Development
Well it is just amazing. In a nutshell, this preferred approach to running Boot Camp, had always been plagued by speed issues. Not anymore. While I have not had time to give it an extensive run for its money, I notice a huge difference in Windows start-up, program call up and reactiveness as a whole. Everything has been simplified. It is just seamless and blends perfectly with OS X. It now supports dual monitors. It has an iPhone free application to run virtual machines remotely from the palm of your hand.

Coherence or the ability to blend Windows with OS X was just taken to another level with a “Crystal” mode option that makes the few remaining boundaries disappear. Your are literally running Windows in OS X. If that wasn’t made clear before, this is the utmost advantage over running Windows in a Boot Camp.

Conclusion
I highly recommend Parallels for people wishing to carry Windows (it supports Windows 7) around for the few remaining instances whereby you would be required to run a native PC application on your Mac.

Of course, Google’s service is not the only one. You can also try the well-known OpenDNS or the quite fast UltraDNS to see which one is better but it can be hard to determine which one is really faster.

The answer is surprisingly easy to find thanks to a free, open source tool from a Google employee (Gotta love those “20% projects”). NameBench is a little tool that will run tests on a random set of sites using public DNS servers and local servers (your ISP, others nearby etc.). It takes about 5 minutes to run and will tell you what DNS servers you should be using.

Quick, Easy and Free. That’s my kind of solution!

In my case, I’ve been a Mobile Me/.Mac member since 2003 but the service has 1 big issue : it really is an Apple-centric solution (and thus, not great on a non-Apple device) and while it can sync your bookmarks, it still doesn’t support tags to organize them. If you surf even half as much as I do, it’s easy to get hundreds of bookmarks in a few months, most of them unorganized. Who doesn’t have a “Cool Stuff” bookmark folder? Because of this, I’ve decided to split my bookmarks in two. My Safari bookmark bar is being used for those sites I visit everyday and those bookmarks are being synched through Mobile Me but everything else is going to Delicious.

Now Delicious is great, but I love having a native OS X client to manage those web services. For a while I was using the very simple (and quite cheap) “Delish” but it wasn’t all that great. It’s a nice application, but nothing to write home about. For one thing, why would you write home about a Delicious application?

I was very happy lately when I found Delibar, a very nice, well-working, incredibly slick-looking and yes, nice-smelling native OS X client for Delicious. At 18$, it’s not exactly cheap but if you use Delicious in any capacity you owe it to yourself to try this out. There’s a free version that has limited functionalities if you want to try it before buying. That version never expires.

The app has bookmarklets to let you easily add a page to your delicious account and supports a system wide shortcut key to bring up the search panel. You can also see the latest bookmarks from members of your Delicious network.

Greatly recommended.

I recently installed Acrobits’ Softphone (a Prague based company) and it really delivers the goods.

The interface is intuitive (like most iPhone Apps, what an OS!) and it installs in a jiffy. I just joined their Beta testing group and will have a sneak preview at upcoming features. When it comes to VoIP, we never have enough features and options.

First, aside from the obvious advantage of extracting calls out of one’s data plan with a WiFi connection, there is also a conversation record feature and push notification. You can put yourself and the other party on separate audio tracks on the .wav saved file. You can access your conversations through Safari and Bonjour by specifying the listening port and allowing web access in the application’s settings.

On top of that, there is a keep alive function that allows you to close the application and receive calls nonetheless. Finally, you can set up multiple SIP accounts. Can’t wait to be on the road again, working off a cyber café’s WiFi aroma. I learned that Apple may soon lift the ban on softphones’ ability to access 3G networks. That would be awesome, carrying everywhere multiple phone lines at all times on one device in uninterrupted bliss (unless your parking space is three floors down).

And, I also installed what I think is a glimpse at the future—Ustream or the individual as a live witness or participant. Broadcast yourself. It’s far from being perfect but portability and instantaneity overshadows the set backs. You create an account and you broadcast live from your iPhone. Hey James, time to update Q.

To say that I wouldn’t mind having those features around is an understatement. There’s also a lot more I wish Aperture would do, including perhaps native export to some of the popular online sites to host photos (other than of course Flickr). SmugMug would be welcome in my case but there are others. We live in such an interconnected world now with medias being uploaded all the time, it makes sense to have native support for those online destination.

Hopefully we’ll see a new version announced in the new few months.

The 3Gs is much like Mac OS X 10.6, it’s a mostly minor upgrade in this case focusing on a few highlights (Speed and Camera). A lot of people have been wondering if the upgrade is worth it from the original iPhone or from the 3G. After a few days using the phone, I can’t answer for everybody but I can say it was totally worth it for me.

The camera is great and I think that the touch to focus will make its way to pro cameras in the future. That’s a brilliant use of the touch screen and overall, the 3Gs takes very good pictures. It doesn’t have the N95/N96/N97’s camera (5MP+), but the autofocus, automacro and auto whitebalance go a long way in making good pictures.

The phone is also much faster. If you had both a 3G and an iPod Touch, you had probably noticed the Touch was much faster than the 3G and the 3Gs is now faster than both of them. Combined with the excellent (and free) 3.0 OS upgrade, it makes for a very speedy and very responsive phone. 3G games in particular got a big boost and once they start using OpenGL ES 2.0, it’ll be an even bigger difference.

One thing that really surprised me was the speed of the network. Here in Canada we are lucky enough that Rogers actually supports the new 3Gs “7.2Mbits” capability. Using USB tethering, I was able to download Firefox at 544KB/s, a very impressive speed. Given that tethering is free until at least december with a 1GB+ data plan, it’s an awesome feature for us in Canada.

What makes it all worth though is that more and more apps will make use of the better camera, the integrated compass and the voice control (through future APIs I expect to be part of an SDK update). The compass might seem like a useless feature, but look at the Augmented Reality apps on Android phones and you’ll see just how powerful it can be. 3.2 megapixels camera might not seems like a big deal, but a camera that can focus as close as 10CM can be very useful for scanning smaller stuff like barcodes.

Voice control already controls the phone and the iPod (and it certainly isn’t perfect yet — Apple still has some work here) but I can foresee a future where I’ll be able to tell my phone to read me the last received SMS or to control a game using my voice (”attack unit”, “defend base”, etc.)

Overall, much like the 3.0 OS update, it’s what the phone enables in the future that’s the most interesting. The 3.0 OS update will make apps much better because of the thousand new API and the new phone will also do its part with its added power and features.

It’s not a critical update by any mean, but it’s a very sweet phone. If you’re still on the original iPhone, it’s a no brainer update. If you’re on a dumb phone, run, don’t walk.

It was time to clean up the biggest files. There are two neat litlle programs to quickly find the biggest files on your Mac system: Whatsize and GrandPerspective. They have very different approaches. Whatsize is much more elaborate, allowing multiple views of the data.

But GrandPerspective is free and offers a very innovative view of the largest files on your hardisk. I guess the keyword is free.

One of its most impressive feature is its mass mailer capability with email templates. The templates accept HTML and txt and conveniently include customizable fields that can be programmed to read your contacts to personalize your email. You can also set categories for your contacts and separate them in groups.

If we move up a notch we have to recognize Elements SBM by Ntractive. This is by far one of the best designed software I’ve seen in years. But are you and your organization ready for cloud computing? If the answer is positive then this is the one to buy.

Finally comes Daylite by Marketcircle, a cross between both solutions. A bit of a power horse and a power price. I guess it’s the price to pay for a very mature solution, seamlessly integrated to mail.

I also experimented with XTuple to no avail. Never succeeded in installing it. It looks promising but its interface is sort of dated and “PC” inspired.

Have fun contacting and keeping track of your marketing efforts.

First the online store was slow, confused and plainly put, out to lunch. With perseverance and constant browser refresh, I finally got PayPal approval to talk to the archaic ColdFusion Adobe store which seems to have been programmed before CSS were invented, ignoring least path of resistance online buying concept and user-friendliness. Had I not needed inDesign CS4 to produce a magazine and had not Quark Express been so overpriced, I would have quit immediately.

Are you still with me? It’s not over it only gets worse. Then, I received a lame email basically saying that my order was being processed and that I would receive a download link eventually. This, after PayPal had approved the transaction! After 2 days of wait (order was placed over the week-end and everybody knows servers don’t work week-ends), I decided to call support. I had to wait 10 minutes to finally talk to a nice person with an Indian accent who told me the store was undergoing overhaul and was experiencing problems. Understatement of the year.

After this call, I finally received a confirmation email with a link to download asking me to login to start downloading. A dated Java application looking like it was part of the original 1984 Mac OS, started “managing” the over 1 Gig file transfer. Much to my surprised, the download got stuck on 86% and I had to stop it and restart it to finish off the 9 minute portion of this ordeal (it had been downloading all night!). Praise download management, all together now “It ain’t automatic and a human had to intervene to make it work”.

And to top it all, after all this I’m back to square one. After having received a second email confirming my serial number that is apparent on the web page where you actually download the application, I had the pleasant surprise of finding out that the installer does not accept it. SUPPORT, SUPPORT and SUPPORT again. Hey Adobe get your act together you’ re leaving money on the table… How many have resigned in front of such a disappointing online buying experience? When will it be resolved?

Inventory
Product is not showcased immediately on the storefront, i.e. you have to find it.
ColdFusion store should be dropped, it just does not cut it, too many steps and slow refreshes.
Why send an email to verify a transaction that has been approved?
Why such a long week-end wait time?
Why do we have to call support to obtain results?
Why send a second email for the link that does not contain the serial number?
Why send a third email with a serial number when the download page already includes that serial number?
Why is the serial number not working!

Who is minding the store? Let me know when you open…

As someone who now owns an iPhone, an Android G1 and a Blackberry curve, I can say that I’m really excited about what 3.0 will bring. To me, it really feels like Apple managed to fix 75% of what was clearly missing from the platform. Stuff like Copy/Paste was an obvious flaw, but the “1000 new APIs” that Apple announced will certainly have the biggest impact on the future of the platform. I really believe that applications will be quite a bit better once a few weeks go by and developers have a chance to update their applications.

I must say, I really wasn’t expecting this much and don’t take the (relatively small) amount of new end-user features alone when judging the 3.0 update.