Category: Apple

iPad note-taking and password management apps

I’ve been messing around with note-taking and password management apps on my iPad a bit today, so I thought I’d write up some notes.

First, for note-taking, I have Evernote and Satchel. I use Backpack on the web to keep track of a bunch of stuff, so Satchel is a good thing. As mentioned in my last post, it works well. I really don’t need Evernote too, but it’s free, so I’ve been playing around with it. I like the fact that it’s got desktop clients for Mac and Windows, in addition to the web client and the iPad/iPhone apps. I don’t think I’d give up on Backpack and move everything over to Evernote though.

I also use DEVONthink on my Mac and OneNote on my PC for note-taking. I should probably try to move away from both of those, and get all my info into Backpack and/or Evernote. Oh, and I use Google Docs too, though usually I’m using that for more structured documents rather than random notes.

For password management, I use KeePass on the PC and KeePassX on the Mac. I keep a single database in sync across all my computers via Windows Live Sync. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be a good KeePass client for the iPad/iPhone. I tried iKeepass today, but I couldn’t get it to work. It could open my KeePass file, but it wouldn’t expand the main tree to show me my passwords. I might be able to get around that, but I’m not sure I want to spend a lot of time on it.

There are a few good password managers for the iPad. I used SplashID on my Palm many years ago, and they have an iPad client now, so that might be a good choice. 1Password is pretty popular on the Mac. I’m not sure about their Windows client though. There are a few other programs, too, but I don’t know much about them.

I’m hesitant to go with anything that isn’t compatible with KeePass database files, but there just doesn’t seem to be anything good that works with KeePass on the iPad. If I decide to go with a different program, I’ll have to decide whether I want to switch over completely to that program (on Windows, Mac, and iPad), or just use it as a supplement to KeePass, and keep copies of my most frequently used accounts in there.

more iPad notes

I’m home sick today, so I might as well write a blog post on some iPad stuff, following up on my last post.

My Marware Evo-Vue case arrived in the mail yesterday. It’s well-made and fits the iPad well.

I bought Satchel, and have used it to update my Backpack account a few times already. It works well. There are a few interface quirks, but nothing big. I wish it had the ability to detach a file from a Backpack page, and send it to GoodReader though. I’m really liking GoodReader. It’s easy to get files into it (from a computer via wifi, or from Google Docs, or GMail, or MobileMe…) and it works well as a PDF reader and file management tool.

The one other app I’m thinking about buying is PrintCentral. I don’t really need to be able to print from the iPad, but it would be nice.

iPad

So I succumbed to peer pressure and got an iPad. I reserved it on Saturday and picked it up on Monday. It’s the 32GB 3G model.

Surprisingly, the unlimited data plan from AT&T was still available (even though it was supposed to disappear last week, I think), so I went ahead and signed up for that. I don’t know if I’ll keep the data plan turned on; I may only need it occasionally.

I haven’t found a killer app for the iPad yet. Nothing I’ve played with so far really makes me think, “yeah, I needed one of these.” I’ve been using an app called FrontPocket on my iPod Touch to access my Backpack account. I checked to see if there was an iPad-specific version of FrontPocket out, and was surprised to see that the app appears to be discontinued entirely. It’s no longer in the app store, and there’s no mention of it on the developer’s web site anymore. There is, however, a new app for accessing Backpack from another developer, and they have an iPad-specific version. It’s called Satchel and it’s from Stand Alone Software. If I remember correctly, these guys have been around since the days of the Newton. (I vaguely recall using one of their apps on my Newton, but I don’t remember what it was.) So, I’m probably going to download that and give it a whirl. I don’t know if that’ll be my “killer app”, but maybe it’ll be useful.

Oh, and I ordered an Eco-View case from Marware. As usual with these things, I spent far too much time looking at cases on the web. If they’d had the standard Apple case in stock when I picked up my iPad, I probably would have settled for that. But they had *no* cases in stock at all, so I went nuts on the web, and decided that this one looked good.

WonderCon 2010

Packed show floor image – WonderCon 2010 draws in S.F. (photos) – CNET News

Well, I’m not in SF at WonderCon this weekend. Maybe next year.

Nor did I buy an iPad today, though I did go to the Apple Store with a friend when he picked up his. I’ve almost justified getting myself an iPad, under the theory that attending WonderCon would have cost much more than an iPad, between the plane fare and the hotel, so I can spend some of the money I would otherwise have spent on WonderCon on an iPad. Yeah, I know the logic doesn’t quite hold up.

Snow Leopard

I have a bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to write up and post, but I just haven’t had a chance to do it. For now, just a couple of observations on Snow Leopard, since I upgraded my MacBook on Friday. The upgrade was smooth. I’ve got two semi-important programs that don’t work anymore though: Windows Live Sync and SonicWall NetExtender. I’m hopeful that both will be updated, but I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile, on the list of stuff that *does* work, there are a few oddball programs I use that are working fine: KeePassX, Lotus Notes 8.5, and Missing Sync all work. I *think* Fusion and TechTool Pro work, but I haven’t really tried anything crazy in either of those yet.

stupid boot camp

So I decided to mess around with Boot Camp tonight, and maybe install Win 7 on my Mac.
First problem: I figure out that Boot Camp Assistant isn’t installed on my Mac. So, I have to get the OS X install DVD, and figure out where the installer is, and run that. OK.
Next problem: When I set up my new 500 GB drive a couple of weeks ago, I used 400 GB for my Mac partition, and left 100 GB for a possible Windows partition. Thinking ahead is good, yes? Apparently, no. Boot Camp Assistant doesn’t recognize that. It cheerfully offers to subdivide my 400 GB partition, so I can use part of *that* for Windows, but it doesn’t even see that 100 GB unpartitioned space.
So, now I’ve re-sized my main partition to take up the whole drive. Maybe tomorrow night I’ll run BCA again and see about breaking it back up into two partitions.

random stuff

Some random notes, since I haven’t been doing much blogging lately:

I replaced the hard drive in my MacBook with a new 500 GB drive a couple of weeks ago. It’s working pretty well. At first, I thought the fan on the MacBook was coming on too often, but that doesn’t seem to be a big problem now. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything from the old drive to the new one, then just switched drives. No problems. I did de-authorize iTunes before switching drives, just in case. I really don’t know if switching to the new drive would have caused me to have to re-authorize iTunes, but I thought it might. I got the drive, and an external enclosure from Newegg.

I upgraded the OS on my BlackBerry Storm to 4.7.0.148 on Sunday, when Verizon released it. I couldn’t do the OTA upgrade, since I didn’t have enough free space for that, so I did it through Desktop Manager. It worked OK, but I had to manually restore my apps after the upgrade. DM backed up the apps, but couldn’t restore them for some reason. It wasn’t a big deal to do the restore myself. All my application settings, though, apparently got lost in the upgrade. I had to re-enter user names and passwords into a few apps, and re-enter authorization codes into a couple of apps. I also found that QuickLaunch 1.x didn’t work right with the new OS, so I paid CrackBerry $2 to upgrade to 2.x. It works fine now, and the new features were certainly worth the $2, so I’m glad I upgraded.

I’ve been fighting a cold since Mother’s Day. The first week, it was pretty much a standard cold. In the second week, I developed a really bad cough, but all the other symptoms pretty much went away. I went to the doctor, and she basically told me that it was a post-nasal drip problem, and just gave me some samples of Zyrtec and Nasonex. I’m not sure if either of those did me any good. When I ran out, I switched back to Claritin (actually, a generic equivalent). I’m not sure if *that’s* doing me any good either, but I think it is, at least a bit. The cough, and the throat tickle, come and go. I’ve learned to keep my windows closed at home, with the air conditioning on, and (sometimes) my air cleaner too. I definitely sleep better that way. I’ve also signed up for allergy alert e-mails from the Claritin site, and from pollen.com. I’d like to see if I can really correlate my problems with any specific allergy levels, or particular allergens. I remember having this same problem last year, right around the same time, so I’m guessing it’s a seasonal thing that I might be able to manage, if I can figure out exactly what’s screwing me up, and learn to stay away from it.

Meanwhile, I’m spending a lot of time alone in my apartment, catching up on my reading! I’ve read all the Hugo-nominated novels that were in the Hugo packet. I’ve now started into the novellas. Honestly, I thought all the novels were great, and I’m not sure which one deserves the Hugo. Conversely, none of the novellas has stood out as really great so far. I’ve only finished two though.

CVS and ViewVC on the Mac

I’m working on a project right now that involves CVS and ViewVC. I decided to set up a test environment on my MacBook for this. It was pretty easy. CVS is apparently part of the standard Mac OS dev tools install, so it was already on the machine. I set up a test repository under my home directory and put a few files in there. There’s an article on the Apple site about CVS that could get you started if you’re not familiar with CVS.

Getting ViewVC up and running took a bit more effort, but wasn’t really difficult. If you just unpack it in a folder off your home directory, you can easily run it in standalone mode. My repository is under ~/sandbox, so “bin/standalone.py -r ~/sandbox” gets it running at localhost:7467/viewvc. (Python needs to be set up on your machine, but that too is part of the standard dev tools install.)

Installing ViewVC so it’s running under Apache takes a little more effort, but it’s not too hard. I used the standard “./viewvc-install” to do a standard install to /usr/local/viewvc-1.0.7. From there, I just edited the viewvc.conf file to set my CVS root. Then, I had to set up a couple of things in Apache. The Apache config on my Mac was in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. I set up a script alias like this:
ScriptAlias /viewvc /usr/local/viewvc-1.0.7/bin/cgi/viewvc.cgi
I also set up a “Directory” section to point to “/usr/local/viewvc-1.0.7/bin/cgi/”. I think that’s all I had to do. After that, I could access the ViewVC site at localhost/viewvc.

I didn’t try to set up the ViewVC stuff that requires MySQL, but that probably wouldn’t be too hard.

some more calendar syncing notes

OK, I’m sure anyone reading this blog is by now bored out of their skull by all this talk about syncing calendars. I have no idea why, but I’m still finding it kind of interesting getting all this stuff straightened out. A while back, I blogged about the weird way that Apple handles birthdays between iCal and Address Book.

To summarize: You can generate a calendar in iCal that shows all the birthdays for your contacts. It’s not a normal calendar, though. It’s more like a calendar subscription, which means you can’t push it down to your iPod with MobileMe. I’ve been using a third-party utility to generate a “real” birthday calendar, which *can* be pushed down to the iPod, or anywhere else I’m syncing my calendars.

I think this auto-generated birthday calendar is the source of some of my syncing problems, both with Outlook (on the PC) and on the BlackBerry (via Missing Sync).

Looking at this thread at the Macworld forums, it appears that iPhone OS 3.0 may actually support subscribing to calendars, so I won’t need the third-party utility anymore. I’m not sure if Missing Sync will support pushing that down to my BlackBerry though.