MacNoob

I have always admired the speed of Safari but the lure of Firefox’s add-ons kept me from switching to Apple’s browser…until now. When I switched to a Mac some 18 months ago, one of the first things I downloaded was Firefox. I’d been using it on Windows since version 0.9 and on my new Mac it was an island of familiarity in the ocean of new(to me) operating system. Frankly, the then current Safari 2 seemed a little feature-poor by comparison. When I learned about Webkit, I began downloading the nightly build every now and then just to see if its speed could wow me enough to make me switch. While it was very fast, I always found myself missing FEBE and Better G-Mail. FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) enables me to save all my add-ons, bookmarks and preferences automatically and is an absolute necessity when moving between and adding computers as often as I do. The Better G-Mail add-on adds features and visual appeal to the normally bland Google app. I spend so much time with GMail I really need it to look and feel more like a desktop app.
When the Safari 4 beta was released I was immediately attracted to its speed and new features.  Also, a couple of recent developments have lessened my dependence on my favorite Firefox add-ons. First, Google has dramatically enhanced GMail’s feature set. With a multitude of new themes and its recent addition of off-line capability there is little need for third-party embellishment. Second, the new Foxmarks web service provides web synchronization of bookmarks and login data between Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.
I really wanted to give Safari 4 a good shakedown so I immediately set it as the default browser on my Macbook Pro, the machine I use 90% of the time. The first couple of days were a bit uncomfortable just because of the normal learning curve. Different button and tab placement along with some slight rendering differences kept me a little off-balance, but I was determined not to fall back into my comfort zone for comfort alone. After just two or three days using Safari 4 I found I had gotten quite used to it and I still haven’t run into any real show-stoppers. The sites I frequent all work well and the JavaScript-rich ones certainly render much faster. I really thought Apple’s claims of speed were just so much hype, but Firefox now seems almost sluggish on sites like GMail or Google Maps.
Is Safari perfect? Of course not. Are there things I wish Safari did better? Sure. Is this new version good enough to lure me away from Firefox? Time will tell, but it is still the default browser on all my systems after a week and that’s about five days longer than any of its predecessors.

 Email This Post

Apple just released Safari 4 as a public beta and I predict it will make Safari a force to reckon with in the browser wars.  Safari has always been a solid, fast browser in OS X.  Last year’s release of the first Windows version was an ipso-facto announcement by Cupertino that they can compete with any browser.  Safari 3, while a very good browser, didn’t offer a real differentiator to the two leading market share holders despite Apple’s claims of speed, safety and reliability.  It really was a “me too” entrance into the mainstream browser market.

No more.  Safari 4 is a true game-changer.  With it’s cover flow and “Top Sites” views, this browser will give Windows users a glimpse into the beautiful world of Apple core animation.  People who’ve never experienced OS X will get an eye-popping introduction to the most visually pleasing UI on the planet.  I downloaded the beta this morning and installed it on my Mac and Vista machines.  I opened it on the 24″ monitor of the Vista PC that faces my office door.  Within an hour, nearly a half-dozen people (PC users) stuck their head in asking, “What’s that?!”  Safari 4 is that stunning.

Of course, it’s too early to tell how robust, stable, etc. this new Safari version is, but if it’s just functionally “good enough” many will use it just because it’s so pretty.  Apple’s tag line for their new offering is “…the world’s fastest and most innovative browser.”  I’ll leave the speed tests for others, but I will attest to its innovation.  Putting the tabs across the top of the browser was genius, especially on smaller screens where real estate (room on the screen) is at a premium.  That, coupled with the views I mentioned are reason enough for most people to switch.  For me, I’ll wait and see just how much I miss my Firefox add-ins.

Let’s face it, the reason Internet Explorer enjoys a 70+% share of the browser market is because it is the default on the most popular operating system.  Firefox has continued to whittle away at IE’s share with its huge assortment of add-ins.  I have no doubt this will make Safari a real player in the browser market.  The interesting question is, at who’s expense?

 Email This Post

If you’re new to the Mac platform, the sheer number of apps promising to make your life easier or more productive can be daunting.  I’ve wasted lots of money on applications I rarely (or never) use.  These five are real “keepers” and won’t cost you a dime.

I’ve owned my Mac for 18 months now and it’s hard to remember my computing life without it. Maybe I’m presumptuous, but I feel like a real OS X veteran now. I’ve tried a ton of applications as I’ve explored this new (to me) platform and it turns out there’s five of them I use every day and can’t imagine using my Mac without them. The cool part; THEY’RE ALL FREE! I’m not going to try and number these or assign them any relevant score because they serve such a variety of purposes. I find them all extremely useful and wouldn’t want to give a single one of them up.  This post isn’t a review, just a list of free stuff that I think every noob should at least try.

• Quicksilver Using this application is by far the fastest way to launch an app or find a file anywhere on your Mac.  It has a skinnable UI and is capable of much more than launching apps and opening files, but if you’re like me and prefer to keep both hands on your keyboard, Quicksilver is perfect for finding and opening things with just a couple of keystrokes. In fact, just about anything you can do in Finder with a mouse, you can do in Quicksilver with the keyboard.  Beyond that, there is a huge list of other applications that provide plugins to Quicksilver exposing their functionality.  FTP and e-mail are the two I use most, but the list of possibilities seems endless.  For searching, file manipulation and application launching, Quicksilver can shave tons of time off of every-day tasks.
• Evernote Just as its’ name implies, Evernote is a virtual ubiquitous notebook that works on any computer with a browser and internet connection. I use it to record all my product keys, snatch web pages and code snippets and about a hundred other things. I add a note on my Mac, it syncs with the Evernote server and is available on my PC at work and my iPhone.  One of the coolest features of Evernote is its OCR (optical character recognition) capability.  When you paste any picture containing text into Evernote, that text becomes searchable like everything else.  It even works on pics of hand-written notes.  It’s not magic, the Evernote folks actually employ humans to decipher the pictures.  There are Mac and Windows versions of the product, but I find the web-based app to be the most useful.  I can log into evernote.com from any machine with an internet connection and get to all my notes and attached files.  As a professional IT guy, this feature has saved my bacon more than once.  Registration is free and the only restrictions are the amount of data you can transfer per month and the file types available for synchronization.  I used the free version for several months without noticing any of the limits.  I synced all sorts of picture and music files and any document I wanted to sync, I simply converted to PDF first.  Evernote never complained about any of them.  There are no nag screens either.  I wound up buying a one year “premium” subscription ($45) out of guilt more than necessity.  Being a software developer myself, I wanted to reward the Evernote Corporation for conceiving and producing such an extremely useful product.  It has become an integral part of my daily workflow.
• Dropox As Evernote is for managing notes and clips, Dropbox is for managing and sharing files.  The best way to describe Dropbox is an internet-based file server.  Installing Dropbox creates a folder on your Mac that allows you to move or copy files of any type into it and Dropbox synchronizes those files to your corresponding folder on their servers.  You can access your files from any computer (Mac, Windows or Linux) with an internet connection using a web browser or the free client application.  When you add a file to your Dropbox folder it is then automatically synchronized to every machine where you have Dropbox installed.  This process happens quietly, in the background so, as a user you simply click on your dropbox folder to access your files without having to first download them.  If there are files you’d like to share with others, Dropbox provides a public folder for each account.  Files you place in this public folder can be shared with everyone or only those you choose.  In Finder, when you right-click on a file in this public folder, a menu option allows you to copy a link to the clipboard and paste it anywhere you want, like in an e-mail or other document.  Like an advanced file server, Dropbox maintains versions of all your files.  If you make an editing mistake or accidentally delete something within a document, correcting your mistake is as simple as opening an earlier version of the file.  This could come in particularly handy if multiple people are working on a project in one of your public folders.   The free version provides 2 gigs of space.  For $10 per month or $99 per year that increases to 50 gigs.  I use the free version to keep several important files that I never want to be without and for sharing pictures and short videos with friends and family.  It is amazing how much you can store with 2 gigs of space if you shy away from media, especially video.  In fact, excluding media, my entire life’s work (since 1982) fits on about a gig and a half.  When you have multiple machines and/or change computers as often as I do, the size of your personal data becomes a familiar number.  Now, thanks to Dropbox I have it all available to me anywhere I go.
• iStat Menus This application is an instrument cluster for monitoring all facets of your Mac.  From physical conditions like fan speeds and temperatures to operating conditions like CPU and memory utilization, disk and network activity, iStat Menus provides a way to monitor them all in an efficient, unobtrusive way.  I installed this app the first week after getting my Mac and I’ve used it every day since.  iStat Menus installs as a preference pane in the System Preferences application.  From there you configure which of the multitude of monitors you want to display on your menu bar.  I keep the CPU, memory and temperature graphs on mine.  Clicking one of these menu bar displays drops down detailed data about it.  For instance, I keep a small CPU graph on my menu bar to see how busy my system is at a glance.  If I want to know more, I click the graph and a drop-down menu shows me a detailed graph of each CPU core, a list of the top five processes by CPU usage and information about average load, system uptime and how many processes I have running.  There’s also a link to launch the Activity Monitor if I need to know more.  In addition to the CPU, you can configure menus for memory, disks, network, temperatures, fans and even how you display the date and time.  Each is as complete and extensible as the CPU example I just described.  I’m a geek, so I like all the bells and whistles, but even an every-day user will find something in iStat Menus to their liking.
• Skitch I use this app for every picture on this blog and any time I need to capture any portion of my screen.  The best thing about Skitch (aside from the price) is its intuitive interface and ease-of-use.  Skitch is the easiest app I’ve tried for capturing, annotating and sharing screen and iSight snapshots.  Images captured with Skitch can be automatically uploaded to .Me, flickr, facebook or to Skitch.com.  Are there more extensive screen capture utilities? Yes, but none are easier to use or less obtrusive than Skitch.  I own Snapz Pro X and use it for more intricate capture jobs but Skitch is the app that is always running and on my menu bar because of its’ simplicity.  It does 90% of what I need in a capture utility, it’s small, easy and it’s free.  I donated to the company because I like their product so much, but the Skitch application doesn’t nag you to do so or limit functionality in any way.  It just works well and does almost everything I need it to.

Keep these applications in mind if you’re looking for the capabilities they provide.  They’re all on every Mac I own.  I only wish they’d been available or I had know about them before spending money on others that don’t work as well or I didn’t really need.

 Email This Post

Before I begin, let me apologize for my long absence. The past two weeks have been quite busy for everyone in the MacNoob household. Between hurricane repair, Mrs. MacNoob business traveling twelve days and my day job, time to update the blog has been virtually non-existent. I promise to do better. (Yeah, right!)
The folks at BriteMac have made what has become an indispensable iPhone app for anyone who travels on an expense account.   JetSet has become the application worthy of elevation to my first home screen, right next to my calendar. I’ve been a business traveler for 25 years and tracking expenses has always been a challenge. My record-keeping (or lack thereof) has undoubtedly cost me hundreds of dollars over the years in lost reimbursements. Lost and/or forgotten receipts and other records have forced me to spend untold hours searching through luggage, calling hotels and writing creative, apologetic notes to accountants. All to often I wound up spending my own money on something my company should have paid for.
As of two months ago (when I purchased JetSet), my expense records are impeccable. I’ve taken three business trips in that time and [thanks to JetSet] each trip’s expense report was a simple 15-minute non-event. The only reason the reports take that long is because of my company’s nightmarish expense reporting form.  It is the result of some accountant acting out self-delusions of being a programmer while using Excel.  But that’s a subject for another day.
It is quite obvious someone at BriteMac has done as much business traveling as I have. JetSet couldn’t possibly be so complete otherwise. It is a well thought out, easy-to-use “Swiss army knife” for business travel. First, if you need to book your own trip, JetSet’s opening screen provides buttons for airlines, hotels and car rental contact information (both phone and web links).  I haven’t used this since my travel is almost always booked for me, but it is nice to know Avis’s phone number is just a couple of touches away.  There’s also a “+” button for creating a new expense report.  This is a bit of a misnomer because JetSet is really an expense tracking application.  Reporting consists only of a simple CSV file output, but I’ll get to that later.  Once you create a “report” JetSet begins to show its real strength, adding individual expenses.  Clicking the “+” while within a given expense report reveals a screen full of icons for 14 common expenses plus the ever-popular “Misc.” category.  Touching one of these takes you to a data entry screen where you can name and annotate an expense item and the really cool part, presents you with a camera icon for photographing a receipt.  This seemed a bit gimmicky at first, but when I started using JetSet I found it to be its strongest feature.  The reality of business travel doesn’t usually provide time for detailed record keeping of each expense at the time it is incurred.  The camera feature enables you to simply snap a photo of a receipt and postpone the detail data entry for later.  I found this particularly handy in restaurants, but it works well for hotel bills and cab receipts as well.  Basically, any time you’re in a hurry or don’t want to be bothered, just snap a photo and you’ve got a permanent record of your expense.  My accounting department even accepted a reprint of one of these photos on my last report.  Losing receipts is an all-to-common malady I suffer from, but it happens to even the most meticulous record-keepers now and then.

JetSet date stamps each expense record for you, but you can edit any portion of the expense at any time, including its date.  Can you say “creative accounting”?  Not that I encourage that sort of thing, but more to emphasize the fact that changes to records are not only possible, but easy.  An integrated calculator pops up whenever you need to enter expense amounts and it includes a button to store your resulting numbers.  This is a very nice feature, especially when you need to calculate some portion of a receipt that may include non-expense items, like hotel bills.  I usually have to subtract charges for movie rentals and the like.

Finally, JetSet includes the ability to transmit any expense report to a GoogleDocs spreadsheet in CSV format.  It’s not perfect, but clearly the lowest common denominator to work with virtually any reporting system.  Personally, I use Google for cutting and pasting expenses into my company’s report format and I retain the file with Google for archiving.

Clearly, it would be impossible to create an expense report application flexible enough to accommodate any company’s reporting structure without winding up with some unusable Rube-Goldberg P.O.S.  On the other hand, JetSet manages to incorporate every feature you need to easily track expenses when they occur and summarize them when its time to report.  This app is “three for three” in my experience and has become part of my normal workflow on every business trip.  I’m certain, given my past, that I’ve saved the $9.99 price of JetSet many times over by virtue of more accurate expense reporting.  Well worth the toll, and fun too!

 Email This Post

Kevin Rose shared a link to this video on Twitter.  It is a very cool look into what Mozilla Labs (The Firefox guys) is up to.  It’s worth a look…

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Aloha.

 Email This Post

It isn’t often I come across an app that I find completely indispensable after only a couple of week’s use. I downloaded Evernote based on a recommendation from one of the TWiT podcasts and it has become one of a handful of applications I can’t live without. I find myself using it several times per day and it has become such a part of my workflow I can’t imagine how I functioned without it.
Evernote is for keeping track of notes (of course), but it does so much more I find it hard to decide where to begin with my description. First, it is a client app that resides on a Mac or PC that includes several tools for collecting and organizing random data. This can be text, pasted from any document, audio, pictures, links or entire web pages just to name a few. Second, it is a web service that continually synchronizes your notes and provides almost all the functionality the desktop application does for adding, modifying and organizing your data. Third, it is a mobile application for Windows Mobile or iPhone 2.0 devices with a neatly tailored UI for small screens that stays completely synchronized as well. I haven’t tried the Windows Mobile version, but the iPhone application lets you record audio notes, picture notes with OCR (from a saved photo or new snapshot) and regular text. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is especially cool. I can take a snapshot of a receipt, for instance, Evernote recognizes the text and I’ve got a record of my transaction I can search, cut and paste to my expense report or do anything I would do with any normal picture! Great for keeping track of expenses.
One of the most powerful features Evernote offers is the ability to organize. You can attach any number of tags to a note, name it anything you wish and Evernote automatically saves notes with meta data like location, time and date. All your notes become instantly searchable by any of these criteria as well as by their content. This video provides a nice introduction.

Being an IT guy, I use Evernote to store product keys, installation notes and procedures, all the static IP addresses on my network and much more. The really great part is I don’t have to carry it with me. Any computer with an internet connection enables me to see, search and manipulate all my notes using any browser. I can also modify existing or add new notes as well. Like I said, I’m having a hard time imagining how I did my job without it. I’m sure I did it quite a bit slower.
The most amazing thing about Evernote?…..IT’S ABSOLUTELY FREE! ALL VERSIONS! FULLY FUNCTIONAL! There is a paid version, but all it adds is the amount of monthly bandwidth you’re allowed and phone support. Unless you’re a complete freak (like me) you probably won’t need it though.
Needless to say, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND EVERNOTE. As a matter of fact, you need to be really creative to dream up an excuse NOT to use it!  Get it here.

 Email This Post