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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.

GrandCentral is a new phone service that has been getting a lot of buzz lately. The idea is simple one phone number for life. Let’s think about it, most of us today have many phone numbers we might be reached at throughout the day, perhaps a home number in the morning, your office number during the day, your cell phone during your commute, your vacation home on the weekends (we can dream can’t we) – you get the idea. The idea behind GrandCentral is to link all your phone numbers together with a single phone number. You have a GrandCentral number which you give to your contacts and that number can be set up to ring any or all of your other phones. So if someone needs to reach you they only need one number, not a list saying when you will be where. Simple but brilliant!

Take it one step further and you can consolodate your voicemail as well, rather than four different voicemail systems you can have everything go to one very robust full featured voicemail system through GrandCentral. While the one phone number and single voicemail combination is the most compelling reason to try GrandCentral, it is only the tip of the iceberg. GrandCentral has many great features such as ListenIn a feature that lets you screen your calls, you can actually listen to voicemail as it is recorded and pick up the line if your choose. Other cool features include call screening, SPAM filtering (for your calls – no more telemarketers), e-mail notifications and WebCall buttons. The feature set looks very impressive.

GrandCentral was acquired by Google in July, who obviously sees the tremendous potential, and it is currently in private beta. I managed to get an invite and I am very excited to try out the system. I think the concept holds a lot of promise. The major phone companies should be watching GrandCentral, it really is what phone service should be. During the beta all of the features are free, but I would imagine it will move to a subscription model at some point. Anyway it looks very interesting – I’ll keep you posted as I try the service. I do have a few invites, if you are interested in one please post a short response to this blog entry telling readers why you are interested in GrandCentral (you will need to make an account – sorry but blog spam drives me nuts).

In the technology business you really need to be learning new things all the time or be left behind. This means always having a few books that you are working on as well a reading the blogs daily. I try to attend a few training classes or college courses each year and catch the occasional conference. Of course technical training can be very expensive and time consuming, but I recently came across an interesting alternative that is very cost effective and easily work with any schedule. Lynda.com is an online training solution that has been around since 1995 and they offer a great selection of online video training. They have a basic subscription for $25/month that allows you access to their complete library. I just signed up for a 7 day trial, but I will likely purchase an annual plan if I continue to be impressed.

The training is done with a series of high quality Quicktime movies. Right now I am watching a Podcasting training module conducted by Scott Bourne, which is excellent. They seem to have a nice selection. Some of the courses I plan to take include: Ruby on Rails Essential Training, CSS for Designers, Working with Color, Javascript Essentials and Web Redesign. Many of the courses are taught by industry leaders and my impression thus far is very positive. It is definitely worth checking out! I found a free 14 day trial which can give you a good feel for what it is all about.

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.

In an effort to spread the word about the new BluOctopus blog we have set up a Technorati Profile. Technorati is the premier listing of blogs on the Internet, which catalogs some of the best blog on the web. It is a great place to find great blogs and articles – check it out if you are not already a member.

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!

One of my criteria when I recently got a new phone was that it be capable of acting as a modem occasionally for my laptop, a MacBook Pro. While I don’t need access frequently enough to justify the $59.99 monthly fee of having a dedicated EVDO card, on occasion it would be helpful to have Internet access – perhaps to show a client a web site when I am offsite.Now according to RIM (BlackBerry) the 8830 can not be used as a tethered modem, nor can it be used as a Bluetooth modem, here is a quote from their support site:”Mac users will not be able to use their BlackBerry handheld as tethered modems with their mac laptop or computer as there is no support capability for Mac yet. The Mac does not use or recognize the standard modem drivers used by Microsoft Windows. At present, there is no tethered modem support via Bluetooth® functionality for Windows or Mac…”A quick search on Google tells a different story. I quickly found a forum thread that indicates that the 8830 can be used as a DUN Bluetooth modem. Below is a summary of the directions that I found for setting the 8830 up as a Bluetooth DUN modem on my network Verizon Wireless:

• Go to System Preferences (OSX 10.4.x or greater)
• Choose Bluetooth
• Under the Setup tab choose “Set Up New Device”
• The Wizard should walk you through the process, but here are the details you need:
  • Username = yourphonenumber@vzw3g.com
  • Password = vzw
  • Phone Number = #777
  • Modem script = WWAN Support

This worked for me – while speed wasn’t great over bluetooth, it certainly meets my needs. If you are trying to accomplish this as well I would highly suggest you checkout the forum thread I previously mentioned.

While there may be no smartphones that met all of my criteria right out of the box it does look like both the Palm Treo 700p and the BlackBerry 8830 came very close. Both phones are feature rich and include many important features such as robust e-mail, Internet, modem capabilities and the ability to read common document formats. However in the end I found a few things that I preferred about the BlackBerry 8830 including:

1. User interface – I like the user interface on the BlackBerry I found it very intuitive. The trackball interface was very easy to use.
2. E-mail – This is what BlackBerry is famous for and give it a try and you see why.
3. Form factor – The 8830 is slim and fit well in the hand – a big plus.

Once I have had ample time to use the phone I will post a short review.

Recently I found myself in the market for a new cell phone. Being one that usually researches new purchases before I buy, I began to think about the criteria of what I wanted in a new cell phone. Here is what I came up for as my criteria:

• A phone that supports “push” e-mail
• Support for viewing common document types (Word, PDF, etc)
• The ability to use my phone as a modem for my laptop occasionally
• A good user interface (a rarity in the cell phone world IMHO)
• A full QWERTY keyboard
• Ability to surf the Internet in a meaningful way
• Compatibility with the Mac platform (both for syncing and modem use)
• Compatible with my current provider (Verizon Wireless)
• A decent music player would be nice

Based on my criteria I would be looking at phones in the category referred to as smartphones. Smartphones are a class of phones that offer more computer like functionality than typical phones and usually include: a keyboard, robust e-mail capacity and productivity software. Well known phones in this category include: the Palm Treo, Motorola Q and the Blackberry.

Before I progressed much further in my research I decided to visit a couple of the local wireless stores. In my area Verizon Wireless has the best coverage by far – I say that in part based on my own experience with other carriers including Nextel (Sprint) and T-Mobile. AT&T is probably the next best choice in this area, but by most accounts the coverage is somewhat spotty in this area.

First I visited the Verizon Wireless store. Never really been a big fan of their stores, they don’t seem very customer oriented. You enter the store and are required to sign in – is it just me or does anyone else feel like they are visiting a doctors office? It seems to me if they are so busy that they need you to sign in then perhaps they need to expand their store and hire enough people to help everyone in a timely manner. At any rate after I signed in I proceeded to look around. In the smartphone section they had phones from Palm including the Treo 700p, several Blackberry phones and the Motorola Q. After a few minuted I was called over to the counter by a sales associate. When I told the associate my criteria for a new phone she sounded surprised that I knew the features I required – hey doesn’t everybody? She immediately started talking about the Treo and the Blackberry. I asked her about Mac compatibility and she referenced a smartphone comparison grid prepared by Verizon. While the grid had some of the information I wanted to know it did not tell the whole story. I asked about using a phone as a modem – she said she did not know the answer to my question. Of course then I would have expected her to find someone that did know the answer, but as usual my expectations were too high. At anyrate I had gotten some basic info from Verizon and realized that I would need to search out my answers myself – thank God for Google.

Next I visited my local AT&T store. While I was doubtful about switching service from Verizon to AT&T I decided I would go take a look and check things out. After all the iPhone was going to be released soon and that was only on AT&T, so maybe it was time to take another look at AT&T. The one clear advantage of AT&T over Verizon Wireless is that AT&T always gets the cool phones long before Verizon does, case and point the iPhone. When I talked the the sales associate she showed me the Blackberry Curve, which looked like a very nice phone. I had never considered a Blackberry, but this was an interesting looking phone – I love the form factor. When asked about thing like using the Blackberry as a modem, I got answers like “I think so”, but being one that like certainty I knew I needed to do some more homework before I proceeded.

As I did some of my own research I kept coming to the same conclusion that there were many phones that did all of the things I wanted if I was on a Windows platform, but the choice for Mac compatibility seemed limited. The Palm Treo 700p seemed to be one of the better choices, it came bundled with Mac syncing software, but after doing some more research I found that it could not be used as a tethered modem for a Mac (at least according to Palm). Although it was indicated that the 700p can be used a dialup networking (DUN) modem over Bluetooth.

I also began researching the Blackberry 8830, while I really liked the Blackberry Curve Verizon did not carry that model, so I began looking at the 8830 which has a lot in common with the Curve sans the camera. According to Verzon’s smartphone matrix the 8830 did not include sync software, but it indicated that there was 3rd party software available. Fact is the 8830 does now include PocketMac a sync utility for the Mac platform. However my research indicated that Missing Sync from MarkSpace was a better choice for Mac users. According to the RIM site (Blackberry) the 8830 can not be used as a tethered modem or as a DUN device. A little work with Google and I did find info to support that the 8830 can be used as a DUN Bluetooth modem. The picture that was now emerging is that perhaps with a little effort I can find a phone that will meet all of my criteria.

So it looks like my best choices as of now is either the Palm 700p or the Blackberry 8830. The iPhone looks very cool and interesting, but looks like it will lack certain features that are important to me, such as the ability to act as a modem for a laptop – not to mention the iPhone will be tied to the slower EDGE network for Internet access. Stay tuned and find out which smartphone I choose.