Amuyu

## It’s about who uses it

So I’ve been ranting about how, for me, the iPad is not the device for content creation. After further reflection, that needs to be revised. I should change my tone because it could be for others. At the iPad 2 introduction The Steve made a point of mentioning that this is the intersection of technology and liberal arts. That’s it. That’s who can use the pad for _creation_. My world is emphatically not liberal arts. My passions all revolve around technology. My work is _all_ technology. Interestingly, my content creation, although putatively creative, is all technology driven. The closest I get to liberal arts is … media consumption. Aha.

Now, the truly creative folks – the artists/authors/painters – they are typically not technology driven. They want something to capture their creative expression in an intuitive way. They could care less about the megaseekels and geegasquirtz. They care that it turns on, they point, and it does. iPad.

I get it.

But not for me.

## My move to the cloud
It turns out that my move to the cloud might be what everyone else is going to be doing. Over the last week or so, I’ve changed the way I look at my computing devices. For a very long time (well just about forever), I’ve really only had one computer that I used as “the computer.” That’s despite having a ton of hardware laying around doing things in my basement and my desk. Those “other” computers were utility devices: my vmware farm for email/http/etc services, my mac mini for desktop/utility services, my netapp/open solaris boxes for file storage. My laptop was still the primary holder of what I considered critical functionality and data. If I lost or broke my laptop, I’d be in a world of hurt. Well, not really, backups are a good thing. I’d be in a world of “recover, waste time waiting, and then do work.”

With my acquisition of a truly powerful desktop (iMac 27″ core i7 – woot!), I needed to make a change. I’d prefer to work on my desktop when I can, and then go mobile when necessary – and do it seamlessly. The email part was easy, or should have been easy. I’ll post on that later. What was not easy was the data. In retrospect, it should have been easy, but I made it hard for myself. In my ultimate fantasy world, I would have liked a complete copy of all data, application state, and application configuration transferred from one machine to another. That way I could literally get up from my desk, move to the couch with the laptop, and just continue. Sure – I could have done that with remote desktop of some sort, but that’s not really an option when I’m on a plane or in a hotel with crappy internet. In the ideal world, I would only be sacrificing compute performance and screen real-estate for mobility. To get there, I played with a ton of sync options, both commercial and open source: rsync, goodsync, chronosync, etc. Unfortunately, none of them really give you the state of applications, and in the case of chronosync – your computers have to be physically close (as in the same network) to effectively keep them in sync.

My path to the cloud became clearer with the acquisition of the MBA 11″. Even though it’s a top of the line 128GB SSD model, it simply does not have the capacity to hold all of the data that I kept on my previous core machine – my 17″ MBP. That meant sacrifice. Out of sacrifice came clarity. Before this, I had not fully committed to the iMac being “the computer”. That’s because I wanted full access to everything while on the road. Well, the 11″ is going to be the on-the-road machine. I can’t have full access on it. The decision was simple: the iMac became the ‘puter. All of my iTunes and iPhoto stuff left the MBP and moved over to the iMac. With that move, I loose the ability to sync my i-devices on the road, but that’s ok. I’ve not been fanatical about that anyways.

All that was left was the problem of having my core important data available to me at all times on all computers. Enter Dropbox. Finally, I purchased a paid account on the dropbox service, and sync’d all of my core data to the cloud. My work flow had to be changed a little bit based on where I placed my stuff. Instead of ~/Documents/xxx, I now place it in ~/Dropbox/xxx. That service now automatically sync’s all data to the cloud and back to my devices – even my iDevices if needed.

### the network is not the computer
Sun’s vision was to make all services cloud based – including compute. The only thing you would need is an access terminal and your data and applications would bet there. The access device really needed only enough horsepower to run authentication, the network, and the display. VMware’s view and the rest of the VDI gang are headed down this same path. For much of the enterprise needs (think call centers and things like that), this is __the right way__. But – for me that means I have to be on the network. I’m not always on a reliable network or even a fast one. I have to have local compute and storage to do what I need to do. In all honesty, I think a very large segment of the non-home, non-drone corporate worker user base is in the same boat. The problem has been exactly the path that I went through: how to make the data and the compute always available.

### where I ended up at
After much mashing of teeth, and angst, I ended up here:

– The iMac is my central compute platform and also acts as the master sync for all data, including the iDevices
– Core data is hosted on Dropbox and automatically sync’d to all my devices, mobile or not (great value for $100/year)
– My MacBook’s have essentially become interchangeable. Use the Air for when I need light weight and simplicity (most of the time). Use the MBP when I’m traveling and need a desktop replacement (large screen, compute horsepower, etc.)
– The idevices (iPhone, iPad) have become more useful because I can use the data from Dropbox to do quick work on recent data

To accomplish this, I had to make one major workflow change: Close all apps at the end of the day. Because OSX is so reliable about sleep mode, I’ve gotten into the habit of just closing my laptop and moving on. Many times I don’t even save my work. Really. It is that good. Well, the sync thing requires that I do not do that. It’ll take a little while to break a 7 year old habit, but that can be done.

Anyways, if you think about what I have gotten to, it is this: My compute devices are interchangeable and I can select which one I use based on practical location requirements (i.e. am I sitting at my desk?, on a plane?, at a customer’s?, etc.). As a side effect of this, my data is now also safe. It’s on the cloud, and multiple devices. Loosing any device due to theft, negligence, failure, etc – means little other than replacement of the device. The important stuff, my work and data, are simply re-instated. Pretty damn cool.

## So – I lost some images…
Today I had to do some errands, one of which included me going to a car wash. It was more than just a simple wash – it was the first wash of my wife’s 1.5 year old car. Yeah – that’s not good, but it is what it is. Naturally, that wash took some time \(and money\). During the wait, I fired up my MacBook 11.6″ \(weee!!!\). I looked and saw that there was no open wifi around. But not to fear, I whipped out my trusty clear hotspot. In a manner of a few minutes, I’m settled and I start doing today’s stuff.

Today’s stuff happened to be an update my daughter’s lacrosse website ([rhsgirlslax](http://rhsgirlslax.com/ “RHS Lax”)). I had to put some of the sponsor images on the website via a pretty cool WordPress plugin called [Ad Squares Widget](http://www.primothemes.com/ “Ad Squares”). It felt good to be happily resizing images, redoing some of the logos so they would fit, etc on a really small form factor computer. Definitely something I could not have done (well easily) on an iPad. Anywho, about halfway through the mini project, I noticed that the plugin had been updated. WordPress does a nice job of notifying you about this. So – not thinking twice about it, I told wordpress to go ahead and update the plugin. While it was doing that, I finished fixing the code for the plugin and then added all the URL’s to the adds into the widget. But, when I went to reload the site, none of my images worked. A serious WTF moment later and some digging showed me what should have been pretty evident all along. The example code from the plugin places the images in the folder with the plugin. I did that. Well – when you update the plugin, it doesn’t update the directories and files – it replaces them! BAM! All my images were gone.

No big deal, right? Just upload them to the server again and poof. Well, that wasn’t so easy. The 11″ MBA just came into duty and all I had was the images that I was working on that day (got them from my email). Well – the good news is that the iMac that had those images was at home. A quick ssh to my home server and a hop over to the iMac and I was there. Then I ran into a simple problem: how do I efficiently transfer those files back to my 11″. That’s when Dropbox did a double whami AHA! on me. A quick “mv rhsimages ~/Dropbox” later they were in the cloud and seconds later on the 11″. Wee!!

It gets better. I serve the website from my home server via my DSL line that has a relatively meager 750Kb/s uplink. It works well for most things, but it sure isn’t enough to quickly serve something with tons of images. Well Dropbox, has this public folder thing. If you want, you can generate a URL to any file in that folder. So rather than copying those images back to my server, I left them on Dropbox and grabbed the public URL. I used that in the Ad Squares page and now my daughter’s site is being served a zillion times faster.

So – what is this then? I like to think of it as my cloud migration experiment. I’m doing a blend of private (my vmware farm with the web server) and public (Dropbox) clouds to do something better. How about that.

So I travel a lot

I’ve been on a plane a ton lately. Last year, for the first time in many, many years, I made platinum with Delta. However, even with that semi-rarified status, I still don’t get upgraded to first class all of the time. That means that I have to figure out how to spend my time in coach often. Very often. So lately, I’ve been using my ipad as “the device” on the plane. I can listen to music, do some light email, read a book, etc. – you know the drill. However, as you can tell from my previous post, I can not use the ipad for everything that I need it to be: a real computer. I can’t do email, correctly. I can’t — well, simply put – I can’t create on the ipad. Now, I do know that there’s apps that let you do a lot of stuff, but when it comes down to word processing, spreadsheeting (that sounds wrong somehow), and presentation creating, the ipad just won’t do.

The dilemma I have is that my work laptop is a very generously provided 17″ MBP. It’s an awesome laptop. The screen is beautiful, the horsepower is amazing, the hard disk size is stupendous, etc., etc. But – it’s big. Too big. I can’t open it in rookie class on the plane unless I happen to sit on an exit row. Even then, that means that I’m giving up the meager refreshments that are served to us during the flight. That laptop consumes all of my generous space allocation. I have on occasion gotten a drink and played the very dangerous balancing game of putting the drink on my laptop.

Enter the MacBook Air 11.6″. I’ve just come into possession of one. It is clearly an amazing piece of technology. The form factor is truly hard to describe, unless you actually hold one and use one. You do sacrifice a ton: screen real estate, cpu horsepower, storage space, and ports. My specimen happens to be a top of the line 1.6GHz, 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM unit. In my mind – those are essentially minimum specs. They happen to be the maximum at this point, but they are what they are. That said, what you gain for that sacrifice is an laptop that you can actually forget you have in your hand. I closed it and was walking from my office to the kitchen when my daughter waylaid me and we started talking. 20 minutes later, I’m still standing there, and the laptop was honestly forgotten in my hand. It’s that light. That’s very cool.

I’ve been using it for a couple of days now. Battery life on this is rated at 5 hours. That turns out to be 5 real hours in my experience. As in, I did just about anything I would normally do during a day of using the laptop and it gave me about 5 hours. That’s actually fricking amazing. There’s few flights that I take that are much longer than 5 hours – and I suspect that if I’m careful with wifi, bluetooth, etc. I can get much more. The CPU you get on this is surprisingly fast. My office productivity apps (MS and Apple) all fire up nearly instantly – even the first time after a reboot. All thanks to that cool SSD drive. My spreadsheets are not monster computationally challenging things. My presentations are kinda creative, but don’t require supercomputer’s worth of processing to deliver. And even though I do create some pretty complex Word documents – everything is fast enough. I mean, can I tell the difference between this and my 27″ Core i7 Imac? You bet – but the beauty of it is – that I can use that whenever I’m home. I can usually reserve the long sessions of content creation to when I am around the super ‘puter. The 11″ air is way more than good enough. And that’s cool.

oh and what about doing that email thing?

That is honestly, my number one annoyance with the pad. I can use it, just like I use my iphone, for quick emails and status checks. I can’t use it for real email. That means doing real answers – which includes a lot of typing, documents, replies, flagging of importance, and filing of emails.

Does the 11″ do this? Yes! It does, it’s a full computer. The whole thing. I mean everything. I can CREATE, FILE, DO IT ALL!!!

I’m giddy with excitement for having this cool thing.

one more thing

It’s so small I can actually take it to bed. When I’m done using it, I close it and lay down on my nightstand. Without having to do the one arm sweep of everything else so it will fit. I wrote this whole article – in bed. My lap is not scorched. And I like it.

I like it a lot.

so what do you do with the other computers?

The iMac will remain as the main production ‘puter. The 17″ MBP, will become the playground/take it on the road when you know you will need to do heavy duty content creation computer. The 11″ will become the default travel companion along with the iPad. Media consumption will remain on the iPad. That’s what it’s made fore and it’s much better than OSX computers.

More on this once I actually travel with this thing.

Sorry for the length. Had to get it out while I was thinking about it.

I’m back (and a review of the ZaggMate)

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything to this blog. Sorry about that. Had some issues with hackers, patience, a new baby, and laziness. It happens.

Things have changed much since I last wrote: baby, new mbp, imac, mac mini, iphone, and ipad. Yes, Apple has my garnished my wages in a very interesting way.

So – I figured a review would be a good way to bring this back to life. I love my iPad and I’ve been looking for a way to turn it into “the” tool to use while I’m flying. I really hate to lug around my 17″ MBP, specially on day trips. However, the iPad by itself is not really that efficient of a machine for me to sort the 100’s of emails. The onscreen keyboard is also difficult to use if you are trying to write anything but just a few sentences (better than an iPhone, but much less than a real keyboard). Zagg introduced the ZaggMate and some of the reviews said it was cool. I found out you could get one at a bestbuy and I did. My hopes were that it was going to at least let me reduce my backpack load down to two things: ipad+zaggmate and Clear hot spot. I tried it and this is what came of it:

The good:

• The fit and overall polish is very high. It looks like it was made for the ipad.
• The keyboard is pretty responsive and can keep up with me at my fastest, but that’s a limited thing because of some of the downsides
• Battery life is rated at months and recharge time is very quick.
• There are several function keys that are built into the keyboard that are nice touches: volume keys, media keys (ipod control) and screen keyboard controls.
• Having a full keyboard makes things like SSH eminently usable now. Also using text note utilities that do things like Markdown are much more usable. You no longer need a special app, just to get the markdown symbols.
• The case+ipad = real thin.

The bad:

• The keyboard is not full sized, so it takes some getting used to. I definitely can not type as fast as I can with a real full sized keyboard. However, it is much faster than the onscreen keyboard.
• There is no cutout for the headphone. That means that to use the ipad as an audio device, you have to take it out of the case. There’s not way to fit the case and the audio plugins at the same time. Period.
• Once you take the ipad out of the case, you can not flip it over and put it back in the case. Basically, unless you are using it as a stand, you can not use the case. On my flight, before we took off, I had to take the ipad out, put the keyboard in the seat back and wait until we were up in the air before I could use it.
• The f’ing caps lock key! The keyboard is small already and it’s really easy to hit the caps lock key. I don’t need that key. I wish there was a way to turn it off or remap it like there is in OSX.
• The osx mail.app keyboard shortcuts don’t work. So – you use the keyboard only to type stuff in. Sending, moving, replying, deleting, etc are all done through screen interactions.- The back of the ipad is not protected while it’s in the case. You can get another thingy, but those are another $30-$70
• The plastic thing that props the ipad up feels very cheap. I don’t trust it to survive in the long run

The final result = me returning the case this weekend. Cool experiment, but not really all there. The killers for me:

• No back protection
• No way for it to latch on the back when you are not using the keyboard
• No audio hole
• Flimsy build of the stand thing

I’ve been far to quiet here for way too long. So, to kick things back up, here’s my redo of my most essential mac software. I’m doing this because this one post is the most visited page/entry to my blog. For those of you new to here, thanks and welcome. Hopefully you’ll find what I post here useful. If you compare this to my original post, you’ll see that this list has grown quite a bit. That’s a good thing. It probably shows that Mac software has come along a long way and also that the quality has gone up along the way.

Essentials

1. QuickSilver – It’s way hard to describe this tool, but I can’t imagine using a Mac without it. Think of it as speed for your Mac. There’s definitely a learning curve to this, but once you get over it, you won’t ever go back (free)
2. Adium – Premium, way cool, instant messenger. Supports Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Jabber, Google, + many others (free)
3. NetNewsWire – a very powerfull RSS reader, that also has an iPhone companion. They sync over a free service. (free)
4. Transmit – IMHO, the best mac FTP client out there. It costs bucks, but they are worth it (check the next item for a free, almost as good program).
5. Cyberduck – The FTP/SFTP client for Macs (free)
6. Xee – The fastest, most feature rich image viewer I have been able to find for the Mac. (free)
7. Firefox – if Safari won’t do it, this will (free)
8. HandBrake – The easiest way to rip, transcode, and store DVD’s. Can be used for video iPods as well. (free)
9. Unison – a great USENET news reader. Very Mac like interface, but has some odd edges to it
10. MacVIM – The VI clone now with a real Mac GUI (Cocoa based). (free)
11. VLC – The opensource Video viewer. If this doesn’t play it, you can’t play it on a Mac. (free)
12. Flip4Mac – Microsoft has stopped supporting their video player and is now giving this as a Quicktime plugin instead. This works better than the media player ever did, but doesn’t work with DRM content. (free)
13. CoRD – The best Mac RDP (Windows Remote Desktop Protocol) client out there. Simply great. Make sure to use one of the daily builds, they seem stable for me and bring much needed functionality. (free)CoRD – The best Mac RDP (Windows Remote Desktop Protocol) client out there. Simply great (free)
14. Calibre – if you use an ebook reader (like I do), this is THE tool to manage your collection, convert it, and up/download it to your device (supports Sony, Kindle, and many others). (free)
15. iCHM – An actively developed, fast, Cocoa based CHM document reader. If you don’t know what a CHM is, then you don’t need this. If you do, you must get this. (free)
16. RapidWeaver – think iWeb done right. Think “build a web site fast, simple”. Think “there’s much hidden power”.
17. Shimo – if you use VPN on your Mac, you need this to take care of it. It works with Cisco clients (lays on top of it) and many other VPN protocols (natively). Must have for us corporate users. (shareware)
18. DropBox – a free service and utility to keep multiple computer’s data sync’d. They have Mac, Windows, and Linux clients as well as a Web interface. 2GB free space. More if you pay for it.
19. iStatMenus – do you hate that you don’t know your memory usage, or if your hard disk is doing anything, or the temperature of your mac, or …. you get the idea. Free utility that sits on your menu bar and shows monitors for anything you want on your computer (free)
20. 1Password – keep all of your passwords for all of your web-sites, accounts, etc. Autofills on Safari and Firefox (if you want). Also has a free iPhone companion you can sync with.
21. ShoveBox – another one that’s hard to describe, but think of this as the place you shove, store, write all those little notes, links, screen grabs that you don’t know where to keep but know that you will need at some other point.
22. Little Snitch – so, you have a firewall protecting what information comes in to your computer – Little Snitch does the same for the stuff going out of your computer.

Cool

1. ecto – A blog editor. WYSIWYG and HTML formats. Let’s you edit with spell checking and live previews. (shareware)
2. ImageWell – a simple, fast, well tuned image editor for bloggers (and anyone else that doesn’t need to ‘shop images) (shareware)
3. SeaShore – a simple, fast, image editor for when you do need to do simple ‘shopping (free)
4. Gimp – The opensource image manipulation program. (free)
5. LaunchBar – Spotlight on steroids and then some (in my eyes a lesser, but simpler QuickSilver) (free)
6. MacTheRipper – Another DVD ripper. This one doesn’t transcode, but it does a superb job of de-DRM’ing your collection. (shareware)
7. TinkerTool – tinker with a zillion Mac options. (free)
8. NameMangler – if you ever have to rename a bunch of files and hate doing the click, click, click thing, or the cli reg-ex dance, this is the tool to fix it all (free)
9. OmniGraffle – The premier mac graphing tool. In many ways much better than Visio (which it can import and export to). A must if you have to deal with any schematic, styled, or hierarchical drawings.
10. ScreenFlow – If you ever need to capture a video of what you have on your screen, annotate it, and share it with the world (a.k.a. screen casting), this is most likely the only tool you’ll ever need.
11. SuperDuper! – A very powerful backup tool. This let’s you back up your hard drive to another very efficiently. You can also use it to upgrade your drive (will make the second drive bootable for you). (shareware)
12. TiVo Decode Manager – if you have TiVo, and you want to take your recorded TV shows with you, this is a free tool equivalent to TiVo To Go. (free)
13. JollysFastVNC – a super fast, very flexible VNC client. (free)
14. Max – do you ever convert from one audio format to another? Do you want to do it fast, simple, and have a good workflow for doing this (including tagging)? Here you go.

Nice-to-Have

1. Azureus – the best torrent client. (free)
2. BBEdit – the most feature rich native Mac editor. If it wasn’t for VIM, i’d use this all the time (shareware)
3. Opera – a very nice, fast, feature rich web browser. (free)
4. Path Finder – a Finder replacement. I would use this all the time if it was the built-in Finder. Many people use it exclusively. If Apple re-does the finder and gives is half of the features in this tool, we would all be that much better for it.
5. REALBasic – If you want to code apps, but don’t want to get into the details of XCode, Cocoa, and a steep learning curve, this is the tool. It has much coolness including the ability to develop on a Mac and deploy native apps to Linux and Windows (and vice versa). Free Linux version. Mac/Windows are paid.

Depecrated (stuff that was cool before 10.5)

1. Desktop Manager – Multiple virtual desktops with the coolest switch transitions. This alone has made people go “ooohhhh! I need a Mac” (free)
2. Thoth – It was my preferred news reader for a long time. It appears that development on it has resumed, but I have not looked at it in a long time.
3. Vim – The VI clone with a GUI interface. Already comes in a CLI format built in. Vim.org has the GUI version. (this is the original posting – a new better mac version is above). (free)
4. RDC Menu – Let’s you launch multiple windows remote desktop sessions at the same time. (free)
5. Spark – A key macro tool that lets you control your apps via keyboard shortcuts. I use it to control iTunes while it’s hidden. (free)

Outside of Safari.App, Mail.app, Microsoft’s Office, and iWork I spend 90% of my time in the stuff here.
Hope this helps you. If you see stuff that should be here, let me know. I’m always looking for other cool stuff.

And the iPhone is cool.

Still working through the decision process between ecto3 and marsedit.

I’m thinking I’m going to stay with ecto3 for now.

On the news side:

Started working my way through Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass. I’m about through the first 8 chapters. Things to know if you are going to be doing this:

• This isn’t like working with Delphi, Visual Basic, Real Basic, or any of the other “object oriented” systems. This is much different.
• You really should learn Objective-C first. Even though he says you should have a moderate knowledge of Objective-C, you really should spend time learning it well. The examples and “challenges” in this book assume a fair amount of knowledge. Some of the exercises and examples really don’t make that much sense until you spend time learning Objective-C.
• It really helps if you have access to the Apple documentation. For example, in chapter 8, you go through some really cool stuff on bindings. For me it was completely magical until I went through the Apple “Cocoa Bindings Programming Topics”, “Key Value Coding Programming Guide”, and “Key Value Observing Programming Guide”. Once I worked through the basics of those documents, chapter 8 went from being a really mystical, chant invoking exercise, to more programming with some occasional leaps of faith.
• Cocoa programming is based on some very extensive frameworks. If you are like me and you want to know how the frameworks work – don’t, yet. Just take some of the stuff as magic and assume that it works. Once I gave in to the “I’ll figure out how that works later” concept, this has started flowing better for me.

I’ll be posting more on this as I go through the exercises on this book. I’ve also started creating side challenges for myself to figure out how some of this stuff works. I’ll post those as well in case you need some additional views. Remember that I’m just learning this stuff so take this material as you would any other beginners: an example of how it possibly works correctly. To get you started, here’s a simple program that I wrote that uses a couple of controls, and a text field. The first one uses bindings to get it’s job done. The second one is the exact same, but uses an Object Controller to mediate the bindings. For me, until I saw both of these simple projects working, I couldn’t really “get” the different between just plain bindings and what an object controller bought for you. Check them out: myBindingsFun and myControllerFun.

Hope that helps someone

It’s hard to decide between ecto and marsedit. So I’m going to try marsedit for a little bit and see if it does better.

Note that Ecto is in late beta for version 3 which is complete rewrite. That means more fun for me while I try both of them out.

Have to tell you that so far, marsedit 2.1.2 seems a little bit easier to use and has a better preview mode.

Turns out that the Wiimote can be connected to the Mac via bluetooth. Apparently, there’s a ton of cool things you can do with this, including control all of the functions on your mac. You can use DarwiinRemote to pair the mote and nunchuck up. With it you can control VLC and most other media programs. Pair it up with RemoteBuddy and just about anything is possible.

If that’s not cool enough, some people have paired it up with some seriously cool audio processing tools (KymaX) with OSCulator. I’m in nerdery heaven. Check out this video:

That’s cool, but this stuff on the PC is even better. Someone – please port Johnny Lee’s stuff over: