Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Mail – we all get more links to articles and webpages nowadays than ever before. I would often find myself coming across an interesting article, but would lose track of it in a mess of tabs, unless I read it right away.
Bookmaking is the most obvious option, but you risk cluttering your useful bookmarks with lots of items you’ll only look at once. So how can you organise your reading? Here’s the system I use…
Just a quick note to let you know I’m playing around with a different theme design for the blog. I wanted to go back to a traditional front page layout with all articles on a single page and decided to try a different style while I’m at it.
Let me know if you find any weirdness, or just what you think!
I just came across a nice collection of simple, clean desktop backgrounds that I had to share. For example:
Head over to Simple Desktops to check them out!
Have you ever been annoyed by the shopping sites that come up on Google while looking for product reviews? Well, it looks like Google has a new feature that should help:
And you’re done! Google will hide most of the shopping results, making it easier to find reviews, tips and other product information.
Continuing in the series of posts hating on MobileMe, today we’re going to look at free alternatives to Mobileme. This article will focus on the core Mobileme features and take a look at the pros and cons of the alternatives.
I’ve never been willing to lock myself into a $99 / year e-mail service, simply because my main e-mail address is something I’d like to be able to keep indefinitely. Gmail can collect (and send) e-mails from a variety of providers and addresses, offers free IMAP support (a must-have for iPhone owners!) and doesn’t include advertising in the messages you send. The storage is basically unlimited and nothing is ever deleted.
Pros: No ads in mails, best-of-breed webmail interface, IMAP support, works great with Mail and iPhone once configured
Cons: IMAP mailbox configuration a bit tricky
Surprise surprise, another Google app! Google Calendar offers basically the same range of features and can be configured to sync with iCal (Google actually provides a handy tool called ‘Calaboration‘ to set things up for you automatically). Perks include free SMS appointment reminders, simple calendar sharing and fast natural language scheduling (e.g typing “Dinner tomorrow at 9pm” will schedule the appointment accordingly).
The web interface is a little less pretty than MobileMe’s, but it gets the job done.
Pros: SMS notifications, iCal integration, CalDAV support, natural language entry, useful “Agenda” list view of upcoming events
Cons: -
I’ve raved about Dropbox in a number of other posts, so I won’t rehash to much of the details here. Suffice to say that Dropbox has the best cloud-based document syncing and storage service I’ve come across. It’s integration with the Finder is perfect, it offers seamless version control and makes sharing with Windows & Linux users a breeze as well.
The only real difference is the storage size – but it’s a big one: While free Dropbox accounts can sync up to 2GB of files, Mobileme offers 20GB of storage. Beyond the free plan, Dropbox also offers a 50GB package, but that costs as much as Mobileme does.
If you don’t need to sync and store large amounts of data in the cloud, Dropbox is perfect. If you do need more storage, then Mobileme is worth reconsidering.
Pros: Seamless cross-platform OS integration, easy sharing, version control & “undelete”
Cons: Only 2 pricing tiers, web-interface a bit tricky at first
Mobileme’s iPhoto Gallery feature is probably my favorite aspect of the entire package. The galleries are a little slow to load, but are very nicely presented. The ability to download an entire Zip file of an album is also a nice touch and the iPhone presentation is the icing on the cake.
But there’s a plethora of picture sharing websites out there that offer similar functionality: I’m just going to name a few that stand out for their decent iPhoto integration:
Overall this might the dealbreaker if you really need to share a lot of images with friends online. Sure, you could always just throw a zip file of your images on your Dropbox account (see above), but if there’s one standout feature of Mobileme, this is it.
There are lots of great alternatives for Mobileme’s individual services worth checking out. Whilst they may not offer the integration that Mobileme does, they sure give the service a run for its money and are worth a look if you’re on the fence about signing up or renewing your account.
Oh, but if you do decide to stick with Mobileme, you can save a bundle if you buy it through Amazon.
There are a bunch of guitar chord & tab sites out there on the web, but usually you’re never near a computer when somebody hands you a guitar and wants you to play a song. Whilst there are a ton of iPhone guitar tuning and chord reference apps in the AppStore, there isn’t much in the way of apps for tabs or sheet music. Luckily there’s a few ways to get your favorite songs on your iPhone…
This semester we’ve been assigned a lot of coursework that needs to be worked on in teams, with each team usually consisting of around 3-6 people. To help us share files, work on document together and generally stay in sync, we’ve started using a few different online services…
Well, Chrome is here and so far I’m pretty impressed. Although currently only available for Windows (you can’t actually download the Windows version if your browser identifies you as a Mac user – I had to select a Windows user agent for the download page to let me download it) it’s quite snappy, even running under Parallels.
I had no trouble loading any pages and even complex pages such as my netvibes.com customized homepage (which is slow to load on other browsers) seemed to load very quickly (and this was in a virtual machine!).
OpenID seems like a nice idea to simplify logins and profiles on the web. The promise: Create an account with one OpenID-enabled service such as Yahoo, WordPress or others and then you’ll be able to sign in to other OpenID-enabled services.
The reality? OpenID still has some way to go before really becoming seamless enough for the average user to use it. Most of the issues lie with the sites implementing OpenID, but from what I can see they’re pretty systemic Here’s my OpenID experience:
So I decided to sign up to Skribit. They offer OpenID support, so I decided to try that, rather than create a traditional account. First of all you’re asked for your OpenID url. If you don’t know what that is, tough luck. There’s no link with more information on what your url could look like or how you can get one.
Frustrated, I figure I’ll go to OpenID.org to find out more. OpenID.org looks like a cross between a phishing site and 1996:
And this is why forcing users to enter credit card details to test a free trial of your somewhat troubled online service is a bad idea – here’s one users experience after signing up for a trial:
“I have just checked my card account online and apple have put a £121 pending transaction on the card! that’s not even 1 years subscription.”
Link to the relevant Apple Support Discussion thread.
A question that never stop being asked is where new Mac users can find OS X equivalents of their favorite Windows apps. Whilst some people would say to just head over to VersionTracker or MacUpdate, I’ve found they’re usually a bit overwhelming: I don’t want to sift through every update, utility or abandoned freeware if all I want is to find a semi-decent FTP client.
So here are 3 sites I’d recommend anyone new to the Mac should check out if you’re looking for the right app for the job:
I found an interesting post on the German mac news website Macnews:
A company by the name of “Pystar” are offering a $400 x86 configuration they’re calling the “OpenMac“. The draw? The OpenMac can be configured with a better graphics card, processor and larger harddrives than the similarly priced Mac mini: For $550 you can get a machine that’s faster than a Mac mini AND has a graphics card with 512MB of dedicated video RAM. (Of course, it has none of the mini’s good looks – but then again, looks aren’t everything).
Pystar claim the OpenMac is capable of running a stock Leopard installation without any modifications. But once you dig a bit deeper, it turns out that’s not quite the case:
“The OpenMac runs the Vanilla kernel with minimal kext patching “
Their FAQ page also includes this tidbit:
“Can I run updates on my OpenMac?
The answer is yes and no. No because there are some updates that are decidedly non-safe. Yes because most updates are not non-safe. It’s best to check on InsanelyMac for this information but when in doubt don’t update it. You may have to reinstall your OS X if it is a non-safe update.”
So they’re basically selling Hackint0sh’s. I expect Apple’s legal dept. is already looking at ways to take this down.
It’s a shame that Apple doesn’t offer a configuration like this though: A Mac mini with a slightly better graphics card would be a great second mac for notebook owners who already have an external monitor who want to play the occasional game without shelling out for an iMac or Mac Pro.
Here’s a quote from an email I just received from tribe.net (for those of you that don’t know Tribe, it’s basically your run-of-the-mill social network, except none of your friends are there):
“We hope you excuse this mass mailing. Some of you getting this email specifically have told us that you don’t want email from tribe.net and we generally don’t send out emails to the entire userbase. We wanted to let you know about the big changes that have happened here at tribe.net, and if you haven’t checked in with us in a while we encourage you to do so.”
Bullshit translator:“Hi! We’re sending you spam, despite promising not to any more”.
So what’s this important news they’ve got to tell everyone, even people that have unsubscribed?
“We’ve listened to our users for solutions to our site instability problems. The overwhelming consensus is that our users love tribe.net so much that they are willing to pay for a premium subscription for all the functions that we now give to you.”
Bullshit translator:“We don’t have any money and Google won’t buy us… can we have some of yours?”
So shilling a new subscription model is so important that Tribe needs to tell users who have specifically told them they’re not interested? Bravo guys, now I really feel like giving your my money and more personal information…