David Alison's Blog

Trying to lose 30lbs with diet, exercise and an iPhone

2010-06-11T08:00:00.008-04:00

By the beginning of 2009 I realized that something needed to be done. We had just returned from a fantastic trip to Jamaica with the entire family, staying at an all-inclusive resort. All-inclusive is code for “eat and drink everything in sight”, and I heartily did just that.

As I reviewed the pictures taken during the trip I was shocked to see how much weight I’d put on over the years. At 45 years old my steady diet of junk food and extremely half-hearted attempts at exercise had converted my body into an awkward pear shape. A professional career of driving a computer everyday meant ready access to snacks and little natural exercise other than pounding away on a keyboard. My fingers were as lean and nimble as ever but that’s where the good news ended.

The stats weren’t pretty: at 5’11” I weighed in at 206lbs, solidly into the overweight category. I wasn’t sleeping well because I snored loudly and suffered from mild nighttime apnea; after lunch I nearly always needed (though didn’t get) a nice long nap. Instead I pumped my body full of coffee and soda to get through it. I was up to size 38 pants and XL shirts, and worst of all my blood pressure was running as high as 153/80. My doctor told me that I would need to get on blood pressure medication soon.

To add insult to injury my wife got us a Wii Fit. After stepping on the evil little device it decided my Wii character needed to look like a friggin beach ball, whereas everyone else in my family had normal Wii characters. On top of that the stupid Wii Fit made a noise that sounded a lot like "Oh My!" when I put my weight on it. I get it, thanks.

It was a new year so I set a very specific goal for myself: I would get down to 175lbs by my 46th birthday in June. That 31lb drop would put me at the weight I was when I met my lovely wife back in 1985, a weight I hadn’t seen on my scale in 23 years. My good friend Jeff had dropped nearly 50lbs in a little over a year so I knew it could be done.

I had the motivation, all I needed were the tools to make it happen.

Diet & exercise are the key to losing weight. Who knew?
Though I’m happy to share the foods I started eating and the exercising I did I won’t go into too much detail right now. Suffice it to say by counting calories, eating quality foods and putting in vigorous exercise I quickly started dropping weight. Initially it came off very fast, then I would hit walls that would take longer to see results.

What I found out about myself was that I was highly motivated by seeing my goal weight and every few days checking on my current weight to see how I was progressing against that goal. I had read some good reviews of Weightbot and figured that since I had my iPhone with me all the time it would be a good tool for helping me track my progress.

Weightbot
The thing I love about Weightbot is that it doesn’t try to be too many things. You enter your height, pop in a goal weight and from then on all you need to do is plug in your weight using a simple dial control. It’s got some great sound and visual effects so it makes it fun to use and even supports a WiFi based Withings Scale for data entry.

Where it comes in handy is when you rotate your iPhone on it’s side and the goal chart appears. Not only does it present you with a chart of your actual progress with your goal displayed, it also gives you a projection of when you will reach your goal weight based on your current weight gain/loss patterns.

I found this view to be a huge motivational tool. I really wanted to make it to my goal weight before my 46th birthday and I could tell early on how I was doing. At $1.99 Weightbot is a great buy and for me was well worth the money.

How I did
Unfortunately I missed my goal weight of 175lbs by my birthday - I hit it four days later. The results of losing that weight and learning to enjoy exercising had a profound impact on me. I went from a size 38 waist to a size 32 and from XL shirts to mediums. My blood pressure dropped dramatically and just a few days ago was measured at 112/71. I continued to drop weight, leveling out at about 170lbs with a measured body fat percentage of 9.9%.

To my surprise (and my wife’s enormous relief) I stopped snoring after dropping the weight. Apparently I carried half that weight in my face and once it was gone my air passages were much clearer and I could sleep silently.

This wasn’t of course because I spent $1.99 on Weightbot; that was just one tool to help me achieve my goal. If you are interested in losing weight and find that you are goal oriented, consider adding Weightbot to your toolbox.

Speaking of goals - I could use your help
A huge part of my exercise regimen has been my newfound love of cycling. Recently I learned about the Tour de Cure, a bike ride to raise money to find a cure for diabetes. My father is a Type I diabetic and since the ride falls on Father’s Day this year I decided I’d jump in and see if I could help them raise some money. I signed up to do the 100 mile “century” ride, my first attempt at that distance.

I’ve been training like a madman lately and am shooting not only to complete it but to do so in less that 6 hours. Would you consider making a donation to the Tour de Cure and sponsoring me on the ride? If so, please click here. All the money goes to the American Diabetes Association and is tax deductible.

Got an iPhone app that is great for helping people keep track of weight loss or exercise performance? Please drop a note in the comments!

Safari 5 Reader - a feature with a direct impact

2010-06-08T10:00:00.006-04:00

On a day where the news from Apple focused on the iPhone 4 and new iOS features, the update to Safari 5 was almost an afterthought, so much so that the press release went out a couple of hours before the product itself was even available. Even the first iteration of the Safari page was improperly formatted.

There are a number of updates that went in to Safari 5, not the least of which is improved HTML 5 support. Though performance is reportedly better I have been unable to detect any improvement; benchmarking would be required to see it. The big user oriented feature that's been added is Reader, a view of certain web pages that eliminates all distractions (ads and visual distractions) that draw away from the material you want to read.

When viewing a web page that Safari determines contains an article, a Reader "button" appears in Safari's address bar:

Clicking that will present the web page in a simple, large scale Times font. Images embedded in the article are often included and if the article has a multi-page footer for navigating Reader will suck in all the pages, presenting you with a single, simply formatted view.

I tried this out on a number of different blogs and news sites and the results were great. Not only was it easier to focus on the content of the article it also allows me to print or e-mail the content to someone using that view.

I for one can't stand those animated ads with people dancing around or the bouncing balls trying to get me to see how low a bank's interest rate is. It's great to have a nicely done feature that allows me to pull out the meat of the content and I anticipate Reader will get a lot of use.

Can Reader change how sites are presented?

While add-ons like AdBlock for Firefox have supported this basic capability for many years, this is the first time a major web browser has presented this as a front and center feature. It will move the blocking of ads from a niche area leveraged by the technical minority to one used by a much larger percentage, especially if Internet Explorer and Firefox follow up with a similar feature.

The interesting part about all of this is how it will impact the economics of the web. Many of the more popular web sites support their content through ad revenues, many on an impression model. When a person visits a site the web server will still count the ad as an impression. Initially this means that web sites that depend on ad revenue will not see a decrease in impressions so they'll be safe. Just not for long.

Over time advertisers will see disturbing trends: while they are getting the same number of impressions as before, the conversion rates will begin to decline. Business models that count on revenues from ads with distracting content will struggle to survive.

In many ways this is no different than the popup wars of the last 10+ years. You may remember when not too long ago a visit to some web sites meant 2-3 popup browser windows appearing. Web browsers have all gotten significantly better at blocking popups and as a result most reputable web sites don't even bother trying to put them up.

If Reader becomes a big hit—which I believe it will—it may actually drive the design of many web sites. If a web site wants to maintain an advertising model they will need to present their content in such a way that a user doesn't quickly reach for the Reader button.

This of course won't happen overnight; it will take years before these changes to behavior have a direct impact. Smart folks have a tendency to see where things are headed and plan accordingly. Just a little FYI for those of you that have web sites that depend on ad revenue; those few high-dollar distracting ads you allow may be killing off your web site.

Isn't it ironic?

One of Apple's big pushes on the iPhone / iPad front is to create a highly useable ad supported model for "free" applications called iAd. So basically Apple has said "We think your web sites have a horrible ad model and presentation. We're giving people a way to avoid it". At the same time they are saying "We really know how to advertise. Here's a new way to do it."

At least they are consistent.

An open letter from a cyclist to 99% of drivers

2010-05-27T15:55:00.006-04:00

The news always seems to be carrying some story about a cyclist and a driver getting into a fight or of a cyclist being struck by a car while they are riding. When these stories are discussed in the comments section of a news site tempers flare and heated arguments about sharing the road break out. The pattern is so consistent that you can predict it pretty accurately:

Cyclists hate drivers that don't give them enough room on the road
Drivers hate cyclists that use roads they didn't pay for
Cyclists hate drivers that don't pay attention
Drivers hate cyclists that see stop signs and traffic lights as optional
Cyclists hate drivers that think bikes can't be lawfully ridden on the road
Drivers hate cyclists that slow traffic

The number of arguments leveled at one another is the ultimate fodder for Interweb trolls but the consistent pattern I see is the hatred part. As a vehicle driver and dedicated cyclist I'd like to take a slightly different approach to this:

Dear 99% of Drivers:

In the last year I've put close to four thousand miles on my various bikes, a large number of them on public roads in several states. While I have encountered my share of drivers that either don't see me or don't want me on the road, you were not one of them.

You pulled your vehicle as far over as you safely could to give me the room I need for both of us to share the road together.

You waited an extra 5 seconds to let me pass before making that right turn that would have cut me off.

On that narrow country road you stayed behind me when we approached that blind curve or hill until I could see ahead to tell you the road was clear and that you could pass me safely.

You weren't composing a text message on your cell phone at the same moment you began to pass me on the road. Or ever while you were driving for that matter.

You saw me trying to cross a busy road and safely slowed down, flashing your lights to let me cross without disrupting the flow of traffic or making the people behind you slam on their brakes.

When you pulled up to an intersection to make a right turn you didn't automatically push the nose of your car out into the area my bike was riding in.

These are just a few of the things you did to help us both safely share the road. I don't know if you could tell by seeing me on my bike but I'm a father, a husband, a neighbor, a son, a brother and a friend. I do know that you saw me as a person, not as an obstacle that needed to be overcome. Your awareness of your surroundings wasn't limited to the interior of your car.

In return I promise to do my part. I'll continue to keep as far right as I safely can. Sometimes I have to swing out a little further into the road than I like because I've had people open their car doors into me. I may hold you up on narrow roads but I want you to safely pass me as soon as possible; as soon as I see that you can pass I'll wave you forward and if I can pull it off safely I'll wave to you or give you a thumbs up. I know you're just following the law but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate it.

Sure, there are still lots of drivers out there that don't understand how fragile a person on a bike is and there are lots of cyclists that disregard common courtesy and the rules of the road as well. The reality is they are a minority, and hopefully a shrinking one.

This letter isn't directed at them though. It's directed at you. Thanks for sharing the road with me.

--David

For the last several years my blog has focused on switching from Windows to Mac and the occasional posts on starting a new business. These are both topics I intend to continue with, I just want to mix in my passion for cycling and exercise as well. I'm always looking at technology that I can use with my Macs, iPhone or iPad to make my cycling and exercise experiences better and hope to write about that as well.

Restore from backup - bringing a Mac back with Time Capsule

2010-04-22T10:30:00.003-04:00

My brother called and told me my mom was in the hospital. At 80 her health has been declining pretty rapidly so I immediately booked a flight to California, planning to spend a week there to help my brother with both her and my father. Needless to say I had a lot on my mind as I rushed to the airport in the wee hours of a Tuesday morning last week.

Back at home my wife's MacBook sat at her desk, left on overnight like she often did so that when she woke up in the morning a quick shake of the mouse would brighten the screen and allow her to check e-mail. From what I can tell in the hourly backup logs, at roughly the same time my aircraft lifted off the runway the 120GB hard disk in her MacBook crashed.

When I checked in with my wife that night to update her on my mom's status, she told me that her MacBook was dead.

Me: "Dead?"

Allison: "It's just got a gray screen. I've tried restarting it and that's all that comes up."

Of course, this has to happen when the only techie in the family leaves on a weeklong trip. Fortunately for us my wife's MacBook is backed up regularly using Time Machine pointing at a Time Capsule. To make a really long story short, I tried to get our 14 year old daughter to install a replacement drive into the MacBook. The salesman at BestBuy sold her the wrong drive so after trying to jam a PATA drive into a SATA slot, she gave up until I returned home.

Bringing Back a Dead Mac

When I came home from California I promptly returned the incorrect drive and picked up a Western Digital 320GB black drive instead. Fast, high capacity, good reviews and I've had excellent luck with WD drives in the past. The installation was a snap as I've done this before.

I did encounter a problem when I first tried restoring my data though. Having purchased a number of different Macs over the last two years, I had quite a few OS X install disks lying around, including several for MacBooks since my wife and both daughters have them. Apparently I was using the wrong one because it would not allow me to do a restore from the Mac OS X Install Disc. Once I figured out the correct disk everything went much more smoothly. If you have multiple Macs you may want to label your disk sets to ensure they match up w/ the right Mac.

First I used Disk Utility to format the drive as a single large partition using Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Next, from the OS X Installer menu I ran the restore utility. By following the prompts I was able to select our Time Capsule and choose the correct bundle on it for my wife's machine.

Though I normally access the network from her machine using WiFi, I took a standard ethernet cable and plugged it directly into the Time Capsule to help speed up the process. It ended up taking about 3 hours to restore her machine. Once restored a quick reboot returned her machine to its pre-hard-drive-crash state.

The Importance of Backups

Do yourself a favor right now: check the status of your backup and—if you're the techie in the family—do that for all the computers in your home. Make sure it's running properly and that you have a basic game plan for the day your primary (or secondary) hard drive fails. Your hard drive will eventually fail. It may not happen for ten years, several months or as you are reading this but it will eventually fail.

As more and more of our lives are captured digitally, backups are more important than ever. If all you do is set up Time Machine to point at a remote drive at least you have something to fall back on.

And for those that are interested, my mom is doing much better. My brother and I moved our parents into assisted living apartments. They have help with meals, medical care on site and lots of other folks to interact with. It's the ultimate backup system for the elderly.

Do you have a backup technique you use that may help others? Please share it below!

The Accidental iPad and How I Use It

2010-04-05T11:55:00.000-04:00

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad a few months ago I didn't think "Wow, I gotta have me one of those...". Though I was intrigued by the form factor and slightly motivated by Steve Jobs' demonstration of the device, it didn't scream out at me as something I needed. I was actually more amused with all the criticism surrounding the choice of iPad as the name for the device.

I yawned and went on with my life.

Nearly a month ago I walked in to our local Apple store with my family. We weren't looking for anything in particular, just letting my kids fawn over the Mac hardware as we thought about buying a MacBook for my son before he heads off to college. I asked one of the Apple store employees if they had an iPad I could take a look at. He handed me an 8 x 6 inch card with a picture of one on it. The device was far thinner and lighter than I expected.

He then asked if I would like to reserve one.

Me: "No thanks"

Apple Employee: "There's no commitment. It just means that we'll have one here for you in case they sell out. That way you can come in on launch day and be assured you will have one."

Me: "Uh, nah, thanks"

Wife: "Well, maybe you should sign up in case you really want it."

My wife is usually the uber-frugal one when it comes to technology purchases. I'm the good cop, she's the bad cop. She is the voice of reason when the "I WANT IT" klaxon sounds off. When she flashes the green light—which she clearly was doing—I jump before she reconsiders.

Seconds later I had a 16GB iPad reserved for April 3, 2010. Besides, there was no obligation, right?

Launch Day

The morning of April 3, 2010 passed without incident. I didn't find myself in a line outside the Apple store, nor did I feel this overwhelming need to run out and buy an iPad. The impulse of signing up to reserve one didn't translate into the action required to go out and get one. I read my news feeds, saw people writing about it and was mildly interested.

I was driving by my local Apple store—really, just happened to be in the area—when I decided to pull in and actually see an iPad in person. I walked past the abandoned rope line and cart full of water and cookies the Apple staff had put out to cater to line standers.

Inside the place was mobbed. There were people queued up to see the demo iPads several layers deep. I looked over people's shoulders and watched them play with the iPad for a short while before I became impatient, went to the back of the store and asked that they sell me my reserved iPad. Within 10 minutes I was walking outside with my new iPad and an Apple case for it.

It all happened a lot faster than I expected. I blame my wife for not talking me out of getting one.

Using the iPad

There are hundreds—likely thousands—of reviews on the iPad already. I've found the vast majority of them very accurate and reasonably consistent on features and functionality. The bigger issue to me is, what role does the iPad really fill? Is it something you would find useful?

I'm on my computing devices all day. I have a large, dual monitor Mac Pro for software development. When I'm on the road I carry along a 15" MacBook Pro. I also carry a 3GS iPhone. Between these three devices I had pretty much every need covered.

All of three days into owning an iPad I've found a niche for it that works great for me: information consumption. Here is how I'm using the iPad:

In the morning I flip open the case on the iPad, set it up at a slightly elevated angle and fire up e-mail while I eat breakfast. I rarely respond first thing in the morning; I just delete the useless e-mail and file away the informational stuff, which the e-mail client on the iPad is perfect for. When I'm in the office is when I actually respond unless it's very trivial. I then fire up my iPad based Twitter client, currently Twitterrific. Since I follow lots of news oriented feeds I'm able to quickly scroll through items and catch up on the news. If I find a link to a story that I want to read I tap it and Twitterrific displays it in a windowed browser.

This is where the screen on the iPad comes in handy; it doesn't feel at all cramped. Though I always marveled at my iPhone's screen resolution, it suddenly feels highly constrained next to the iPad:

Could I use my MacBook Pro for this? Sure, I could. It just feels so bulky. Could I use my iPhone for this? Yep, sure can, though I trade in supreme portability for a tiny little screen.

The iPad has a super long battery life from what I can tell so far. I charged it to capacity on the initial sync and have been using it pretty heavily for the last 3 days, yet as of this moment it's sitting at 25% capacity. It means that I've been treating it more like a book, leaving it out to be grabbed as I need it, not constantly tethered to a power supply like my MacBook Pro is.

As a result, I kept the iPad handy throughout the day, grabbing it when I wanted to quickly scan sports updates or read through news feeds. This is the ultimate lazy Sunday, information appliance I've ever seen.

I even fired up the iBooks application and—after playing around with some of the ancient free books available—bought a new title (The Pacific by Hugh Ambrose). Using the iPad as an e-book reader is very nice; the text is far more readable than on a Kindle, though I have only tried using it in shaded areas. I don't see sitting on a sunny beach and reading on the iPad unless you have a large umbrella handy. Way too much glare.

Summing It Up

Whether an iPad is right for someone is obviously a very personal decision; will you use it enough to make it worth the investment from a cash and time perspective? On the want versus need scale an iPad falls far more into the want category. It is far easier to justify a laptop or smartphone than an iPad since they are accepted tools of modern information workers. Will the iPad become a tool of the modern information professional? Perhaps, though it's not likely to happen with this initial version.

My experience three days in is that I am really enjoying my iPad and see that it has added a quality to some parts of my daily routine that were missing. I'm looking forward in the coming months to exploring the various applications available for the iPad as well; the few that I have played with have been very useable and take full advantage of the iPad user experience.

I'm really glad my wife talked me into getting one.

Thinking of getting an iPad? Not sure if it will work for what you want to do? Got one and using it in a unique way? Please add a comment below!

Macs and Failing Hard Disks - an early detection tool

2010-02-05T08:00:00.006-05:00

The other day I was sitting at my desk when I started to hear a faint clicking sound. I pushed the noise out of my mind for a while and continued to work on the task at hand. Before long the clicking started to get louder and louder; it was clearly a consistent mechanical noise and was coming from under my desk, right where my Mac Pro is parked.

I popped my head down there and sure enough, it sounded like one of my 4 hard drives was starting to go. Usually if you hear a clicking sound coming from a hard drive its demise is imminent. I blasted out a quick note about this on Twitter and my friend Ast recommended that I try running SMART Utility to see where the problem was.

SMART Utility for Mac scans the internal hardware diagnostics of a hard drive to quickly determine its health. Using the data collected on the hard drive itself as well as a custom algorithm it can help predict when a hard drive is starting to have problems and may need to be replaced. It's like an early warning system that can give you a chance to pull the data off a drive before it's too late.

I pulled SMART Utility down and ran it and sure enough a Growl warning popped up:

When I took a look at the main SMART Utility screen there was a failing drive:

My Backup drive was having some issues: 375 errors and a reallocated bad sector. This 1TB drive is my primary backup for Time Machine; with that drive potentially compromised I started to panic. With all the documents, photos and digitized home video I've collected over the last 20+ years I was worried if one of my primary drives went down I'd be in serious trouble.

Fortunately for me I had an additional drive that I kept in my Mac Pro to serve as a spare. SMART Utility recommended that I replace the drive so I reset Time Machine to point at my spare drive and let it run, backing up the drive overnight.

The next day I shut down the Mac Pro, preparing to pull out the bad drive. It was only after I powered down my Mac that I realized I could still hear that clicking sound that started this little adventure. How was the drive clicking if it didn't have any power?!?

Well, it turns out it wasn't one of my drives that was doing the clicking; it was an older UPS that was also parked right next to my Mac Pro. The fan in it had started clicking—that was the sound I was actually hearing. I proceeded to kick the UPS until it stopped clicking.

(No, really, I did. Kicked it like a soccer ball. It ended up getting quiet for about 10 minutes too. Ultimately I ended up having to replace it anyway. No nasty comments from the People for the Ethical Treatment of UPSs, please.)

An Important Lesson

While the clicking sound wasn't actually the problem it did prompt me to test my drives. Had I known that a tool like SMART Utility was out there I would have bought and run it a long time ago. Sure, the drive SMART Utility identified hadn't completely failed yet and is technically still serviceable. That said, the data I have is far too important to store it on a drive that shows signs of having problems.

SMART Utility is a nice little app, can diagnose all of your drives in just a few seconds and costs $25. Highly recommended.

Oh yeah, if your drive starts to make a clicking sound I wouldn't recommend kicking it until it quiets down. That's only something you do with a balky UPS. Got a tip for keeping your hard drive healthy? A utility you recommend for ensuring it's safe? Drop a note in the comments.

Switching to Mac - Two Years Later

2010-02-02T10:00:00.001-05:00

It's now the two year mark for my switch from Windows to Mac. Over the last two years I've gone from a Windows developer exploring the Mac as a compliment to my Windows and Linux machines to a full time Mac user that spends the vast majority of my time in OS X.

I didn't wake up one day and say "Wow, I hate Windows. I'm going to switch to Mac". I bought a little white MacBook, put it on the desk next to my primary Windows machine and started playing with it. Though technically underpowered compared to the dual screen, custom built PC I spent all of my time on, I found myself constantly reaching over to the MacBook to use it. The environment was fresh and new to me and I began to really enjoy the user interface consistency that OS X and the vast majority of Mac applications shared.

For such a small device the performance was excellent too; though it was the least expensive of the MacBook line of computers it didn't feel like a compromised machine. Applications loaded quickly and I could run several large applications at once and see very little performance impact. In the past when I purchased the least expensive Windows based laptops the machine was barely usable out of the box; it needed to be cleaned of all the "extra" applications and within a month of using it the performance would start to deteriorate. Not so with the Mac.

In relatively short order I went from having a MacBook to purchasing a Mac Pro, which replaced my primary Windows desktop. Whereas the MacBook was quick, the Mac Pro was—and still is—remarkably fast. With dual 2.8Ghz quad core Xeons and 12GB of RAM, I was suddenly able to run a huge number of applications seamlessly.

The bottom line is I'm really happy I decided to "try out" that MacBook two years ago. Computing—as a software developer the place I spent a huge number of my waking hours—became fun and exciting again.

Tips For New Switchers

Over the last two years I've learned a lot about helping people make a successful switch from Windows to Mac. Here is a quick summary of some tips that can help you or someone you know make the transition easier, along with some links to blog posts on the topic:

1) Learn the keyboard

As a touch typist the first problem I had when I started using a Mac was adjusting to the keyboard. A Mac has a Control, Option and Command key to the left of the spacebar, Windows has Control, Start, Alt in that same spot. The more advanced a keyboard user you are the more time it will take you to adjust. Keys like Home and End exist on a full size Mac keyboard but they don't perform the same actions they do on Windows. Backspace and Delete swap labels but not functionality. All of this leads to a lot of missteps initially; invest the time to learn the keys.

2) Be prepared to deal with MS Office files

Nobody at Apple would ever want to admit it but for now DOC, XLS and PPT files are the common language of the business world. You will want to find a solution to open, create and edit Microsoft Office files quickly and easily. The most obvious way to handle this is to get the Mac version of Microsoft Office. While I personally have it installed on one of my Macs, lately I've been using Neo Office to handle those types of files. Though technically you can use iWork to handle that, creating DOC and XLS files in Pages and Numbers requires extra steps that make it a challenge.

Blog Posts: I hate my Mac!

3) Learn about DMG files

If you download a new application over the web chances are it will be packaged up as a DMG file. A DMG file is a disk image and presents itself like a physical CD / DVD would when it is loaded up on your Mac. TUAW has an excellent 101 style overview of them. DMG files are important because of tip #4.

4) Learn to install applications

If you are coming from the Windows world you will need to adjust to how 3rd party applications are delivered on Macs. In Windows most downloaded applications come in the form of a self contained setup program. Double-click it and it starts an install wizard. On Mac you will generally receive a DMG file (see tip #3 above). Inside it may be a PKG file; which can be double-clicked to start an installation program. In some cases the application will just be contained in the DMG file; you drag that into your Applications folder to "install" it. The process is simple once you learn it but not obvious if you are new to Macs.

Blog Posts: Installing new applications

5) Time Machine is your friend

Go out and buy an inexpensive external hard drive that you can use to run Time Machine, the backup program that comes with OS X. It's seamless, backs up your machine every hour and quickly allows you to either grab an older version of a file you've recently modified or perform a complete restore on the machine. I don't need to use Time Machine for restoring files too often but when I do it's a glorious feeling that I've got backups when I need them.

Blog Posts: I love Time Machine because... | Fixing a simple Time Machine error

6) Learn about windows

I'm not talking about Windows the operating system, but the windows in OS X. In Windows when you want to close an application people often just click the X in the top right corner of the window. On OS X the majority of the time clicking on the little red circle that turns into an X when you hover over it will also close the window of the application but not actually quit the application. Maximizing a window in OS X doesn't make it full screen like it does in Windows.

Blog Posts: Tips for tabbing your way through windows | Avoid the potholes when switching from Windows to Mac

7) Find some great applications

OS X is a pretty complete operating system and comes with enough applications to get any web oriented person up and running. That said, there are tens of thousands of applications that you can use to make the most out of your Mac experience. Over the last two years I've cataloged the applications I've found and without a doubt those are my most popular blog posts. Whatever your interest is, chances are someone has created a nice little application to service that need.

Blog Posts: After 3 months, what's really being used | My critical applications 5 months after switching | 8 months after switching, my favorite applications | My top 10 free Mac utilities | 10 little known Mac utilities

Hopefully this will help some of the more recent switchers out there. You can grab a complete list of my Switching to Mac blog posts (currently at 71) by clicking on the Switching to Mac label on my blog.

Have a tip for helping a recent switcher adjust to a Mac from Windows? Drop a note in the comments below!

Using Mac Preview for a quick slideshow - fail

2010-01-09T10:31:00.010-05:00

I generally like to put up blog posts that talk about cool things I've discovered on my Mac, or problems I've overcome and how I did that. This time it's about a pet peeve I have with my Mac: quickly viewing a group of images. I believe there is a tiny change Apple can make that would have a huge impact on usability, especially for non-technical users.

Preview is a very cool part of OS X. Small and light, I can load lots of different files and off I go, scanning through them quickly. As a technical person I appreciate the way it works when viewing a group of files; I select them, pop-up the context menu (Right Click for me) and select Open. Preview loads them up and off I go. I can happily navigate through the selection or throw together a quick slideshow from the Preview menu.

Where this breaks down is for the non-tech user. My wife was looking through a large collection of images this morning on a shared drive that I have. She navigates to Force (my Mac Pro), selects a shared Photos folder, then navigates down to the folder of images she wants to see. So far so good.

The first thing she does is double-click on an image, which loads it up into Preview. This is a natural act for virtually any non-technical person; you see a file you want to view and you double-click on it. Great! Then she wants to see the next image. The navigation within Preview doesn't work because by double-clicking on an image she has only selected a single image. It's only if she has selected a group of files that Preview allows any navigation between those files.

As a software developer with a UI background I understand the importance of having objects behave consistently. Select a group and perform an action on them. Got it.

Where this breaks down in Preview is that non-technical users don't grasp the concept of collecting a group of items and performing an action on them. By navigating to a folder they already have gone into a collection of items. Why should I then have to select all of those items before performing a group action on them? This is especially true with an application that is designed to help a user quickly scan through files without having to load a large app to see them.

If I want my wife to use Preview to view all of the images in a folder I need to tell her to navigate to that folder, click on the first file in that folder to ensure it has focus, press Command-A to select all of the items (or click-drag the mouse on all of them), then press Command-O to open them. She does this once every month or so, not often enough that she's going to remember it.

Other Options

Of course there are other options here. I added a Quick Look button to her Finder window by Right-Clicking on the toolbar area, selecting Customize Toolbar... and then dragging the Quick Look icon to the toolbar area:

Now she navigates to the folder, selects the file and clicks the little eyeball. Quick Look is even faster than preview but has a small problem: if I click the Full Screen button it loses the ability to navigate through the rest of the images. She uses a white MacBook so the screen is not very large; I told her to drag the Quick Look window to a larger size (it resets every time you switch to a different folder) so that she can see it better.

Use Cover Flow

An option I tried for her was to use the Cover Flow view. While it's very obvious how to navigate, the small size of her MacBook screen and the large areas of screen real-estate used for navigation controls leaves some pretty tiny images.

Just use iPhoto!

I use iPhoto on my Mac Pro and that's what I use to browse my photo library. So why don't I just have my wife use that? There are two options for her using iPhoto: the first involves her importing all of the images I take (and I take a lot) into her local copy of iPhoto. That's far too much work when all she really wants to do is quickly browse through the last month of photos that have been taken.

The second option is that I have iPhoto loaded on my Mac Pro and share the my collection. This presents two problems: sharing a 40K photo sized iPhoto library over a wireless connection is... S...L...O...W. It also means I have to have iPhoto loaded at all times on my Mac Pro in order for it to be accessible. Both are non-options for me.

Use a Different Application

When I posted this little Pet Peeve on Twitter I got a couple of responses. @Eaglesdontflock suggested that I used a program called Phoenix Slides, a donation-ware application that puts up blazingly fast slide shows. I tried playing with Phoenix Slides and came away very impressed, so much so that it will be a different blog post in the next couple of days.

Ask that Apple change Preview

Yeah, ok, it's a long shot but one of the things I can do is ask Apple to change the behavior of Preview at some point in the near future. So here you go Apple:

If I load up a single file in Preview I would like the navigation controls to be enabled as though I had selected all of the files in a folder. Let me navigate through all of them. This is only true if I selected a single file.

Too much? Then if I load up a single file in Preview, let the Slideshow feature work on all of the files in the folder. Seriously, why even offer the Slideshow option when only a single item is selected?

Will this break a UI model? Well, it's really only a change on a single application: Preview. It doesn't imply that all applications need this behavior. Since the goal of Preview is to quickly and efficiently scan through files I would think this would be a great little change and in keeping with the purpose of the application. If it's too much then make it an option in the Preview preferences. At this point I'd take a terminal hack to make it work that way!

As always, if you have a suggestion for a better way to handle this please drop it into the comments below. I also encourage you to follow me on Twitter. Sure, you'll get a lot of other non-Mac stuff but hopefully you'll get some value out of it as well.

Apple solves my MacBook Pro battery problem

2009-12-03T08:30:00.001-05:00

After finding that my MacBook Pro's battery required service and would no longer hold a charge I made an appointment with the Genius Bar at my local Apple store in Reston, VA. After a short wait Vilma (the Genius) called me up and asked what the trouble was. After I filled her in on the issue she reached into a drawer and grabbed an iPod Nano that was labeled "Battery Diagnostics":

Once that was plugged in and she rebooted the machine she loaded up a diagnostic application and sure enough the status of my battery was decidedly bad:

I bought this MacBook Pro in June of 2008 so it's nearly one and a half years old, yet still under the 3 year AppleCare warranty I purchased. She told me however that batteries are not covered under the extended AppleCare warranty unless the failure is a result of a manufacturers defect. Though she delivered the news in a friendly and empathetic way I was not happy.

Vilma could see that I only had 48 cycles on the battery and it seemed reasonable to me that this should be covered by the warranty. According to Apple a removable MacBook / Pro battery should be able to retain up to an 80% charge after 300 cycles. She pulled the information on the battery and left to talk to someone else, presumably a manager, explaining to me as she left that she would do everything she could to get it covered. A few minutes later she returned and said Apple would be replacing it under the warranty.

I don't know if she replaced it because it had a "manufacturers defect" or because it only had 48 cycles on it. Fortunately for me I didn't have to shell out $129 for a new battery. She popped in the new battery and fired up the diagnostics and sure enough, the new battery registered healthy.

Ideal Battery Care

As we were wrapping up the battery replacement I asked Vilma how I should treat the battery to get optimal life out of it. Her recommendation was to cycle the battery constantly, running the machine on the battery almost exclusively. The seemed a little excessive to me but clearly leaving my MBP plugged in nearly 24 hours a day was not the right answer.

Apple has a page on battery care and their recommendation is that if you are not regularly running your notebook from the battery that you should do full charge / discharge cycle at least once per month. This apparently helps keep the "battery juices" flowing, which does make sense. They also recommend that if you are going to keep your MacBook powered down for an extended period of time that you leave it at about 50% power, which will help preserve the battery life.

I wish that Apple had made this information more apparent to me when I purchased my MacBook Pro; if they did it was likely just a footnote in the information I was provided. Telling someone that they need to manage their battery life does seem odd coming from a company that prides itself on simple "it just works" products. Apparently the latest generation of MacBook Pros with the sealed in batteries are not nearly as finicky when it comes to battery life, though Apple does recommend this charge / discharge cycle for them as well.

Personally I'm just happy I have a battery that can actually hold a charge again. I'll be setting up a weekly reminder to run a full charge / discharge cycle on my battery too, with another reminder to do a full battery recalibration per Apple's Support Knowledge Base.

Any suggestions on how best to make your MacBook's battery life last as long as possible? Please drop a note in the comments!

A MacBook Pro and a Dying Battery

2009-12-01T11:15:00.001-05:00

I've gotten a lot of e-mail lately asking why I haven't been updating my blog. Frankly it's because of two reasons: my business has kept me busier than a one-armed wall-paper hanger and my Macs have just worked. With my adjustment period from Windows to Mac firmly in the rear view mirror and a well rounded set of applications available for use, I haven't really had any issues to speak of.

That is, until this last weekend when my MacBook Pro's battery decided to act up.

Since I have a very powerful Mac Pro humming away under my desk I don't use my MacBook Pro too often. I'll take it when I travel but don't use it on battery power too often. Since I bought the machine about 18 months ago I've only cycled the battery 47 times according to System Profiler.

While traveling over Thanksgiving I pulled the MBP from my bag, powered it up and started happily working away. Oddly the battery indicator—which should show a full charge—rapidly dropped to 92%. Within about 15 minutes my battery power was already dropping below 70%.

I kept working away, popping open some web sites and updating a spreadsheet with some of the data I was looking up. I glanced up at the battery gauge and saw that it was already down in the 40% range after only about 20 minutes of use when suddenly my MBP shut down.

This wasn't a graceful "I'm going to sleep now" shut down. There were no warnings, no kernel panics and no obvious signs of distress from my Mac. The screen just went black. I had about 3 seconds of noise from the fans and hard drive spinning down while I contemplated what had just happened. Did I save what I was working on? Did I really only get 20 minutes of use out of my battery?

I closed the MBP and flipped it over, pushed the little battery indicator button and two little green lights winked back at me. Odd. I pressed the power button and the MBP started to boot up. It was nearly through the boot process when it decided to give up and shut down again.

I grabbed my power cord, plugged the machine in and booted it up. It came up fine, no issues and dutifully reported that it was charging the battery. I remembered that I had recently seen an article on calibrating the battery from Apple. The process was simple:

Get the machine fully recharged then let it rest in that state for at least 2 hours. Once charged, unplug the power and run it down until the machine goes into a sleep state. Let it stay in sleep mode for at least 5 hours to fully exhaust the battery. Recharge from there and you are ready to go.

The problem was, the machine would shut off well before I got down too low on the battery. I decided to get it as close to the "shut down zone" as I could (about 40%), then put the machine to sleep. The graceful pulsating light told me it was happily slumbering away. I left it like that to see how long the battery would last while preserving the memory in sleep mode.

Three days later I lost patience and tried to wake it from sleep mode while still disconnected from power. Though the light was still pulsing I couldn't wake the machine. Not completely dead, it appeared to be in a coma. I reconnected power, turned on the machine and it quickly restored itself. The battery gauge was registering numbers all over the map and after it charged fully it indicated that I needed to "Service Battery":

At this point I'll try taking it into to my local Apple store and see how they deal with it. I have an Apple Care extended warranty though I'm not sure if they will cover the battery with that. Stay tuned and I'll post an update once I learn the outcome. I posted a note about this on Twitter and got lots of responses telling me that Apple quickly replaced their batteries for them. Then again, I also got a link to this page about Apple's battery policy.

Had a battery issue with a MacBook Pro? Did you get a resolution that worked for you? Drop a note in the comments and let me know!

Follow Up: Apple resolved this problem for me. You can read about it here.

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.