David R Storms.com

Decision to Switch

I made the decision quite easily to switch to the Mac. I am a web development and programming professional, and I was already using Linux at work and I wanted the tools and ecosystem of the Mac OS environment. Obviously the tools available cannot be the only reason, since many (and more) exist on the Windows PC ecosystem.  For me there was a number of other factors that made sense for me personally, and even though I could have stayed in Windows, I felt the Mac platform was where I wanted to be.

Factors included:

1. I use Linux as my primary operation system (OS) at work and the sheer number of tools and ease of use is staggering. Ubuntu is the distribution that I use and it makes programs very easy to install and keep up to date. I think Linux got the label that it was not user friendly, I think depending on what you do this is not the case. It’s true that a lot of the common applications for the typical user are not there, such as running Microsoft Office. You would need to know the open source or commercial alternatives which could be a challenge to some users.
2. I love the integrated terminal. On Windows I used PUTTY, but I really like simply firing up a terminal window and having raw access to the system and remote systems.
3. On the Mac I liked the idea that it was an integrated solution. I already purchased an iPhone, and although it synced and worked fine with iTunes on Windows, I just like the idea of using the same manufacturers equipment to get the whole integrated experience. I would feel the exact same way with say the Zune using the PC software made for it.
4. The hardware was a big seller for me. My PC was aging and I always said that if I was to get another PC I would build it myself. But when I looked at the iMac’s, I fell in love with the large bright screens and the very capable components inside. Everyone trusts the quality and beauty of design of the iMac.
5. The iLife software and elegance of OS X was a draw for me as well. I was really interested in iPhoto and GarageBand.
6. I knew that I could make the switch easily since all the tools I used were available on the Mac platform.
7. Xcode was only on the Mac, I am really interested in iPhone development and I needed the Mac for this (simply put, no Hackintosh for me!)

Another thing I loved is that for $50 I got the wireless mouse and keyboard. That means the only cables I have, is the power cable plus the iPhone charging cable and the external hard disk. But out of the box just having 1 power cable was very nice.

Here is an overview of the applications I switched to and what I was able to still use after switching to the iMac.

iTunes and iPhone Apps

I had all my media on an external drive. Thanks to a tip from LifeHacker, I was able to backup my library (which was already consolidated and organized on the external drive) as an XML file. Then I just edited the XML to change the Windows paths to valid Mac OS X paths after connecting the drive to the iMac.

Using iTunes, I just imported my library XML file and it found and added all my playlists and song collection, just as it was before. I was left with a bunch of duplicate playlists but that was fine.

All my podcasts came over, but all of them were marked as not played. I couldn’t find out how to change this, so I just deleted all the previously listened to ones. I figured I wouldn’t need them again and they were just taking up space anyway.

I was worried when my Apps from my iPhone didn’t come over, but that was easily fixed by clicking on the phone in iTunes under Devices, then in the File menu click the “transfer purchased apps from iPhone” and voila, it started adding them back into iTunes. Perfect.

I didn’t notice that iTunes by default puts all of your music in the users Music folder. I have a Western Digital 1 TB My Book where my music was and I thought it would remain there. But since I didn’t change the folder, all of the Music ended up copying to the hard disk. This actually worked in my favour as you will find out later.

iPhone

No real issues here. I was used to the iPhone under Windows and not much changes here.

Devices

I have a Western Digital 1 TB My Book which I simply unplugged from my PC and plugged into the iMac. It mounted and appeared just fine.

Applications

Support now for the Mac platform is better than ever. I was able to easily get Skype (albeit an older version), FileZilla (FTP client) and Eclipse installed and ready to use. I installed Tweeite (ad supported – since I like the paid iPhone version) for my Twitter fix.  I used JungleDisk (excellent backup solution by the way) on Windows and wasn’t really surprised to find that there is a Mac version.  I purchased iWork 09 to replace Microsoft Office which I was OK with since I didn’t use the plethora of Word features. I do miss Excel and the Ribbon UI, but I’ve heard that Microsoft is going to be offering Office online soon for free. I’ve been getting the hang of the equivalents (Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets) and I still find them very functional. I haven’t had a reason to use Keynote yet but I am excited to try and use it since I’ve heard presentation software is way better than PowerPoint (as of now, some interesting things are coming down the pike I think for PowerPoint).

I plan on doing some iPhone development, so I installed the 2 GB+ iPhone SDK with Xcode.

I already knew how to use iTunes and Safari so I was happy there. I think I want to get back to World of Warcraft, and luckily enough the Mac version is right on the install discs, getting up and running was very easy. Ventrillo was also available for the Mac which I will use for voice chatting while playing WoW.

iLife 09

This suite is amazing! The first app I started to play with is iPhoto. I started by importing my 3-disc wedding photos. I started first by playing with faces. This is truly an amazing feature! The software recognizes where faces are in photographs, and since I was doing my wedding album there was a lot of faces so an excellent test! All you have to do is give names to the faces it recognizes, or you can help it find faces by drawing a little box around it. After you do your first photos, iPhoto immediately sets to work looking for those faces. The more you tag the smarter it gets.

When you go to the faces view, you are presented with a grid of the people you tagged. You can then double click them to see the full photos with them in it. iPhoto then below those gives you a big grid of possible pictures with those people in it, all you have to do is click the image if its correct. It zooms into the part of the image with the face so you can see.

This feature alone I think makes this product shine, I haven’t seen any free with Windows solution for that. I recognize that Windows Live Photo Gallery does do face recognition and I remember using it, but it just seemed to work much nicer on iPhoto, could that just be a perception thing? Going deeper I found that you can make really cool slideshows out of your events (aka photo albums) using built in templates that look remarkable. Also creating slideshows was equally impressive with amazing transition effect templates and even great stock music choices (of course you can use your iTunes library).

GarageBand I had a lot of fun with. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to create new music by taking the sample loops provided and just dragging and dropping drums, guitars, piano, sound effects and more! Podcasting is something I think I would like to play around with, and with all of the power of GarageBand, adding music and production value to the podcast just gets that much more easier and fun!

I haven’t played with iMovie or iDVD yet but the getting started videos (that you are directed to when you open the apps) make it look very easy to use.

New Apps

Growl is a tray notification system that many Mac apps can natively talk to. It gives you a customizable popup in the top right. It notifies me when Skype events occur, when TimeMachine starts working, when my JungleDisk backup starts uploading to S3, when I get new Gmail messages and more. So far this is a great update.

As I mentioned earlier all my music from the My Book was moved to my hard disk. So all I did was copy the rest of the data I had to the hard disk, and then setup the whole drive as my TimeMachine drive. This feature is great. I didn’t like always using files off of the My Book since it would always have to spin up. Now with it being for TimeMachine I just access my files locally and my entire Mac is backed up to the My Book. TimeMachine does hourly backups for the last 24 hours, then daily for the last month and then monthly until it runs out of disk space, then it just deletes the oldest. That is great. Plush the interface allows you to visually flow back through file versions in time. The entire desktop disappears and you are floating in space with the active folder in front of you and my more stacked behind it. You then move through those stacks and each one represents a different hour in history for the folder and the files in it. Very cool. My backup solution is now the entire Mac to the My Book, and then my special documents and pictures up to Amazon S3 via JungleDisk. I feel well protected. Especially with my contacts, calendar and email in the cloud.

Xcode I’m just getting started in. Learning Objective-C and the iPhone SDK is a bit of challenge but I am slowing with the help of the Apple developer library and the online community I am starting to build simple apps using the iPhone simulator. I still need to get my $99 developer certificate so that I can install apps on my iPhone and eventually publish to the App Store!

MAMP is Mac + Apache + MySQL + PHP. I have a few secret projects underway that require PHP and MySQL, and as a web developer this is one of the best turn key solutions. You simply install it, then it configures and sets up all the aforementioned packages so that you are ready to create databases and PHP applications. It amazes me how fast this worked, but I’ve used WAMP and LAMP previously and they are just as simple, so I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised.

GmailStatus is what I use to get the email notifications from Gmail. I have setup the Mail client in Mac OS X to work with Gmail, but I really do like the Gmail interface. This notifier app works with Growl so I get the same consistent action message when I get new mail.

Tweetie is an easy to use ad supported Twitter app. I like how it remembers where you were scrolled to in your Twitter feed. I really like the iPhone version so I didn’t mind paying for it, but I’m not sure I like the desktop client enough to buy it.

Textwrangler is a text editor recommended to me. The very simple text editor that comes with the OS wasn’t enough for me. This one offers highlighting by language and tabs and much more features than the simple editors.

I haven’t done it yet, but I will likely download Firefox and eventually Google Chrome but right now I’m pretty happy with Safari.

Conclusion

I think the Mac vs PC debate will go on and on with fanboys on either side. Ultimately some online OS where everything is web application based will likely make all of these irrelevant, but in the many years it will take before we get there, I think the real decision will simply be a matter of choice. I feel good about my Mac experience and it seems like a perfect fit for me. I like the idea of the OS vendor and the hardware provider being the same company. I like Apple products and I can be supported just fine on the Mac platform as I could have on Windows.

I am still very interested in Windows 7 and there are parts of me that will miss some of the features there, but I feel much better about joining the Apple camp.

Hopefully some of things I shared here will be useful to people making the decision or who have already made the decision. Please leave a comment if anything needs to be corrected or if you have anything you can add to help me (and ultimately other readers).

One of the exciting additions to the iPhone in the recent firmware update is the ability to send multi-media messages (pictures and video) the same as text messages. This is nothing new to the mobile phone market, as these features have been staples in products for many years. Could be that these things were left off the release table for Apple until now because it was too much work for them to get it in the phone, or they were planning ahead for future firmware releases and didn’t want to use up everything on their feature list!

Regardless, it is here on the iPhone and it is amazing! Also coming along with the update is the Internet tethering capability which had not been available to non jail-broken phones.

MMS

Unfortunately I wish that I had a 3G S phone so that I could test the video side of this, but alas I only have the 3G, so I will only cover my experience with pictures taken by the camera on the phone.

First thing you will see when you open the Messages app (used to be called a speech bubble called SMS but that wouldn’t make sense now would it!) you will notice near the text bar a small camera. Clicking on that little icon will bring up 2 options:

You can click “Take Photo” and jump right into the Camera app, or click “Choose Existing” and head into the Camera Roll and find the picture you want to send.

When you take the picture, you can optionally choose to Retake the photo, or click Use to have it go into your message.

You can type your text right in the speech bubble. I really like how the image is shrunk down and appears with the message. When you click send, it ends up in its own little speech bubble and the text gets separated into its own bubble:

You will notice a nice addition in 3.0 is that the screen isn’t locked with the sending progress bar anymore. The progress shows up at the top so you are free to start typing the next message, or go back and send a message in a different message thread.

I couldn’t make it happen, but when I first started using this feature I would have failed messages. I am with Rogers up here in Canada so shortly after 3.0 came out I imagine they were a bit overloaded with MMS going everywhere. When failures occur, 3.0 now shows them with a red exclamation point beside them. All you have to do is click that and hit the Retry button when it prompts. This is great because it leaves your messages there, so if it was network congestion with Rogers, I can easily leave the Messages app and come back in later and retry them.

You will notice as I did that with the image bubbles, you lose a lot of real estate in landscape mode trying to read other messages:

Of course if someone sends you a picture, it is easy to grab it. Just click on the image (it will appear as a bubble on the left, just like the senders messages) and you will get a full screen preview of the image. In the bottom left is a little icon that lets you easily save that image into your camera roll for safe keeping:

Speaking of camera roll, if you happen to be in there and looking at images and see something you want to share, there is a new option along with the Email to to send via MMS:

In the next part, I will share my experience with the tethering options found in 3.0.

This is the first post in this series of articles I’m writing detailing the products, services, web sites, technology, etc that I use in my day-to-day life. Hopefully some of this is useful to you when making decisions or maybe you are looking for something and I can help out by describing what I do.

For example, I LOVE THE iPHONE! Apple got it so right when they built this product. Being that I live in Canada, it wasn’t until July 2008 that I even had the option to get one (well, for me anyway). I dumped my carrier in the late fall of 2008 to pick one up. I have since been integrating this device into my life, and it has definately made an impact. I highly recommend this device for anyone that thinks they want a smart phone. Don’t know? Then read on and maybe I can sway you to the dark side!

Applications

Ok, let’s get this part out of the way first. When you talk about the iPhone the first thing most geeks think of is the apps you get from the Apple AppStore. Here are the apps that I use most frequently. I have tried many, but I only want to talk about the ones I like and use most often.

Right away I’ll tell you I have not purchased any apps yet. I will buy an app when I think I need it and the price is right (which for the most part everything is reasonable). I will do a part 2 if I find more apps that I use and maybe there will even be paid versions. Let’s face it, the free ones are where a lot of people go.

In order of most frequently used: (note that icons will launch iTunes and the AppStore)

	Free RSS This app is a great way to organize your news feeds. It simple and it works very well. I have an Engadget feed, the default Apple Hot News feed, CNN entertainment and technology feeds, the tech feed at Digg and Paul Thurrott’s Supersite site feed. I find the Engadget feed the best as it renders photos for each post, plus a built in browser means you don’t have to leave the app to view the web content.
	Twitterriffic & Twittelator Who isn’t using Twitter these days? I even broke down myself. I like reading people I follow on Twitterriffic. However, Twittelator has a cool feature to allow you to geo tag your Tweet, plus take a picture using the iPhone’s camera and include both with your post.
	Google Mobile App The king of search is on the iPhone. What I like is the voice search, which I find very accurate. I can speak “pizza pizza” into the phone and get the number, map and address to the local pizza shop. Very handy.
	WeatherEye Better than the provided weather app by far. It has up to date forecasts during the day and a 3 day and 5 day forecast. Add supported but not that intrusive.
	AroundMe Works using the built in GPS of the phone to use a category, like say Apple Stores and it will tell you the closest with address, phone number and a link to the maps to get directions. Has a very good library of places and works well even in my little part of the world.

Productivity

Web 2.0 was definetely thought of when this phone was built. I leverage a few online services for work and I like having access to them no matter where I am. So here is what I use.

Gmail – email from Google is super easy to setup. When you add a mail account it is one of the options. I highly recommend you use Gmail through the IMAP protocol (you can “Google” that if you don’t know what it is). With IMAP, your email always stays in the cloud (Google servers). This let’s me check my mail using a couple methods:

1. You can use Safari on the iPhone to access the mobile version of Gmail
2. You can use your email client on the iPhone to read, move, delete and respond to all mail
3. You can use your browser on any web enabled machine
4. You can use mail clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, etc to do everything with email

So no matter where I respond to emails or read emails, I edit only the copies on the server so I see the exact same results no matter how I get at my email.

Calendar and Contacts – Since I use Gmail for email, it only makes sense to use Google Calendar for my scheduling needs. The iPhone already has a calendar program and a contacts list. I wanted the same behaviour where I can keep all my data with Google’s services and have them able to be manipulated on the cloud or the phone. I discovered a service that let me take advantage of the 3G’s Exchange capabilities.

Here is how you get started. Visit https://www.nuevasync.com/ and create a fee beta account. They have a mobile phone friendly version of their site (which is the only version).  They have good instructions, but once logged in it’s very simple to activate email, contacts and calendar through their portal which uses the Google API. You have to agree to allow in Google Nuevasync to access your data feeds (nothing manual, you are just promted).

After that, you can simple go into the settings of your iPhone and enable the various Exchange like features so that you have push and pull calendar and contacts. I choose to remain with IMAP for email. It works great, I add a contact in Gmail or a event in the calendar either in my browser or on the iPhone and it appears in both places, and very fast too.

Accessories

There are tons of things you can get for your phone. I settled on some of the essentials. I still to this day use the standard headphones. They are excellent because of the small mic/button tab that works great for music and phone.

The stock head phones that come with the iPhone work great and sound very good. I do have trouble with them staying in my ears, and I am looking at other phones. But, the little mic attached on the cord I can’t do without. You can go forward or back on your iPod, or answer phone calls. The mic works great and I haven’t had anyone say they couldn’t hear me well. I actually prefer using the headset while talking on the phone.

Dock: I purchased the standard dock for the phone that used to come with it. I like having it sit up on the desk rather than have the perfect finish get scratched!

Case: I went with the Marware C.E.O. Sleeve because I liked the belt clip, plus the ease at which I can get the phone free. You have to take the phone out of the sleeve to charge, but that is what I have the dock for. No problem with the head phones and you can easily reach the buttons. You have to remove the phone to use the camera. The inside is a material that wipes the phone on the way in and out, ensuring less smudges. You can find the link here.

Face: I purchased the Power Support Anti-Glare Film set because I wanted to protect the glass surface of the phone. It works great and does indeed cut down on the glare. You lose a bit of clarity but not enough to worry about. I even find I like the touch interface better than using the glass directly. A bit tricky to stick in the right place, but not that hard. Here is the link here.

Thanks for reading my post. Of course there is more things I use with the iPhone, this is just for starters! Leave a comment and let me know what you think.