There are a couple of new note-taking apps for the iPhone that came out just recently. MagicPad’s key feature is cut and paste, which, sadly isn’t built into the iPhone system software. iNote is fairly straightforward and simple. One interesting feature is the ability to switch to landscape mode, which isn’t present in the built-in notepad app. Sadly, neither of these apps has the capability to sync to the desktop or to the web in any way.
Category: Apple
iPod Touch annoyances
The MobileMe syncing stuff has been working fine for my calendar and contacts. I mentioned previously that there was one annoyance with this — there’s no way to get the birthday calendar down to the iPod Touch. I’ve now gotten around this by turning off the normal birthday calendar in iCal, and instead using the ability of MenuCalendarClock to copy birthdays from Address Book into a “normal” iCal calendar. So, long story short, I’ve got all my birthdays on the iPod Touch. MenuCalendarClock costs $20 to register, which is pretty reasonable, given that it does a few other useful things.
I still haven’t found a good note-taking app that syncs between the Touch and either my Mac, PC, or the web. I’m going to keep an eye on the app store and see if anything new and interesting appears.
more iPod Touch and MobileMe stuff
I see that Apple is extending all MobileMe subscriptions by 30 days to make up for the hiccups in the first few days of the service. That’s nice of them. MobileMe is working OK for me now. I’ve input stuff on the web, on my Mac, and on my iPod, and the sync is working fine no matter where I enter stuff. I’d still like to get the birthday issue straightened out though.
When I set up the 2.0 software on my iPod, I initially turned on “push”. That works well, but really drains the battery. I’ve got “pull” turned on now instead, and I’ve got the thing configured to check once an hour. I hope that’ll clear up the battery issues. I wonder if they could make the pull functionality work a bit more intelligently, so it doesn’t kill battery life.
I’ve looked around at a number of productivity apps for the iPhone / iPod Touch. I haven’t found one that looks like it’s all the way there yet, for what I need. There are a few interesting apps that don’t actually sync with their desktop counterparts yet. Things is a good example. Ditto for Dejumble.
I think my preference right now would be to have an iPhone version of DevonThink, Backpack, or maybe Yojimbo. With full sync, of course. I’m not sure any of these apps are going to get iPhone versions soon, though.
MobileMe
I’ve updated my iPod Touch with the 2.0 software, and done the necessary updates on my Mac to support the new MobileMe syncing stuff. Apple is *almost* where they need to be to allow me to replace my old Palm with the iPod Touch. I now have my calendar and contacts synced automatically to the Touch, accessible on the web, and on my Mac. And I can update either the calendar or contacts on the Touch, Mac, or web, and it should all sync automatically. Pretty cool!
There are couple of little problems. First, while the birthdays from my contacts can show through to my calendar on the Mac and on the web, they don’t show on the iPod Touch. This problem is described here, and there’s a tech note about it here. That’s not a killer problem, but it’s definitely an annoyance.
The other problem is that there’s still no good way to sync text notes in the same way as the contacts and calendar. There are a couple of third-party solutions that may work out for this. Here’s an interesting one that should be available soon. Evernote is available now, and might be what I’m looking for. It would be nice if 37 Signals came up with something to allow you to sync BackPack to the iPhone/Touch for offline access, but I don’t see any indication that they’re working on that.
MacHeist and other Mac stuff
Well, after deciding not to buy this year’s MacHeist, I changed my mind and gave them my $49 today. They’ve added enough stuff to the bundle to make it worthwhile for me. Even if I don’t use anything else I’ll probably get my money’s worth out of the two games they added.
And I gave Apple $20 for the new iPod Touch apps. The Touch still isn’t where I think it should be, in terms of functionality, but I’m hoping third-party software will fill the remaining holes after the API comes out next month. If I could just get contact, calendar, and note-taking apps that all sync back to my computer, and can be updated on either the Touch or the MacBook, I’ll be happy. I’m basically just looking for the same stuff I’ve got on my Palm.
Mac software
MacHeist has another bundle of Mac software on sale right now. It’s a good deal, if you need more than one or two of the included applications. I bought the bundle that they were selling about a year ago. About the only app from that bundle that I’m using regularly is DevonThink, which is pretty useful. I’m not really seeing anything in the current bundle that I’d be likely to use, though, so I guess I’ll skip this one.
I have pretty much everything working the way I want it on my new MacBook now. I’ve got FolderShare working fine now. I’ve replaced MacStumbler, which doesn’t seem to work on Intel Macs, with iStumbler, which works fine. And I found out that my old version of the Transmission BitTorrent client didn’t work, so I upgraded to the newest version, which is working fine.
Office 2008 looks interesting, but I don’t think I’ll bother with it. I hardly ever do any word processing or spreadsheet work on the Mac. I do all of that stuff on the PC.
I also paid for VMWare Fusion a couple of weeks ago. (I’d been using the trial version.) I’ve got a Windows XP virtual machine set up, and it’s working reasonably well. I’m mostly just using it when I need remote access to some stuff at work. (I still use pcAnywhere for that, most of the time.)
random stuff
I haven’t gotten around to blogging in the last couple of weeks. Things have been pretty hectic. I’m trying to relax right now, so I thought I’d just write up a few random bits.
I picked up a TomTom One LE GPS unit at Best Buy last week. I don’t really need a GPS often. Most of my driving is just back and forth to work. But, it will definitely come in handy once in a while. I used it today to help me find my way to my friend Paul’s house in New York. I’ve been there before, but not recently. The GPS was definitely a help. In particular, there’s one point where I need to make a turn onto a side street that’s pretty well hidden, until you’re right on top of it. The GPS takes care of that nicely by announcing the turn in advance, then again when you’re right there. It really makes things easier.
I’ve been working my way through the Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde. I’m on the third book now, Well of Lost Plots. It’s starting out quite nicely. I’m really enjoying these books. Lots of fun, weird, stuff.
I installed the trial version of VMware Fusion on my MacBook yesterday, and installed Windows XP into a virtual machine. It works pretty well. It’s a little slow, but a lot better than previous virtual machine products that I’ve used on the Mac. (Of course, this is the first time I’ve used an Intel Mac, so right there you’ve got a major advantage.) Oh, and I’ve got to say, I think it’s time for Windows XP SP3. I installed XP with SP2, and had 90 patches to install from Windows Update. Hey Microsoft, isn’t that enough patches to warrant a service pack? That’s one of the nice things about Apple that we maybe take for granted. OS X 10.4 went from 10.4.0 to 10.4.10, and each of those point releases is cumulative, so you never have too many individual patches to install on a Mac.
AppleCare
I didn’t get the extended warranty from Best Buy when I bought my new MacBook. I generally don’t see much point in Best Buy warranties. I’m considering AppleCare though. I don’t think I’ve ever bothered with it before, and I’ve never really needed it on any of my previous Apple laptops. I might actually keep this laptop for three years, though, so that might make it worthwhile. I just figured out that you can get AppleCare at Amazon for $200 rather that the $250 that you’d have to pay if you bought it from Apple. That makes it a little more likely that I’ll get it.
new MacBook
I bought a new MacBook today. I got the white 2.2 GHz / 120 GB HD model. This is my first Intel mac, so that’s the major difference for me between the new machine and my old G4 iBook. I’m liking it so far. The keyboard is taking a while to get used to, but it’s working fine, and I don’t think I’ll have any long-term problems with it. The screen is smaller than the iBook, but it’s a little higher resolution (1280 x 800). That leaves me with slightly smaller type on screen for some things, but that hasn’t been a problem (yet) either.
I was going to buy a custom MacBook from the Apple web site, and go for 2 GB of RAM and a 250 GB drive, but then I saw that I could get 2GB of RAM for about $50 from Crucial, vs. paying Apple $150. And I can probably get a 250 GB drive for less than what Apple is charging, if I decide I really need it at some point.
I bought the machine from Best Buy, online, for store pickup. That worked out pretty well. I actually got $10 off, since they didn’t have the machine ready for me when I came to pick it up.
I have a few apps that haven’t been upgraded in a while; while they all work on the Intel Mac, they’re probably not working as well as they could. FolderShare was a little flaky even on the old iBook, and hasn’t been updated for Intel, but I think it’s working OK now, since I turned off encryption and compression, per some advice on the FolderShare message boards. I’ve been using Juice to download podcasts for a long time. It doesn’t seem like they’ve got a Universal Binary out either. The PowerPC version works fine, but it’s a bit slow. And I’ve switched over from an old organizer program called iOrganize to DevonThink, which is definitely up-to-date. I also had to apply a patch to KeePassX to get it to work on Leopard.
Overall, not that much grief, considering I’m switching to a new machine, a new processor, and a new OS version.
more fun with consumer electronics
I decided to update the firmware on my HD-DVD player tonight. I don’t have the thing anywhere near my home network, so I figured it would be easier to do the firmware update via CD-R rather than trying to do it over the Internet. Lesson one: the Toshiba HD-A3 doesn’t like CDs burned with Nero. It seems to like CDs burned with ISO Recorder, at 2x speed. I picked up that tidbit from AVS Forum, which is a great source of information on various audio/video stuff. So now I’ve got the HD-A3 at firmware version 1.1. I’m not sure that’ll make any difference for anything I’m doing, but I feel like I’ve accomplished something.
I also ran over to the local Apple Store and picked up a new battery for my iBook G4 today. I’m pretty sure I want to get rid of the iBook and get a new MacBook soon, but the old battery had almost completely died over the last few days, and I really didn’t want to pick up the new MacBook right away. So the new battery seems to be charging as it should right now. Hopefully, it’s a good battery and will get me through until whenever I get the MacBook.