Blog

About a month ago I decided to try MarsEdit, a desktop blogging application for the Mac. The idea behind MarsEdit was to provide a better interface for creating,editing and managing blog post. As someone that maintains and writes for multiple blogs, this was something that sounded interesting. After all the web interfaces were often somewhat less than ideal, especially if you write for several different blogs. There were passwords and URLs to remember and lets face it even the best web interfaces are still not as responsive as a good ole desktop application.

Overall I was quite impressed with MarsEdit. Yes there were a few small things that I didn’t like, but overall I thought it was a far superior experience to the multiple web interfaces I was using to provide content to several blogs. In fact so impressed was I that I was ready to go ahead and purchase MarEdit, but before I did I thought it would be worthwhile to check out the competition.

Perhaps the best known competitor in the desktop blogging space on the Mac is a program called ecto by Adriaan Tijsseling of infinite sushi. I had seen several positive reviews on both MarsEdit and ecto, so I thought I would give the trial version of ecto a spin, before I purchased either.So that is exactly what I am doing – I am writing this post using ecto the feature-rich desktop blogging client for Mac OSX. The trial version of ecto is a 21 day trial (9 less than MarsEdit or the typical 30 day trial), so I will give it whirl and see which one better suits my needs. I do see some promising aspects to ecto, like the Amazon integration. I did download the newest release, which is ecto 3, which is still a beta today as I write this entry. At anyrate I’ll post my thoughts once I have used ecto for a few weeks and let you know which one I decide to buy.

One of the things I really love about my Mac is all of the really great software available for it. It’s kinda of ironic that before I moved to the Mac platform I had the impression that there wasn’t as much software for the Mac. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. There are many small and mid-sized Mac software development shops that really seem to get it – producing highly polished, usable software at an affordable price.

One of the ways that I have discovered many great Mac software applications has been by purchasing software bundles. Recently I purchased the MacHeist software bundle that included 14 great applications for $49 – what a deal. There were many great applications in the bundle, some in fact that I already owned (fortunately with MacHeist you can gift the license if you already own it – which is what I did). When I purchase software bundles I typically find that there are a couple applications that I really want and others that I know little or nothing about. In the case of the recent MacHeist bundle it was SnapZ Pro, AppZapper and ChaChing that really motivated me to buy the bundle. I already owned CSSEdit and Pixelmator, which are both fantastic. However sometimes it is the hidden gems that turn out to be really exciting.

Last week I was staying at a hotel while attending a training class. It seemed like a good opportunity to try out one of the other applications that came with the MacHeist bundle – Awaken 4.0. Awaken is basically an alarm clock for your Mac. I never really thought about wanting to turn my Mac into a fancy alarm clock, but suddenly it seemed like a good time to try it out. You know what? It is very useful and worked quite well. The program allows you to set multiple alarms and wake up to your choice of music or sounds. It also has a simple egg timer and sleep timer as well. The program will first wake your computer, then launch iTunes and then slowly start the music and wake you up. It is simple and works flawlessly. Anyway if you find you need to turn your Mac into an alarm clock check out Awaken 4.0.

Well well well it has been some time since my last blog entry. Why you might ask? Well no good excuse other than I have been very busy over the course of the last several months. In November I got involved with a large project for a nationally known American magazine. Not a project that I can discuss at the moment, but something that could be very interesting. Of course the holiday season is always busy as well. I also was working on preparing the curriculum for a class that began teaching in January (more details coming soon on that one). So now that I have given a few excuses the truth is that sometimes blogging is just too hard….it takes time and when one gets busy it is sometimes one of the first things on the chopping block.

What if blogging could be easier? Well thanks to some software from Red Sweater Software it might become a little easier. Red Sweater makes a piece of software called Mars Edit. Mars Edit is basically a desktop application that lets you write and post blog entries. Why would you need that – not like it is difficult to get online and use WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type, etc… That is true, in fact I have a couple blogs running on WordPress and it is a pretty nice system. The advantage of something like Mars Edit is that you can manage many blogs from one desktop interface. Rather than having to log on to each of my blogs individually I can set them up in Mars Edit and quickly post to any and all of them. The interface is nice and fairly intuitive – and of course it feels like a desktop application (as it should). If you are not connected to the Internet – you can still write, although of course you can’t post until you are back online. It also makes it very easy add media from iPhoto or even Flickr. We commonly use Flickr to post to our son’s blog, but it is not the best process posting from Flickr. I often find that postings from Flickr need some pretty significant editing. Anyway Mars Edit looks like an interesting option, one I am sure will be especially interesting to those that post to more than one blog on a regular basis.

At this point I have downloaded a free trial to give it a spin. If it proves to be worthwhile I will certainly purchase a license. How will I determine if it is worthwhile? See if it gets me to blog more! Anyway it looks promising – check it out!

I have had my iPod Touch now for a couple weeks and thought I would post a mini review. The very short review – it’s amazing. Could it be more amazing? Yes and I think it will be, but we’ll get to that in a second. Let me begin by giving you my initial impressions. First of all the iPod Touch is all about the user interface and as always Apple does a great job on it. To truly appreciate the genius of the multitouch interface you have to try it, but in a nutshell multitouch is a simple intuitive touch screen user interface.

There are so many things to love about the iPod Touch. For starters it really is the best iPod ever. Really it is, it may not be the largest capacity, but it is definitely the best. The screen is beautiful, the user interface is incredible and the features are great. Of course it is a great music player. It has many ways to navigate your music, including a nicely implemented version of coverflow. Video looks, to quote Steve, absolutely gorgeous, really magnificent. Perhaps one of my favorite features is the built in Wifi. Setup is a breeze and the built in Safari browser is incredible. This is the first mobile device I have seen that really makes surfing the Internet a pleasure not a compromise. Of course the built in Wifi also enabled the implementation of the iTunes store – great addition. The iTunes store works seamlessly on the Touch, great addition.

One of the common criticisms that I have heard about the iPod Touch is the capacity. While I would love an 80GB iPod Touch, I think Apple did the right thing by sticking with solid state flash memory. I think a hard drive version would lack some of the performance of the current Touch. Will we see bigger ones? Sure I would guess by this time next year we will see a 32GB model. Flash memory is expensive – but the price is always coming down. A 16GB solid state expresscard drive runs about $299 right now…. so the 16GB iPod Touch at $399 seems reasonable. My previous iPod (still in service) was a 40GB iPod Photo. So going from 40GB to 16GB might seem like a big change and it is, but you need to consider the way you use the device. The 40GB iPod enabled me to carry just about all of my music all of the time. Truth be told I probably only listened to 10% of it 90% of the time, but it was a nice feeling to be able to carry your whole library. So what has the change from 40GB to 16GB meant to me? It has meant that I must prioritize. My solution was to rate all of my music (which I have always wanted to do) and make smart playlist so that I can always carry my best music with me. Now I only carry my best stuff (which really makes random fun again). At the present I have all my 4 and 5 star music, a bunch of my new music (in a list I call music discovery), a bunch of home movies, a couple TV shows and a whole lot of podcast. Trust me when I say 16GB is more that you need even if you have a large collection if you set your priorites. It is not a device to carry your whole library, but certainly very capable of carrying the best of your stuff.

One other thing I want to address. The iPod Touch is not an iPhone. While the two share a common platform and many features, they are in fact different devices with different capacities. I have seen a lot of reviews where people complain about the things the Touch does not do that the iPhone does. In some cases it is hard to determine why it was decided not to support some features on the Touch, but at the end of the day if the iPhone better suits your needs buy an iPhone. I probably would have bought an iPhone if it had been supported on Verizon. While I am not crazy about Verizon, they do have the best service in the area I live. I don’t think much of most of the cellular companies – but that’s a whole other rant.

Apple recently announced that a SDK (software development kit) was being developed for the iPhone and iPod Touch. What does that mean? It means third party applications will soon be supported on the iPod Touch. Things will get really exciting when that happens and the iPod moves beyond just being a portable media player to being a mobile computing platform… exciting stuff!

In closing I highly recommend the iPod Touch! It is truly amazing, but the best part? It is going to get even more amazing in the future. The next generation will be larger capacity and once the SDK comes out it will revolutionize the portable media player space.

Prior to switching from Windows based PCs to OS X on the Mac I was under the impression that there wasn’t as much software available for the Mac platform. However, I can honestly say since I moved to the Mac I have purchased more software than all of my years on Windows. Why? A number of reasons, but I think one of the overwhelming reason has been that there is a lot of great software written for the Mac, it seems like I am always discovering great new programs for the Mac.

One of my recent discoveries was a program called ArtText from BeLight Software. ArtText is a simple yet powerful application that allows you to do all sorts of interesting things with text and graphics. With ArtText you can create logos, banners, buttons, icons and more. In ArtText you have materials such as glass, plastic and metal that have various properties and you apply the material (or the texture) to your text and vector images. The result? You end up with highly stylized text and graphics. Want a fancy web 2.0 badge? Use ArtText’s built in glass material to make a cool badge. Need to make a simple text logo? ArtText has plenty of options – you can even create your own materials. I would recommend you download a trial version and give it a spin.

Looking for a quick way to make beautiful images for the web? Well if you have a Mac Picturesque from Acqualia software might be for you. Winner of the best Mac OS X student product for the 2007 Apple Design Awards, Picturesque was written entirely in Cocoa by Zac Cohan and Nik Youdale.

Picturesque is a very simple and intuitive image enhancing application that does a few things and does them well. With Picturesque you can simply drag and drop images into the staging area and with a few clicks of the mouse easily apply a number of polished effect including: reflection, glow, shadow, rounded corners, stroke, fade and resize.  I’ve been using it for a few weeks now for the graphics for this blog and have found it to be very useful.

Take a look at this very short video to get a feel for what you can do with Picturesque. Download a demo from the Acqualia web site, decide to buy it – good news it is only $19.50 – nice price for a solid product.

Ever since I moved to the Mac platform I have been a big fan of OmniGroup’s software. My first experience was with OmniOutliner, which is a very versatile outlining and idea organization application. When I was looking for a Visio type application for the Mac I found OmniGraffle, which is great for developing all sorts of charts and diagrams. I have tried OmniWeb and would love to try OmniPlan at some point when my business grows to the point it would be helpful. Overall I find OmniGroup’s software to be intuitive, useful and user centered.

Recently I was looking for a good GTD (Getting Things Done) productivity application for my Mac. I had heard that Merlin Mann was working with OmniGroup on OmniFocus so I headed over to the OmniGroup web site to see what I could find. I found that the application was still under development and a release date hasn’t been given. There is an interesting video demo by Ethan Schoonover and a link for a mailing list, which I signed up for in hopes of getting on the beta testers list.

Shortly after signing up for the mailing list I got an e-mail from the OmniGroup giving me the opportunity to alpha test OmniFocus. While I am not usually to eager for alpha testing I looked at the Omni forums and it sounded like the product was fairly stable. Of course at the end of the day it is an alpha test, and there is a big warning at the top of the page that reads:

“This release is still under development. Your feedback will help us improve the software, and we apologize if it crashes or misbehaves.”

At this point I have only taken a little time to look at the application, but so far so good. It looks like it might be a promising product in the personal productivity space and I look forward to trying it out. I’ll try to post my thoughts on it once I have had a chance to really get to know it better.

I own several iPods. My first was a 40GB iPod Photo my wife bought me for Christmas 3 years ago. Since then we have added an iPod Shuffle, a pink Mini for my wife and a 1GB Nano. I love my iPods! I’ve always been somewhat of a gadget guy and my iPod is one of my favorites. In fact it is one of the few things that I use almost daily. It was my iPod that led me to buy my first Mac computer – and now we own three.

It is amazing how Apple has revolutionized the music business with the iPod. Since Apple introduced the video iPod almost two years ago there has been a lot of speculation as to what the next generation iPod would be – last week we found out. Since I first saw the iPhone I thought wouldn’t it be great to have a phoneless iPhone? That is what Apple has essentially done with iPod Touch.

I am really excited about this iPod I think it will really be a game changer. The user interface is absolutely beautiful, one I am sure will be copied by many in the years to come (Zune Touch anyone). I was really happy to see Apple include WiFi and Safari for me this was a critical factor in my decision to order one.

It should be interesting to see how the iPhone/iPod develop as a platform. While Apple doesn’t currently have an API for developers I imagine that it is only a matter of time before they open one up for developers, perhaps WWDC 2008? With the iPod Touch and the iPhone running a version of OSX it should be interesting to see how they evolve. I would suspect that we might see some new functionality for both of the devices when the new version of OSX, Leopard, ships in October.

Anyway I’ll be sure to give it a quick review when I get it at the end of this month.

Do you use your computer for anything important? Do you store digital pictures on your computer? How about music or movies? Do you use your computer for banking? Maybe for your own small business? If you answered yes to any of these questions I have another question for you – do you backup your computer on a regular basis? If not you should! Chances are that if you have been lucky enough never to have had a hard drive failure, a major system crash, a fire, a flood or an angry ex-wife – that one day your luck may run out.

I’ve been using a personal computer for a long time now and for many years I never really had much of a backup strategy. Over the years I have lost an important file or two because of it. I’ve had hard drive failures and system crashes that have required me to restore systems and resulted in me losing many files. While these losses were sometimes significant they were never catastrophic.

However something is different today than it was five or ten years ago – the amount of really important stuff on my computer has increased exponentially. Think back five or ten years – you probably still took most of your pictures with a film based camera, used a checkbook register to balance your checkbook, did your taxes on paper and your music collection was probably a stack of CDs on a rack by your TV. Maybe you still don’t use your computer to do all of these things, but someday you will and no better time than the present to start preparing.

I have a co-worker that lost a hard drive a few months back and lost his entire music collection. What is the value of a loss like that? In my case I have over 8,000 songs in my digital music library. If you value each song at .99 cents then you see that I have almost $8,000 worth of music on my hard drive. Truth be told a lot of what is on my hard drive is music I ripped off of my CD collection and I could recreate much of my collection, but that is a very time consuming process – and let’s face it time is money.

I don’t know about you – but I love my digital camera and I take a lot of pictures. The year my son was born I took over 15,000 pictures! A couple years ago I had a hard drive problem on my PC and lost a bunch of my honeymoon pictures (not a good thing). Anyway digital photos are something hard to put a value on, but if you are not backing up your digital images you will be sorry one day.

Anyway suffice to say I am a strong believer now (as a result of some tough lessons) in the importance of backing up your hard drive. Hopefully you are starting to realize that you might want to implement a backup strategy if you are not currently backing up your files. Next week I will talk a little about my backup strategy perhaps you can tell me what you do to backup your Mac.

If you are a software developer or coder of any kind you may find yourself using a file comparison or merge tool at some point. I have been using a product called Beyond Compare for a couple years now and found it to be a great utility. Unfortunately Scooter Software does not make a Mac version of Beyond Compare and while I could use it with Parallels on the Windows side of my MacBook Pro that wouldn’t be very practical in terms of work flow.

For some time I have been looking for a reasonably priced file comparison/merge tool for the Mac. I tried a trial version of zsCompare by ZizaSoft, which looked like a nice choice. The standard version is $99, which isn’t bad but seemed a little high, perhaps since I was comparing it to Beyond Compare. I decided to keep looking and found a nice resource on Wikipedia which was a comparison of file comparison tools.

One of the tools that I decided to evaluate was DiffCompare from SourceGear. DiffCompare has the following features:

• File diff, graphically shows the changes between two files. Includes intra-line highlighting and full support for editing.
• Merge, it graphically shows the changes between 3 files. Allows automatic merging (when safe to do so) and full control over editing the resulting file.
• Folder diff, performs a side-by-side comparison of 2 folders, showing which files are only present in one file or the other, as well as file pairs which are identical or different.
• Configurable. Rulesets and options provide for customized appearance and behavior.
• Cross-platform. Identical feature set on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix.

I have only used it lightly at this point, but it looks promising – might be worth checking out if you are looking for a diff/comparision tool for Mac. Oh yeah and I almost forgot to mention the best part – it’s FREE!