From TUAW TV: The Savant experience in NYC.

Filing this one under: Things to do when you have entirely too much money (but fun to try none the less).

Full story

I’m thinking this couldn’t possibly be this easy but what started out as a relatively simple task turned into a ah-ha moment tonight. Long story short – I came across a brain dead easy way to synchronize just about any application between multiple Macs using free software. Full disclosure, I haven’t yet looked into this on any bigger picture scale but for my needs, it has worked flawlessly. For you and your Macs – caveat emptor my friend.

A little background – I’ve been using Apple’s online tools (formerly .Mac currently .Me) since way back in 2000 when they were quite rudimentary and called iTools (back when they were even free). I still keep an active .Mac account (I don’t think I’ll ever be able to bring myself to call it .Me which just sounds so…lame) and I primarily use this account for purposes of syncing various apps (Calendars, Contacts, Mail, etc). With the iPhone 3GS, syncing is all the more important but one of my favorite aspects has always been the syncing of certain other applications (Apple and Non) like Transmit, Keychains, Dashboard Widgets, Mail accounts and Bookmarks. I always found that syncing function to work (mostly) and I’ve always wondered why more applications didn’t tie into .Mac’s sync services.

Tonight, I’ve discovered an easy solution to this issue that I wanted to sshare. I was an early user of Cultured Code’s Things.app and was happy when the iPhone version of Things arrived (and alsowon an Apple Design Award thank you very much). As expected, the desktop version synced nicely with the iPhone/iPod Touch app. Like a lot of developers, I tend to split my time between multiple Macs and after you get in the habit of routinely using an application, it becomes natural to want it on whatever computer you happen to be in front of and Things certainly felt that way for me. With the syncing already happening between my desktop Mac and the iPhone automatically, I needed to find a quick way to get the Things database to now sync between the two Macs that I work on.

Being the kind of company that seems to anticipate your needs before you do, the fine folks over at Cultured Code had set up fully user editable wiki and sure enough, someone else had a similar need and found a very elegant solution using nothing but free software to do it (not to mention, extremely popular free software (Dropbox) that many of us already have installed on our systems). I took just a few minutes, tried it out, and the problem of syncing Things on multiple Macs was history.

Technically, it’s not at all a very complicated solution and with very minor modifications, you can get it work for just about any Mac applications (disclaimer: I’ve done this with the apps I find it necessary to have sync’d – your mileage may indeed vary – as always back that shit up before playing with any of this). The big hero of the hour is the free software I mentioned called DropBox. For those of you not using it, I highly recommend it. It’s an application that really does have a lot of potential uses. In my case, I have a folder where I frequently save my weekly segments for the MacReviewCast and on the other end, Tim Verporten receives the audio file minutes after I save it locally without me having to lift a finger. Also, we have a group of people that use DropBox to collaborative on files for a book we’re writing and DropBox makes sure we all always have the most recent files. Another common use is for syncing files on multiple computers. Bottom line, you owe it to yourself to go check out DropBox and get yourself a free account. While you are signing up, be a pal and enter my email (powellj@mac.com) as the referrer and they’ll give me additional free space on my DB account.

Back to our story – having said all that, here’s how it works in a nutshell:

Many of your applications hold persistent data in a common location: \ username \ library \ application support \ app-or-company-name \

Inside this folder, you can usually find all your data stored in some common file format which can be anything from a flat text file, sqlite database, xml or whatever. Most applications are hardwired to look for their data in this specific location (in some apps this can be changed, but more – its more hassle than its worth).

You can install DropBox on both (or more) of your Macs to then keep these special data folders (for each app separately) sync’d up on both machines so regardless of which Mac you happen to be at, the data is automatically up to date on all machines. This basically does what sync services in .Mac/.Me does only without the $99/year pricetag (and in my experience, its way faster than .Mac’s syncing). You will need to do all of this in the terminal (until someone takes 5 minutes and writes an AppleScript for it) but I’m thinking that anyone who has the need think in terms of syncing data between multiple Macs and takes the time to read this far, isn’t likely to be the kind of person scared off by a little command line action. (but if you are, be sure to check out Dan Benjamin’s fine new screencast called Meet the Command Line over at PeepCode.

Details, details … (straight from Culture Codes wiki post on the subject) – just know that you’ll have to manually look in ~/ library / application support / XXX / to see the specifics of the files & app you are needing to keep sync’d. Drop me a line if you have questions on it.

This is a “how to” to keep Things in sync between Macs using Dropbox.

• First we make an appropriate folder on Dropbox (you just need to do this on your first computer, and obviously both computers need to have Dropbox installed): mkdir -p ~/Dropbox/Library
• Then we hop into the folder just above where Things stores its database: cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cultured\ Code
• We now move your existing Things database onto Dropbox (again, just on the first computer): mv Things ~/Dropbox/Library/Things, OR:
• If you’re on the second computer (at work, for example), you need to remove the Things folder: rm -rf Things
• Now we link the Things folder to Dropbox: ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/Things Things
• Instead of doing the last two steps, another option is to invoke Things by pressing the ALT key and choose the new Library in the Dropbox directory.
Based off the longer version on my article: Synchronising Things using Dropbox Note: This sync solution seems to work fine if you don’t run both Things apps at the same time. However, the one caveat is that scheduled todo’s based on iCal calendars (such as the Birthdays calendar) do not sync correctly. One Things app will have the correct calendar reference, but the other will have a ?. This is possibly because Things uses an internal reference for the calendars, not their display name.

After Things.app, the first application that I really need to keep in sync was Code Collector Pro from M Cubed Software. (Shameless plug – if you work with any kind of code whatsoever you really ought to check out CCP. It is lightweight, extremely flexible and comes with a free web service to share your codebase with others (optional) but if you take nothing else away from this article check out CCP, it absolutely rocks). I modified a few directory and file names but other than that, the instructions above did the trick nicely and now I’ve got up to date copies of all of my source code on either machine and I don’t even have to think about it – it just happens.

Obviously the weakest link in the chain here is the huge amount of trust being placed in DropBox. Technically, a copy of every bit of data is going through their system and that is definitely worth significant consideration. The data is technically stored on Amazons S3 service and Drew from DropBox adds: “We encrypt files using AES-256 before storing the file data on S3, and the underlying transport (for everything) is SSL. (we’ll also be adding the ability to provide your own private key.)”

I’d be curious to hear how this works out for you all. Drop me a line at powellj@mac.com

Ever since the keynote from WWDC last week, the usual slew of news from Apple fan boys & MacMacs has kicked into some serious over drive and it seems you can’t turn around without someone (wrongfully) bitching about AT&T not letting them out of their existing contract (learn to read your contract folks). The time for talk is over with yesterday’s release of iPhone OS 3 being officially released into the wild (review). A few issues being reported around the web, on this end – I forked over the $10 to upgrade my iPod Touch which went flawlessly.

Tomorrow the hardware drops with the iPhone 3G S arriving at AT&T as well as your local Apple stores (at least in the United States). Andy Ihnatko’s just posted his review of the new iPhone here. Not being a biggest fan of crowds, I’ll probably skip tomorrows mad rush and but I’m thinking either over the weekend or possibly monday will be the day I pick up my iPhone 3G S.

It’s a trip watch the keynotes, read the articles and just be bombarded by all the new wiz-bang features in the new device but for me, it really hit home while listening to this week’s episode of MacBreak Weekly when they were discussing the new hardware specs in the 3G S and Alex Lindsay commented about the specs of the system he was using back when he worked at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic doing animation work on Star Wars (Episode 1). The obvious point being we now carry around hardware & software in our iPhones that is literally more powerful than the technology that went into making Star Wars – Damn.

From the mighty Theocacao

Thinking Like a Cocoa Programmer

How To Make Great Software

Being a great Mac or iPhone programmer means more than just knowing Objective-C and the Cocoa, it means thinking in a different way about designing and writing software. Understanding how experienced Cocoa programmers look at things will help you get closer to becoming an expert.

Full article

Fortune is reporting that Apple’s market share of PCs over $1,000 hits 66%. The real fun, of course, remains in the comments.

An interesting piece on Apple place in respect to the Innovator’s Dilemma.

Clayton Christensen’s seminal work The Innovator’s Dilemma1 describes how incumbent vendors typically compete by continually adding performance (typically in the form of new features) eventually overshooting the requirements of their target market and providing an opportunity for upstart competitors to provide a lower-cost “good enough” solution.

Full article

Dave nails it once again.

A Mac user’s view after five months with Vista

I have tried very hard to like Vista. I really did not have a lot of choice. I needed some sort of Windows to run Internet Explorer and the forms package that NC real estate agents use to complete transactions.

I did not have the resources to run Windows on my two year old MacBook, and buying an inexpensive Windows laptop was the cheapest solution.

At a certain point you have to decide that frustration you are experiencing is something you are willing to endure or make plans to minimize it.

I knew when another Realtor® called me this weekend and wanted advice on buying a computer that I had come to a conclusion. He was already leaning towards a Mac, so I came out and told him that he would be better off with a Mac if he could afford it.

Some of my favorite lines from the post:

* Life is too short to be constantly dealing with operating system frustrations.

* While there are people like me who have to use Windows, I am still baffled at how so many people can buy a product that does not really work well.

* Having to reboot a system a couple of times a day is inexcusable this far into the computer revolution.

After years of blogging, still not a bad post from the man – cheers!

I’ve really enjoyed alternating between the new thin Apple keyboard and the Logitech Cordless Desktop MX 3200 Laser (who names these things?). However, one aspect of this particular Logitech keyboard drove me crazy – the age old switching of the Alt and Command key. It’s ironic how this trivial little switch can absolutely throw off your workflow as you continue mess up simple things like calling Quicksilver, doing basic copy/paste operations and Apple-W, Apple-Q type quit/kill operations — all because you brian doesn’t remember which keyboard its on and reminding you to move that left hand over 1/8″ to hit the ‘proper’ key.

Tonight I finally hit my limit and went hunting for a solution. There really should be an easier way to remap this kind of thing without resorting to third party utilities but until then, DoubleCommand comes to the rescue. Open source and fills the exact need I had – you gotta love it.

From M.B. Darden

I passed an Apple Store. It had recently been renovated, and I had never been there. (In fact, I’d never been in an Apple Store anywhere.) I went in. First, I’m not a techie or a remotely skilled computer user. I have no strong feelings about Apple. I went in without preconceptions. I went in really to avoid leaving the mall — it was freezing out & snowing & I was hoping (dreaming) that a few minutes later it would be a lot warmer and not snowing. Here’s what I think I learned or observed or concluded on my first trip to the Apple Store…

• Michael Dell & Other Consumer PC-Makers: It’s Over. Apple Has Won
• Apple “Geniuses” Are Chick Magnets
• Apple Geniuses Are In Fact Geniuses
• Bridging The Generation Gap May Be Possible, After All
• Starbucks, Don’t Get Too Cocky
• New Best Place To Furnish Your Home
• Black (In fashion) Is Back
• I’m A Lot Less Savvy And Smart Than I Thought

Read the full article for the specifics of his list. I find his observations to be interesting considering they are coming from someone who knows very little about tech and even less about Apple.

From MacWorld UK: Microsoft recently confirmed it has sold just over a million Zunes – but recent research says most Zune owners rue the day they ever dipped into their pocket to pick one up, with 70 per cent of Zune owners planning to ditch the device in favour of an iPod or iPhone just as soon as they can.

Survey research from the Eagle Research Group shows most Zune owners are displeased, meaning the player has acquired little brand loyalty.

Zune owners surveyed are most excited by iPhone’s ability to let users navigate their music using Cover Flow.

An astonishing 36 per cent of people who purchased a Zune now say they would never have purchased one if they had realised Apple would produce something as innovative as the iPhone.

I was happy to see John Welch’s recent piece in Information Week entitled: The Top 22 Mac OS X Products. Even better, his article was picked up on Slashdot.

A most interesting comparison / review of Windows Vista compared to Mac OS X written by John C. Welch.

While Vista is indeed a major update to Windows, there’s a lot of it that is, quite frankly, just Microsoft making up for lost time. The last non-server release of Windows was in 2001 with Windows XP, with only a single major interim update in service pack 2. In the same time, Apple has been steadily releasing updates to Mac OS X on what was a yearly schedule, now around every 18 months.

I just knew there was a reason I liked Costco! The finally figured out a way to put the Zune to good use! From MacDailyNews

From Daring Fireball

Today Is the Ten-Year Anniversary of Apple’s Acquisition of NeXT

Apple’s PR archive doesn’t go back that far, but the Internet Archive’s does. This letter to Apple’s customers from then-CEO Gil Amelio is worth a read, too: It also means that our co-founder Steven P. Jobs, will rejoin Apple, reporting to me. I know I speak for everyone at Apple in welcoming Steve home.

Reporting to Amelio, eh?

A soon to be classic quote from former head Windows manager Jim Allchin during recent legal testimony.

Mr. Allchin says, I’m not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers, both business and home, the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems our customers face are. [ Money quote ] I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that does not translate into great products. He goes on to say, I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.” You can read the press release in its entirety here.

A great post today from the fine folks over at Signal vs. Noise (aka 37 Signals) regarding a recent discovery they made after installing the RC1 candidate of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Vista. Aside from the fact that this has got to go down in the history books as one of the most drawn out and mismanaged software projects in recent memory, their is an utter lack of excitement regarding this pending release (aside from the obvious list of candidates who stand to profit from the sale of new hardware and software accompanying the launch).

One thing that many of us have wondered is that since the launch of Windows XP way back in 2001, Microsoft has had a lot of time to observe the rapidly changing wired world around them, but have they learned anything? Do they take those lessons and apply them to make Windows a more consumer friendly OS? The result? Well, I can’t say as I’m all that surprised.

…and even testing things in IE isn’t easy. For example, here’s what you see when you click View Source in Vista: This is just one of the endless confirmation dialogs Microsoft has added in the name of security. Here, the language doesn’t even make sense: No, a “website” doesn’t “want” to “open web content,” I clicked View Source! And the dialog box defaults to not letting me do what I want. So you can’t even trust Vista to do what you tell it to do. But the most painful experience yet has been installing Microsoft Script Debugger, an ancient artifact used to debug JavaScript in IE. After finding the link on Microsoft’s web site, it takes a stunning 35 clicks through nearly as many dialog boxes just to get the thing installed.

To drive home the point, they did a video screen capture of the process of downloading a Microsoft application (Script Debugger) from the Microsoft site using Vista and then recorded a second video of performing a similar process on the Mac. For your amusement:

Installing Microsoft Script Debugger in Windows Vista, 10 MB

Installing Apple’s debugger in OS X, 1 MB

Read about the full adventure here. If you don’t appreciate your Mac, take a gander at these two videos abd think again. Macs are far from perfect but I’m eternially grateful that I no longer have to deal with the utter BS that is Microsoft Windows.

Most interesting:

If you want to grab the attention of a roomful of hackers, one sure fire way to do it is to show them a new method for remotely circumventing the security of an Apple Macbook computer to seize total control over the machine.

Full Article

Update 9/27/606 Weeks later, this thing has been analyzed to death and as suspected, things aren’t quite what they seem. Even if these guys had a valid point, their techniques and positioning made them considerably less believable. Full story

Mac user Dan Kurtz joins the collection of folks getting their Mac laptops engraved and/or etched. Brave souls indeed (mainly because it makes selling the laptop more difficult down the road unless you are one of the many who keep their Macs forever).

His design of choice is most interesting and he’s even offering the original artwork available on his site, including a png version. It didn’t take long before his pride and joy was picked up on Engadget as well.

In a related note, a fellow Mac user recently had his MacBookPro engraved with an indian scene and he did a good job documenting the process from start to finish.

Mac users tend to be passionate about their machines and quite often for good reason but my hats off to the Exploding Dog who write this piece which is essentially a very loving eulogy for his Powerbook. The computer in question is classic Titanium Powerbook which had its fair share of known issue (ahem, chipping paint and poor wifi distance) but this laptop stands out for so many reasons.

I vividly remember the day I took ownership of my very first native OSX Mac which also happened to be a 15″ Titanium Powerbook and it was literally like no other laptop I’ve ever owned. It was unique in every way that mattered and constantly drew looks from people everywhere from the boardroom to the local users group. Its thinness and elegant design made it an absolute joy to use and I took many precautions to keep it as perfect as possible over the years.

Alas, this isn’t about my own experiences — take a look at the eulogy to gain some insights into why certain Mac users are so passionate about their machines. His particular machine obviously took quite a beating over time but it also obviously had a great deal of meaning to him to warrant such long term devotion. My favorite line from the article:

I have probably owned ten or more computers in my life and none of them were that special. they would just come and go. i never made a web page for those computers. i could probably list a hundred reasons why my powerbook was so cool. and i know i sound like an idiot. but it was a cool computer. I guess now it is time to recycle the powerbook and get a new one. but now a new laptop would be more of a luxury than a necessity. apple’s new laptops are cool but they are not as cool.

<img src=”http://203.98.164.153/~jlpowell/blog/images/billretires.jpg” width=”448″ height=”363 border=”0″ align=”right” hspace=”15″ vspace=”5″ />

Care of Lauri Taimila:

I have noticed that many people try to imitate Mac OSX Tiger’s look with their current operating system. No matter is it Windows or Linux. I’m one of those people and this is my atteption to make Ubuntu Linux look like OSX Tiger. I use Ubuntu simply because it is the best distribution of the best operating system. Ubuntu uses Gnome as it’s desktop environment. For this reason the guide is for only for Gnome users. It you are using some other distribution, this guide is still valid in most cases. This guide tries to be as spesific as possible, so that even newbies can follow it easily!

Mac users are at their core a very creative group of people and I consider it an honor to be included among that group. The lengths that some Mac fans will go in terms of sheer effort to showcase their passions can be mind blowing but we all thrive off of the creativity of others. It is along those lines that I wanted to pass along a new site put together by Motohiko Narita called The Vintage Mac Museum.

This online museum does an amazing job (in a very innovative way) of documenting an extensive collection of Macintosh software from the 9″ monochrome time period. So many interesting programs that might otherwise be lost in the sands of time (or for all we know, still plugging away on the millions of older Macs that are still in use today.

Also, as previously discussed on a recent Mac ReviewCast, don’t forget to also check out the Macintosh Folklore Radio podcast which brings to life many of the stories originally found at Folklore.org by Mac luminary software wiz Andy Hertzfeld.

I’ve said it before and I hope that I never get to stop saying it: the Mac community has some of the most damn creative people working in it! How often to you see a really clever user interface implemented in some game and wonder why can’t we get stuff like that in OS itself? One of my personal favorites has today become a reality thanks to the fine folks over at Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop blog which today introduced the world to a small Mac hack called Visor.

Remember in Quake (and many other FPS titles) how you could always bring down a terminal window from which you could enter in cheat codes and such? Well, some clever guys have figured out a great little hack that allows you to have OS X’s terminal window drop down from the top of the screen via a customizable key combo. So you can be working away and need to jump out to the command line for a something and now, it’s just a quick key-combo away. The visual effect is of course, very slick and not to leave well enough alone, they’ve also made it so that you can easily embed any quicktime composer (.qtz) file which will play behind the terminal window (but you do have to adjust the transparency level of your terminal window ahead of time).

You really do have to see this in action to fully appreciate it’s usefulness – so of course they’ve also made a movie to show it off properly. Essentially this is accomplished by creating this as a plugin for SIMBL but it works fantastic and if you use the terminal on anything more than a casual level, it’s a must have in my book. Nice job guys.

Installation instructions and download links here.

Gotta love the occasional Apple easter egg, especially when it comes from a movie instead of being embedded in software. In this case, it comes from the newly opened Pixar movie Cars. This was originally found by Brian at FreeMacBlog. He finds:

In the opening race of the movie, I thought I caught a glimpse of an Apple car. I thought it strange because there is no other product placement in the whole movie. So, when I got home I grabbed the movie on line (for research sake) and sure enough, there is the Apple car. And even more fitting, the number on the car was 84. Pretty cool!