I recently installed Skitch for doing mac screenshotting after I switched to Mac from Windows. I found it to be cumbersome and not exactly intuitive. Then I discovered a really handy screenshotting tool that comes as a Dashboard Widget. Check this out (Screenshot Plus).
MobileMe is Apple’s answer to Microsoft Exchange with some additional features that look a lot like that Microsoft is offering with their new Live Workspace service. Essentially it gives you a unified way to handle eMail, Files, Photos, Calendar, and Address Book between all your machines including your PC, Mac, iPhone (iTouch), and AppleTV. For a marketing overview, check out the video over at apple.com. Its main advantage for business users is probably the way it provides similar functionality to Blackberry with the Push-Email Push-Contacts and Push-Calendar features. This means that the very moment an email is sent to you, you are notified with an audible noise from your iPhone without having to wait for it to page the server. Pretty cool indeed, and I bet RIM is shaking in their boots.
Email. The web based eMail application seems top notch. Clearly mirrored on Microsoft Outlook, it provides a clean, fast UI with seamless integration to the other MobileMe services. The push-email to mobile devices such as iPhone and iPod Touch make this feature an excellent choice for business users. Also, the Ajax-y goodness baked right into the Sproutcore platform makes this a really competitive webmail solution – right up there with Yahoo Mail and Gmail.
Online Storage with iDisk. This is something that has really been missing all-in-one suites. Some way is needed to move large files about the web between devices that doesn’t feel so ‘tacked on’. I was really impressed with the way Microsoft is solving this problem with Live Workspace, and it looks like Apple is following suit with 20GB of storage.
Calendar. This feature is well executed. The calendaring synchronization between devices is perfect, and the UI for the calendar interface on the web is as good as Outlook’s.
No Chat. Integrated chat is conspicuously missing from this package. While I can do texting-yes, I cannot see those conversations in the web view if I am away from my phone or don’t want to use my phone. I’ve really gotten used to this feature with Google Apps.
Browser Support. It’s odd that a solution targeting PC users does not support IE6 and only has limited support for IE7. As a rich-ui web developer I know that it’s far easier to build a web app that supports these browsers from the beginning than to go back and fix it later.
Price. Apple is asking for $99 for an individual account (per year). If you buy an iPhone or Mac you can get it for $69. To me this is steep. If I fork out the $2200 commitment for a new iPhone (with 3 year contract in Canada) why are they asking for $70 more bucks just so I can have the same level of communications Blackberry offers me all-inclusive? Also just generally what I expect these days for $99 is quite a lot when it comes to online services. Microsoft will sell me an entire office suite for $170 – I feel like I’m getting ripped off by paying $100 to Apple to make their own devices talk to one another. If I had to pick a price that would make sense for me.. I’d go closer to $49 for the Individual account, and no more than $20 if I buy a new computer or iPhone and sign up within 30 days.
Data Migration. I have so far seen very little on how they are going to help me move my data from Blackberry/Exchange/Google Apps to MobileMe. This is huge for winning converts and my biggest objection so far.
Apple has bitten off a lot for the first release appears to have chosen well for the baseline featureset. As always, I am wary about jumping on new Apple products right when they come out because I usually get burned (either with unanticipated price drops soon after launch, or hardware/software failures). However, my main objection to mobileme is that I am a committed Google Apps user and would have a hard time migrating all my data – as well as my email address. I will certainly keep my eye on this because I would love to get this level of integration with my devices, and like a lot of what Apple does, it looks oh-so-sweet.
I stumbled onto a copy of Making Things Happen (Second Edition) a few weeks ago here at Nitobi and I’ve finally had a chance to give it a good going-over when I was at the lake this weekend. This is a good book – let me say right off. I liked both the style of writing (very straightforward, employing limited amounts of jargon), and the methodical experience-based approach to explaining project management. Its definitely written from a software-development perspective (the author having worked on projects like Windows and Internet Explorer for Microsoft) but the insights contained would pretty much apply to any team-based project situation.
The author speaks from a place of experience. The book is littered with insights one could only gain from years of ground-level project management – probably with the same types of quirky software developers you and I deal with all the time (ourselves included, no doubt).
Topics covered include:
These items above are the broad strokes (lifted from the author’s website). Getting into it, I also encountered such gems as:
He caps each chapter off with some exercises, making this a useful resource for teaching a course on project management, although I rarely did more than just glance at them.
Rotten-tomatoes style I give this a rating of 90%. The only substantial criticism I would give is that sometimes it does seem a bit rambling, but those digressions were usually quite entertaining so its hardly a reason not to go pick up a copy of your own. BTW you can buy it right now from Amazon by clicking here: Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly))
I recently became aware of a beta version of a new SVN client for MacOS called Versions. I downloaded the beta to try it out.
Let me say this is probably the new de-facto SVN client for Mac users. Not only is it a powerful and full-featured client (along the lines of TortoiseSVN but with more features), but its intuitive and easy to use. I love the TRAC integration (although I havent got into it yet). I highly recommend giving it a try. Here are some screenshots:
It’s odd there is no global Clear() method on the HttpContext cache. Anyway, this is how you do it:
private static void DeleteAllCacheItems()
{
HttpContext ctx = HttpContext.Current;
IDictionaryEnumerator d = ctx.Cache.GetEnumerator();
while(d.MoveNext())
{
ctx.Cache.Remove(d.Key.ToString());
}
}
I was excited to get home last night to finally rent a movie on my AppleTV. Apple just recently announced that rentals were now available in Canada. Here are my notes:
The Bad:
There don’t seem to be all that many movies for rent. Also, you cant see which ones are available until you click on it – which is time consuming if you are just browsing. I expect this will improve over time though. One thing that really frustrated me was I could not browse for rentals from my AppleTV initially. I had to go through the process of renting one through iTunes before the menu options would appear in my AppleTV.. and they still didn’t all appear after I did. The system of ‘activating’ an AppleTV for movie rentals and encouraging users to try it out needs to be improved, or people just will not discover the feature.
The Good:
I rented a non-HD quality version of I Am Legend (starring Will Smith) for $4.99. The movie downloaded almost right away (it took about 22 minutes) and I was able to quickly sync it to my AppleTV (with some trouble.. the first time syncing it quit with no error message). Watching it on the AppleTV was simple and the video quality was excellent. All in all I was happy with this. I did not appreciate, however, only having 1 day to watch the movie after I started it.. I would be running really close to the wire if I decided to start watching it after work one day, and then finish it off the next.
All in all, the system worked well enough that I will do it again, but I wish they would improve the experience of actually renting the movie from AppleTV, and that they would tell us if a movie is available for rent without having to select it first.
According to Forbes, Apple “has been quietly positioning millions of units of a mysterious new product-almost certainly the new iPhone-in key markets since March.” Despite this, there has been no public announcement or images released of this new device.
It will almost certainly support 3G – a faster mobile internet system (so you’ll finally be able to actually watch those YouTube flicks while on the bus). Probably the storage capacity of the device will be increased too. If we’re lucky they’ll have done something about battery life too – although that seems doubtful with the demands of the 3G circuitry and any additional storage they intend to cram on there.
Mobile devices from Apple in the future may have the ability to draw power from the sun for longer battery lives. This revelation came to light today as people at Trade the News (a better article is here) noticed that recent patent applications from Apple included technology to harness sunlight.
While it may be a ways off in the future – photovoltaic cells beneath the touch-screen could add hours to battery lives – making devices like the iPhone much more practical for business users – who have been complaining about the limitations of the small battery for users who are constantly on the go. This is one of the major reasons consumers won’t be leaving Blackberry anytime soon for business communication.
Of course the bigger story here is that with solar energy and using other types of micro-energy devices we could one-day take our mobile devices completely off-grid. It has some appeal, if you can get over the idea that you’ll never again have the excuse ’sorry my iPhone battery was dead.. wasnt receiving any calls’.
All you designers out there.. if you ever were looking for a font that was clear even at very small PT’s, this is for you. Over at WebSiteTips.com, I found a list of pixel fonts – many of them free! Check them out:
http://websitetips.com/fonts/pixel/#pixelfonts
I wrote a fairly basic but handy JavaScript Object Inspector and Logger that works across different browsers. I call it “NitobiBug“.
Read all about it’s features here. I did a video tour also, which you can see here (turn down your volume – its loud!).
Check out the live demo here.
Essentially, what it does is provide a logging utility like Firebug’s console.log that properly inspects objects and shows you it’s members. If you log errors it formats them nicely too. If you inspect DOM elements with it, it attempts to show you where on the page they are and calculate their widths and heights and positions on the page. You can resize and drag NitobiBug around the page, and it tries to remember where you put it.
I use it all the time while I’m working on RobotReplay so I figured maybe other people would too. It’s certainly not the only such tool out there but I think it’s decent. Anyway, your comments are welcome!
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