Territorial Bloggings

So, I’ve had the new 17″ MacBook Pro for a couple of days now, using it enough to form more than just the cursory first impressions ( pretty, big, fast, cool, etc… ). Here’s a quick rundown on what’s struck me as the most significant & impressive elements of this beast so far.

The Screen: It’s not just that it’s big (which it is), it’s also that it’s so clear & bright. Frankly, the reason I pushed to make the jump from the 15″ to the 17″ was in the hopes that the extra workspace on 17′s 1900×1200 display (as compared to the the 15′s 1440×900) would be more than worth the extra 1.1 lbs. It is. It would be worth another pound. The extra screen real estate is useful, empowering, and gorgeous. WIN

The Body: I’ve watched the videos on the new MBP unibody design. I’ve even handled my mom & dad’s 13″ & 15″ MBP’s a few times. I knew they were solid. But I didn’t know just how solid, and now (and I use this word advisedly) sensual, the unibody design was until I got the chance to live with this 17″ MBP. It’s solid, supple, and just plain nice to touch. It feels good, and that translates into a computer that’s nicer & easier to use. The tolerances to which it is engineered are simply amazing. Everything fits. Everything works. My old 15″ MBP was solid, but this one makes it look/feel creaky & flimsy by comparison. WIN

The Keyboard: I’ve long been a fan of the new style (sleek, low-profile) Mac keyboards. I use one on my PC at work, and have one as the external keyboard for when I have the MBP “docked” & connected to a second monitor at my desk. The 17″ MBP has one of these keyboards (the old 15″ MBP didn’t), and in combination with the unibody engineering, typing on this is simply a joy. No stress, no strain, & great tactile feedback. Granted, it’s no IBM Model M – but what has ever matched that? No, pair the MBP keyboard with the fabulous multi-touch trackpad, and you’ve got a big WIN

The Battery: This MBP has one of the new Apple-designed, lithium-polymer, long-life batteries that is hardwired into the laptop. I.e., you can’t swap it out on the fly. I don’t care, as it doesn’t really impact me. I never had that come up with the old MBP, as I’m not a road-warrior type user. This new battery is rated for 1000 full discharge/recharge cycles, and up to 8 hrs of (theoretical) life per charge. Thus far, out of curiosity, I’ve done two cycles just to see what I could get using as I normally would if I had it plugged into the power. And I’ve gotten right at 4 hours each time. WIN

The other stuff is expected, really, in that it’s not surprising that a C2D 3.06 is fast, that 4GB of RAM is roomy & fast, that a 500GB 7200RPM HD is big & fast, and that the whole package is perfectly integrated with Snow Leopard.

All in all, I’m pleased as punch, and about as happy as a Mac fanboy can be…

-ghp

Now it’s time for the second in my three part series of posts on my entry into the iPhone world. Part one dealt with general musings on iPhone usability, and part three will deal with my favorite iPhone apps. In this second part, however, I’m going to write about what I’ve cobbled together in order to integrate the iPhone into my overall online productivity environment.

As a preface, and jumping off on something that I wrote in the first post, something that’s important to me is that I have clear separation between work and personal, particularly in terms of email & calendar. I made the decision long ago not to commingle those any more than necessary, even though I’ve never worked for an employer where that’s been an issue — better safe than sorry. So, I want to be able to control how/where the separate data streams (calendar in particular) get synchronized/combined.

That all being said, after a bit of experimentation, I have pretty much settled on a workable solution, whereby I have things nicely integrated & synchronizing without too much effort. [HT to Sem. Gillespie for the general format & inspiration for this section...]

Hosting: Eleven2 – a good, solid, semi-budget type host, but with great service, and not such a huge user base that they’re so big that they engage in overselling. Plus, they support WordPress fully, in that all the new functionality like push-button upgrades work. And, the owners are iPhone users, so there’s a possibility that they’ll start supporting iPhone push email.

Email: Right now it’s Gmail, in the form of Google Apps for Your Domain, for personal mail, and Groupwise for work mail, both set up on the iPhone as IMAP. Both work without any problem, and I have no complaints at all, wrt email.

Calendaring: Groupwise for work, and Google Calendar for personal & to synchronize. This is where it gets a little trickier, because GW doesn’t play nice with other systems, in terms of interoperability. Back when I had the Blackberry, I found a 3rd party app that kept GW in sync with Gcal (before I found a way to have the Blackberry serve as the hub for that purpose), so now that app (CompanionLink for Google) serves as the conduit by which my central Gcal & GW keep in sync. Then, I can easily keep the iPhone in sync with Gcal using the newly available hooks that Google has put in place. It’s clunky, but it all works surprisingly well.

Contacts: Traditionally, I used GW as the hub for my contact management. No more. Now, I’m using Google Contacts, and taking advantage of the hooks that are now available to integrate directly into the iPhone’s Contacts/Address Book. So, I have access to my contacts in Gmail/on the web and on my iPhone (and on my Mac since I’m using Spanning Sync to facilitate syncing my calendars & contacts down into iCal & the Address Book), although they’re not kept in sync in GW. Which, frankly, isn’t that big a deal to me…

Photos: I generally don’t do a whole lot with putting my photos online; however, when I do need to work with photos online, I’ve found Flickr to be the best option. Good organization, good sharing, good integration with other apps (WordPress, Facebook, iPhoto, etc…).

Task Management: I’m on an ever-present quest to organize my life through task managment. I’ve tried GTD (Getting Things Done) without much success, either in paper, or in various online forms. I tried using the Blackberry as a way to implement a bit of order into the chaos. I never had much success. Thus far with the iPhone, however, I’ve had a bit of success with the following combo – Tasks as the task manager app on the iPhone, Jott as the way to easily get tasks input into the system via voice/dictation, and Toodledo as the web hub by which the tasks are integrated & managed overall. I’ve actually been using this system, it’s been helpful, and it’s been working.

Social: Facebook has emerged, surprisingly enough, as my social space of choice. I also have a presence on Twitter, but I really don’t keep it up. Blogging, of course, is a given. The iPhone apps for all three of these social spaces are quite strong, with the apps for Facebook and WordPress being particularly strong.

Backups: While this isn’t specifically related to the iPhone, it is something that’s important nonetheless – there’s nothing worse than the feeling you get when you mis-click, or when a drive dies, and you lose data. That’s when you’ll want to have all the backups you can get your hands on! I have two external hard drives (320GB, Firewire400) that I use to back up my MacBookPro. One is dedicated to TimeMachine (the backup software built into OSX) backups, so that if I need to go back and get a version of a file from any time pretty much within the past year, I can go and pull it out. The second drive is dedicated to use by SuperDuper!, a great backup app that allows me to have a daily updated, bootable copy of my MBP’s hard drive, just in case something were to happen to it. With the combo of those two backup methods, I’m totally protected, and it’s all automatic!

Online Storage: This is one that I go back and forth on, as to whether or not I really need it. Because I really don’t use all that much online storage, although I do need some, other than what I use as part of my web hosting, in order to transfer files back & forth (to work & home & the web host). I’ve tried JungleDisk, which is a good front end for Amazon’s S3 storage service. It works pretty well, and Amazon’s pricing is pretty reasonable. At the moment, I’m focused more on using the storage that I have available as part of my hosting at Eleven2. The trick with that approach is (for me, at least) to then integrate it into the OS (Mac at home, Windows at work) as a drive, so as to make it simpler & easier to use. WebDrive for Windows is a pretty good app for that, and ForkLift and/or ExpanDrive for the Mac are good solutions.

Conspicuous in its absence thus far has been Apple’s own MobileMe offering. I’ve tried it. I’ve found it wanting. What it does, it does well enough. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do enough to justify the cost, even in light of the wonderfully tight integration with the iPhone. Even for the core functionality of email, calendaring, & contacts management, MobileMe is not flexible enough to trump the solution that I’ve been able to cobble together.

And that’s actually kinda cool…

Coming in Part 3: Musings on iPhone Apps

-ghp

So, I’ve had my iPhone for just over a month now, and I must say that it’s still just about the niftiest device that I’ve ever used. Seriously, it’s right up there with my MacBook Pro & the DirecTV DVR, which were heretofore the best and/or biggest game-changing pieces of technology that I’ve ever owned.

The Blackberry Curve that was replaced by the iPhone was certainly quite good, from a utilitarian standpoint. It was/is a great smartphone. But, I would state that it (and the Blackberry as a platform), IMO, is primarily a phone/communications device that has had some other things bolted onto it in order to become a more fully functional tool. And, make no mistake about it, it does these things very well. Even setting market share arguments aside, RIM has good technology, and they make it available to folks in attractive form factors that enable those folks to do lots of useful & necessary things. But deep in their heart/soul, Blackberries are still those two-way pagers — that’s their DNA.

The iPhone, on the other hand, feels to me like a computer — a Macintosh — that has a phone that’s been smartly grafted into it. Largely, IMO, that’s because of the fact that Safari works just like it does on any “regular” Mac, and that Mail on an iPhone handles attachments/content just like a regular mail client does. I’ve been able to read/view Word/Excel/PDF/photo files, and any other mail attachments without any problem on the iPhone — something that wasn’t nearly the case on my Blackberry (it was always a struggle). And, to put it simply & bluntly, the Blackberry browser is flat out inferior to Safari.

Quite frankly, and this was a surprise to me, the overall experience with the iPhone is good enough that, if I were presented with a situation where I was without a computer for an extended period of time (say a few days to a week or so), it would only be a minor inconvenience (with the Blackberry, it’d have been a major setback). I could do most everything I do on a daily basis, with very little change in how I do it. The biggest inconvenience/oddity is that there’s no cut & paste functionality, which impacts more than you might think.

As an iPod, it’s as stellar as you would imagine. So, the only thing I’ll mention in that regard is more a commentary on integrated car audio/phone functionality — if you can get it, do so! I can control the iPod using the stereo touchpad controls, via the USB link in my Honda Civic, and it’s very nifty. It’s fully integrated and it keeps the iPhone charged, which is an advantage over the regular audio-in jack option (which is still better than FM or cassette options). For phone use, I’ve got the integrated Bluetooth Hands-Free control, that allows full use of the phone, and is much easier (and, I hope, safer) than even the Bluetooth headset that I had been using. These aren’t unique to the iPhone, I know, but I do like how this functionality works with the iPhone, compared to what I had with my Blackberry & regular iPod.

As a side note, switching from Verizon to AT&T wasn’t a problem for me, either in terms of the mechanical process of switching (the conversion of the corporate account’s ownership to me & porting the number from Verizon to AT&T was painless), or in terms of Verizon vs. AT&T. I’ve actually found AT&T to be pleasant enough to work with after so many years of dealing with Verizon (their web interface is much better, IMO), the pricing & service plans are comparable enough to be a wash, and the coverage hasn’t been an issue where I spend my time (even when I’ve traveled far afield to West Lafayette & Akron). The next step will be getting Deb moved over to AT&T when her Verizon contract runs out in May, and then we’ll get a family plan set up (and probably have to deal with the inevitable of getting Melissa set up with her first phone…).

About the only thing that was easier with my Blackberry was integrating & synchronizing my work & personal calendars; however, that’s actually more a function of the fact that at work we use Novell’s GroupWise email/calendaring software, and have the requisite BES infrastructure up & running to fully accommodate the necessary integrations of Blackberries & GroupWise. GroupWise is rather notorious for not playing nicely or easily with a huge number of 3rd party apps, and their interoperability with the iPhone leaves much to be desired.

I’m now realizing that there are really three posts that I want to write on this subject. I’m now wrapping up the first one – general iPhone usability impressions. In the next post, I’ll delve a little deeper into the specific mechanisms that I’ve setup to make the iPhone work in an integrated and synchronized fashion, in terms of productivity (personal and otherwise). In the third & final post, I’ll talk about some of the iPhone apps that have become my favorites.

That realization made, I’ll close this first out by noting that my being a general Apple fanboy is only a small part of my infatuation with the iPhone (and my Apple fanboy-dom is actually, I would contend, more appropriately an “It-Just-Works-Elegantly” fanboy-dom…). Rather, my infatuation with the iPhone is based on what the device is able to do, how it is able to do it, and how those two factors map themselves to my way of getting things done. In light of how I do things, then, the iPhone really is that good.

As this has turned into a (very) long post, I’ll stop now. If there are any questions, or if I’ve missed anything that you might want to know about, just ask & I’ll be glad to answer…

-ghp

It’s alive… alive!

The new “old” 500mb SCSI drive has been successfully installed, replacing the dead 120MB drive (that had replaced the original 20MB disk). System 6.0.8 has been successfully installed, and my little SE is now running just as smoothly as it did on the day I got it in mid-March almost 20 years ago. Better, even, because I didn’t get it upgraded from 1mb to 4mb of RAM until Fall ’89 (at a cool $250/MB from the UNC-CH Tar Heel Bookstore!).

Also nifty to to note is that I was able to resurrect some files from an 18 disk (1.44mb format) full backup of the 20mb hard drive that I made back on 12/25/90! That is pretty darned neat. I remember how very cool & impressive I thought that 20MB hard drive was back when I got it. It was my first computer with a hard disk, and I was in heaven, because I didn’t have to worry about boot disks, system disks, data disks, and all the juggling thereof. I couldn’t imagine ever filling all that space. Even so, I was very careful about keeping everything backed up, just in case. And it only took 18 years to have such vigilance vindicated!

Now I just need to get my next project done — a “bridge” Mac of some sort, so that I can get all of my old word processing files (Mac Word 3.x, natch – I used Mac Word long before WinWord even existed, and even remember my first exposure to PC Word, when I was aghast at what a character-based piece of garbage it was…) migrated over from the SE-era floppies onto the MBP. I’m thinking something running, maybe OS 9.x. It’ll interesting, though, because my experience with MacOS jumped from 7.1 (in 1990) to 10.x (in 2002). I pretty much had no exposure to, or experience with, 7.5, 7.6, 8.x or 9.x, so whatever I decide to go with will be a learning experience.

-ghp

I get nostalgic quite easily. Always have. It’s not all that bad a thing, and probably contributed to my affinity with History & being an History major as an undergrad. That said, I do also tend to get melancholy at times, and that’s not always that good, when combined with nostalgia jags.

Anyway, of late, I’ve been getting increasingly nostalgic about computers. Someday, I’m going to attempt to do a more thorough rundown of the computers I’ve gotten, built, and/or used over the 26 years that I’ve had computers to call my own. The list of what I built & when, however, could be a bit tricky, though, as I’ve started to forget exactly what I built into the various boxes I assembled in the late ’90s.

The first computer that I really felt was mine was the Apple IIc that I got in August 1984, just as I was about to start my senior year of high school. I really, really wanted a Mac, but settled/rationalized that a IIc was OK because I could have a mouse with it, and might even be better because I could do my computer class (BASIC programming & such) homework just like at school (where Apple IIe computers were used). It wasn’t exactly what I wanted (I had bought into the Cult of Mac almost immediately upon hearing about the Mac), but I just wanted a computer with that rainbow fruit on it.

Years later, much to my chagrin, I found out that my father was surprised when my mom & I came home with the IIc instead of the Mac. He expected, and was OK with, my getting the Mac. The thing is, though, I was firmly convinced that he was dead set against the Mac, as it wasn’t as “practical” as the IIc. It wasn’t the first, and certainly not the last, time that I outmaneuvered myself!

That all said, I’m very fascinated by this Flickr photoset of someone unboxing a pristine, never-before-opened, 1988 vintage Apple IIc. Very cool. Very cool, indeed.

Now, I wouldn’t want to have that IIc, as my nostalgia doesn’t extend far enough to want to actually use one these days.

The same, however, cannot be said for the Mac SE that I got in 1988. Over the course of the next few weeks, I’m going to be putting the final touches on refurbishing that SE, so that I can have it up & running again in time for its 20th anniversary. I’m not looking to try and get it online or anything like that (I’m not that much of a masochist, after all…), but I do want to have it working & running just like I did back in the day. I have every intention of keeping y’all updated with all the gory details…

-ghp

Well, it was a good news/bad news kinda deal…

Good news: I figured out both what was wrong with the iMac’s wireless connectivity, and how to deal with it such that I didn’t have to drill holes or take the iMac in for repairs.

Bad news: It wasn’t cost-free.

In short, the Airport (wireless) card in the iMac is dead. I tried pretty much everything I could find to try at Apple’s support site, and I couldn’t get it jolted back into working. Unfortunately, beyond RAM upgrades, the iMac isn’t really something that I want to try and crack open in order to make sure that something just didn’t come unseated. And I really didn’t want to take the time/money/risk of taking it into the Apple Store (in Chicago) in order for them to check it out. I didn’t get the AppleCare with it, and it’s been about 15 months since I got it, so it’s out of warranty.

Since the wired NIC works without a problem (heck, I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to when then Airport card died, as I haven’t even tried to use it for months…), I set out to figure out a way to see if I could leverage my existing wireless network. This, then, is where I met with some success. Apple has made it quite easy to link two (or more) Airport base stations together into an extended-range single wireless network. So, all I had to do was go out & plunk down some coin for a new Airport Extreme.

Eh, after deciding to take the plunge & get the full MacBook Pro monty, what’s another $180 in order to see my grand vision come to fruition, right? In for a penny, in for a pound!

So, I was able to set up the new, better-featured, Airport Extreme as the main base station, and I relegated the older one to be the relay station and, more importantly, the iMac’s link into the wireless network.

Everything is now working as it should — the family is getting adjusted to using the iMac, and I’ve got my MBP setup going, including having the 19″ ViewSonic LCD monitor from the now dismantled virus/malware magnet, er, Windows box running as a second display alongside the MBP. It’s pretty cool to have a 1280×1024 display to complement & expand the workspace provided by the MBP’s 1440×900 display.

All’s well that ends well, I guess…

-ghp

Soon to arrive at Schloß TB:

A brand spanking new 15″ MacBook Pro!

Side benefit #1: It’s coming with a free 4gb iPod Nano (silver, natch…)

Side benefit #2: Schloß TB will now officially be an all-Mac shop, as the orneriness & age of the last Windows box prompted this upgrade.

I’m giddy with excitement…

-ghp