I like the ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup App for the iPhone more than I expected.  Perhaps that's because the so-called reviewers in the iTunes App Store were almost universal in their condemnation of this free app.  That's not surprising, considering the fact that the app contains the option of purchasing significant additional functionality for US$ 7.99.  A lot of the reviewers consider these features, such as live game statistics, to be core to an application like this one.

This is the live game score between Honduras and Chile
on June 16. There is very little information about
matches in progress that's available in the free version
of the ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup app.

But when I looked at the app closely, I found a number of useful features available for free.  This justifies keeping it on my phone and looking at it regularly during the tournament.

The infamous part of the ESPN World Cup app is the "Get the Full World Cup Experience" dialog. This box seems to pop up everywhere when you first start using the iPhone app. The dialog box says Upgrade to get all of the live audio, in-game video highlights, play-by-play commentary, and alerts for all 64 matches Dig into detailed field visualization, watch studio analysis, and more! You can't miss it.

It's frustrating when this dialog pops up because the app's controls give no indication of what is and what is not premium content. All they needed to do was embed a padlock icon in each control that is inoperative without the $7.99 in app purchase. More after the photo montage and the jump.

Continue reading "Using The ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup App for the iPhone" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My latest Inside iPhone post is called How an iPhone Can Help You Be More Productive When Commuting Via Mass Transit. One of the things I talk about in that post is the power of using location-based contexts within the OmniFocus for iPhone application.

I realized while writing the Inside iPhone piece that setting locations for contexts within OmniFocus for iPhone 1.0.1 is not straightforward. So I thought I would expand upon that issue here in this post.

The Fundimentals of Context Location

Each context within OmniFocus for iPhone can have a location associated with it. The location can be:

• the iPhone's current location,
• a street address,
• an address associated with a contact in the Address Book, or
• a business name retrieved from a search conducted using Google.

The location of contexts is set on a hierarchical basis, so I set the location of my home at the "Home" level of the context tree rather than at each sub-context.

Errands Context: Set locations of the contexts in the
Errands list by tapping "Edit" on this screen.

Establishing a Context Location

I set the location of a context by tapping on the "Contexts" choice on the OmniFocus home screen. OmniFocus presents the top level of my context hierarchy. I descend through the context hierarchy by tapping until I reach the list of contexts containing the context whose location I want to set.

I'm talking about my "Errands" contexts in this article. These are stores and service providers that I do business with often. Most of them have definite physical locations that I go to on a regular basis.

In this article, we're talking about my "Target" context. This is where I put my shopping list of products I buy at a Target Store.

If I want to set the location of the "Target" context, I need to stay on this screen and tap the "Edit" button. Once I tap "Edit", I can tap the "Target" element in the list and go to the screen where I set the location of the Target context.

Continue reading "Assigning Locations to OmniFocus iPhone Contexts" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the few nagging problems I've experienced with my iPhone is a photo saving problem. This has been described in several different ways by other iPhone users out on the Internet:

• iPhone "disappearing photos" bug experienced by Jeffrey Zeldman back in November 2007.
• iPhone Camera Problems: Blank White Thumbnails mentioned in June on iPhoneGuru.org

This problem started happening to me a couple of weeks ago when I was still running iPhone Firmware 1.0. I had hoped that the 2.0 Firmware Update would solve this problem, but it didn't. At that point I had to start doing serious research, otherwise my camera would have been useless to me.

Apparently there is some recurring issue with saving photos taken with the internal iPhone camera once more than 1023 photos have been saved. In my case, the problem started happening when the LastFileGroupNumber was at 1043. It is not clear to me whether all iPhones have this problem, if all first-generation iPhones have it, or if this is only affecting users of the first-generation iPhone under certain circumstances.

The best solution to this problem that I've found so far was first discussed in Topic : Camera will not save pictures to phone after snapping photo, an Apple support discussion. About a quarter of the way into the thread, a contributor named "JKeenan" said the following:

Continue reading "A Solution for iPhone Photo Saving Problems" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Screenshot of Twitterific Application on my iPhone: This
is a screenshot of the new Twitterific Application installed
on my iPhone after I performed the 2.0 Firmware Update.
[ Screenshot: Dave Aiello on Flickr ]

I found a way to access the iPhone 2.0 Firmware in advance of the official release through iTunes. I decided to give the upgrade a try and liveblog it on Twitter. You can see the transcript of this on twitter.com/daiello.

I had complete success with the installation. I was able to install Epocrates Rx, Twitterific, and Evernote. The preceding links are to screenshots of each application on my Flickr account.

The most interesting feature addition I've found in the iPhone 2.0 firmware is in the Calendar. Calendar now shows which iCal calendar each event comes from. Here's a screenshot I posted to my Flickr account that illustrates this feature.

I would provide details on how to perform the 2.0 Firmware update yourself, but Apple has asked other websites to take down the information that they previously provided about where to get the firmware image. I have no interest in repeating information that Apple is actively trying to quash.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Cool Tool: StrollAway on Cool Tools: "... Once we got this hook, rather than just parking our stroller in the kitchen or dining room, we created a set, out-of-the-way place to store it. And since it's off the floor, that gives us more space to fill up with more baby stuff. The hook is strong (we have a Quinny Buzz stroller, which weighs abouts 15 lbs.). It doesn't require drilling or mounting into anything, since it hangs over the top a door....." Great idea.
• SightSpeed Goes Mainstream with Dell Video Chat « on Web Worker Daily: "... The SightSpeed software installed easily on my Mac, and the video conversation with Mr. Csathy was crisp, smooth and effortless as compared to any I’ve tried with Skype. He had a fancy headset, but I was just using the MacBook Pro’s built-in speakers and microphone. For once, video conferencing felt approachable to me beyond Apple iChat...." This article has a good screen cap of the theme that Dell applied to SightSpeed's software. [ Found out about the Dell / SightSpeed deal from friend Andy Abramson ]
• Access And Share Files With Box.net on The Apple Phone Show: "I have tried several online file store and share solutions since getting my iPhone almost a year ago now. Box.net seems to be the one application that has endured time. I like using it to store and share my most important files and collaborate on work. I’m still getting used to moving my workflow entirely online. I am used to have files that I can access stored locally on all of my devices. But, times they are ‘a changing. The reason I think I have continued using this service and have let others fall by the wayside is because the interface is so simple...." I have to try this.
• iPhone as Pedometer on Inside iPhone: "A short while ago, I discovered that Wii Fit could be used to track my progress as I walked on a treadmill. Wii Fit has a game where you jog in place in front of your TV to travel through a virtual landscape. Instead of bouncing up and down on the floor, I put my wiimote in my pocket, hopped on the treadmill and had a much better virtual exercise experience. And of course this got me thinking: if the wii can track movement, why can't the iPhone do the same?" Cool idea. Interesting execution.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've seen a several tweets and articles today stating that Apple is advocating a Javascript-based Model View Controller framework for web development called SproutCore. Reports indicate that Apple based the MobileMe web application announced at WWDC on SproutCore and provided details on the framework in sessions at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference last week in San Francisco.

AppleInsider has a very good article called Apple's open secret: SproutCore is Cocoa for the Web that goes into some details about why Apple is so interested in SproutCore and why Apple may be switching some of the animation and special effects on its website to SproutCore from other frameworks like Prototype and Scriptaculous.

That article lead me to SproutCore - Feature Rich Javascript Framework, which says that SproutCore is a JavaScript implementation of the Cocoa framework commonly used in MacOS X application development.

This article in turn pointed to Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore from RoughlyDrafted Magazine which explains why Apple would prefer to use HTML, Javascript, and CSS rather than Flash to implement rich internet applications on the web.

It's pretty clear from this article that Apple not only wants to avoid becoming dependent upon Flash or Silverlight so that it can control its own destiny, but that it wants to use a Javascript framework like SproutCore to build web applications that usurp some of the power of the Windows platform by making Windows less and less necessary. Check out some of the comments to this article if you want to really get into why Apple is making the strategic architecture bets that it is on the future of MacOS X.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over on The Apple Phone Show Blog, Liana Lehua suggested that iPhone fans buy a copy of .Mac from Amazon.com now in order to access MobileMe when it goes live in July. It looks like you'll save about $30 if you do this.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a bit of a kick out of the latest installment of Mossberg's Mailbox, Do Macs Last Longer Than Windows PCs?. In it, a reader asks:

Do Macs last longer than Windows PCs? I am willing to pay the additional cost for a Mac if it will last significantly longer, but if it has approximately the same lifespan as a PC from a reputable manufacturer, I will stay with PCs.

Walt answers by saying that he hasn't noticed a "significant difference" in the length of service that PCs and Macs provide, that Macs are generally considered high product-quality devices, and that PCs vary in quality depending on the manufacturer.

I think Walt Mossberg is either being too polite to his reader, or he is taking the question at face value in the interest of saving space in the print edition of The Wall Street Journal.

I think a more helpful way to answer the question is as follows:

The value of owning a Mac instead of a PC is in the quality of the experience of using a Mac every day, or the enhanced personal productivity that can be yours when using Mac OS X instead of Windows Vista. This includes the value of the iLife '08 software that ships free with all Macs, and represents a substantial value compared with the photo, video, and audio editing features of Windows XP or Vista.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jonathan Greene pointed out iTunes Agent in his Twitter feed. iTunes Agent is an Open Source Windows application that extends iTunes to allow it to work with third-party MP3 players and mobile phones. According to the website:

iTunes is a great music player and organizer. Unfortunately iTunes is made to only synchronize with iPods. Not everyone own an iPod.... How great would it not be if you could synchronize your non-iPod MP3 player, your Playstation Portable and your Walkman phone with your iTunes Library? Enter: iTunes Agent!

iTunes Agent requires the .NET 2.0 Final Framework to operate properly.

I like the idea because I like iTunes as a media management application.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article in its Tuesday edition about a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could have a profound impact on online fantasy sports. The article says that Major League Baseball and the Players Association have been fighting for three years to limit the number of companies offering online fantasy baseball games. They apparently attempted to use a strategy that combined strict licensing terms with high fees.

A year ago, a company called CDM Fantasy Sports Corp won the right to use statistical information without paying a license fee. Major League Baseball appealed to the Supreme Court. The Court just rejected the appeal without comment.

The article goes on to say:

In taking on the fantasy-baseball operators, and losing, MLB has likely cost every pro sports league millions of dollars. All the leagues had been getting fees from fantasy operators.

The first few times I read this, I assumed that the reporter meant that MLB shouldn't have appealed the lower court's decision. Now I suspect that the strategy being questioned question is the attempt to license statistics more strictly and increase fees.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Sixty-Six on Daring Fireball: "The idea that Apple now sells two-thirds of retail computers costing $1000 or more is simply stunning. I (along with many others) have long argued that a simplistic “overall PC market share” number has never been a good metric for gauging the Mac’s success because the “overall PC market” includes millions of commodity-level low-end machines that Apple neither tries nor wants to sell."
• Making Your Mark in a Web 2.0 World on Web Worker Daily: This article describes the building of a Social Media Resume, a personal website that includes links to your LinkedIn or Facebook profile page, as well as photos or video from websites like Flickr and Viddler. I relaunched DaveAiello.com about two weeks ago, but didn't realize that creating this kind of site is an emerging trend.
• Mac OS X Services (the menu you never go to) on Random Tech: "There's a whole hidden side of text modification that is stashed away, yet right at your fingertips. If you go to the Application menu (if you're in Safari, click the menu 'Safari') -> Services, a whole list pops down. You've probably disregarded this in the past (if you've ever seen it) because most of the options are grayed out, or unclickable. All you need to do is highlight some text. Go back to the menu and there are so many to choose from!"

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the utilities programs that veteran Mac users swear by is Quicksilver which at first glance appears to be a keyboard-based application launcher.

It turns out that QuickSilver can be used for a great deal more than application launching, but a lot of the productivity that you can gain from it isn't at all obvious.

One of the best tools I've found to understand Quicksilver are two video podcasts from the MacBreak series. The first and longest one is MacBreak Episode 12: Quicksilver, which is available on iTunes, but is also available on Google Video (not YouTube):

In this episode you get to see how Merlin Mann selects something on his Mac by typing its name using Quicksilver, and then selects a command to perform on it. You can think of the the first action (a search) done in Quicksilver as the subject of a sentence, while the section action (selection of a command) is the verb.

Continue reading "MacBreak Video Shows Finer Points of Quicksilver Utility for the Mac" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple released MacOS X Version 10.5.3 earlier today. I first learned about the release when I was checking out Summize for the first time and saw references to Mac OS X and Leopard on the home page as "trending topics".

MacWorld has a good summary of the important fixes and new features included in the update. However, I performed the update before the Macworld article came out. I made the decision to take the update after I read through the About the Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update article in the Apple Knowledge Base.

Whenever a software developer like Apple releases a major update, I look at the list of fixes to see if any of them are must-haves for me. The fix that caused me to start the update process immediately related to Spaces:

Resolves an issue in which switching to a different space and returning back to the original space may reorder the application windows with a different active window.

This bug was a significant productivity drain for me. I often switch back and forth between the space where I keep Mail.app and the space where I do my blog writing or the space where I do web development. Every time I returned to a space, the active window changed from the one I had last used. I usually had to invoke Exposé to find the window I needed to use.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Polar Infrared Interface USB commonly
used with PCs running Windows XP doesn't
work on a Mac [ Photo: Dave Aiello on Flickr ]

The Polar Infrared Interface USB that many people got with their Polar S-Series heart rate monitors is a USB 1.1 device. I've been trying to use it without success on my MacBook Pro with Polar Precision Performance Software 4 running under Windows XP on VMware Fusion.

According to a number of articles that I've read, the only way to reliably get the Polar Infrared Interface USB to connect with a Polar heart rate monitor using Mac hardware is to boot into Windows XP directly from Boot Camp. No configuration of Windows XP under VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop 3.0 seems to work properly.

A number of people on the Polar user support forums have reported success when using the Polar IrDA USB 2.0 Adapter with PPP4 under Windows XP with either VMware Fusion or Parallels.

The biggest problem with the Polar IrDA USB 2.0 Adapter is its expense. In my opinion, a lot of Polar accessory products that aren't proprietary are similar to Apple-branded products; They are very nice looking and well-supported by the manufacturer, but not economical. Some purchasers of the Polar IrDA USB 2.0 Adapter agree that it's nice looking, but think documentation is very sparse.

A far less expensive IrDA-USB adapter that some people claim to have gotten working is the Cables Unlimited USB1510.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Kathleen and Jimmy looking at the iPhoto
book that we ordered for her mom. The
second copy arrived today. [ Photo: Dave
Aiello on Flickr. ]

Kathleen and I took advantage of an iPhoto Custom Photo Book promotion that Apple ran for Mother's Day. We ordered Kathleen's mother a hard cover photo book. We made sure we ordered before the April 30 cut off date for standard shipping.

Something happened to the order while it was in production and it didn't ship in time for delivery last Friday. When we realized this, Kathleen called Apple Customer Service.

Kathleen told the Apple customer service agent that we ordered before the deadline and that FedEx was reporting that the shipment was not going to arrive in time for us to give it as a gift on Mother's Day.

Here's what the person at Apple Photo Services Support wrote back after receiving a message from the main customer service group:

Dear Kathleen,

Thank you for your recent Apple photo order.

I understand that you submitted your order to us in time to be received by May 11th. You may have noticed that the tracking information for your order indicates the estimated delivery date is after May 11th.

To ensure that your order is received by May 11th, your order is being reprocessed free of charge and will be sent via expedited shipping. When it ships, you will receive a separate email with the tracking number for your duplicate order. Please accept both orders as a goodwill gesture.

I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. I hope you continue to enjoy using Apple Photo Services for your creative projects. If you have any questions or concerns, please reply to this email and we will assist you further.

Thank you for being a loyal Apple customer and have a wonderful day.

Sincerely,

Sofia
Apple Photo Services Support

http://www.apple.com/support/photoservices/ww

The replacement package arrived on Friday, overnighted from Elk Grove, CA. Kathleen's mom got the gift on time and she was thrilled.

The original iPhoto book arrived via FedEx Ground on Monday. Kathleen and I get to keep a beautiful book of photos of Jimmy and us, courtesy of Apple.

The photos books we ordered are truly first rate. The service we got is unbeatable. Kathleen never mentioned that I write a blog about computer technology, or that we know anybody who works for Apple. I think we got the service that Apple would give to any customer who had the same problem.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been using Twitter for several weeks, because there are things that friends of mine might be interested in hearing about that will never make it into an email or an Operation Gadget post.

Twitterific vs Spaz: These two desktop Twitter
clients that run on the Mac are competing for
space on my desktop. Only one will survive
the week. [ Screenshot by Dave Aiello on Flickr ]

It only took a few minutes of serious Twitter use for me to realize that I wanted a desktop client. It's easy to see which client friends are using, just visit http://twitter.com/daiello and look at one of my latest tweets:

The link to the word "Spaz" indicates that I used the Spaz client to post that tweet.

The two clients that I've tried so far are Twitterific and Spaz. Both run on the Mac, but take pretty different design approaches when you look at them closely.

Twitterific has been around longer, and it's a classic Cocoa application. This means that it runs only on MacOS X. It's closed source and ad supported unless you pay the $14.95 fee that the publisher wants you to pay.

I actually like the ads that are inserted periodically in my twit stream. They come from The DECK, the same ad network that is used on 37signals' network of web sites.

Twitterific is nice if you are a Mac user because of how well it integrates with all the other applications that a Mac geek like me is going to have installed. It integrates seemlessly with Growl, a kind of a notification manager that lots of Mac applications tie into.

Twitterific also configures itself as a Heads Up Display (or HUD). It does this by setting itself to float above the windows in front of it and using CSS opacity to allow windows underneath it to be viewed. That's a cool effect, and is particularly useful when used in conjunction with Leopard features like Spaces. When it's in this mode, it removes its icon from the Dock, which is nice because it makes the Dock a bit more concise.

Spaz is the newcomer. It's an open source Adobe AIR application. It looks nice, but doesn't have some of the MacOS X-specific features that Twitterific has. It's free and has no ads.

Continue reading "Twitterific vs Spaz: The Twitter Client Face-off on My Desktop" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a music video that's making the rounds of web sites I read:

The movement away from Windows and toward the Mac is still in it's early stages, so lots of people haven't seen all of these Mac applications before. My question is, does it make more sense as a music video or an ad for Leopard?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the best techniques for using an iPhone with a large iTunes library is to use Smart Playlists to automatically select tracks from your library according to logical rules. I discussed this in Use Smart Playlists for Endless Combinations of Christmas Music. I wanted to provide an update because I see a problem with this technique.

I have some Smart Playlists for rock music that I listen to sometimes when I'm running. However, I picked up some music as part of the Lance Armstrong: Run Longer workout (available from ) that's actually part of the "Alternative" genre that I want to include in these playlists.

The problem I ran into is that Alternative and Rock music go together in my mind, but they didn't end up together according to the way I had my rock-related Smart Playlists defined. The rules for my "Rock Favorites" Smart Playlist were:

• Match all of the following rules
• Genre contains Rock
• Rating is greater than ***
• Limit to 25 items selected by most played

If you want to add the Alternative genre, you can't just add a second genres rule in iTunes without changing the selection criteria to "Match any of the following rules", and then you lose the rating criteria.

The only way to choose two or more genres and include rating criteria is to exclude every other genre but the ones you want. This was discussed by Merlin Mann from 43Folders.com in 2006 in an article called "Music Only" for your iTunes playlists.

• Children's Music
• Classical
• Soundtrack
• Vocal
• Country
• Jazz
• Easy Listening
• Holiday
• Folk
• Miscellaneous

You might have to exclude more genres if your iTunes library is more diverse than mine.

I can see why Apple would design iTunes so that there is a simple one level logic to selection criteria for Smart Playlists, but the problem of how to combine music in closely related genres is made more complicated by iTunes' simplicity.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

• How to Eat Healthily at Top Chain Restaurants on Lifehacker: "The food experts at Health magazine have scoured the menus at popular restaurant chains in search of the healthiest foods on the menu, rounding up several healthy menu options at otherwise unhealthy chains."

  They found reasonably healthy choices at Denny's, Ruby Tuesday, and P.F. Chang's, among others.
• AT&T Providing Free Wi-Fi Access to iPhone Users - Mac Rumors on MacRumors: "A couple of readers have reported that AT&T hotspots are now offering free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users. Barnes and Noble, Starbucks and presumably AT&T's 71,000 other Wi-fi hotspot locations are now offering iPhone users a custom portal to access free Wi-Fi. A special iPhone formatted page asks for your mobile phone number. Once entered, you can access the Wi-Fi access for free."

• The "missing" iPhone ringtone on TUAW: "We've all seen the iPhone ads.... None are identical, but most have something in common. Namely, that peculiar ringtone. We call it peculiar because it isn't actually included with the iPhone. Luckily, most of us have it installed on our computers already."

  The article goes on to explain how to convert the Apple Loop that comes with GarageBand (part of iLife '08) into a ringtone for your iPhone.
• In search of a GTD solution on TUAW: Brett Terpstra's take on different ways you can integrate Mac apps and utilities into a Getting Things Done system. ".... This round of solution-searching began with a post by Dennis Best titled Getting things done (simply) in Leopard. It outlined a system where iCal calendars are your contexts (or areas of responsibility), To-dos are created in Mail, Mail Notes become projects, and Smart Mailboxes were used to interesting ends. It even had a tagging system, allowing for great flexibility. This was highly appealing to me given its close integration with my primary source of tasks and information: email...."
• Interactive GTD Software Comparison Table on Priacta.com: "102 Researched GTD Software Titles and Counting. Software listed here has been verified to support Getting Things Done and related systems...." Solutions on the web, Windows, Mac, handheld, Linux, and Python are documented. I'll have to look at why they breakout Python separately.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I bought my MacBook Pro at the end of February, it was one of the first Macs shipped that didn't include the Apple Remote. This meant that I would have to buy one for $30 at the Apple Store or less if I shopped around.

Remote Buddy iPhone Interface: one of the unique features
that sets Remote Buddy apart from other Mac remote
control software.

I decided that I would start using the MacBook Pro and see if I missed the Apple Remote.

Over the past few weeks, I've thought about buying an Apple Remote but not pulled the trigger. I haven't needed to make any Keynote presentations, and I don't use iTunes locally on my Mac enough to make it worthwhile because I use my iPhone so much.

One thing I hadn't counted on was finding a Mac application that made my iPhone into a remote control for my Mac. Remote Buddy provides a framework in which remote control actions for many Mac applications can live. It supports a number of remote control devices including:

• Apple Remote
• iPhone and iPod Touch
• Griffin Airclick
• Nintendo Wii Remote

This makes Remote Buddy quite similar to Salling Clicker, a program that has existed for a long time and has many of the same features.

What makes Remote Buddy different is the mini Ajax-based web application that ships with it. You can install this app on your Mac and use it to present a remote control user interface on a non-jailbroken iPhone. This is a really cool idea if you ask me.

I'm sure that lots of people who use a MacOS X-based computer and an iPhone won't need something like Remote Buddy. However, if you are using your Mac as an automation hub, you may find Remote Buddy very useful.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On our trip to Buffalo this weekend, Kathleen, Jimmy, and I stayed in two Marriott properties that had public WiFi networks. The thing I didn't like about them is that they are wide open networks which means anyone can join and do pretty much anything they want locally.

I have my MacBook Pro setup the way I want to use it when I am on my home office network. This means that I have iPhoto and iTunes sharing enabled, and a public folder available so that my wife can grab files from me or give me files without my intervention. I don't want these services to be advertised an available when I'm on a foreign WiFi network.

I turned off iPhoto and iTunes sharing manually when I went on line at the hotels. This only took a minute or two, but I don't want to have to remember to do it or to think about it. I'm almost positive that I'll forget to turn these services back on in many cases when I get home.

In order to batten down the hatches on my Mac, I need a couple of discrete pieces of software:

• Software to make my Mac "context-aware". The leading choices seem to be Marco Polo and Home Zone. My personal preference is for Marco Polo at the moment.
• Rules to identify when my Mac is at home and when it isn't at home. The easiest way to do this is to detect the MAC address of our Airport Extreme base station.
• Scripts to turn on and off the iTunes, iPhoto, and networking services, based on the context. I probably also want to step up the aggressiveness of the software firewall running on my Mac.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Wall Street Journal Business Technology Blog reports that Apple spent $844 million on research and development in 2007, significantly less than competitors Microsoft, IBM, H-P, Sun, and AMD. This is interesting because everybody and their brother has been touting Apple as a uniquely innovative company.

I think Apple succeeds so prolifically because it is especially focused on innovation in its core competencies. Lots of its competitors invest in research that doesn't make the same impact on their product lines as Apple's research does on Apple's products.

I think people have a tendency to criticize Apple for the wrong reasons. A lot of people complained about Apple delaying the release of OS X Leopard, and waiting until recently to release the iPhone SDK. Could they have shipped those products faster if they hired more engineers?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was one of the people who bought a Mac in the fiscal quarter that ended March 29. The last time I bought a Mac for myself was over 10 years ago. I guess wasn't alone, because The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple's quarterly earnings rose 36 percent, largely on the strength of Mac sales. Revenues grew 43 percent overall to approximately $7.42 billion.

There were some aspects of the Mac sales figures that I found hard to believe. Apple reported that it sold 51 percent more Macs in the quarter than in the same period a year earlier. They sold nearly $3.5 billion dollars worth of Macs in three months. Overall PC market growth was only 12 percent, so Apple is clearly stealing a significant share of the U.S. market from PC makers.

Apple sold 1.7 million iPhones during this period, which is about what analysts that follow the company had expected. The article goes on to say:

Apple executives said a 'significant' portion of its iPhone sales continue to involve consumers who 'unlock' the iPhone to work on unauthorized wireless networks, especially overseas in countries such as China, where the iPhone isn't yet available from Apple.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ars Technica published a terrific article by Peter Bright that illustrates why the Mac platform is growing at the expense of Windows. According to the article:

Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it—that's the argument. The truth is that Windows is hampered by 25-year old design decisions. These decisions mean that it's clunky to use and absolutely horrible to write applications for. The applications that people do write are almost universally terrible. They're ugly, they're inconsistent, they're disorganized; there's no finesse, no care lavished on them. Microsoft—surely the company with the greatest interest in making Windows and Windows applications exude quality—is, in fact, one of the worst perpetrators.

The author's perspective is not unique. What makes this article more interesting is his next conclusion:

The unfortunate thing about this is that there is a company that's not only faced similar problems but also tackled them. Apple in the mid-1990s was faced with an operating system that was going nowhere, and needed to take radical action to avoid going out of business. And so that's what Apple did.

This article goes on to discuss this history of the Mac and Windows platforms from 1997 on, and fairly concisely explains how Microsoft squandered what appeared to be an insurmountable architectural lead over Apple. It also explains how the third-party Mac software community rose from shareware roots, riding the momentum of MacOS X from about 10.3 on.

There's a reason why practically every thought leader on the Internet is a Mac user in 2008: the quality of the user experience. This is not marketing hype. You can see little examples of it everywhere when you look over a Mac user's shoulder. What Apple started with MacOS X and continued with its iLife, iWork, and Professional-series applications, has been continued and driven forward by the third-party developer community and its full scale embrace of the Cocoa application framework.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is April 15, a date that quite a few different tax authorities in the United States have picked as the deadline for filing annual tax returns. I had to file several returns today, including:

• U.S. Federal Income Tax for my wife and me
• Pennsylvania State Income Tax for my wife and me
• Pennsylvania Local Earned Income Tax for my wife and me
• New Jersey Corporate Business Tax for a company that I partially own

Due to slightly higher than expected income in 2007, my wife and I owed a small amount to the Federal, State, and Local tax authorities. I paid these taxes using my credit card through Pay1040.com, a payment provider closely associated with H&R Block and the TaxCut tax preparation program, and Official Payments Corporation, the payment provider most commonly used by tax authorities in the United States.

Pay1040.com successfully processed my Federal Income Tax payment using the Safari browser that is installed on my wife's MacBook. She is still using MacOS X 10.4, but all of the software updates have been applied so she is on Safari 3.1. That's good news, because this is the first time I have used Pay1040.com and I didn't expected a relatively small provider to have a Safari-friendly payment process.

TaxCut's Pennsylvania Tax Preparation Software didn't even offer the option of paying by credit card, so I had to file on paper and use the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue's website to initiate a credit card payment. Their chosen payment partner is Official Payments.

At Official Payments' website, I found that I couldn't make a payment with Safari at all despite the fact that there was no indication that Safari was not a supported browser. I could never get to the page where I could confirm my payment details on either my wife's MacBook running OS X 10.4 or my fully updated MacBook Pro running Leopard.

I had to switch over to Firefox on my Mac in order to pay what I owed the State of Pennsylvania.

I took advantage of web-based electronic filing offered by the local tax administrator serving my town-- a company called Berkheimer Tax Administrator, Inc.. Berkheimer performs this service for lots of towns, school districts, and emergency services districts within Pennsylvania.

Safari didn't work for interacting with their electronic filing site, and I had to use Firefox to complete the forms. When time came to pay, however, I was warned that the interaction between Berkheimer's electronic filing solution and Official Payments would only work in Internet Explorer. So, I had to save my session, fire up VMware Fusion, launch IE 7 in Windows XP, login to Berkheimer's e-filing site, pickup my session where I left off, and make the payment. Forcing someone to use a PC for any step of a tax filing process is simply unacceptable in 2008.

Surprisingly, The New Jersey Division of Taxation had the most Safari-friendly payment system I experienced. They also use Official Payments, but they created their own front end to it. This front end is very simple and apparently had none of the browser-specific JavaScript that is present on Official Payments' own site. I was surprised because other aspects of the New Jersey state government are pretty IE specific.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Ode To A Burrito -- Chipotle Mexican Grill on Fast Company: "Good food wrapped in a socially responsible message has created legions of Chipotle fans -- and a superhot business. Acquired by McDonald's in 1998 when there were only 14 Chipotles, the company went public in 2006 with 500 stores and watched its stock rise from $22 to $110 in 18 months. The now-independent outfit is enjoying an 80% revenue run-up over three years....

  "Chipotle has achieved these impressive stats by spurning fast-food orthodoxy. Workers make each burrito by hand, which leads to long lines of customers waiting far beyond the four-minute industry standard. Turns out, that's not a problem for many customers." There aren't many Chipotles in Pennsylvania, but one just opened in Warrington, in the same complex with one of our two closest Wegman's. Why can't we eat there more often? [ via 37signals SVN ]
• Forwarding voicemails? on 37signals SVN: "Visual Voicemail on the iPhone is a huge step forward for voicemail, but it still feels a bit last generation. It’s still about the static message that sits in your box. You can’t forward it along, you can’t email it to yourself, you can’t even play it to someone else who’s on the phone with you." Great points.
• 15 Features of the Perfect Work Space on LifeDev: "8. No clutter - Clutter is an aesthetic problem as well as a mental problem. Cluttered work spaces give create cluttered thinking. Your mind will never be as clear as it could be with a messy, unorganized environment. This also includes your desktop clutter as well." My only question about the article is: why is "no clutter" feature number 8 and not higher on the list?
• Household: De-Clutter with a Six-Month "Maybe Box" on Lifehacker: "I can vouch for the power of hidden non-necessities. My garage has served as a de facto "Maybe" space for most of this winter, leading my house toward a serious garage sale this spring."
• The Cost of Working In a Digital World on LifeDev: "A very important article has been written by The New York Times showing the hazards of being a web worker. Without boundaries and carefult attention to our Internet usage, we can quickly find our health declining. Prolific blogger Om Malik, who suffered some life-threatening health problems late last year, shares some insights his doctor gave as to why web workers have health problems."
• #1 Song on This Date in History from Josh Hosler: "What was the #1 song on ... the day you were born? the day you graduated from high school? the day you were married? the day your child was born? the approximate date you were conceived?" Awesome site. [ via Pogue's Posts and Alltop Gadgets ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day I was looking forward to watching NHL playoff games, and started thinking about how much fun it would be to watch Hockey Night in Canada on the CBC instead of Versus.

I went over to CBC.ca and watched the HNIC Playoff Preview Show on the CBC Sports Video Player. The player is a Flash-based application that sits in your browser of choice. After a brief video introduction, the Hockey Night in Canada Opening was shown. This is a series of highlights playing over the Hockey Night in Canada Theme Song. The opening sequence lasted about 45 seconds.

Occasionally I hear people talking about trying to buy the Hockey Night in Canada theme as their ringtone for their mobile phone. Nobody I know has it as their ringtone on their iPhone. I decided to try to use Mac software to create an iPhone ringtone of the actual Hockey Night in Canada Theme as broadcast by the CBC. I had no idea how easy this would turn out to be.

Before I describe this technique, I want to warn you that distributing copyrighted material such as the Hockey Night in Canada Theme Song is probably illegal where you live. However, no one can stop you from making an iPhone ringtone for your own personal use using the following technique.

The software I used to make this ringtone was Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba Software ($32 direct from the developer) and GarageBand '08 which is part of the iLife '08 software suite from Apple.

Audio Hijack Pro allows you to intercept (or hijack) the audio output of any application running on your Mac, and save it as an MP3 file. I hijacked the audio output of Safari and captured the Hockey Night in Canada Theme Song in about as much time as it took to locate the Opening in the program and then watch and listen to that opening.

Once I had the MP3 file, I brought it into GarageBand '08 and did the following:

1. I positioned the MP3 on the timeline so that the beginning of the song was at time 0:00.
2. I clicked the button called "Cycle Region" in the second set of controls below the timelines. That button needs to be clicked to "on" before a ringtone can be created.
3. I clicked and dragged the region of the time bar representing the music I wanted as part of my ringtone. I learned from Googling around that the sound had to be 40 seconds or less in duration, so I made sure that I only selected that amount of time in the time bar.
4. I chose "Send Ringtone to iTunes" from the "Share" menu.

This last step automatically exported the music clip as a ringtone and caused iTunes to import it. The next time I synced my iPhone, the custom ringtone was automatically transferred to it.

Once that was done, I could designate my Hockey Night in Canada ringtone as my default ringtone. Better yet, I decided to make it a ringtone unique to some of my friends from hockey and hockey officiating.

The true power of this technique is that you can capture and convert into a ringtone any sound that your Mac can play for you. This means the entire repertoire of YouTube is at your disposal, as well as things like Hulu, current programming from all of the major networks, and things like CBS Classic TV episodes.

I'm thinking of making a ringtone of the Hawaii Five-O Theme Song or the Love that Good n' Plenty Jingle from the 1960s next. [ Hat tip to The Mac Observer for their article Making Custom Ringtones with GarageBand ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• For the Phinney Family, a Dream and a Challenge on NYTimes.com: This story came out last week, right before Taylor Phinney raced in the Individual Pursuits at the Track Cycling World Championships. Taylor finished eighth. His father, Davis, is a legendary U.S. cycling champ who has struggled with Parkinson's Disease in recent years. This article summarizes their recent struggles and successes.
• ScreenFlow: The Killer Screencasting App on MacTips: "ScreenFlow is the application I've been waiting for on the Mac. I've been using it recently for the MacTips Videos and I love it! It's saves me so much time because I'm able to focus on creating valuable content rather than editing videos."
• Dash’s Car Navigator Gives Smart Directions, if Others Participate, Walt Mossberg on AllThingsD: "As smart as in-car navigation devices are, they could be smarter. They could talk to each other via the Internet and share information on how fast traffic is moving on the roads they have just traveled.... Starting this week, just such a smarter navigation box is hitting the market. Called the Dash Express, this $400 product looks a lot like units from better-known firms... But, unlike any other in-car navigation device I’ve seen, each Dash Express... becomes part of a network, connected to the company via the Internet. "
• Windows XP: Going, going ... gone? on Computerworld: "The approaching death of Windows XP may upset you, but it shouldn't come as a surprise. Microsoft Corp.'s product life-cycle guidelines have foretold the fate of XP since 2001. In fact, Microsoft has been killing off one version of a product as it is replaced with another for years now. But this time around, the approaching demise of XP is getting more attention than, say, the final passing of Windows 2000."
• Coming Soon to a Phone Near You on WSJ.com: This article summarizes forthcoming developments in mobile phone voice control, improved web browsers, enhanced storage, and video sharing. [ Subscription may be required to read this article. ]
• How To Use Nokia’s Sports Tracker as a Photo Tracker on The Gadgets Page: "Ms. Jen was part of Nokia’s Urbanista Diaries Relay, which means they sent her to India to promote the Nokia N82 in all its glory. While on the trip, she realized how well the Sports Tracker (a typically exercise related feature) could be used to track the geo-locations of your photos"
• Note to readers: Today would be my grandfather James M. Lynch, Jr.'s 95th birthday. He died in 1982. He is one of the inspirations for this site, since he bought and tried every important electronic gadget that existed in the 1970s. He owned the first digital watch, desktop calculator, and personal computers I ever saw.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I uploaded a favicon for Operation Gadget a little while ago. I used a program called Pixen to make it on my MacBook Pro. Pixen is donationware.

The "Operation Gadget" title on the Alltop Gadgets Page looked naked without a favicon on its left. I felt like I had to step up and get something reasonable in there quickly.

It's hard to create something original and memorable in a 16x16 bitmap. So many of the most obvious gadget designs are taken already.

I have a really good one on CTDATA.com, but that's because CTDATA's logo is professionally designed, and we just scaled it down to fit the favicon image size.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today, I needed to come up to speed quickly on IBM WebSphere MQ, a complex piece of enterprise software so I could discuss it with a senior manager at a potential consulting client. The easiest way to do this was to read an introductory whitepaper on Websphere MQ that would provide me with a very high level understanding of the software and some applications of it.

The problem was that I didn't have time to read the whitepaper because it's a 32 pages document and I needed to be at the client's office in less than two hours. I decided to take a few minutes and try to use my Mac to convert the text of the document to an audio file that I could listen to on my iPhone while driving.

I based my solution on the idea published by Ben Waldie in Automator Power: Variables and Looping that was published in the February issue of Macworld. Ben's solution has two limitations:

1. It's Mac-only, which is not a problem for me.
2. It's intended to handle articles from RSS and Atom feeds, and what I needed was to read the text contained in a PDF file.

My adaptation neatly extracts the text out of the PDF file and uses the same suggested MacOS services to create the audio file. Here's how I did it:

Before I began writing my Automator workflow, I needed to install PDFtoText, a shell program that converts PDF documents into plain text. Carsten Blüm built a DMG installer for this open source utility.

My Automator workflow is as follows:

1. Internet: Get Specified URLs to retrieve ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/integration/wmq/WS_MQ_Messaging_Backbone_for_SOA.pdf.
2. Internet:Download URLs to the Downloads directory.

3. Utilities:Run Shell Script on the following script using the "/bin/bash" shell:

   /usr/local/bin/pdftotext
   /Users/.../WS_MQ_Messaging_Backbone_for_SOA.pdf
   /Users/.../WS_MQ_Messaging_Backbone_for_SOA.text

   This invokes the utility to read the PDFtoText converter and extract the text from the PDF file. The text above is one continuous command statement separated by spaces. Substitute your home directory and "/Downloads" for the ellipsis in the previous two lines.
4. Files & Folders: Open Finder Items to open the text file created above.
5. Text: Get Contents of TextEdit Document extracts the text out of the file.
6. Text: Text to Audio File reads the extracted text into an AIFF file. I store it that file in the Downloads directory to be consistent.
7. Music: Import Audio Files brings the file into iTunes. I use the AAC Encoder and delete the source AIFF file after I've encoded it.
8. Music: Add Songs to Playlist to add the new audio file to a playlist I call "Technology Reading".

This workflow worked incredibly well for me. It should work well for you too, assuming you can fast forward through things that aren't meant to be read like tables of contents, page numbers, and the text that is contained in tables and charts.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

• Stuff We Like: The Dave Laptop Stand on Lifehacker: "The Dave (oh Ikea, you and your names!) features adjustable height and angle, and can double as a TV tray or simple end table when you're not computing. If you've been looking for a better way to surf the internet from the comfort of your couch, the $25 Dave might be just the ticket."
• Optimizing File Sharing on Your Home Wi-Fi Network on Web Worker Daily: "A lot of people who have successfully put in a Wi-Fi network neglect to optimize the way files are shared between computers in a home or workgroup. You can choose ways to organize shared files, and ensure that files are shared securely or not visible to other users on your Wi-Fi network very easily...." Good instructions on how to do this whether you have Windows or Macs
• StrechCordz Short Resistance Training Belt on Cool Tools: "The StrechCordz resistance training belt makes expensive, complex, "endless" pools obsolete. At one end of a 4-foot, black rubber tube is a nylon belt with a simple plastic snap-clip that slips around my waist. On the other end is a loop I attach to the deep-end ladder of our modest home pool. That's it... just tether up and start swimming. Swim as hard and fast as you like yet stay in place."
• Cycling Photography Tips: Shooting Head On on Spare Cycles: "Shooting head on is both difficult and easy: difficult in that the rider is moving at you very fast so your margin for error is very little, but easy in that you don't have to move your camera very much at all."
• Easter's early this year. Deal with it. on God Plays Dice: "...the cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves every 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat every nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other every 375 centuries, so the air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn't matter because that's a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000." [ via Slashdot ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Holy Saturday on Wikipedia: Lots of names exist for the day before Easter. I had no idea that so much thought had been put into this day over the years. Sorry if you consider this a sacrilege.
• Sk*rt: "Digg for Chicks" on How to Change the World (blog.GuyKawasaki.com): "I love Sk*rt. You can think of it as "Digg for chicks" (in the words of QueenofSpain), and it features the user-selected stories in topic such as Arts & Entertainment, Design & Crafts, Family & Parenting, and Food & Home."
• View higher quality videos on YouTube on MacOSXhints: "Many people are using a trick to view any YouTube video in high-quality -- simply append &fmt=18 to the end of the URL. This is a job for AppleScript! Here are two simple versions; the first, for for OmniWeb... and the second, for Safari...."
• Lemnis Pharox LED Bulb on CoolTools: "I have been dutifully buying the various LED bulbs being marketed as home incandescent replacements for a year or two. Up until now, all have had that weird, blue flickery LED light, and all have been expensive. The Lemnis Pharox is the first one that actually delivers as a home bulb replacement. It sips electricity pulling down a mere 4 watts, will last for 35 years, and replaces the light of a 40 watt incandescent."
• Adventures in Rechargeable Batteries on CodingHorror: "I've been a rechargeable battery user for years. It seems the frugal thing to do in the long run, and it's also healthier for the planet when we aren't discarding mountains of single-use batteries into landfills." Author Jeff Atwood provides a lot of tips on getting the most out of modern rechargeable batteries. [ via LifeHacker ]
• PimpMySafari.com, recommended by Merlin Mann on MacBreak Weekly. This is the reference site for all plugins and bookmarklets for the Safari web browser.
• First Look: Safari 3.1 adds speed and HTML 5 features on Computerworld: "With the 3.1 release, Safari has become the fastest browser you can use. If that isn't enough reason to make a switch, its strong adherence to Web standards and rapid adoption of new technologies might make you think again."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It took me about half a day to convince myself that MarsEdit is a must have for blogging on Operation Gadget. Here's why.

Operation Gadget talks a lot about electronic gadgets, computers, and software. I often provide links to these products that point to a place where you can buy them, such as Amazon.com. Links like this tend to make the blog a few dollars which pays for hosting and what not.

Building these links takes time. In the half day since I downloaded MarsEdit, I figured out how to adapt an AppleScript that came with MarsEdit to lookup on Amazon.com the selected text in a post I'm writing. I select the text of a product name in the post I'm writing, invoke the AppleScript, and quickly find a page referring to that product on Amazon.

From there I find the Amazon Standard Identifier (ASIN) which is the way to uniquely identify a product in the Amazon catalog. The ASIN is always in the URL of the product's page on Amazon.com. Once I have the ASIN, I can build a link using a MarsEdit markup macro that I wrote for myself.

I haven't had a chance yet to benchmark the actual time difference between writing an Operation Gadget post in the Movable Type web interface and locally on my Mac in MarsEdit, but I'm guessing that I cut my editing time down by two minutes per story using the AppleScript and the macro that I described above. That's well worth the $29.95 licensing cost of MarsEdit, so I'll be paying for my license this weekend.

I can see other opportunities to develop AppleScripts and MarsEdit macros for similar productivity improvements on the RinkAtlas Blog. I'm sure I'll think of other uses for this technology as well.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm trying out MarsEdit, a MacOS X blogging client, for a few posts to see if it improves my productivity. It's been recommended by higher beings in the blogosphere like Andy Abramson and John Gruber-- two people whose blogs I read every day.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• An Enduring Measure of Fitness: The Simple Push-Up on NYTimes.com: "The push-up is the ultimate barometer of fitness. It tests the whole body, engaging muscle groups in the arms, chest, abdomen, hips and legs. It requires the body to be taut like a plank with toes and palms on the floor. The act of lifting and lowering one’s entire weight is taxing even for the very fit." Doing push-ups is a habit I've been trying to get into. This article is a good reminder of why.
• Your Story: Throwing new tools at a communication problem? on 43Folders.com: "...The anecdotes I hear from worker bees often focus on the frustration they felt when a wiki, a new CMS, a mailing list, or some other tool was introduced into an ecosystem that was suffering from a more fundamental communication problem. A lot of people tell me that this makes matters much worse all around, often amplifying the complexity of the original problem, in addition to piling on burnt cycles that were committed on getting everyone up to speed on the new 'silver bullet....'" Oh the stories I could tell about a Wiki I once used....
• ExpanDrive on Daring Fireball: "ExpanDrive 1.01 is a new $29 file system extension for Mac OS X, based in part on MacFUSE, that lets you mount SFTP servers as volumes in the Finder. I’ve been using ExpanDrive for a week and it is extremely impressive. I’ve never seen anything like it for the Mac. Magnetk, the company behind ExpanDrive, has a similar product for Windows called SftpDrive that’s been around for a while."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Topeak Mini 6 on CoolTools: "This incredibly compact, bike-oriented multi-tool has five different sizes of Allen wrench plus a Phillips screwdriver head, all of which folds up into a little pod about the size of a walnut. Sometimes I'll carry it in my pocket or toss it in shoulder bag; mostly I keep it in the under-seat pouch of my bike. It really comes in handy for quick adjustments...."
• Tapping Your TiVo's Hidden Talents on The Mossberg Solution in the WSJ: "... like any old friend -- or spouse -- who has been around for a while, TiVo has a few tricks up its sleeve that might surprise longtime users and new owners alike. This column includes just a handful of those tricks and highlights some features that may make TiVo more useful. These tips are for everyday users, not serious hackers, and many others exist."
• 1Password. It’s All I Need…And This Remote. on Apple Phone Show: "If there is anything I love more than software that works, it’s software that helps me save time and having to type on my iPhone’s keyboard. This is especially significant when having to type my uber-strong passwords into a login password field. I’ve been using 1Password since Macworld, and I really find it helpful...."

• iPhone SDK, Apple's Touch Platform, and The Next Two Decades on 37signals Signal versus Noise: "What we saw today {at the iPhone Software Roadmap Event} was the spark. The explosion will continue for twenty years. We will all feel the warmth."

  "What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile...."



• Behind the scenes of the old school HBO intro, a video on YouTube noted on 37signals Signal versus Noise: If you have time to watch any of this 11-minute video produced by HBO about the filming of an introductory film clip that HBO used as a lead in to a feature film presentation, you will be amazed at the amount of time put into building scale models of a city, town, and countryside. Yes this was state-of-the art technology in 1982. But think of how differently it would be done today.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The first book I bought to try to get new ideas on how I could better leverage my iPhone as a multimedia Swiss Army Knife was iPhone Fully Loaded by Andy Ihnatko. I have been really impressed by this book because it has some really excellent tips and techniques that go beyond many of the ideas I've seen discussed on iPhone-related blogs and websites.

Andy Ihnatko is a freelance journalist who writes a technology column in The Chicago Sun Times and appears regularly on The Early Show on CBS. He hit my radar screen through his regular gigs on The Apple Phone Show and MacBreak Weekly podcasts. Some of the concepts he discussed on those programs, such as using Smart Playlists to fill your iPhone with a constant amount of music that you like but haven't listened to recently (mentioned previously on Operation Gadget), and using Handbrake to convert chapters of DVDs that you own to clips that are playable on your iPhone, are prominently featured in this book. However, there are a lot more ideas that go far deeper into Mac and PC technology to pull together content that you have access to, package it in a form that's storable on your iPhone or iPod touch, and get it transferred on to your device.

There are also ideas that didn't appeal to me personally, but were interesting to read about from a general knowledge perspective. Andy is a big fan of comic books, so he includes an entire chapter on finding comics on the Internet and transmogrifying for your iPhone. He also talks about extensively about electronics and software that can be used to record radio programs for later playback on your iPhone. I used to listen to a great deal of radio myself, so this is interesting to me, but podcasts have largely replaced my radio listening habit since I got my iPhone, and I can barely keep up with the podcasts that I'm subscribed to now.

There are a number of other good iPhone-related books, such as The iPhone Pocket Guide by Chris Breen of MacWorld Magazine, but few are as jam-packed with ideas for filling your iPhone with content as iPhone Fully Loaded. This book always seems to be sitting near my MacBook Pro, and I think it will stay there for some time.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the applications I was dying to try when I got my MacBook Pro was Pixelmator. This is a low-cost image editing application for the Mac that aggressively integrates MacOS-specific features such as iSight camera input, an integrated Photo Browser, as well as integration with OS-level technologies like Automator and the Quartz Graphics Layer.

Pixelmator is not really a poor man's Adobe Photoshop as it might appear at first glance. This is a better integrated, more Mac-specific image editor than Photoshop.

A Pixelmator license is $59 after a 30-day trial period. I like the program and consider it worth the money. The issue is that I expect to be able to use the application and its output during the trial period. When I tried to use it on the day I downloaded it, the program watermarked my images with "Created with Pixelmator".

I think Pixelmator Team has used the watermark trick too aggressively. It makes more sense to me to have a trial period where output is true, and have the watermark present only in the images created after the trial period is over.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I ordered my MacBook Pro on Sunday night. It's a build-to-order machine with a 160-Gigabyte hard drive that's based on the 2.2-GigaHertz Core 2 Duo, Santa Rosa-based MacBook Pro. If I get the machine that's currently on the market, it will be 194-percent faster than my current Dell Latitude C810, the design for which is now six years old.

I think I will be picking myself up off of the floor when I open the box and turn it on. This says nothing about the switch from Windows 2000 to MacOS X Leopard.

There are so many places where I can't really go on the web right now, just because of CPU constraints. YouTube and a lot of the Flash-based video sites are typically terrible. A lot of frames are missing when I play clips. As a result, I find myself grabbing my iPhone and using the WiFi capability to watch video. I think that's going to make a huge difference in my web experience.

I'm hoping that the web development IDEs that I use, Zend Studio 5.5 and Zend Studio for Eclipse, are leaps and bounds better on OS X than on an old, slow Windows machine. I'm also hoping that a personal organization tool such as OmniFocus or Things make me way more effective. We'll see.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Apple introduces Aperture 2.0 on MacNN: "Apple on Tuesday released Aperture 2.0, a major revision of the company's professional photo editing and management application. The upgrade brings in a new, sleeker user interface that allows users to flip between Browser and Viewer modes with a single key press and a heads-up display that makes the most of the screen area while still allowing quick access to editing or navigation controls." This was the only change that Apple made at the Apple On-line Store today.
• 8 Tips For Using Running As a Productivity Booster on LifeDev: "There is a certain type of activity that is my absolute favorite for clearing the mind for some really productive thinking. It has the ultimate blend of physical activity, low mental resource usage, and a change of atmosphere. A perfect storm for some good ‘ol fashioned subconscious problem solving. Nothing adds a shot of productive thinking to the day like a spirited run."
• Make iMovie '08 find movies on other drives on MacOS X Hints: Using a symbolic directory link allows iMovie '08 to utilize movie content from secondary or external drives.
• {Leopard Update} 10.5.2 makes your {World of Warcraft} go faster on TUAW: "After hearing that the patch made reader Jason's Mac play faster, WoW Insider's Adam Holisky saw his FPS jump from 30 to 50 on his first-gen Intel iMac (he also has 2gb of RAM, and installed the graphics update with 10.5.2)."
• 30 Benefits of Ebooks from Epublishers Weekly: "Read an Ebook Week is a yearly event, and this year (2008) it runs from March 2 to March 8. To encourage the celebration of this little-known happening, here is our list of 30 Benefits of Ebooks. We love pbooks (paper books), and hope that they are never replaced by their electronic grandchildren. Yet ebooks are a worthy companion to their paper elders." [ via Lifehacker ]
• Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick on Lifehacker: "You don't have to lease server space or keep your home computer always on to access a personal web server—you can run a web, FTP, and database server straight from a USB drive. A slim web server package called XAMPP fits on a USB stick and can run database-driven webapps like the software that powers Wikipedia, MediaWiki. Almost two years ago you learned how to set up your "personal Wikipedia" on your home web server to capture ideas and track document revisions in a central knowledge repository. Today we'll set up MediaWiki on your flash drive for access on any Windows PC on the go." It's incredible that you can run MediaWiki on a thumb drive now.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MacRumors reports that Garmin released a new beta version of their Bobcat GPS management tool for MacOS X. This beta of version 2.0 of the software includes the following features:

• transfer waypoints, tracks, and routes between a Mac and Garmin GPS device,
• manage maps and DRM keys for transfer to a Garmin GPS, and
• search for points of interest on the Mac and transfer the locations to your Garmin GPS.

It wasn't too long ago that Mac users would have to keep a PC around the house or spin up a PC emulator or virtual machine to take advantage of Garmin software. Bobcat looks like a serious product that can help you get the most out of your GPS or heart-rate monitor.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Gmail IMAP Change in 1.13 - Apple Phone Show on Apple Phone Show Blog: "The 1.13 upgrade to the iPhone automatically changes POP configured Gmail to IMAP...." I saw the change in folder arrangement on my iPhone after I updated the firmware, but I didn't realize the implications of it until I read about the switch to IMAP online.
• The new Favicons: Making Webclip icons for iPhone on SixApart ProNet: The professional developer website for Movable Type and TypePad posted the first explanation of how to make a custom icon for a website that will appear on the home screen of an iPhone or an iPod Touch. I already made a Webclip icon for RinkAtlas, a site whose logo lends itself to doing so.

• Forty years since Masterton's death on the Globe on Hockey Blog: "Masterton, 29 at the time, was checked by Larry Cahan and Ron Harris of the Oakland Seals, and hit his head on the ice after falling backwards. The game took place Jan. 13, 1968, in Bloomington, Minnesota, and Masterton died in hospital two days later due to a brain injury."

  "His death led to the lobbying of more widespread use of helmets, and a mandatory helmet rule was passed in the summer of 1979." Anyone playing ice hockey should pause for a moment and remember Bill Masterton. His unfortunate death began a series of rule changes and other protective measures that have made our sport much safer.



• Mini-Review: Amazon Kindle vs. Sony Reader on 37signals Signal vs Noise: "There are plenty of comprehensive reviews of the Kindle floating around so I don’t think we need another one. Instead, I’ll focus on comparing it with the Sony Reader."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a Nokia N800 through the Nokia Blogger Relations Program several months ago. I found this device quite interesting, but I never had the opportunity to dig into it as deeply as I had wanted to. I started to think about it again about a week ago, when I was thinking about creating a webcam for our Christmas Tree at my house.

I started Googling around, and I found a three-part series of articles on IBM developerWorks that provide a detailed explanation of how to write your own webcam client for the N800.

Part one is called Developing for the N800 and talks about the environment you need to use to develop a maemo package. Maemo is a Linux-based development platform for Internet tablets such as the N770 and the N800. The article talks extensively about Scratchbox, a cross-compilation toolkit that most people use to make maemo package development easier.

Part two of the tutorial is Accessing the Nokia N800 camera which discusses the maemo Camera API and a multimedia application framework called GStreamer.

By the time I finished reading part two of the tutorial, I began to wonder how the editor of this site could consider this project to be "introductory level". If that's the case, then some of the stuff on this site must be ridiculously complex and/or technical in nature.

The third part of the tutorial is Auto-uploading Nokia N800 photos. This explains in detail how to best extend the on board software and services of the N800 with your own code in order to develop an automated uploading tool. When you combine this with previous code to access the camera and convert images that it outputs into an uploadable format, you end up with a webcam client.

I was really impressed with these articles, and I got a much better understanding of the N800's potential by reading it.

The thing that stopped me from building the webcam application according to the instructions is the prerequisites. I didn't have a machine that had enough free space to build up a Linux virtual machine that would be an appropriate build environment for a maemo package. It would have taken me time to free that space. I may end up waiting to do this until I get my MacBook Pro sometime in January.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Apple Phone Show Weblog reports that GarageBand Version 4.1.1 (the update that was released yesterday), includes a fix for the "Send Ringtone to iTunes" feature that's found in the "Share" menu. The article implies that they tested this feature and it works.

This gives iPhone users another way to create custom ringtones, in addition to the feature in the The iTunes Music Store, and third-party utilities like iToner and iPhoneRingToneMaker.

GarageBand is part of iLife '08.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The only thing I've missed since I switched from my old reliable Treo 650 to my iPhone is an onboard password / information management tool. On the Treo 650, I used a utility program called SplashID, which was great for remembering hundreds of sets of application and server credentials.

(I mentioned that I was trying SplashID on Operation Gadget back in 2005, but never wrote a full review. You can find a good SplashID review on Everything Treo.)

I had concluded that I would have to wait for one to be released after the iPhone SDK is made available until I heard about Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software. Yojimbo is an information organizer for MacOS X that can be used for password management. I'm planning to get a Mac mini to go with my iPhone in a week or two, so this software will be a step in the right direction.

Yojimbo integrates with .Mac for synchronization services. It also intregrates with a third party service called Webjimbo that provides glue between the Yojimbo application on your Mac and a website that's browser and iPhone friendly.

Yojimbo does a lot more than just manage passwords. You can also use it to manage snippets of text, images, PDFs, and similar stuff. It also integrates well with Spotlight, so it makes a lot of sense as a note taking application for people who are heavily in to the Mac platform.

Macworld did a good review of Yojimbo back in March 2006. That probably needs to be updated, but it still provides some good background on the application.

The cost of doing this is $39 for Yojimbo (or $69 for the Yojimbo Family Pack) and $29.95 for Webjimbo. I don't think that a .Mac account is required in order to use Webjimbo, but for other synchronization services on the Mac platform, a $99 per year subscription to .Mac is required.

This sounds like a lot of money to spend to keep your passwords organized and at your fingertips. However, it is a password management solution that's available to iPhone users today. I'm definitely planning to give Yojimbo a try when I get the rest of the pieces of my new computing life assembled.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I was reading O'Reilly Radar, I noticed the article by Artur Bergman that discusses some of the developments at the iPhoneDevCamp over last weekend. The most interesting part of that article for me was the discussion of Safari's handling of calls to Google Maps:

Most offensive is, however, Apple's claim to integrate with Google Maps, which means Safari intercepts requests to "http://maps.google.com/" and sends them to the Google Maps application. No other high-end phone manufacturer even comes close to this level of arrogance.

I hadn't thought about the Google Maps Widget integration in that way before, so I decided to test the iPhone's behavior while trying to use my Google Maps Mashup RinkAtlas.com. RinkAtlas demonstrates the exact behavior on the iPhone that Artur is talking about. When you get to the point of generating directions to a hockey rink in RinkAtlas, we make a call to Google Maps and pass the two encoded endpoints. The iPhone redirects this request to the Google Maps Widget running locally.

I'm pleased to note that the Google Maps Widget handles all of the parameters passed correctly, including the ones where I spoof URI options to get around API calls that didn't exist when I wrote that part of RinkAtlas. I'll eventually (hopefully) get around to extending RinkAtlas to include the directions live on our site using the new Google Maps Directions API, but Artur's analysis is absolutely correct.

I'm not as upset as Artur is about Safari redirecting calls to the Google Maps website, but I can see how this wouldn't be ideal if the Google Map Widget ever fell behind in terms of its API support. I also know that Google talked extensively about how the ability to call specific versions of the Google Maps API was a feature that developers on the cutting edge should use. I think this approach has been undermined by Apple's interception of calls to the Google Maps Website.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Back on January 10, I asked Is OS X the Key Component of the Apple iPhone? The first point I made in that article was about multitasking:

Elegantly-implemented multitasking on a handheld device: Windows Mobile handhelds have this capability already, but none devices I've seen have a UI that comes close to what Jobs demonstrated. Treo handhelds from Palm running the PalmOS don't do multitasking at all. It isn't clear to me whether RIM or Nokia have true multitasking OSes on their smartphones, and I've used both quite extensively.

I'm pointing this out for two reasons:

1. I've got an iPhone, and I'm more impressed with the multitasking capabilities of the iPhone after actually using it.
2. Marc Hedlund from O'Reilly Radar brought up multitasking on the iPhone last week as a "new-ish" thought about the iPhone. I'm not sure it qualifies as a newish thought anymore.

I think Hedlund's article is very insightful for some of the other points he makes. He compares the iPhone to several of the Treo's best features, and tells why the iPhone comes out pretty favorably. He's saying a lot of things that I haven't had time to say, probably better than I would have said them.

The only thing he doesn't mention that I think is a significant advantage to using an iPhone instead of a Treo is the $20+ discount you get on "unlimited" wireless data plans that AT&T gave me when I switched from my Treo 650 to the iPhone. I kid you not.

I think AT&T offers less expensive data plans for the iPhone because they realize that the iPhone will be in the hands of more individuals who pay their own mobile phone bills. These people will have a harder time expensing the monthly wireless bill than the average Treo or Blackberry user. That's my theory anyway.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Signal vs. Noise pointed out a terrific comparison of cost of various methods of do-it-yourself electronic tax preparation. This article is excellent because it attempts to compare the so-called out the door price of doing your state and federal taxes. Out the door pricing is defined as the total cost of tax preparation and electronic filing of both a Federal and a single-state tax return.

There are a number of electronic tax preparation options that I was unaware of before reading this article. The major tax preparation brands TurboTax and TaxCut have both packaged software and on-line tax preparation and filing services. These are delivered in several different bundles, each at different prices. In addition there are several smaller competitors included in the review.

My brother Scott has been touting the benefits of on-line tax preparation and filing for several years. This comparison proves that this option is worth trying, because the on-line versions of the major tax preparation and filing services are sometimes noticeably cheaper than their packaged software equivalents.

With two and a half weeks left until the personal tax filing deadline, a lot of people still have to buckle down and do the work. I hope that they can benefit from this handy comparison.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Deepweb has fixed problems in
LeTour 2006 that made it incompatible
with the Treo 650 and 700p Datebook.
[ Image: Deepweb Internet Solutions ]

Our friend Ad de Vries and his coworkers at Deepweb in The Netherlands have released Version 2.0 of LeTour 2006. The major new feature of this release is the inclusion of team and rider lists. This was done by adding two small buttons to the upper left area of the map (not shown in our screen capture) labeled "Teams" and "Riders".

The riders lists are well designed in that they provide the race number, name, and home country of each rider organized by team. Deepweb has also included a tiny thumbnail image of each team's jersey on their riders list screen. All of this information would be very helpful to a first time spectator at the Tour who was in the Depart or Arivee area.

I would have loved to have a riders list on my phone at races I've covered in person in the past. It probably wouldn't be necessary for me to identify the riders on the top teams in this year's Tour because I've seen folks like George Hincapie and Jens Voigt at other races, but it would be great for identifying domestiques for teams like Bouygues Telecom.

The other key feature in this version of LeTour 2006 for me is the Treo Datebook bug fix. It turns out that there was a problem with the feature that let you add Tour de France stage information to your Palm Datebook, at least with respect to the Treo 650 and 700p. I first mentioned this possibility in the article Dutch Developer Releases PalmOS-based Guide to the 2006 Tour de France. I wasn't able to be any help at all during subsequent testing, but the guys at Deepweb found and fixed the problem.

This Palm app is highly recommended for Treo users who want to follow the Tour.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France, PalmOS, Treo 650.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Deepweb has released LeTour 2006
to help Palm users follow the
2006 Tour de France. [ Image:
Deepweb Internet Solutions ]

Frank Steele at TDFblog.com recently pointed out that Deepweb has published Le Tour 2006 a PalmOS application that provides stage profiles and distances, as well as intermediate Sprint and King-of-the-Mountains points. An update is planned to provide information about teams including rider lists.

I downloaded Version 1.0 on to my Treo 650 in order to see how well it works. The screens are written mostly in English, with the big exception being that the application uses the term "Etape" to refer to each stage. No big deal there.

The biggest glitch I've seen so far is that the Le Tour 2006 application is supposed to be able to insert information about each Etape (stage) into your Datebook. Whenever I try this, my Treo 650 does a soft reset. This may be because I run DateBk5 from Pimlico Software. I emailed Deepweb to report the problem and I'll let you know if I hear that they can repeat the problem.

I definitely think this software is worth having on my Treo, and I'd recommend it to any Tour fan who is aTreo user.

Update: According to Ad de Vries from Deepweb, "At this moment we have no complains about using LeTour on a Treo 650 (the same for our F1 program) but of course we will check it ASAP with the Treo 650 simulator (we don't have such a nice device overhere) and let you know if we know more about your problem."

This is a great response to receive from a Palm developer-- another reason you should download LeTour and give it a try.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France, PalmOS, Treo 650.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lifehacker pointed out a great article on NewsForge.com that gives tips on how to get the most out of Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird is the email client I use everyday.

I've already taken the suggestion of creating a Smart Folder to filter server status messages out of my main IMAP mailbox. This saves me some time because I don't have to type the search criteria into the QuickSearch box once or twice a day. It also provides me with a handy way to delete these messages en masse after I've reviewed them.

I'm looking forward to trying out Thunderbird extensions that the author recommends. I just heard about the Contacts Sidebar for the first time today when I was researching syncing the email addresses in Thunderbird with those in my Treo via Palm Desktop.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell is the proud owner of a new MacBook Pro. He reports that Apple Mail, part of Mac OS X Tiger is a significant improvement over Eudora 6, the latest version available for the Mac. Martin writes:

I've been using Apple Mail 2.0.8 for about 10 days now, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how good it is. Overall, I find it far superior to Eudora 6 on either OS X or Windows, mostly because of performance: when I do some operation that hits the {IMAP} server, like moving many mails, I see a symbol showing me that work is going on, but it doesn't block me from moving on to some other task. My Eudora experience was the opposite, I hesitated to do something like open an enormous spam mailbox, lest it bog down the client for 10 minutes and prevent me from getting any work done.

Part of the performance is undoubtedly the raw power of a native Intel application running on a (powerful) Core Duo chip, but I suspect most of what I'm feeling is the asynchrony that Apple Mail allows.

There are a few Eudora features that I miss that I haven't figured out in Mail, but I can't imagine going back to Eudora.

Technorati Tags: MacBook Pro, Apple Mail, Mac OS X, Eudora 6.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, CyberNet Technology News published a useful article called Reducing Your Memory Usage In Firefox that lists a number of Firefox extensions that apparently leak memory. The article includes links to Bugzilla reports for many of the memory leaks in question, which may make some people more confident about the validity of these claims.

It will be interesting to see how quickly the Firefox community is able to respond and address some of these memory leaks and performance problems that affect some of the most popular extensions.

See also: Download.com Publishes Handy Firefox Optimization Tips

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was thrilled to see that Apple introduced Boot Camp yesterday. Boot Camp is a free-standing add-on to the next release of Mac OS X that gives Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers dual boot capability. All you need to do to run Microsoft Windows on the same machine is to install your own copy of Windows XP.

This is an 80 to 90-percent solution for people that want to upgrade their primary workstation, are currently Windows users, and can't drop Windows because of the need to run an application that has no Mac OS X-equivalent. I am even more interested in owning a MacBook Pro now than I was before the announcement.

The next logical step for the Mac OS X-- beyond Boot Camp-- is to vitualization of the Windows operating system. I've been a big fan and heavy user of VMware for the last three years or so. What VMware's products let you do is run a logically-separate computer in a window on your Windows or Linux workstation desktop. This has meant that I've been able to create virtual copies of servers that my company has running on the Internet, so that I can do testing before we make major infrastructure changes.

What I hope to see soon is a VMware Workstation as an alternative to Boot Camp. VMware Workstation for Mac OS X would run Windows XP at the same time as you run Mac OS X. It could also run other Intel-based operating systems. Based on the current cost of Workstation for Windows and Linux, it would probably cost about $200.00

Apple could go and build a virtualization product like VMware Workstation on their own-- call it Boot Camp 2, but I think it would be far more efficient for Apple to encourage VMware to come out with a version of VMware Workstation for Mac OS X. This would allow casual Windows users to continue to use Boot Camp and gradually wean themselves from Windows, while power users who need access to both platforms would be able to go the operating system virtualization route.

Technorati Tags: Boot Camp, MacBook Pro, Mac OS X, VMware, Windows XP

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Download.com recently published Optimizing Firefox, a special section loaded with tips on how to improve the performance of Firefox. I found a lot of information about Firefox in it that I didn't know. For instance:

• Download performance can be improved by deleting the record of old downloads from the Download Manager.
• Overall browser performance on slow machines can be enhanced using the FireTune plugin.
• Memory usage can be decreased by changing the "Back-Forward cache" value, particularly if your computer has more than 512 Megabytes of RAM.

I'm definitely going to set some time aside to play with my Firefox configuration according to these guidelines. [ via Random Thoughts ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

For years I've been a big Polar heart rate monitor fan. My Polar S-725x rides on the handlebars of my Trek 1500 everyday. But, recently, I've been looking at the Garmin Edge 305HR+ and I really think that it has a lot of potential as an alternative to pure cycling computers like the Polar CS200cad.

The Garmin Edge 305 is a feature-packed device with a large display. It includes a high sensitivity GPS receiver that's supposed to be a huge improvement over the early Garmin Forerunner fitness gadgets, a chest strap-based heart rate monitor, and speed and cadence sensors that you mount on your bike frame.

Garmin Training Center Software, which is their training journal product continues to improve. It's looking more and more like Polar Precision Performance Software plus basic GPS routing. My Garmin fitness gadget is a Forerunner 201, so I didn't get this version of Garmin Training Center with it, but I think I'm going to upgrade so I can do a head-to-head comparison of it with PPP.

I prefer wrist-mountable fitness gadgets because I participate in duathlons and officiate a lot of hockey, but if I were a bike-only athlete, I'd absolutely compare the Garmin Edge products to the Polar CS cycling computers.

Product Options: The Edge 305 is also available in an HRM-only model, the Garmin Edge 305HR, and a speed and cadence-only model, the Garmin Edge 305CAD.

Technorati Tags: Garmin Edge 305, Polar CS200, Garmin Training Center, Polar Precision Performance, fitness gadgets, cycling computers

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Boing Boing has done a nice job of covering the chaos that's taking place around the switch to or from Daylight Savings Time (also known as "Summer Time") in some parts of the world. Earlier today, they pointed out that Indiana has decided to adopt DST uniformly this year. One minor problem, however, they forgot to tell the makers of computer operating systems and other electronic infrastructure services.

Can you imagine what will happen to Microsoft Outlook calendar users who don't think to change their Windows time zone setting from "Indiana (East)" to "Eastern Time (US & Canada)"?

Some states in Australia have delayed their switch back to local standard time to accomodate the Commonwealth Games. This apparently really confused a bunch of Microsoft Exchange servers (and the users that rely on them) at large companies.

I guess it makes sense to a lot of people who don't think through the electronic implications to do this sort of thing. I mean, it might have been confusing for some television viewers who wanted to watch the Commonwealth Games, since half of the British Commonwealth is located in the Western Hemisphere which changes its time on a different date than Europe and, presumably, Asia and Australia. But, this change screwed up a lot of meetings and probably caused havoc with alarm systems and things like Global Positioning Systems.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Janus Sandsgaard of Machine Culture emailed me on Friday to point out that Polar Precision Performance Software has been updated to add the following new features:

• Double-clicking on day row opens the Diary to Daily details page.
• Week count extended to max. 20 (Calendar Properties – General – Number of Weeks)
• Entire day note text shown if there are no exercises for the day.
• Team name added to Quick user switch member name list. (Shown only if Coach login is on.)
• Sending data from one day is now possible.
• Plus a number of fixes for bugs that popped up in previous version.

Polar Precision Performance Software has been my favorite training log software for a long time. (To find out why, read Why Training Log Software is One of The Most Important Features of a Fitness Gadget from December 2003.) I think PPP has remained relevant over the last three years because Polar keeps enhancing it. I strongly recommend that all Polar AXN and S-Series HRM users upgrade as soon as possible. [ Thanks Janus! ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Wall Street Journal reported that Palm saw marketshare growth for its Treo 650 and 700 series mobile phones as a result of the patent dispute between Research in Motion, the manufacturer of BlackBerry handheld devices, and NTP, Inc., a patent holding company based in Arlington, VA. According to the article:

... While the BlackBerry lawsuit is settled, corporations say the episode made them realize they need a contingency plan in case the BlackBerry is ever shut down. Palm, of Sunnyvale, Calif., has tripled its corporate sales force over the past year to work with carriers and to talk to more corporations about the Treo....

In the quarter ended in late November, Palm sold 602,000 Treos, nearing the 645,000 new subscriber accounts that RIM signed on in the same period. And when Palm reports fiscal third-quarter earnings today, analysts project the company will easily double its Treo sales from 279,000 in the year-earlier quarter. Internally, Palm executives say they believe that the Treo will outsell BlackBerrys by the end of this year.

The really amazing thing about large corporations continued support of BlackBerry is the amount of infrastructure on the back end of enterprise messaging systems that must be maintained in order to keep workers' BlackBerry handhelds running. BlackBerry Enterprise Server software must be co-located with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, and Novell Groupwise in order for users of the BlackBerry handhelds to receive the much touted "push email" features of the platform. Users of email platforms other than Exchange, Domino, and Groupwise are not likely to get the same benefit from having a BlackBerry.

The Palm OS based Treos, such as the 600 and 650, have much more flexibilty in terms of running a variety of email clients that offer enhanced features to a wider-range of mail servers. GoodLink from Good Technologies is very competitive with BlackBerry Enterprise Server for customers whose businesses use Exchange or Domino. Simpler email server environments receive advanced features from the Chatter Email Client which provides push email features for IMAP, and Snapper Mail which provides enhanced features mainly to users of POP mailboxes.

Here at Operation Gadget, my Kathleen and I use twin Treo 650s to access our IMAP mail accounts wirelessly. I'm connected to three separate IMAP accounts simultaneously when I'm out of the office. This is incredible power considering that we run a very simple, Open Source-based email infrastructure. Anyone could do this sort of thing for themselves, if they decided to rent a Linux virtual server and take the time to understand how to setup IMAP and any of a number of Mail Transfer Agents. We use UWimap and exim and they do a fine job for us at minimal cost. [ Subscription required to read most articles from The Wall Street Journal ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've seen a couple of really good tutorials on the proper use of UNIX power tools recently that I wanted to bring to the attention of Operation Gadget readers:

• Mastering Wget from Lifehacker.com: "... A versatile, old school Unix program called Wget is a highly hackable, handy little tool that can take care of all your downloading needs. Whether you want to mirror an entire web site, automatically download music or movies from a set of favorite weblogs, or transfer huge files painlessly on a slow or intermittent network connection, Wget’s for you...."
• How-To: SSH tunnels for secure network access from Engagdet: "Have you ever avoided checking your email over that free wireless access point for fear of someone snarfing your password? Secure, trusted networks aren't always available, so today we'll show you how to use SSH to keep those unencrypted POP3 or IMAP passwords and data safe."

SSH is installed and ready-to-run on every Apple Macintosh that runs Mac OS X. The article on SSH even shows you use a third-party utility called SSH Tunnel Manager as a front end. I thought Wget was part of MacOS X, but, it appears that Wget is a third party utility and is available for Mac OS X here.

Windows PC users have slightly different options. They can either download PuTTY and use it to create a tunnel, or you can download Cygwin which contains both Wget and OpenSSH.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will delay the general release of Windows Vista until January 2007. According to the article, "Mr. Allchin {co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division} said that the major reason for this delay -- which amounts to several weeks beyond the original expected launch date -- is to give Microsoft more time to improve the "quality" of the Windows Vista. Specifically, he said Microsoft needs a few more weeks to test the security and other quality aspects of the product."

The announcement was made in a conference call with analysts late this afternoon.

I've never been to iterested in Vista because I think desktop operating systems other than Mac OS X are commodities. I have to admit that now I'm really intrigued. Who knows what will happen to the market for new Windows PCs now that consumers won't be able to get Vista for at least 10 months? [ Registration required to view most articles in The Wall Street Journal. ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We have a number of people who like math in our family, so Kathleen and I were pleased to discover Sudoku last week when we were shopping for Christmas gifts. Wikipedia says that Sudoku is a Japanese logic-based numeric placement puzzle which reportedly became popular in 1985 but only broke out to the rest of the world recently. According to the article:

The aim of the canonical puzzle is to enter a numerical digit from 1 through 9 in each cell of a 9×9 grid made up of 3×3 subgrids (called "regions"), starting with various digits given in some cells (the "givens"). Each row, column, and region must contain only one instance of each numeral.

The game we bought Sudoku - The Utterly Addictive Number Puzzle Game is apparently so popular that Amazon.com is having trouble keeping it in stock. Here are a few other options for people who are trying to find Sudoku to give as a gift for the holidays:

• Board Games
  • SuDoku Sensations
  • The Original SuDoku with Wood Playing Pieces
• Electronic Games
  • Handheld Sudoku
  • Play at Joe's Sudoku Challenge
  • Sudoku Puzzle Addict
• Books
  • The Official Book of Sudoku: Book 1
  • Sudoku Easy Presented by Will Shortz, Volume 1
  • Sudoku Easy to Hard Presented by Will Shortz, Volume 2

Even more Sudoku options can be found at Amazon.com by searching for Sudoku.

Technorati Tags: Sudoku, Sudoku electronic games, Sudoku books, Sudoku games, Sudoku software, Christmas gifts, Hanukkah gifts

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the hottest stories I've ever written for Operation Gadget is What Alternatives to Garage Band Exist on Windows?. I originally wrote this article in March 2004 and I've updated it at least three times because of feedback from our readers.

I just added a professional level audio editing tools discussion to this article where I discuss:

• Adobe Audition 1.5
• Sony Soundforge 8 and
• Steinberg Wavelab 6

I like Adobe Audition best of the three because of it's integration with other Adobe tools and the wealth of third party documentation and training materials. Check out the full discussion and let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: Garage Band, podcasting, Windows audio software, Adobe Audition, Sony Sound Forge, Steinberg Wavelab

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few Operation Gadget readers have written since we redesigned our pages to point out that the page sidebars are out of alignment on their browsers. Most of the people who are experiencing this are using Firefox 1.07 or earlier. These alignment problems are fixed in Firefox 1.5.

Firefox 1.5 has just been released. To get it, visit http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just noticed that Amazon.com is offering Corel Paint Shop Pro 9 while supplies last for as little as $19.99! Paint Shop Pro is a great photo editing tool for people who don't need all the complexity of Adobe Photoshop Elements, but who still want to do things like:

• fill flash filter correction
• digital camera image noise removal
• anti-aliased text addition

I use Paint Shop Pro to do quick image editing nearly every day. From what I hear about Version 9, you need a fast computer with plenty of memory and a large screen to take best advantage of the photo editing features, but it's hard to beat the price.

To get the $19.99 price, you need to apply for a rebate, but even if you don't, you get Paint Shop Pro at 50-percent off the list price.

Why such a great deal? Corel's going upscale with Corel Paint Shop Pro X, the new version which was released last month. The list price of Paint Shop Pro X is $129.99, it's on sale for $99.99, but you can get it for as little as $69.99 after rebate.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In a joint announcement in Sunnyvale and Tokyo, PalmSource disclosed that it is becoming part of Access Company, Ltd., the developer of the NetFront browser and other Internet technology for mobile devices. The agreement is said to be a definitive, all cash deal valued at $324.3 million, approximately ¥35.9 billion, or $18.50 per share of PalmSource. Both boards of directors have already approved the transaction.

According to the announcement, "ACCESS' USD $18.50 per share offer represents an 83% premium for PalmSource stockholders based on the market closing price of USD $10.09 on September 8, 2005.... The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of 2005 calendar year, pending regulatory approval and the approval of PalmSource's shareholders."

More information about Access Company, Ltd., may be found at http://www.access-us-inc.com/. [ via The Wall Street Journal, registration required ]

Technorati Tags: PalmOS

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I forgot to mention that yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a free article called Talk of the Internet that surprisingly focused on computer applications that support voice communications between users. The article begins by describing how users of Battlefield 2 from Electronic Arts can communicate with each other via a Voice over IP (VoIP) client that's embedded in the game itself. How cool is that?

Of course this is old hat to people that have been using XBox Live for a while, but I missed the peer-to-peer voice communications aspects of this on-line service until it was recently pointed out to me.

I keyed in on the discussion of Battlefield 2 in this article because it's a perfect example of an application for VoIP that's not simply about saving money on telephone calls by routing them over the Internet. The voice communications capability in Battlefield 2 is arguably a new dimension of Internet-aware computer applications.

Analysts like Maribel Lopez of Forrester Research believe that VoIP is overhyped because cheap long distance calling will not drive VoIP adoption as far into the mainstream as will new ways to use voice communications that come embedded in products and services we buy.

The article goes on to point out that VoIP is also being embedded in Instant Messaging and similar Internet communications apps that already have a huge number of users. The IM-feel of Skype was probably helpful in its rapid adoption. Google probably thought it would catch a wave of early adopters by designing Google Talk with a similar feature set.

I'd also like to point out that the WSJ article mentions my new friend Andy Abramson of VoIP Watch and how VoIP helped facilitate his long distance relationship with his fiancee Helene Malabed. This story has gotten a lot of play in VoIP-related blogs recently, but it's illustrative of the new opportunities that people will have to build close relationships with people who live some distance away.

I hate to think about how much money I spent on long distance charges talking to Kathleen when she lived in Philadelphia and I lived in Denville, NJ, before we got married. If that part of our relationship were taking place today, we could have saved most of that cost. It would be extremely difficult to quantify those savings without going through many dozens of phone bills, but I wouldn't be surprised to have paid a four-digit number of dollars over the three years Kathleen was in medical school.

Technorati Tags: VoIP

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

VeloACE: An Open Source Bike
Computer System for PalmOS.
For when you absolutely
want to have your bike
speedometer be a PDA.
[ Image: Mark Hammerling ]

Sammy and the other folks over at PalmAddict don't normally scoop us on fitness gadget news, but you'll see why they did in a moment. One of their readers tipped them off to VeloACE, an open source bike computer software project for the PalmOS.

I think this is an interesting proof of concept, but I honestly have no idea what would motivate a cyclist to use this program unless he or she was also the biggest Palm geek in the world. I can't imagine mounting a Palm IIIx or Palm IIIxe to my bike handle bars as suggested, then installing a wired wheel sensor. The late model Palm's aren't water-resistant by any stretch of the imagination.

I think it's amazing that someone wrote a bike computer PalmOS application. It certainly illustrates the bredth of third-party software offerings for Palm handhelds, but a solution like this belongs in Make.

I realize that a program like this is going to intrigue some people. If you're interested in comparing VeloACE's feature set to the kind of technology available in gadgets designed from the outset to be used as bike computers, check out these devices:

• Polar S625x: more of a running computer than a bike computer. Includes a heart rate monitor wrist receiver and chest transmitter, training log software for a PC, and a weather-resistant foot pod for measuring running distances. Add a Polar Cycling Speed Sensor and a Polar Bike Mount Kit and you've got a computer suitable for running or biking.
• Garmin Forerunner 301: a GPS-based biking or running computer that includes a heart rate monitor. Great for creating maps of training runs and rides. Also includes training log software. Get the Garmin Forerunner 201 if you don't need/want the HRM.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

PalmAddict reported that a version of the Opera browser now works on the Treo 650 and other powerful PalmOS devices. Included in this group are the Palm LifeDrive, Treo 600, and the Tungsten T3.

The article refers to an Opera Mini Treo installation howto that explains system requirements (most significantly Java) and technical issues (the default language is Norwegian, but can be changed to English).

I keep thinking that I should try browsers like Opera Mini and Xiino but I haven't done it yet. Maybe I should try Opera Mini, since I recently installed Java on my Treo to test KMaps, a Treo 650-friendly client for Google Maps.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Andrew Carton of Treonauts published a good summary of RSS reader options for Treo 650 users. The headline readers include PalmOS applications that have paid licenses, browser-based RSS readers that are free, as well as email and Java-based offerings.

Of the RSS readers I've tried so far, Bloglines Mobile (part of Bloglines.com) is my favorite. However, if I was more into podcasting, I'd probably be using QuickNews. QuickNews has robust RSS attachment support, which means it can do things like download podcasts directly to an SD card installed in your Treo and play them in Pocket Tunes.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Marc Orchant published a great list of add-on software for his Treo 650 over on The Office Weblog a couple of days ago. He's suggested two or three Palm applications I'm trying out now:

• SplashID, part of Splash Wallet: I mentioned that I'm trying this out a little while ago here on Operation Gadget.
• Note Studio: a PalmOS-based wiki with a conduit and a desktop app for both Mac and PC. Definitely worth trying.
• Card Backup: a Palm app that backs up your PDAs main memory to a memory card. I bought an MMC card for this purpose before my trip to Chicago in April, but never used it to store a backup. I think there is a freeware and a more fully featured version of this.

These applications and the others mentioned in Marc's article are great ideas for Treo 650 users who are looking to improve their personal productivity.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Somewhere in the transition to my Treo 650 back in March, I lost a memo entry that contained a big list of passwords for websites and other applications. It was a bad idea to store that information in that manner in the first place, so I resolved to find a Palm application that did a better job.

I found one and so I've downloaded a trial version of SplashID from SplashData. According to the website:

SplashID safely and securely stores all of your personal identification information including user names, passwords, credit cards, calling cards, bank accounts, PINs, and more. Information is stored in a secure, encrypted format and is quickly accessible on a Palm OS handheld or Desktop computer with the included desktop software.

I'll load some of my passwords into SplashID and see how I like it. When I have some thoughts on its usefulness, I'll post them here on Operation Gadget.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Harry Lowe of the University of Washington published an article called 2005 Tour de France with Google Earth where he has recorded the routes of the first five stages of the Tour de France for playback using Google Earth.

For those of you who haven't been following its evolution, Google Earth is the name for the latest version of the PC application program formerly known as Keyhole. It allows you to zoom in on an address pretty much anywhere in the world using satellite imaging and a sophisticated geographic information system. Yes, you can see a satellite image of an address using Google Maps, but Google Earth is much more interactive since it is a full blown PC application.

Harry says that enjoyment of this experience requires "Lotsa RAM, lotsa Gigahertz, lotsa video card" and "Lotsa connection to the Internet", so keep that in mind if you follow his instructions.

I can't participate yet because my brother and I are running Category 5e cable into the Home Office today so we can connect my Blogging Workstation to the Internet for the first time since we moved to Newtown. When we get that done, I'll be downloading Google Earth and playing back some of these early Tour stages.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

As I mentioned on Monday, Beth Seliga, a freelance photographer who covers pro cycling, asked me which email client to use on her new palmOne Treo 650.

I had strong opinions ready when she asked this question, so I'm going to repeat them and enhance them with links for the benefit of everyone who reads Operation Gadget. In an attempt to keep it simple, I'm breaking the results down into two categories: what may work and what probably won't work:

• What May Work

  • Chatter Email: This is the email client that Kathleen and I both use. I chose Chatter Email because of:

    1. the Strong IMAP Support: I decided to standardize on IMAP-enabled mailboxes so that what we saw on the desktop we would also see on the Treos.
    2. my Selection of the Unlimited Data Plan: I was willing to pay $39.99 per month for unlimited data service for our two Treos.

    If you do not choose to go on an unlimited data plan with your Treo, that doesn't mean that Chatter Email would be a bad solution for you. However, you should realize that using the push email capability may cause you exceed your bucket of wireless data kilobytes.

  • SnapperMail: This email client appears to be aimed at the POP3 email users of the world, rather than IMAP users like me. If you use the Post Office Protocol for email, I would definitely give SnapperMail a try. I think it's clearly more stable than VersaMail.
    

• What Probably Won't Work
  
  
  
  • VersaMail: I realize that this is the email client that most Treo 650 users try first, mainly because palmOne installs it and puts part of it in ROM. There are a couple of issues with this program that are show stoppers for me:
    
    
    
    1. Instability: Versamail just crashes too often. It seems like Versamail crashes on people whenever they try to show me their Treos running it. Most of the time the demonstration starts like this: "Why does this program crash so often? Oh darn...."
       

    2. Faux IMAP Support: The folks at palmOne don't seem to understand the design philosophy behind IMAP-- specifically, that IMAP users are supposed to keep their email permanently on the mail server. If you need clarification on this point, refer to In Order to Understand Wireless Email, First Understand the Purposes of the Protocols.

       When you use Versamail to manage your IMAP mailbox, it loads copies of part of each email on to your Treo and keeps them there-- just like the way it handles email messages under POP3. The only thing is it doesn't discard those messages when you finish looking at each message. It also doesn't discard those messages if you choose to constrain the number of messages in your Inbox to those messages that arrived in the last "n" days.
       

    
    
  
  

Those are my opinions on the three biggest email clients for the Treo 600 and 650. I've had my Treo 650 for 11 weeks now and taken it on a two week business trip, so I think I can be reasonably confident that I'm not missing anything in the basic functionality of these three programs. However, if I receive new information, find out something new, or a serious competitor materializes to these three, I'll mention it here.

I'm intentionally leaving out clients that are specific to one mobile phone carrier. I know that Cingular has one. I don't think it is worth using because the number of users from whom you can learn will be so much smaller than if you chose a mainstream Treo email client.

If you have any alternatives that I haven't mentioned, feel free to post a comment and I will take a look at it.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As I mentioned in an earlier article, Sammarye Lewis, co-author of the new book Tour de France for Dummies asked me how to make her H-P iPAQ h6315 work smoothly with a Garmin GPS 10 Deluxe or another handheld GPS, so that she can get directions to places along the Tour de France stage routes.

I did some research on this, and here is a summary of my findings so far. I'm breaking the results down into two categories: what may work and what probably won't work:

• What May Work

  • Garmin GPS 10 Deluxe with Bluetooth and Garmin Que Pocket PC Software: This maybe the easiest solution to get working straight out of the box if it meets your needs. The bundle includes the GPS unit, Que software for Pocket PC, corresponding software for a Windows PC, and a CitySelect North America CD containing map data. The entire package is reviewed in considerable depth on PocketNow.com.

    The concern I have with this solution is that it doesn't provide maps of France out of the box. Maybe there is a bundle available that contains a Europe rather than North America CD?
    

  • CoPilot Live Pocket PC 5 from ALK Technologies: There are three separate North American offerings priced between $299 and $349. I know that there is also a European version with the same options, but the European site directs potential customers to authorized dealers.

    According to ALK's European site, the European map CD is available for £100. I don't know what the price is if you buy it in the USA.

    PocketGPSWorld.co.uk has a great review of CoPilot Live PPC 5 (which is continued in Part 2) that makes it look like a very good candidate for this job.
    

  
  
• What Probably Won't Work
  
  
  
  • Microsoft Pocket Streets 2005 plus a handheld GPS: This looked like a good solution at first, but if you read the feature set carefully, Pocket Streets does not support route planning.
    
  
  

I'm going to add information to this story if I find other solutions or further information about the solutions already mentioned.

If you have any suggestions that I haven't mentioned, feel free to post a comment and I will take a look at it.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been using VersaMail 3.0 since I got my Treo 650 eight days ago. I'm always hesitant to make conclusive statements without backing them up with significant research, but I want to warn people who are just starting to use the Treo 650 or are considering purchasing it: VersaMail doesn't seem to work too well as an IMAP mail client, at least with respect to the way I manage my IMAP mailboxes.

I have three separate IMAP mailboxes, one each for:

• operationgadget.com (mail about this blog),
• ctdata.com (corporate mail), and
• weblogimprovement.com (mail regarding weblog engineering that I do for clients).

These mailboxes each have between several hundred and two thousand messages in their Inboxes. I have virtually unlimited storage capability for each of these IMAP mailboxes because I manage my own mailservers.

The perfect mobile IMAP client for me would provide windows into my three mailboxes, using as much bandwidth on the Cingular EDGE network as necessary. The way VersaMail appears to work is to download at least a portion of each message onto my Treo, as if I was trying to conserve bandwidth.

I'm not saying that this is definitely how VersaMail works because I haven't read all the documentation. I think I am safe in making this judgement, however, because my Treo 650 has become more sluggish as VersaMail has collected and displayed more email in each IMAP mailbox. Further evidence is the steady increase in the amount of time it takes to sync to the PC I use, refered to elsewhere on Operation Gadget as my blogging workstation.

I'm now attempting to sync my Palm to my PC. Once I complete this task, I'm probably going to remove VersaMail and try one of the third party email clients that works with the Treo 650. The ones I want to try the most are SnapperMail and ChatterEmail.

I'm planning to take a look at both of these programs and provide some details on how they differ from VersaMail. Once I've determined which one of the three best meets my needs, I will try to review it in detail here on Operation Gadget.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

PlayerBlog reports that TextAloud 2.0 has been released by NextUp.com. This software "reads" text that you provide and creates spoken word MP3 files.

When I use an iPod, I often listen to spoken word content from Audible.com. I could see myself using TextAloud to timeshift some reading that would otherwise take place at my desk. A lot of TextAloud's usefulness to me would depend on the interface that you use to begin the MP3 content-generation process. I'll have to do more research into how the product works.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Brighthand reports that PalmSource is developing new synchronisation tools for the PalmOS based on SyncML, an XML-based vendor-independent standard. This is a smart move by PalmSource because it:

1. begins the process of getting them out of the desktop organizer business,
2. gives the customer more personal information management application choices (including PC operating systems), and
3. aligns them more closely with the goals of the mobile phone hardware manufacturers.

The last point is critical because PalmSource sees itself competing with operating system vendors like Symbian, which makes the OS for Nokia smartphones, than it used to. This is particularly evident when you consider their acquisition of China Mobile Soft.

I welcome the fact that PalmSource is embracing SyncML. The sooner I can pick which address book, calendar, and to do list management applications I want to use on my desktop or laptop, the better I will like it.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

SplashBlog is a new photoblogging application for the palmOS that hit my RADAR screen a couple of days ago when Josh Rubin metioned it on Cool Hunting. It was mentioned again yesterday on PalmInfoCenter.

When I first looked at SplashBlog, I was concerned it was a "walled garden," meaning that the application only worked with SplashData's own photoblog hosting service. However, according to the PalmInfoCenter article, "SplashBlog is also compatible with the TypePad blogging service and support is planned for similar services such as Blogger, Flickr and Zoto."

Sounds like it's worth looking at.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CanalPDA.com, a Spanish-language PDA site, has developed this interesting list of the 10 wierdest palmOS programs available today. (The list is written in English.) Included are things like a virtual voodoo doll, a program that lets you create a fake call on a Treo so you can end an appointment early, and a Palm version of the Kama Sutra.

In my opinion, there are at least a couple of programs that could be useful in certain situations, I'm just not going to say which ones. [ via PalmInfoCenter.com ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Stuart Tevendale reports that iSMARTtrain Version 2.0 is now available. This $40.00 program is a fitness training log for the Apple Macintosh platform, with versions coming soon for Windows and Linux. iSMARTtrain interfaces with the Polar S610, S625x, S710, S720, S725, S810, Xtrainer, or Accurex II heart rate monitors. Pre-existing data can be imported from PCCoach, Polar Precision Performance Software, or other training logs that use ".hrm" files.

iSMARTtrain also helps athletes interact with a coach by making it easy to email preformance data from training sessions and races. This would be helpful to athletes who use coaching services like Carmichael Training Systems.

A limited version of iSMARTtrain is available for free. It allows 20 entries to be placed in the log, which sounds like enough to decide whether the program is right for you.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Treonauts pointed out two inexpensive utilities that help streamline keyboard use on the Treo 650. KeyCaps600 helps Treo 600 and 650 users to type faster by providing alternate ways to enter capital letters, punctuation, and symbols.

KBLightsOff provides a mechanism to toggle the keyboard backlight on and off. This is an important battery-saving technique when using a Treo 650 to watch video, read eBooks, or listen to MP3s.

Both of these programs are small and cheap. You can pick up licensed versions of each for $15.50, and help the developers of these utilities continue to support and enhance them.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A week ago, Washington Post columnist Rob Pegoraro offered two good alternatives to using Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. The Microsoft email clients are out of date from the features perspective. My sense is that most Operation Gadget readers know enough about email clients to be able to choose one that enhances their personal productivity.

One of the things that stood out for me in this article was the attention that Rob Pegoraro pays to IMAP support in Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0:

Eudora and Thunderbird can connect to the two main types of e-mail account, the Post Office Protocol (POP) service almost every Internet provider offers and a better but harder-to-find one called Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). But each feels at home in only one of these standards. Eudora is terrific with POP but slow and clumsy with IMAP; Thunderbird's near-peerless IMAP performance contrasts with POP support that omits a few options handy when checking one account from two computers.

I recently finished a major email server migration and converted from POP3 to IMAP accounts for managing my email. When I was using POP3, I read my email with Evolution, a Linux-based personal information manager with good email, contact management, and calendar support. I started using Evolution because my mail server didn't have SpamAssassin running on it and Evolution integrates with a locally running instance of SpamAssassin.

Now that I've moved to a modern email infrastructure, I can afford to start using IMAP and keep most of my email on the server. This frees me to use any one of my desktops or laptops to read my email. It also allows me to check my mail on a handheld communicator like the Treo 650 or the H-P iPAQ h6135 as well.

Thunderbird might be the best "version 1.0" product I've ever used on the Internet. It handles multiple IMAP accounts with ease. Thunderbird avoids many of the "connection reset by peer" error messages that I ran into when using Evolution to manage a single IMAP mailbox. There are a few nice-to-have features missing from Thunderbird, including an in-line spelling checker and a streamlined account interface for people like me who use multiple IMAP accounts.

Rob's column fairly compares Thunderbird and Eudora, and shows the areas where Thunderbird needs to be improved. I think the Mozilla project now has a very good email client in Thunderbird to go with its small and efficient Firefox web browser.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I downloaded a copy of Konfabulator for my Windows 2000 blogging workstation. Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine that lets you place widgets on your Mac OSX or Windows desktop. There are a number of neat widgets available and creation of others is simple if you know JavaScript, XML, and a scripting language that runs on your platform of choice.

I've already found a couple of uses for Konfabulator, so I'll probably pay the $25 shareware fee in order to keep using it past the end of the evaluation period.

One widget that I didn't expect to enjoy as much is the Picture Frame. Every five minutes, it picks a random image out of the photo archive on my local Linux server. I haven't seen a lot of these photos in a long time.

I tried to take a screen shot with my copy of Paint Shop Pro, but it didn't capture the widgets and I'm not sure why. Hopefully, I'll figure it out and update this story.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Register reports that a recent survey by Forrester Research indicated that 22 percent of British Internet users reported that they have bought software that was advertised in spam that they received. The survey was sponsored by the Business Software Alliance which probably would have been happy that so many Britons said they bought software for their home computers, except that probably none of the spammers are members of the BSA.

The Register expressed doubt that the methodology used produced realistic results:

The BSA said its survey looks at a different metric of how many people ever bought through spam compared to the percentage of spam messages that result in a purchase. A reasonable response - but we remain sceptical about this survey. Some people do respond to spam - otherwise it wouldn't exist. But the idea that Briton {sic} harbours five million-plus people who bought software by junk email strains belief.

Nine in ten of those polled in the UK by Forrester received spam. Apparently, 23 per cent of spam gets read, according to the study. Again this figure raises eyebrows.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am planning to get back to the regular business of Operation Gadget. But, before I do, I want to close the loop on the email problems that I had last week.

A lot of application software creates permanent or temporary files that act as mini databases to improve performance under certain circumstances. For instance, email client applications often create database files or indexes that speed up searching through message archives. I love features like this because I don't notice the tiny performance hit that my laptop takes when my mail client saves each message, but finding old emails is so much faster than it used to be before these features were implemented.

The downside of this is really only evident when one of these index files gets corrupted. Some email clients don't seem to be able to either:

1. recover from this sort of problem automatically, or
2. report that there are damaged files and recommend user action.

It seems like any application that contains a lot of text in a small number of large files is potentially subject to this sort of problem. In the past few business days, I have run into major glitches that involved:

1. Novell Evolution, an OpenSource email and calendar program for the Linux platform that has a similar feature set to Microsoft Outlook, and
2. Straw, a website headline reader for the Gnome desktop environment.

As a software user, you can help yourself by thinking about the software you use, and asking if it has features like the ones I've described. If so, you should look at how important each application is to you, and whether they have the proper priority in your system backup strategy. I hadn't done this thinking recently, so I was surprised at how off-track I got when my email client and my website headline reader stopped working simultaneously.

I am going to open up my backup tools today and make sure that the data files and directories for these applications are backed up frequently. I will also make sure I can restore them in case they get corrupted again. Doing this before a problem occurs will probably save you hours of head scratching and muttering to yourself.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In today's Wall Street Journal, Thomas E. Weber suggests that the best way to remember a vacation or a family event may be to make a DVD-based slideshow using digital photos. Weber says:

After I switched from film to digital, I noticed something about my pictures. They were all great -- yet in some ways, they were all alike, with smiling people caught at just the right moment. Not that I'm such a gifted photographer. I just wasn't showing anyone the outtakes. And while the pictures I culled out were individually mediocre, taken as a whole they captured the essence of my family and friends, regardless of frowns or cut-off heads.

That's why I've become a big fan of digital "slideshows" stored on DVD. After you pick a few special images to print or e-mail to friends, you can take the rest and create a video presentation you can watch on your TV.

Weber likes ArcSoft DVD SlideShow for making DVD compilations of digital photos and Adaptec Sonic MyDVD Studio Deluxe for making slideshows that also incorporate live-motion video. I prefer MyDVD Studio Deluxe because it is only marginally more expensive than DVD SlideShow and has more features.

The idea of making DVD slideshows is an excellent one, and I'm sure my family will be interested in trying this soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Hexlet LLC just released HBlogger Version 2.0, a weblogging client for PalmOS version 3.5 and higher. The new version has come out quickly after the initial release, and includes the following new features.

• Support for weblogs based on TypePad, UJournal, DeadJournal, Blurty, NeedlessPanic, Plogs, Caledia, and GreatestJournal,
• Upload of images,
• Better error reporting,
• Better FTP server support, and
• Five-way navigation support on the Treo 600.

The new version is available for download on Hexlet's website for $9.99. [ via TreoCentral ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hexlet LLC recently announced HBlogger, a weblogging client for PalmOS version 3.5 and higher. HBlogger supports the following blogging tools:

• MovableType,
• LiveJournal, and
• Blogger.

I wish that my Treo 180 were working, because I'd love to download a product like this and give it a try. When I first started Operation Gadget, I tried a couple of posts using Movable Type web interface with the Blazer web browser. That wasn't an optimal way to blog.

A report I read on PalmInfocenter says that HBlogger provides an optimized blogging environment and supports a number of advanced features of each weblogging tool. It wouldn't surprise me if this application implements the using the MetaWeblog API. If it works well, it would be a major improvement over just using the browser.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lots of people are recommending that Microsoft Windows users stop using the Internet Explorer browser. If you've downloaded Mozilla or Firefox, you may have noticed that the user experience is a bit less refined than in the IE environment.

Wired News has published an article recommending a number of plugins for Mozilla and Firefox that will make you more productive. Plugins that are recommended include:

• BugMeNot,
• Cookie Culler,
• Magpie, and
• Web Developer.

This is a good list. I have a few of the plugins installed (chiefly, Googlebar, which is really useful). I'm going to have to install a few more of them and see how well they work. [ via Slashdot ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell pointed out an article on CNET News.com that reports that Red Hat and Novell are adding the Real Networks open source Helix Media Player to their respective Linux distributions. According to the article, these two companies will also work with RealNetworks to help integrate Helix with their operating systems and applications.

Martin said, "This is really important. Everyone that competes for consumers with {Microsoft} needs to get into Linux desktop distributions."

I agree, but as a full time Linux user, I would add that having any working version of a Real Networks media player as part of the major Linux distributions would help make Linux a much more credible desktop competitor. Fedora, a rapidly-maturing successor to Red Hat Linux 9, is taking a different approach by actively removing components potentially covered by software patents. As such, I doubt that the Helix player will make it into Fedora Core 2 anytime soon.

The deal between Red Hat, Novell, and Real Networks covers Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop and the SUSE Linux Desktop, two distributions that many people expect to be deployed more and more in corporations and government, as an alternative to Microsoft Windows. It's unlikely that this announcement will have a significant impact on the home PC market unless super-cheap desktops and laptops really take off.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

MacDevCenter has published an excellent automated digital photo gallery creation howto written by Mike Schienle of Custom Visuals, LLC. This is Mike's first article for the O'Reilly Network, but in my opinion, it's similar in quality to Phillip Torreone's How-To Friday articles that have been published recently on Engadget.

Mike's article walks us through the design and implementation of a digital photo gallery that leverages Sendmail or a similar MTA, MySQL, and Perl with the ImageMagick image manipulation modules. The design hinges on using an email account as an intake mechanism for the automated gallery builder. It's a brilliant design because it's:

1. simple,
2. based on a well-defined personal need,
3. well documented,
4. easy-to-implement, and
5. extensible.

Although the article talks about using the digital photo gallery builder with Apple iPhoto, it could be used successfully with almost any personal digital photo management application as its front end. Mike implements his gallery builder on a Mac OS X server, but it's written in a way that would allow it to run on Linux or any other UNIX derivative without alteration.

I've got a ton of digital photos that my wife and I would like to be able to show to friends and family. So, building a digital photo gallery makes a lot of sense. I've also got experience with all of the individual components that are used in this design. You can bet that I'll have a version of this implemented on one of my servers soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Associated Press reports that David Bowie is encouraging people to remix his classic music with new tracks from his album "Reality". He is running a contest on bowieNet to select the most popular remix submitted to the site, with the overall winner receiving a new Audi TT coupe.

The contest is co-sponsored by ACIDplanet.com, a website run by Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, the makers of Screenblast ACID 4.0. Participants could also use ACID XPress a ten-track free version of the same software. Other software options are listed on the ACIDplanet Contest Details page.

This one of the more encouraging examples of guerilla marketing that the recording industry has come up with. Compare this to the reaction that EMI had to the Beatles remix called "The Grey Album" created by Brian "Dangermouse" Burton. Maybe EMI should have struck a deal to allow this album to be widely published, rather than sending a "cease and desist" letter. [ via Techdirt ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hands High Software has developed a $29.95 utility called WiFile that allows PalmOS users with wireless network support to access files on Windows, MacOS, and Samba-compatible file servers. WiFile makes use of the SMB/CIFS protocols to browse and manipulate shared directories.

This is a nifty little utility that apparently began life as SmbMate. SmbMate was mentioned by PalmInfocenter back in September 2003, was acquired by Hands High sometime between then and March, and had its name changed to WiFile.

I'm sure WiFile would be useful to users of the palmOne Tungsten C, or the Sony Clie UX50, TH55, or TJ37 PDAs, all of which have built-in WiFi. Other PalmOS PDAs with wireless capabilities could conceivably use this software as well, but are not as likely to be used in a fashion where sharing files from the network would be a tremendous advantage.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pocket RSS is one of the RSS aggregators for the Pocket PC platform. Ed Hansberry of Pocket PC Thoughts wrote a good summary of the new features and added several screenshots to provide a sense of what it's like to use the program.

This is the latest in a series of weblog headline aggregation software reviews that suggests that support for the OPML subscription format is critical in any aggregator that you use for serious work. OPML makes it possible for you to export or import all of the RSS subscriptions that you have setup within a headline aggregator. OPML makes it possible to quickly copy a set of subscriptions from one program to another, from a laptop to a handheld, and so on.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Brad Choate is considered a Movable Type guru. (That's the weblogging tool that tons of sites use, including Operation Gadget.) He published a list of software that he has installed on his Macintosh since he switched to a 15-inch Powerbook G4 back in October.

I'm always interested in the programs that people run on their Powerbooks. Some of the coolest applications get developed for OS X and I never seem to get to run them. Brad has a good list of programs here that will be of interest to people in the software development and system administration communities, and a good mix of commercial and free software. [ via dive into mark b-links ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Daily Wireless put together an excellent article about RSS use on mobile devices. The article includes a list of RSS aggregators for platforms from the PC and Macintosh all the way down to the iPod. [ via MobileWhack ]

One suggestion that the author, Phillip Torreone, makes is Syndigator, a Perl-based RSS aggregator based on Gtk that he believes is a good choice for Linux users. I have been using Straw since I got Fedora Core 1 running on my laptop. I will have to try Syndigator and see how mature it is relative to Straw.

BTW, Phillip Torreone and I seem to have a lot of interests in common lately. The other day, I noticed his website about exercise technology called /run. Today, I found him writing for Daily Wireless. He's blogging as much as I am, if not more.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was going to evaluate the Palm OS application called Life Balance from Llamagraphics. I never really got into it, initially because of the work required to rebuild my laptop after the hard disk died. Since I got it running again under Fedora Core 1, I have fallen in love with Ximian Evolution, an Outlook-like mail client for Linux that includes contact and "to do list" integration with PalmOS handhelds.

Ximian Evolution represents a major productivity improvement for me. I can finally see the majority of the data I keep on my Treo 180 syncronized on my laptop and integrated with my email. Maybe I could have done part of this when I was running Mozilla Mail, but I never bothered to go to the trouble to figure out gnome-pilot or how to get all of the connectors working.

I still think that Life Balance could be an interesting and useful tool for peole who are trying to gauge how much time they devote to work and family tasks. I still have issues that a program like this could help me with, but, the integration opportunities provided by Ximian Evolution are too great for me to pass up.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell has been getting a first-hand account of my foray into Fedora and has suggested that he too would like to break away from Microsoft Windows. I've warned him, repeatedly, that it's not for everyone and may not be most people for a while yet.

In my travels today, I noticed that Brendan Koerner, "Mr. Roboto" at the Village Voice , is suggesting a book called "Linux for Non-Geeks". Koerner said:

Sure, you'd like to join the open-source revolution and all that, but aren't those non-Windows operating systems just for eggheads? Of course not, and the good folks at No Starch Press are willing to show you why it's all very non-threatening. Their new Linux for Non-Geeks ($35), available at nostarch.com, has the full skinny on all the Linux basics: how to browse the Web, burn CDs, and do all those other modest tasks you've enjoyed as a Windows user.

Between Linux for Geeks and my favorite desk-side reference,
Linux for Windows Administrators, a Windows user could probably figure out 80 percent of the head-scratching features, design choices, and possible glitches.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Petteri Kangaslampi and Sergei Khloupnov have ported the PuTTY SSH client application to the Symbian mobile phone operating system. The Putty for Symbian OS project currently supports the following phones:

• Series 60 mobile phones including:
  • Nokia 3650,
  • Nokia 6600, and
  • Nokia N-Gage, as well as
  • phones from LG Electronics, Lenovo, Panasonic, Samsung, Sendo and Siemens listed on Series60.com.
• Nokia 9200 Communicator series including:
  • Nokia 9210,
  • Nokia 9210i, and
  • Nokia 9290.

These phones are more popular in Europe and Asia than they are in America, but the Series 60 phones are expected to be big sellers this year. Rumors indicate that the Nokia 6600 will be coming to the U.S. market soon.

I am intrigued by availability of an SSH client for Series 60 phones. When I heard about this, I started looking for a pocket Bluetooth keyboard that would make an SSH client far more usable. So far, I haven't found one.

Operation Gadget has provided information on mobile SSH clients for other popular PDAs and handhelds. In March, I provided information about SSH clients for Palm OS devices.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Operation Gadget makes no friends in the industries that we cover when we take aggressive positions against the actions of gadget and software makers. But, I feel compelled to ask the question:

What is Intuit thinking?

They announced that on-line services for Quicken 98, 99, and 2000 are being discontinued in April and May. This is disrespectful of Intuit's customers for the following reasons:

• Quicken users pay for access to these on-line services through their banks,
• Quicken users were provided with about 90 days notice of the discontinuation of service.

It's one thing for Intuit to scale back or eliminate phone support offerings for these late-model versions of Quicken. If I were them, I would charge a premium for continuing per-incident support. But, the cessation of on-line services is really a poke in the eye to customers who are perfectly satisfied with the personal finance software they already have, and don't need technical support.

This on-line service cessation could also never be attempted in the business software market with such short notice. Even if notice was provided on January 1, 2004, that's just about 120 days for customers to learn of the decision, buy an upgrade, and convert their data. Why force them to upgrade so quickly?

As Jim Coates of the Chicago Tribune said in a recent column discussing Intuit's decision, "When it comes to planned obsolescence nothing ever seems to be illegal in the computer marketplace."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the ideas I got from researching the What's on People's Treo 600's article was to take the 30-day free trial of Life Balance from Llamagraphics. This is a personal productivity application that runs on Windows, Macintosh, and Palm OS. Its purpose is to help users set goals, break them down into tasks, and complete them.

The difference between Life Balance and other productivity applications that I've used on the Palm is that Life Balance offers help balancing among personal, family, and business activities. Instead of simply providing a "To Do" list, Life Balance builds the To Do list dynamically from an goals outline.

Life Balance is a subtly complex application. Normally, I can download applications to my Treo, start using them, and just intuitively understand how to use them. I looked at the manual for the program within 10 minutes of launching it, and I expect to go back to it later today.

I will provide a complete report on Life Balance here in the next couple of weeks.

BTW, this screenshot is courtesy of Llamagraphics and doesn't represent tasks that I've entered into my copy of Life Balance. For instance, I don't know anyone named Morgan or Fluffy.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nechbi.com points out that RuttenSoft has released a utility called Activesync-Disconnecter that lets you turn Activesync off on a Smartphone running Smartphone 2003 without removing the phone from the cradle or stopping Bluetooth. Apparently, there are situations when it would be helpful to do this, but I hadn't considered the possibility until now.

RuttenSoft also has software to let your Smartphone act as a remote control for Windows Media Player or a remote control for PowerPoint when the applications are running on a Bluetooth-associated PC.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The BBC reports that Microsoft was fined € 500 million for limiting competition with its Windows Media Player software. At today's exchange rates, that's approximately $621 million. The European Union Competition Commission wants a competitive market to exist in basic multimedia software for PCs, and they believe that Microsoft has made this very difficult by the degree to which Windows Media Player is integrated into the Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The Competition Commission has also ordered some changes to the way Microsoft markets Windows in Europe. A long series of appeals is likely.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today, Dan Iggers from Toronto asked the following question:

I hope you are the right person to ask, or can point me in the right direction.

My son would like to have, for his birthday, recording software akin to "Garage Band" and a microphone. We have a Pentium II or III (?) PC with XP, and we can't go out and buy a Mac. Is there PC software that might fill the bill?

Thanks for asking, Dan. I'm answering this question on the site for the benefit of our readers. Try to keep your son away from Operation Gadget until his birthday.

With all the press that Garage Band received recently, you'd think that it was the first program of its kind for any computer. But, there have been digital music creation tools for the PC and Macintosh since before Windows.

I'm going to get in trouble with real musicians here, because there are programs out there that define themselves as "accompanyment generators," while others call themselves "digital recording studios." I'm not sure which of them is more appropriate for your son, so I'll pick a few examples that I consider affordable, then I'll talk a bit about the professional level tools that will help you do things like produce sound for independent films or professional audio applications.

Affordable Products

The first product I'm going to recommend looking at is Band-in-a-Box Pro 2008. This is the latest version of a product that has been around a long time and has had features added to it again and again. It's not as slick looking as Garage Band, but it allows you to combine keyboard, guitar, and vocal inputs with accompanyment created on the PC. You can use it for notation as well.

One of the reasons I'm recommending Band-in-a-Box is because it has an active user group. These people may be too musically geeky for you or your son. But, anytime a product has a user group that is this organized, it means that it's a high quality product to which customers have made a big commitment.

Another product that may fit the bill while taking a slightly different approach is Cakewalk Sonar Home Studio 6XL. Descriptions of Sonar Home Studio 6 talk more about incorporating ACID-format audio loops which is one of the main features of Garage Band. There's also Screenblast Sound Forge, a product from Sony Pictures Entertainment that is even more oriented to loop-based music creation. This may not be powerful enough for your son, because it doesn't look like you can integrate your own performances as much.

Continue reading "What Alternatives to Garage Band Exist on Windows?" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (38) | TrackBacks (1)

I just received the March 1 issue of Time Magazine, where Anita Hamilton reviewed Easy Media Creator 7 from Roxio. Roxio launched Easy Media Creator 7 at Demo 2004 in Scottsdale on February 17, and it's already available.

Easy Media Creator 7 takes the "suite approach" to organizing photos, music, and video on a PC in a way that reminds me of Apple iLife '04 for the Macintosh. As such, Easy Media Creator 7 may have an impact on the competitive marketplace for digital music. Roxio owns Napster which has been re-positioned as a competitor to the iTunes Music Store. Apple uses the iTunes software that ships with the iPod to drive traffic to the iTunes Music Store. But, since Apple has not yet ported the other components of iLife '04 to the PC, they cannot offer the entire digital media management suite on the PC, the way that Roxio can.

Will this situation close the marketshare gap between iTunes Music Store and Napster? Probably not, because I think the iPod and iPod mini are still better digital music players than anything that supports Napster. But, a few digital media junkies who have not already bought an iPod may be swayed to a Napster-compatible player by the depth of integration offered by Easy Media Creator 7.

Surprisingly, Roxio has also chosen to integrate data backup into this product suite. When I first saw this feature, I thought that they included data backup in order to justify the ability to make archival copies of commercial DVDs (the feature that has gotten 321 Studios in trouble over DVD X Copy). But, Roxio's product information clearly states that Disc Copier cannot be used to copy copy-protected CDs and DVDs. It's a good idea to include generalized data backup tools in a suite like this, both because the rest of the product is so data-centric and because so few customers take the proper steps to safeguard one-of-a-kind data that they create on their PCs.

Roxio's website pointed me to a review of Easy Media Creator 7 published by PC Magazine. This review is a good resource for people who read the Anita Hamilton's article in Time Magazine and want more specifics.

I think Easy Media Creator 7 is a really compelling bundle of features that Roxio has integrated very well. It compares very favorably with the Apple iLife suite prior to the introduction of GarageBand. The price of Easy Media Creator 7 at major resellers, including Amazon.com is also very competitive. Digital media users with PCs really ought to consider picking up a copy of it.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell pointed out that Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco ruled that 321 Studios must stop making software that allows users to make archival copies of DVDs, a ruling aimed at halting the sale of a 321 Studios product called DVD X Copy. According to the Reuters article:

Illston barred 321 from selling its DVD copying software within one week. As part of its appeal, 321 said it would seek to stay the ruling so it can continue selling its DVDXCOPY program.

321 Studios claims that its software has legitimate use as a means for DVD buyers to backup the content from commercially-bought DVDs in order to safeguard them from theft or damage. They also say that they can modify their software to remove a component that Judge Illston ruled is an infringement of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MacJams.com has done the first review of Apple GarageBand Jam Pack that I've seen. The Jam Pack is an add-on to GarageBand, one of the components of Apple iLife '04.

The Jam Pack includes 2,046 new loops (synthetic instruments playing phrases from a musical score). Many of these loops could be considered members of families with some of the loops that come with GarageBand in the iLife '04 package. Jam Pack also includes a number of new synthetic instruments and effect pre-settings.

MacJams' review is quite interesting because it contains several screen shots, as well as a detailed explanation of how the GarageBand application is structured and how add-ons are installed.

The reviewer liked the Jam Pack enough to recommend it. The conclusion reads, in part:

After playing with the Jam Pack for some time, it seems to be well worth the expense. Very compelling are the nifty new guitar amps, which allow you to make some truly cool sounds. And, you don't even need a guitar to get them -- any instrument capable of outputting an analog sound can be run through GarageBand's guitar amplifier to get a very convincing guitar sound....

And, of course, adding over 2,000 loops to your collection greatly decreases the possibility that your songs will sound like everyone else's.

It's reasonable to expect that there will be quite a few add-on packages for GarageBand, but it may take a while for them to come to market. Apple's first add-on, the Jam Pack, looks like its worth the money, and its release comes quite quickly after the initial shipment of iLife '04.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amazon.com is now taking orders for iLife '04 on behalf of its partner J&R Music World. iLife '04 features the new music creation application called GarageBand as well as iTunes 4.2, iPhoto 4, iMovie 4, and iDVD 4.

Of the four upgraded applications, iPhoto 4 is probably the one with the most important upgrades. New features include:

• Automatic time-based organization
• Smart Albums
• Photo sharing via Rendezvous
• Photo rating (one to five stars)
• Transitions that are remeniscent of those in Keynote

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In his Personal Technology column that appears in today's Wall Street Journal, Walter Mossberg talks about why he prefers Adobe Photoshop Album for digital photo management on Windows PCs. I looked at the PC photo management software choices a few weeks ago, and chose Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4 over Adobe Photoshop Album. But, if you compare Walter Mossberg's reasoning to mine, you can see that we are most interested in different features. Mossberg says:

The virtual-collections feature is the key to managing your photos without relying on a mastery of Windows folders and files. You can have a virtual album of your trip to Hawaii without worrying about whether all your pictures are in neatly organized folders and subfolders on your hard disk, with names relating to vacations or Hawaii. And virtual albums also spare users from having to be anal enough to add captions or tags to each and every picture.

For a lot of people who are managing a growing collections of digital photos, features like this are the biggest reason to invest in a piece of photo management software, instead of relying on the built-in capabilities of Windows XP.

When I looked at the same software products, I was not as interested in drag-and-drop collection management. I thought quick access to a number of photo touch-up features was a little more important. I was also concerned about the need to create a local database to manage collections that reside on network drives.

Near the end of his review of Photoshop Album, Walter Mossberg mentioned the kind of problems that can develop around the need to maintain a local database for your photos: "{Adobe Photoshop Album} can be sluggish with even a few thousand photos." This would be a serious consideration for me and my wife, but, it takes a while for many people to build up a library of several thousand digital photos.

I like Walter Mossberg's analysis of Adobe Photoshop Album, and I think that the features he focuses on are really important to new digital camera owners who are serious about building a well-managed photo library. I would encourage Operation Gadget readers to carefully read both our review and Mossberg's, decide on the features that matter most to you, and then make your choice.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, New York Times Circuits columnist David Pogue reviewed Garage Band, part of the iLife '04 suite of media creation tools from Apple Computer. This is an excellent review, explaining the key features of the product and giving some indication of how they can be used by someone who does not have a lot of musical background:

It's designed to let people with even the feeblest musical talent, or even musical interest, create professional-sounding digital recordings. It puts at least as much power into amateur hands as its i-predecessors; all it lacks is the traditional first initial....

You can transpose {1,100 included musical loops}, making them play higher or lower, and even change their tempo. (Indeed, that's one of GarageBand's most impressive bits of magic; how can software make a digital recording play in a different key, or at a different tempo, without distorting it?) Still, that's not quite the same thing as complete freedom to choose chords or melodies. In terms of compositional choices, nonmusicians are pretty much limited to fooling around with when various instruments play, not what.

This is the kind of review that a product like Garage Band needs in order to catch the attention of people who might be intrigued enough by it to choose to buy a Macintosh to use it. I imagine that a relatively small number of customers will run out and buy a Macintosh just to run Garage Band. But, if someone is looking to replace a home computer, they might be persuaded by Garage Band and other unique pieces of the iLife '04 suite to choose a Mac and figure out how to migrate their documents.

If Apple can recapture a little of the Switch Campaign momentum with the new iLife suite, I'm sure they will be happy.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another thing that Apple announced earlier today at MacWorld Expo is an addition to the updated iLife '04 software suite called Garage Band. This is a digital music editing tool which allows you to integrate royalty-free music clips called "Apple Loops" , synthetic instruments playing parts of a musical score, and physical instruments connected to the computer through USB or MIDI.

Whether you are a musician or