the message body. It would keep the content intact and allow you to see where an RT has been.

2) Make links external to a tweet
Another thing I would like to see broken out of the text area of a tweet is the ability to have one or more links to web content on a tweet. Sure, services like Bit.ly, TinyURL, etc. can make some pretty small links but this is a very common "cargo" for a tweet. This need could also be addressed if Twitter supported hyperlinks in a Tweet.

I know, SMS gateways would have a difficult time dealing with this since text messaging is part of Twitter's foundation but few people get their tweets through SMS anyway; if you're doing it on a phone it's likely a smart phone with a Twitter client anyway. You know, one with a web browser so you can actually see what the link points to. Making SMS the high water mark for tweet capabilities will severely limit any new features in the future.

3) Build in support for hashtags
Hashtags are one of the cooler things the Twitter community created. By prefacing a word with the hash symbol (#) people create virtual conversations around a topic. Combine it with the Search capability in Twitter and it's a great way to stay on top of topics you care about. I use it all the time while watching sporting events at home. It's a great way to get general commentary on something that is happening live and to find others to follow that share your passion on a topic.

The downside of hashtags is that they once again tend to chew up that precious 140 characters with something that really should just be a tagged attribute that can be used for searches and views. People need the ability to organize the tweets they see and hashtags can serve as the vehicle for that.

4) Allow me to create views on the Twitter web site
The main reason I like TweetDeck is it's ability to create views of the people or topics I want to follow on Twitter. When you combine those views with hashtags you get a great way of staying on top of the topics you want to track when you want to track them. This functionality is something I would really like to see Twitter add to their main web site interface. Sure, it can be left to the custom client applications to service that need but more and more I find myself accessing Twitter from multiple locations; I would like my views to follow me where I go.

Let me set them up, name them and then access them from any client as well.

5) Give me the option of receiving DMs from followers
Direct Messages are very handy, though I don't like the fact that people cannot direct message me if I don't follow them too. I don't follow a lot of people because the noise factor gets too high, yet I want people to be able to reach me easily. Just give me the option of setting who can send me a direct message:

Anyone
People that follow me
People that I follow and follow me
Nobody

That should pretty well cover all the cases of direct messaging.

So there you have it, the five things that I think would make Twitter better. Yes, I know, many of these changes have sweeping architectural implications for Twitter but hey, if Twitter is going to be around for a long time it will need to support the ways people are actually using it.

What about you? Got a suggestion for something in Twitter that I didn't include? Drop a note in the comments. Or if you're feeling brief, shoot me a tweet on it.

MacHeist 3 Bundle - some great apps

2009-04-03T09:45:00.005-04:00

In the unlikely event you haven't heard of the MacHeist 3 Bundle allow me to introduce you.

MacHeist is a collection of applications available for a dramatically reduced price. A significant portion of the proceeds go to a variety of 10 different charities, which you can designate when you purchase or simply let MacHeist evenly distribute to all.

I've heard some people complain that this devalues ISV software, a claim I find ridiculous. The single most challenging problem every ISV faces is getting people to learn about their software. The more people that are exposed to it, the more likely you are to "get the word out". It also gives the ISVs the opportunity to be associated with a really good cause; as I write this blog post over $342K have been raised for charities. Everyone wins in this scenario; the buyers gets a great deal, the ISVs get some great exposure and the charities get money at a time when donations have dropped precipitously during this economic recession.

That said, most people buy MacHeist not out of a desire to support a charity but because they see a great bargain on one or two applications in the collection, would likely pay $39 just for that application alone and then get a bunch of bonus applications too. The charity angle is another bonus. That was the case for me.

What I Really Liked
Though World of Goo is normally only $20 the game is so much fun I consider it a buy at $39. The animation, sound effects and play of the game are simply outstanding. Having been a big time gamer in the PC world with first person shooters I tended to avoid puzzle style games; World of Goo is rapidly changing my opinion. Now I'm hunting for more games like it!

Picturesque, which is normally a $35 application, allows you to do some really cool treatments to photos, framing them up, placing them on angles and creating beautiful drop shadows. Though I've been pretty happy with the cadre of different applications I use for basic photo editing the stuff that I can do quickly with Picturesque is really nice. Note the graphic at the top of this blog post? That took just a second with Picturesque.

Kinemac is a rather large application that normally carries a pretty heavy price tag of $300. Though I've only started to play with it Kinemac looks like a really slick way to create 3D animations of text and objects. I've been wanting to dress up some video tutorials I've been putting together for SharedStatus and I'm hoping Kinemac will help me create a nice intro animation.

Those were my big three and easily worth the price of admission. Virtually all of the applications, with the notable exception of the bonus Big Bang Board Games collection, installed and worked fine. Big Bang Board Games apparently needs to phone home to its server in order to start up properly and the server was overwhelmed initially. That's very bad form in my book; I don't care for apps that phone home on startup but if you do that at least add in code that will fail gracefully, not bomb out the app.

If I was into cooking I'd likely enjoy SousChef, which really looks interesting. To paraphrase Richard Nixon however "I am not a cook", to say nothing of a chef. I love the ability to place your Mac in full screen "recipe" mode so that it becomes a partner in the kitchen.

As of today there are only 4 days left to purchase MacHeist. If you're thinking of buying it do it soon because if they cross the $400K donation mark to charity it will unlock BoinxTV, something I personally would really like to try out. In addition web development tool Espresso and task management tool The Hit List will be unlocked if they can sell enough copies.

Was there an application in the bundle that you really liked that I didn't mention? Drop a note in the comments and fill us in!

Need to shorten URLs? Give Bit.ly a try

2009-04-01T08:30:00.002-04:00

I always ignored URL shortening services in the past; what was the point? My e-mail systems always seemed to handle URLs automatically, forums that I frequented usually shortened the URLs for me and more often than not if I needed a URL in a blog post I created a hyperlink. It wasn't until I started using Twitter quite a bit that I started to appreciate a really small URL. When you have 140 characters to express your thoughts and you are as verbose as I am, every single character counts.

Not long ago I noticed a buddy using Bit.ly to shorten his URLs. Up until then I always thought of TinyURL.com but 5 fewer characters in the domain name alone is substantial so I thought I'd give it a try. I give it my long URL, it gives me back a short URL and then I send that out to people. End of story, right?

Well, not quite. Bit.ly does two things that have made it a top service for me, one that I use frequently and recommend to friends. The first is that they provide a small JavaScript link that can be added to your browser's toolbar. If you are parked on a page you would like to share with others just click on the toolbar button and a dynamic page will load over your existing page, giving you the shortened URL.

The reason I really like Bit.ly though is that it has dynamically updated click-through stats. Since I have no control over traffic I link up through Twitter and other services I can see how many people have clicked on a link I have provided. I can also see which conversations have referenced it, something that's handy if you want to see how people are forwarding around something.

If you happen to hit a URL that has already been "bit.ly'd" then you'll see the click through stats on it as well. Needless to say services like Bit.ly are taking URL shortening to a completely different level.

Got a URL shortening service you really like? Drop a note in the comments and share! And if you're not already doing it feel free to follow me on Twitter through DAlison.

Got kids that play sports? Learn about concussions

2009-03-26T23:30:00.003-04:00

It was bitterly cold last night as my wife and I sat in the stands to watch my son's varsity lacrosse game against the cross-town team. Many of these kids had competed on the same junior league teams growing up and as a result there is a fierce competition when they play against one another. Pride was on the line and the hitting was hard, the emotions high.

It was late in the third quarter and my son, a 17 year old mid-fielder, was racing to pick up a loose ball. He saw an opponent angling for the ball and had the advantage on him but didn't see a second one racing in from a sharp angle. Just as he bent over to scoop up the ball the unseen player tried to check my son in the shoulder to knock him off balance but missed and struck him hard on the left side of his helmet with his stick. The ref did not see the blow and play continued.

My son rolled on the ground and popped right back up but didn't look quite right. He stayed in the game but from the stands we could see that he was not running very well. He also was crouching over a bit once he was positioned. I thought maybe he had gotten the wind knocked out of him.

He stayed in for another minute or so as the ball moved the length of the field then came out when the next mid-field line came in. As we sat up in the stands we were wondered if our son was okay because he didn't return to the game.

The Late Night Phone Call
The game ran late and we were home waiting for my son to get back from the school in his own car. The phone rang and it was one of his coaches, telling us that my son had apparently suffered a concussion and that they did not want him to drive himself home. The athletic trainers and coaches at our school are outstanding and followed all the right procedures in ensuring that my son was being monitored properly.

When I got to the school my son looked fine, though he was not his usual self. He normally has an easy smile but his look was very serious as he described what happened when the opposing player struck his helmet. First he said he heard an incredibly loud roar, as though a peal of thunder was going off inside his helmet. He also immediately began to see swirling images in his right eye. He felt dazed and had a pretty bad headache though he had never blacked out.

The school's athletic trainer recommended that we take him to a doctor either now or first thing in the morning (it was now nearly 10pm). Having experienced concussions before with him my concern got the better of me and I drove him to our local hospital. The ER doctor examined him pretty quickly and since his headache seemed to be getting worse ordered a CT Scan for him. They generally are looking for internal bleeding and the CT Scan is a good tool for determining if they need to conduct emergency surgery to relieve pressure from building on the patient's brain. Fortunately his scan came back clean; no obvious damage.

The ER doctor told me to check on him every 3 hours for the next day, waking him up to see if he was still lucid and that the pain was not getting worse, a sign they may have missed something on the CT Scan.

Later that morning I took him to his regular doctor. By 10am he was actually feeling pretty good; there was no headache unless he shook his head quickly (Don't do that son!). The doctor told him that he needed to stop all physical exertion until all of the signs of the concussion had gone away completely and then from that point we would wait another week before he would be eligible to play again.

All things considered, this went about as well as it can go for a concussion. The reason I'm writing this blog post is because I'm hoping that if you have kids of your own and they play sports or even have a highly active life that includes bumps and bruises you take a couple of minutes and learn about concussions and their treatment.

The Way Things Were
My own athletic adventures as a kid were usually punctuated by phrases like "Rub some dirt in it" and "Come on kid, you're ok, toughen up". It was just the way things were. Even now you see TV shows and movies where someone will knock a person out with a quick blow to the back of the skull. The victim will then magically awake later, rub the back of their head for a second and then move on as though nothing happened.

Take this perspective into the modern age of high school sports. Many kids on successful varsity programs train nearly year round, attending camps, playing in tournaments or participating in off-season workout programs. Throw in a dose of parents with competitive backgrounds that want to see their kids succeed and many kids and parents will push hard to keep their kid in the game.

What's Really Happening
What's actually happening inside the skull during a concussion is that the brain is twisting, creating torque that can lead to unconsciousness. In addition the brain can bump against the inside of the skull and cause bruises to the brain itself. The CDC estimates that this happens nearly 3.8 million times a year in the US for sports and recreation activities.

It's critical that as a parent you be able to separate yourself from the desire to see your son or daughter keep playing the sport they love so much and ensure that if they did get a concussion that you get involved. Read through some of the excellent materials the CDC provides on detecting concussions and if you are in doubt take your child to a doctor immediately.

Sounds a little over-cautious? Perhaps. Of course there is the story of little Morgan McCraken, whose parents got her to the hospital just in time to save her life. Then there's the story of High School football player Max Conradt's multiple concussions and what happened to his life.

My goal is not to frighten you as a parent about yet another thing that can harm your child. Instead my hope is that you'll take a couple of minutes and learn what to look for if your child suffers a head injury. Serious injury is very easy to prevent if you know what to look for and that knowledge is critical if your child plays a contact sport.

Switching from Windows to Mac - Power users can also play

2009-03-24T11:30:00.008-04:00

Lately I've been thinking about why I enjoy working with Macs so much. Since switching to Macs from Windows a little over a year ago I've tried as much as possible to approach it objectively, calling out both the good and bad as I learned my way around OS X, and recording my findings here in this blog.

It's easy to cite the UI consistency I enjoy with Mac based applications. As a software developer that obsesses with user interface design I have a deep appreciation for disparate applications using similar controls and metaphors. It's difficult enough for people to understand the underlying tasks and logic a software application can perform, making them learn different control surfaces is like asking someone to navigate through their own family room after you have rearranged the furniture and turned off the lights; lots of stubbed toes and muttered curse words are sure to ensue.

Instead of the UI, I'm finding the real draw for me has been how productive I am as a power user. As a Windows user I never questioned the Mac's user interface. It looked "pretty", a back-handed compliment if there ever was one. What I did not know, and not a single Mac advocate ever mentioned to me for fear of scaring me away (I assume), was that Macs could channel that inner power user like no other machine could.

At any given time I'm running a dozen or so applications, many comfortably set up in their own Spaces window. I can switch between the programs by hitting the familiar Command-Tab. If I need to launch a new application I use LaunchBar, without question one of the best productivity tools you can get for a Mac (Quicksilver provides a similar capability). No reaching for the mouse and hunting for the application I want to run; I simply hit Command-Space, type 2-3 letters and hit Return and my application is loaded almost immediately. If the application is already running it just switches to it.

My Mac Pro serves as my communications center as well, serving up my email through Apple's Mail program, AIM and Gmail chat through Adium, my Twitter feeds through TweetDeck and my incoming and outgoing phone calls through Skype. If I need to call a number I hit Command-Space, type "call" and enter (or paste) the phone number I want to dial.

If I decide I want to contact someone that's not visible through Adium I'll just hit Command-Space and start typing their name. Once their name appears in the LaunchBar menu I can hit the right arrow key and choose either an email address or phone number. If I choose an email address a new mail message is created with them as the recipient and I'm ready to start composing my message. If I select a phone number Skype takes over, gradually muting the John Coltrane track I have playing on iTunes as the phone begins to ring. I hang up the call and the music comes back.

Meanwhile down in my development Space I've got TextMate (my preferred programming editor), MySQL query browser and three terminal windows open. In one of the terminal windows I have an SSH session to one of my production servers open and am running a tail on one of my logs. The other two terminal windows are positioned in specific directories so that I can quickly execute commands for my Ruby on Rails based application and monitor the debug output from my local server instance. Safari is open in that same Space with the local version of SharedStatus up and running in it.

I even have Windows XP running in a VMware Fusion instance with Internet Explorer loaded and accessing my local version of SharedStatus so that I can be sure it works properly in that particular browser.

If you are a power Windows user that wants to dismiss the Mac as just a simplistic and trendy consumer machine—something I was guilty of—you may want to reevaluate that position. In my experience I've found Macs to be the computing equivalent of automotive sleepers; they look soft and simple on the outside but as soon as you push it you realize it's capable of extreme performance.

A new Mac Mini rounds out the house

2009-03-16T08:45:00.002-04:00

Well, it finally happened. Late last week my 16 year old son came to me and said "Dad, my HP Laptop won't boot up". Wonderful. I went to his room to check it out and sure enough the machine was just continually cycling on startup. It would get to the Windows logo and display the progress bar, suddenly show the briefest flashes of a blue screen (so fast it was unreadable), then the reboot and start the process over. I tried doing a safe boot with each of the types available in the Windows boot menu but no luck. I suspect that the hard drive on the machine had started to go and that a key driver file had become corrupted.

I played with it for a while but my efforts were half hearted. This machine was a hand me down from my wife, one that had been a bit flaky in the past. His was the last operational Windows machine still in use in our house. As I looked down on the HP endlessly flailing through the startup sequence a small smile formed in the corners of my mouth. I could finally be done with supporting aging Windows machines, at least the ones parked in my house. I would get him a Mac of his own.

Since he's a Junior in High School any machine we got him would likely be carted off to college in a year and a half. There may be another generation of MacBooks before that happens (or at least a minor refresh) so I decided to go another way. I bought him the entry level Mac Mini, rationalizing that it would be plenty powerful for his basic needs. I figured that in a year and a half I'll buy him a new MacBook and claim the Mac Mini as a media center machine.

Besides, I already had plenty of accessories around the house.

With a strategy in mind I headed off to the local Apple store and bought the machine, a 2.0 GHz system with 2GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive. I brought it home and hooked it up to a 22" Samsung widescreen display I had from one of my previous PCs (now deceased) and let him use the full size Apple keyboard and Mighty Mouse I got with my Mac Pro.

I had a spare 120GB hard drive sitting around from my original MacBook after I upgraded it to a 320GB drive. A while back I picked up a small USB enclosure for it so that I could use it as an external drive; that became his Time Machine device. He's had an older Logitech subwoofer 2.1 speaker system that generates some really decent sound so he's got everything he needs to listen to his music. The last piece of the setup puzzle was installing iWork '09, for which we have a family license.

I turned the machine over to him with a couple of quick pointers: don't just click the close button on an application's window, click App Name / Quit. I also explained the Dock bar and the basic concepts around the Finder and how to use Spotlight. While my son can touch type incredibly fast he's really not all of that into his computer; it's mainly a tool for accessing his music, the web and writing up papers for school.

Mac Mini Performance
When he first started using it he immediately set about doing multiple things at once: updating the music library in GarageBand (adding in the 1GB worth of stock music from Software Update), adding his music collection into iTunes from it's temporary home on my internal server and actually listening to music at the same time. These little tasks seemed to bring the Mac Mini to its knees, making it slow to respond. I introduced Davey to spinning beach balls.

I told my son to slow down a bit and not spend too much time exploring the machine to form an opinion while it was doing such intensive tasks. Once GarageBand had finished updating the Mini started to perform at an acceptable level.

iTunes and the Disappearing Disk Space
A couple of hours after he started playing with it he called me over to tell me that it was reporting he was out of disk space. Huh? How could he be out of disk space so quickly? Sure, it's only a 120GB hard drive but sheesh, he had over 75GB free when I gave it to him.

It turns out that he not only wanted to add his 10GB music collection to his machine but also wanted access to my rather large music collection as well. The problem is the default setting for iTunes. It copies all of the music into the local storage when adding it to a collection:

My collection—which is over 100GB in size—was being added to his local hard drive and he was blowing out his remaining disk space. In addition Time Machine had started a cycle and he nearly blew that drive's space out as well.

Since my Mac Pro holds my music collection and it's always on he didn't need to have local copies of the music in order to listen to it. We changed the above setting, deleted the local copy of the music then re-added everything and it worked great. I also ended up erasing the Time Machine drive and starting that over. After another couple of hours everything was back to normal and running very nicely.

My son is completely into GarageBand. He is by far the most musically inclined of our house and is a pretty decent guitar player. At some point in the near future I want to get his electric guitar hooked up to his Mac Mini so that he can incorporate his own music into his GarageBand work. I have no experience at all with that so if someone has suggestions on the best way to proceed please drop a note in the comments.

Of course Macs have personality and I'm fond of coming up with Star Wars themed names for our computers. In this case I decided to break from my standards and use a name that also acknowledges my son is named after me. His new Mac is named Mini Me.

Switching from Windows to Mac - One Year Later

2009-03-13T08:45:00.002-04:00

On February 2, 2008 I was a Windows software developer. I had a house full of Windows based machines and was working on building up my next software company using some of them. I am what you might call a heavy duty computer user; I use my machines to communicate with folks (e-mail, forums, etc), develop software, manage my digital photos, edit home videos, play high end games, etc. Basically I spent most of my waking hours in front of a computer and was fine plugging away on Windows XP.

Something however was missing. It took me a while to figure out but I was simply bored with Windows. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Microsoft seemed to have abandoned any attempt at maintaining a uniform user interface and many software vendors were innovating by trying very non-standard UIs. Every time I installed new software I worried that it was blowing up the size of my Registry, potentially subjecting me to Malware and Spyware or installing replacement DLLs for libraries that other applications were counting on.

Every 6-9 months I would have to reinstall Windows and my core applications and suddenly my performance would return. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was having to put far too much time into keeping my machines running smoothly.

It was at this point in my life that many of my friends started getting Macs. They would tell me how much they loved them and how "it just works". I personally didn't find that too informative. What do you mean, it just works? Isn't that just some marketing line Apple wants you to repeat? Are you guys really falling for that?

Still, more and more people, including some highly technical software developers I knew, were getting Macs and raving about them. So on a Sunday afternoon I walked into the Apple store in Tyson's Corner, VA and started checking out a little white MacBook. A short while later I was home with the MacBook sitting on my lap and I wrote the first entry of this blog: a hardcore Windows guy gets a Mac. I wrote nearly daily after that, recording in detail everything I found that I liked and didn't like, hoping it would help other people that were making the adjustment from Windows to Mac.

Invasion of the Macs
What started out as an addition to my collection of computers turned into a full scale replacement of my Windows machines with Macs. For a while I had both my Windows and Mac cranked up and running side by side, though I found myself constantly moving my hands over to the MacBook. Suddenly using a computer felt like fun again. The interface was crisp and clean and the little machine performed incredibly well, much faster than I expected from such an entry level Mac.

It didn't take long before I learned that many of the myths about Macs that I had clung to as a heavy Windows user were just wrong. Things like Macs can only use a single mouse button, that there wasn't much software for them, or that they were really just for consumers and graphic artists. Turns out I was wrong.

Before I knew it I was running VMware Fusion on my MacBook and playing with my Visual Studio development environment in there. Wanting a little more horsepower and a lot more screen real estate I bought a refurbished Mac Pro from Apple and set that up as my primary workstation, re-purposing my dual 20" LCDs as Mac displays. At this point I really didn't even fire up my Windows XP machine any longer. Why bother? Between VMware Fusion and a large collection of native Mac applications I had a machine that could run circles around my Windows XP system.

By the middle of the year my patience for supporting the Windows XP machines that remained in the house was wearing very thin. When my wife would yell to me that her HP laptop "wasn't working" or "is running REALLY slowly" I would look at the machine with disdain and plot to replace it with a Mac. I ended up doing that for her birthday and it's gone surprisingly well, even though she still hasn't mastered how to quit an application (she just clicks the close button on the window).

So here it is a full year later and nearly every member of my family is running a Mac. I've become the "go to" person in my network of friends and family on Mac issues; if someone is considering getting a Mac they like to call and ask me about it and try to understand what will be different, which machine they should buy and how they should set it up. I don't even mind the call and often tell them enthusiastically about things like Time Machine and the iLife suite. If they're more technical I get into Spaces, LaunchBar, terminal windows and half a dozen other "must have" utilities I think they should get.

Not Perfect But Close Enough
My Macs have not been perfect mind you. I continue to get Time Machine errors that correct themselves on the next try (can't it just auto-retry once and THEN tell me there was a problem if that failed???). From a design standpoint I like the fact that the top level menu is fixed and context sensitive because it cuts down on every window having a menu bar, but it means that on multiple display systems that menu may be a screen or two away from what I am working on.

There are also times that the Mac tries to do a little too much for a power user, like when iPhoto insists that I drop my 25K photos into it's collection model in order to do anything useful with them rather than letting me keep it in my own folder structure where it can be shared by everyone in the family. I have a couple other minor complaints but I mention them mainly to point out that I'm trying to be objective in the way I've approached my Macs.

These issues aside I have been extremely happy with my switch to being a Mac user. I frequently run more than a dozen applications at the same time, leveraging Spaces to create a large virtual workspace and jump between my applications. Perhaps it's because I've been lucky but since I became a Mac user I have not experienced a single kernel panic. I mention this only because I have installed a LOT of software on my Macs, trying out many of the tools and utilities that people have recommended to me through this blog.

The performance I get from my Macs has been as good as it was the day that I bought them. I've generally found that all of the applications I get from Apple use a very standardized user interface and because of that most after market vendors have followed that lead and produce applications that look and feel like something you would get from Apple.

Last but by no means least I've found that the Mac community is populated by extremely helpful people that have been willing to give me a hand when I had a question or provide a recommendation when I needed to find the right program. This is something I experienced in places like Mac-Forums and many times in the comments on this blog.

What I find a bit ironic is that when people now ask me why I seem to like Macs so much I don't usually go into all of the details you see in this blog post. I tend to sum up my reason with:

"It just works"

Should internet access be limited for employees?

2009-03-02T08:30:00.001-05:00

Though I am in the process of building up my next company, this is not my first rodeo. From 1998 up until mid-2006 I—and later my partners—managed the growth of WebSurveyor up until its sale. One of the many challenges we had during that time was establishing not only a culture for our employees but also a clear set of rules governing among other things internet access.

The culture that I always wanted centered around personal responsibility. My view was to make sure people understood how important they were to the success of the business and to give them the freedom to use their computer as they saw fit to accomplish their goals. We made it pretty clear that objectionable material (a.k.a. porn) was completely forbidden and you would be fired if found accessing it from the office. If an employee wanted to pull up non-work sites that was fine as long as it didn't interfere with their job performance.

When we had under a dozen employees this was really easy. We worked in cramped offices and none of us had any real privacy, myself included. We were also struggling just to keep the business alive and everyone understood the gravity of the situation; those that didn't we got rid of as quickly as possible. Our margin for error was incredibly small.

Over time the company grew, in some cases very rapidly, and we adjusted by moving into larger office space and hiring more and more people. Once we started reeling off a string of profitable quarters the pressure changed: we went from being in survival mode into a growth and expansion phase. In addition people had considerable privacy over our old environment, even if it was just the shallow barrier created by a couple of cube walls.

It was in this environment our verbal rules needed to change. The model we went with was to create a pretty comprehensive set of policies in our employee handbook and to continually reinforce our culture in meetings and personal interactions with the staff. We still did not limit access to the internet though, so if someone wanted to pull up ESPN at lunch or chat with some friends through AIM we didn't have "electronic counter measures" in effect to prevent that.

My New Magic Trick
This did create the opportunity for abuse though. Being a "boss" meant that I suddenly had a new talent: I could walk up to some people's cube and the second I appeared their browser window would minimize. I became a human minimize button. It was actually pretty comical and in some cases I would pull a "Columbo" and walk a few feet away, then turn back and say "Just one more thing..." to see them minimize the window again. Magic I tell you.

Not everyone did this of course. The people that I respected the most would leave what they had on their monitors up, not really caring that I saw they were actually checking the standings in their fantasy football league or pricing AV equipment for their home. I assumed that those folks were taking a micro-break and besides, they were always my most productive people. They managed to blend the ability to be productive with occasional travels into personal tasks and understood when to refocus on their primary responsibilities.

As a manager we had established a usage policy based on trust and I wanted to see that trust reciprocated. What really shocked me was that this talent (my magical window minimize skill) was not limited to entry level employees. I had senior and very experienced people that had enormous responsibilities do it, in some cases folks that were very recent hires. Needless to say those were not my finest moments as a champion for personal responsibility and usually resulted in a quick "Can I see you in my office for a minute?"

I bring this up because one of the folks that used to work for me, an early employee who I liked and trusted, told me about his new employer. They are a very large company and as a result have a very restrictive internet access policy. They do not allow access to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and have heavily throttled/limited access to things like Gmail and certain chat sites. I'm sure this kind of systemic approach not only makes it easier for management to ensure people are working and not goofing off during the day but also to protect themselves against liability issues such as an employee ogling porn in plain view of others.

Question of the day
My question for you dear reader is this: If you work in a company that limits your internet access does it limit your ability to be productive OR if you work for a company that does not, do you abuse it? Anonymous comments are on so use an alias if you like but I would love to hear some unfiltered feedback on this kind of issue. I also think it will help some of the managers and entrepreneurs that read this blog.

First impressions of the Safari 4 beta

2009-02-26T20:00:00.002-05:00

When Apple released the beta version of Safari 4 I thought, "whatever". While I like Safari and find it to be a perfectly capable browser I am hopelessly addicted to Firefox with its extensions and add-ons. Then I started to see some of the articles coming out about the new Safari and two things got me interested: speed improvements and a new UI for tab management.

I pulled down the Safari beta and installed it on my MacBook Pro, which has 4GB of RAM and is running the latest version of Leopard. By default it installed over my existing version of Safari which I wasn't too happy about. You can uninstall it and it will roll back to your previous version if you need it to but I would have liked to be able to run both concurrently. I'm sure there's a strong technical reason that's not an option. Quite a few users complained about problems with Mail.app, especially if they used Growl for notification support. In my limited time looking at it I didn't experience any problems with Mail. Your mileage may vary.

Top Sites
The first thing that hit me (after the cool animation introducing Safari) was the Top Sites page:

Typical of something from a Finder or iTunes Cover Flow view you can have nicely rendered mini web pages on a large black background that give you a menu of sorts for your most used web pages. While you can "pin" web pages into the view, move and remove those that you don't like, the current beta doesn't give you the ability to put a site in that you want. You have to hope it comes up for it to appear in the list and then pin it. Hopefully this is just a function of it being beta software. I was furiously removing sites and hoping Safari would give me one of my more recently visited sites but after a while it stopped offering suggestions (hence the gap where two web pages are missing in the image above).

There are small, medium and large views that hold 24, 12 and 6 web pages respectively. By default this is your home page so it will come up quite a bit, though you can of course set your home page to anything you like. There's also a little button on the left of the toolbar that gives you quick access to it.

If Apple puts in the ability to manually add my own pages this will be a very nice feature. It would be even cooler if I could create groups of these "top sites".

The New Tabs
My initial reaction to the new tabs was that they were really cool. By moving the tabs into the caption bar Apple has effectively regained roughly 20+ pixels of browser real estate. All the caption bar was good for in the past was as a drag surface and title area anyway. This does create a bit of a challenge though: how do you move the window?

Actually, the same way you did before. Simply single click on any of the tabs—even an inactive one—and you can drag the entire Safari window. As you move the mouse into a tabs area you will notice the close button appears as well as a small textured area to the right of the tab. That textured area allows you to drag the tab out of the browser window and open a new window with that tab as the content area.

The single biggest problem I have with all of this is that if you open a lot of tabs (I often have 10 or more open) then clicking in the caption bar means it's really easy to accidentally hit a close button on a tab. It's almost like a game of whack-a-mole except with browser tabs:

Dan Frakes at Macworld has a really good article about Safari's new tabs: Good or bad? He covers this topic in a lot more detail than I do.

I would love to see Apple add an option that would allow me to turn off the close button for non-selected tabs. That would mean less of a chance of hitting the mole, er, close box on accident. With screen real estate always such a premium I do like the way Apple is tackling this though; it just needs a little tuning. Since this is going to set the standard for OS X tab metaphors moving into the future I'm sure Apple appreciates the gravity of these kinds of decisions.

Performance
The Webkit folks did some major tuning on Safari beta 4; the speed is simply stunning. How much faster is it? If I load my primary blog page (www.davidalison.com), which generally has my last 7 blog posts on it with some fairly complex tables, DIVs, images and poorly designed HTML it takes nearly 4 seconds to completely render in Firefox. Safari 3.2 would complete the render in roughly 3 seconds. The beta handles it in roughly 2 seconds.

Web pages are noticeably snappier and pages that have some of the more complex DIVs for representing things like charts fly up on the page.

Breaking Points and Extras
There is one add-on I use in both Firefox and Safari religiously and that's 1Password. Unfortunately it needed to be updated once the beta was released; fortunately the Agile Web Solutions folks knocked out an update within days that fixed it. There are other plugins that have needed to be updated as well but most of the popular ones appear to have been patched already.

Macworld recently put together an article on some of the hidden preferences for Safari. There are a couple of items in there that can help you customize Safari a little more.

All in all I'm pretty pleased with this new version of Safari, especially when taking into account that it's a beta release. I don't know if I'll switch from Firefox being my default browser, though if Apple can tweak some of the UI issues and still maintain that incredible speed advantage I may just reconsider that.

What's your take? Do you like the new Safari?

SharedStatus.com - easy team management

2009-02-24T13:00:00.003-05:00

Since starting this blog over a year ago I've been sharing my adventures about switching from Windows to Mac and thrown in a couple of stories about starting up a business. When I left the company I founded in late 2007 (after selling it in 2006) my intention was to take a little time off and then plunge into my next business venture, this blog quickly becoming a way for me to escape working 16 hours a day. Now that the new business is ready to go I would like to tell you about SharedStatus.

First Some Background
In virtually every company I have worked in I have had to conduct or contribute to status meetings. The problem with status meetings is that they can be very inefficient. Since most people manage their personal task lists in their own way they often wait until the last minute before the status meeting to quickly slam together what they have been working on.

In setting out to address this problem I discovered that there were other corollary problems that people experienced. Tasks that were assigned to people in some of those very status meetings were sometimes not being done because the person assigned didn’t realize it was being assigned to them. Other times a critical issue would be revealed in a status meeting that could have been more easily addressed earlier but the issue got lost in a tidal wave of e-mails. Collaboration between team members depended on a long thread of e-mails that sometimes didn’t include the very people that needed to be working on the issue.

The more I dug in to business process issues the more I saw that people tried addressing these challenges but that the tools were often not designed to solve such simple challenges. Project Management systems were plentiful but often were far to complex for basic needs. Other systems—like Lotus Notes and Sharepoint—went far down the path to helping solve these problems but required a large IT commitment and huge expense to make it all work.

I felt strongly that there was an opportunity to create a solution that was incredibly easy to use and focused on the core issue: tracking tasks, collaborating with others about those tasks and quickly generating status reports. I wanted to produce a product that was priced in such a way that small businesses could easily afford it and that as it scaled up within a company the costs didn’t get outrageous. Finally, I wanted to handle this as a web-based SaaS product, so it wouldn’t require a big IT involvement in order to get it up and running and anyone with a web browser would be able to use it.

The solution I came up with is called SharedStatus. The primary focus of this tool is to give managers, project leads and team members a simple, lightweight framework for capturing tasks that need to get done, collaborating with others on performing those tasks and quickly generating status reports for team and project meetings.

In SharedStatus most everything revolves around the concept of a task. You can create a task for yourself, view it in your dashboard or in a status report and mark it as complete when you are done. With multiple people in your account you can begin to see the advantage of SharedStatus because you can take any task you create and assign it to another member of your account. That person can either accept or decline the task; once accepted you can view and comment on the task—much like people can view and comment on a blog post—adding information or details that both people (task owner and assignee) can see.

A task can also be associated with a project, which opens other collaboration capabilities. Every member of a project can see all of the tasks that are associated with that project and make comments on them, providing an easy way for project members to help one another with tasks and eliminate the huge threads of e-mail that tend to get generated during the course of a project.

Finally, SharedStatus can optionally support the concept of a supervisor, allowing a manager to quickly see each of their direct reports and the tasks they have assigned to them. Their Dashboard is updated to show each of their direct reports and any critical tasks that they may be working on.

At the heart of SharedStatus is a notification system which each user can customize. They can be notified by e-mail or SMS message when a task they own is changed, accepted, commented on, etc. Users don’t have to keep SharedStatus up and running in a browser all day to have it help them.

Status reports are also a central theme to SharedStatus and can be accessed quickly from a user’s Dashboard, generating a list of the tasks that have been recently completed and a list of tasks that are due in the next time frame.

That in a nutshell is SharedStatus.

If you work in an environment where you need to manage a team of people and would like a simple, light-weight solution for keeping your team on the same page and quickly generating status reports I would appreciate you checking out SharedStatus or letting others in your network know about it. I have priced SharedStatus to be extremely affordable; it is only $2 / month per user ($20 / month minimum) and includes a 2 month unlimited user free trial.

You can get started with SharedStatus right now by going to www.sharedstatus.com.

My top 10 free Mac utilities

2009-02-20T10:45:00.000-05:00

I personally love free software, especially when it adds real value to my work day. In the year since I made the switch from Windows to Mac I have examined hundreds of applications, many of them free or open source, and would like to give you a list of the applications that have made their way into my every day use.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, simply the top applications that I have found to be used nearly daily. In addition I'm not including utilities that ship with OS X. Without further adieu here is my take on them:

Firefox
Though I also use Safari, my default browser is Firefox. Why? Extensions and add-ons. Firefox is effectively a mini-platform for web browsing and as a developer that builds web based applications the number of add-ons to help with HTML/CSS/etc. is mind numbing. The only problem I have with Firefox is that it needs to be restarted occasionally because it will suck up and continue to hold memory, especially after visiting Flash intensive sites. Since I rarely shut down my Mac Pro (I'll put it to sleep instead), Firefox needs a restart every 3-4 days. Example: As I write this Firefox has been up and running for 5 days and is currently consuming 508MB of memory. Fortunately there is an extension called QuickRestart that will allow you to restart Firefox and maintain all of your existing tabs and session states. Oh, and that extension is free too!

Skitch
Though a relatively new addition to my collection of free utilities, Skitch has quickly risen on my list of must have, always handy utilities. As I wrote about it just last month, Skitch makes it so easy to capture, size, crop and annotate images that I don't feel at all compelled to fire up GIMP to edit my images. Add in the free storage and sharing capabilities from the Skitch online service and this is something you should have at the ready if you do ANY image editing or annotating.

Dropbox
Like Skitch, Dropbox is a relatively new addition to my collection of free utilities though I have found it an outstanding application and service. Why? If you have multiple computers you know that moving files between them can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, especially if you are going across platforms (Mac -> Windows -> Linux) like I do. Dropbox uses the web as an intermediary, effectively eliminating that issue. In addition I can detach my MacBook Pro from all networks—jumping on a plane for example—and my key files are there with me. When I return from my trip and reconnect to my network my updated files magically appear on my various desktop machines and even the VM Ware instance running Windows XP.

iStat menu
Rarely does a day go by that I am not consulting iStat menus to see what is up with my Macs, especially when I see inordinate memory usage (see Firefox above) or the CPU is taking a hit. iStat menu lets me quickly see what is going on and presents it in a seamless integration with my OS X shell. I got on the iStat menu bandwagon early in my Mac adoption and have been extremely happy with it ever since.

Adium
I'm online for the majority of my day and since I work from home I can't easily chat with some of my friends. Instant Messaging (IM) provides me with a virtual water cooler. As I have contracted out some of my development activities over the last year I've found IM to be a great way to quickly work through revisions and issues rather than pushing e-mails back and forth. I like Adium for this over iChat because it has a very compact interface and allows me to consolidate all of the various IM accounts (Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, etc) into a single place. Just a great all around application and one that I use throughout the day.

NetNewsWire
As an internet entrepreneur keeping up on the latest technology news is a bit of a challenge because of the sheer quantity. Though I've found sites like TechMeme very helpful for keeping abreast of what's going on I still like to rip through RSS feeds of my favorite sites to see what's up. NetNewsWire is great for this with a snappy interface and a built in browser that makes it easy to queue up stories to read while scanning the headlines.

TweetDeck
I am a bit addicted to Twitter and have found the best way to manage my Twitter feeds is through TweetDeck, a wonderful little Adobe Air based application that presents multiple panes for each of my different views. Though I would prefer that TweetDeck was a native OS X application the developer for it has been pushing out updates pretty regularly and seems to be very attentive to requests from his increasing user base. In case you are interested you can follow me on Twitter by visiting twitter.com/dalison.

Cyberduck
I haven't looked around too much for FTP clients because once I found Cyberduck I didn't see a need. My FTP requirements are generally very simple; push a few files up to one of my servers, grab a log file here or there, etc. For tasks like that it's hard to beat Cyberduck since I just fire it up and away I go, dragging and dropping files between Finder and Cyberduck windows as I need to.

Google Notifier
I love Gmail; it's been very reliable, has plenty of storage, an excellent web interface and an IMAP connection that I can access nicely with Mail.app. The best way I've found to stay on top of incoming e-mails when I don't have Mail.app loaded is through Google Notifier. Sometimes the IMAP interface to Gmail can be a bit slow so Notifier gives me a quicker update when new mail comes in. An added bonus is that it also monitors your Google Calendars and can push out reminders for that as well.

MPlayer OSX
Though I generally can watch video through QuickTime there are file formats that it can struggle with, even with some of the add-ons for it. If QuickTime can't play it I grab MPlayer OSX and it hasn't failed me yet. It's displaced VLC for me because the video quality seems to be a bit smoother.

So there you have it, my top 10 free Mac utilities. There are others that I use, just not as regularly as those listed above, including Handbrake, MySQL Tools, TrueCrypt, Audacity and GIMP. I would also mention QuickSilver, though that has been replaced by LaunchBar (a paid application) for me.

One of the reasons I love writing these types of lists up is that I always get some fantastic recommendations for an application I wasn't aware of. Got a free application or utility that you really love and use all the time? Drop a note in the comments and share!