Yesterday, I wrote my review of 1Password, the OS X application, but I didn’t go into detail about some of Agile Web Solutions’ other offerings that help make 1Password even better. One example is my1Password, a service that AWS will provide (either for free or at cost, unknown at this point) that ties in with 1Password. my1Password is currently in private beta, and the only reason that I have access is because everyone who bought the January 2008 MacHeist Bundle got an invite. However, I have been trying it out for quite awhile, and so here is my review.
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Tags: 1Password, Agile Web Solutions, my1Password, online, passwords, review, security, service

The other day, I was showing off 1Password, one of the apps that I use most frequently on OS X, to a friend. I was subsequently surprised to discover that I’ve apparently never actually reviewed it on my blog. Well, actually, that’s partially true: I reviewed it back in 2006, when it was still called 1Passwd and wasn’t that good, but that post no longer appears on here (since I recently cleared out my fairly lame old posts from before January 2007). In fact, the only real mention that I have of it on this blog was its awesome iPhone/iPod touch app I reviewed a month ago. However, 1Password has gone through revolutionary changes since I reviewed it in 2006, and now I’ve been using the app for almost a year, and it’s been getting better and better. And so today, I’m going to make things right by reviewing 1Password, the application, today, and tomorrow, I’ll be reviewing a new 1Password service that I have invite-only access to and have been playing around with.
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Tags: 1Password, Agile Web Solutions, applications, identities, keychain, Mac, passwords, review, security, wallet

They say that the third time’s the charm, but I don’t know if I would apply that to the third WordCamp conference in San Francisco that took place today. While it may partially have been that maybe I’ve gotten a little bit used to it, now that I’ve been there a few times, a lot of changes happened this year that I didn’t really think were that much for the better. And so my analysis and recap of this year’s WordPress event begins…
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Tags: 2008, Automattic, BarCAmp, Blogging, conference, event, rant, San Francisco, WordCamp, WordPress

When the App Store first launched almost a month ago, I must say, I thought that it would be a great thing. Not only were iPhones and iPod touches opened up to have third-party apps available on them, but they would be available in one centralized location to make it easy for users to get these apps, and the fact that handle was handling distribution in its own store meant that little, smaller developers could have just as much of an entry into the iPhone app market as the big boys.

But now, it appears that the latter part of that belief was not true, as the more I’ve been reading about the developers’ side of the App Store, the more I’ve not been liking it.
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Tags: App Store, Apple, authors, developers, iPhone, iPod touch, iTunes, MOD Database, MOD Team, phpBB, problems, Software, suggestions

I’ve recently been converted.

No, I’m not talking about religion here. (Who knows why I would ever want to blog about religion, anyway!) I’m actually talking about something much more relevant to most of us in this day and age: e-mail.

I’m sure that many and relate themselves to me when I talk about how, during the past school year, I really didn’t do much to keep my e-mail under control, and I found myself having an inbox full of stuff dating all the way back to last September. By the end of June, I had over 1500 messages in my inbox, and I didn’t even remember what most of it was.

Well, one of my goals this summer was to get my life better organized (both in the real world and the computer world), and e-mail was certainly a major target for getting my life back in order. And lo and behold, I found my inspiration in the July 2008 issue of Macworld, which featured a three-part article by Joe Kissell called Empty Your Inbox (part 1, part 2, part 3), which was heavily based on the Inbox Zero philosophy by Merlin Mann. I delved into the Macworld article, Merlin’s video presentation and Merlin’s own set of blog articles surrounding this novel idea of getting your inbox down to nothing.

And after reading and watching, surprising as though it may seem, I’ve successfully implemented Inbox Zero into my life this past month, and now could hardly imagine going back to letting my inbox fill up. (I’m still going through the last few transitional growing pains of adjusting to a new paradigm for my e-mail, but a lot of this stuff is finally starting to become instinctive.)

While you can go check out this info for yourself, here’s my summary of what Inbox Zero is all about, and how it works.
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Tags: data detectors, e-mail, inbox, Inbox Zero, Macworld, Mail, Merlin Mann, OmniFocus, organization

About a month ago, Lorelle VanFossen issued a blogging challenge to bloggers to describe their computer setup, from the past to the present. (I know, I’m a bit slow.) But, I thought, why not, I’ll go back and describe my family’s various computers from 1995 (when we got our first Mac) to today. A lot of the details in this post is thanks in part to Mactracker..
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Tags: blogging challenge, computers, iBook, Lorelle VanFossen, Mac mini, MacBook, Macs, Performa, PowerMac G4, setup

When Apple announced MobileMe back in June and announced that it would be replacing .Mac with a far superior service, I for one was excited. At last, .Mac/MobileMe was actually worth something. (I still think $99/year is a bit pricey, but I’m willing to live with that here.) In fact, if I wasn’t doing all of my stuff from one single computer, if I had one of Apple’s handheld devices, and if I actually had money to spend, I would have purchased MobileMe the very first day.

Boy, am I glad that I’m dirt poor right now.

As completely strange as it might seem, it appears that Apple has flubbed up MobileMe in every conceivable way these past few weeks. Take first the fact that it took about three times as long for the .Mac-to-MobileMe transition to take place (leaving many many .Mac users without any access to vital .Mac services that they needed for a few days), then throw in the whole ongoing fiasco with the so-called “1%” who lost use of their e-mail and actually lost a few days worth of their e-mail in the process. Many of these people weren’t even people who signed up for MobileMe, they signed up for .Mac, and were not expecting MobileMe to happen or for them to have to go through this. I mean, I can see something like this happening to a free service, but when Apple is getting $99/year from these people, that’s pretty ridiculous. Plus the fact that Apple was completely tight-lipped about this for nearly a week says some pretty bad things about how Apple handles its services and its customers.

Now, today, it turns up that Apple is limiting support to those people who were part of that 1%, and only people whom Apple thinks was on that 1%, according to TUAW. I mean, for the love of Pete, has Apple considered that other people may have other problems with MobileMe too? Just this morning, my friend Daniel Brusilovsky was trying to get support through one of those online live support things. After just saying “hi” to the support representative before even having a chance to type his question, the support guy said “Sorry, I can’t help you with this issue, I can only help with MobileMe Mail,” and closed the chat connection. What gives?

Apple, I know that you’re all big and successful now with all of the Macs, iPods, and (now) iPhones you’re selling, but it appears you’re starting to let that go to your head. If you want to be able to rebuild the already-ruined reputation that MobileMe has garnered, you’re going to have to do a lot more things correctly, and you’re going to have to start with the way you treat your paying customers. Otherwise, I’m not giving you a single blood-red penny.

Tags: Apple, e-mail, Mac, MobileMe, outage, reputation, ripoff, support

I’m sure that most people who have been reading my blog or listening to my various podcasts for awhile are aware of my ever-changing attitude towards web browsers. Ever since Safari was first released by Apple back in 2003, I have never used a particular web browser continuously for more than a year at a time. I ditched Internet Explorer back when Safari came out in 2003, and since then have utilized Safari, Mozilla (later replaced to be Seamonkey), Firefox, Camino, and OmniWeb (and I’ve promised myself that I’ll give Flock a try one of these days) over various times, even switching back and forth between them a few times. Two years ago (summer 2006), I went with Firefox 2 beta for a few months, liking it more and more as it went mature, but then shortly after it went mature (and Camino later went 1.0), I switched over to Camino for a good while. Then, last October, when Leopard came out, I gave Safari another go, and found myself loving how it had been improved in Leopard.

Well, about a month and a half ago, Firefox 3 went final. Regardless of your choice of web browser, you have probably heard about Firefox 3’s release and how it successfully set (perhaps even inaugurated) a Guinness World Record for most copies of a software application downloaded in a 24-hour time period, with over 8 million downloads. And, just to show that I was part of the fun, I downloaded Firefox 3 that day too, and I even have a certificate to prove it. However, once I opened up Firefox, I found, lo and behold, that the browser feels so much nicer, smoother, faster, and more Mac-like than Firefox 2 did, and since then, I’ve been using Firefox now for the past six weeks, evaluating it and getting a feel for it, and so now it’s time for me to review it.
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Tags: Firefox, Mozilla, review, update, web browser, world record

In a future blog post, I’ll be reviewing Firefox 3 (which I’ve been playing around with for awhile) and the various Firefox extensions that I’ve been using with it. I’d like to ask of the other Firefox users out there if they have any Firefox extensions that they really like and would recommend that I try out. Head on down to the Comments section and share your suggestions (and help me get even more out of Firefox)!

Tags: addons, extensions, Firefox, web browser

I’m currently writing this blog post on an iPod touch at my local Apple Store, thanks to the WordPress App for the iPhone/iPod touch. Writing on this onscreen keyboard is still a little bit clunky, but I’m certainly doing it faster now than I was doing when I first picked up an iPhone here a year ago.

As i’m sure many of my readers are aware, I’ve been a very longtime holdout when it comes to iPods and iPhones. In fact, as I described in a recent blog post (boy, I wish this thing had a way to let me copy and paste links), my opinion of the iPods (including the touch) has been that they pretty much didn’t do anything that I couldn’t already do on my laptop. True, these things ate more mobile, but just how many of the mobile features that these things offered did I really need to have with me when my laptop was not handy?

But now this darned thing called the App Store is out. Not only has it wowed certain influential tech reviewers like David Pogue (if you haven’t seen his latest video about the App Store, you’re missing out on something GREAT), but it’s even making me take another look at these pocket-sized wonders.

Twitterriffic is certainly one of those Mac apps that has ported over very nicely to the iPhone/iPod touch, but it actually extends the ability of Twitter to reflect what you are actually doing. After all, most if us certainly don’t spend every moment of the day doing things just in the computer, so for Twitter to realize its full potential, it has to be the kind of service that can go mobile. I’ve had the chance to try Twitterrific on the iPod touch, and it has really felt like a nice transformation from its beautifully-simplistic interface on the Mac to an equally beautiful and simplistic interface on the touch. I could easily see it making me 50% more active on Twitter.

WordPress, the app that I am using right now to write this blog post, is also a very interesting examplenof what’s possible. After downloading this app onto here, all I had to do was enter the URL of my blog along with the username and password for my WordPress admin panel and boom, I was in my admin via the app with the ability to edit my past posts or write a new one, like I’m doing now. I could totally see using this to write a brief blog post from somewhere, although maybe not a really long one like I’m doing now.

1Password has not yet gotten their iPhone version out yet, but after seeing the preview that they posted on their blog, it’s another app I’m quite interested in. One of it’s abilities is supposed to be allowing you to generate super-tough and super-safe passwords, but I’ve been a bit slow at getting many of my passwords safe because I wouldn’t remember them if I needed to login from somewhere else and didn’t have 1Password there to autofill the info for me. Between having 1Password on the iPhone/iPod touch and the my1Password service, however, both of which are coming up soon, I could really have a nice solution for keeping track of my passwords and keeping them secure.

OmniFocus for the iPhone/iPod touch, however, has GOT to be the deal-clincher for me. Since I bought the Mac version at Macworld in January, I’ve been working on adopting OmniFocus and getting used to using it to help me organize the various tasks surrounding my life (and try to reduce stress as well). The problem, however, is that it lives on my computer, which I don’t have with me at places like school and other places where I really need to have it handy to add actions to (as well as reminding me of what actions I need to get done). OmniFocus for iPhone/iPod touch, however, would eliminate that problem by letting me have my OmniFocus lists with me to get to, and let me sync them with the ones on my computer. Add in those awesome mobile-only features like location-aware contexts, and it’s about time to put the “Slippery With Drool” signs out.

While I’m still not interested in the iPhone (unless someone wants to donate the $70/month AT&T plan to me, since I doubt I’ll ever be able to afford that and don’t like AT&T anyway), I’m starting to show a bit of interest in the iPod touch for the first time. It may have just been a touchscreen wifi media player when it first came out, but now, thanks to the App Store, I’m convinced that it’s the best PDA out there, and one that I’m really getting interested in. However, I’ll keep waliting until Apple releases their next line of iPods (likely this fall) until I start saving.

P.S. Do yourself a favor to maintain your sanity. Don’t write a post as long as this on an iPhone or iPod touch. It takes too much patience.

Tags: 1Password, App Store, Apple, applications, iPhone, iPod touch, OmniFocus, Twitter, Twitterriffic, WordPress