Syncing the iPhone is a mess. Apple really dropped the ball by not providing a generalized sync framework to support third party apps.

Every time I want to take my iPhone out on the road with me, I need to go through and sync up every application individually: Here’s the song and dance for a full sync:

1. Open up 1Password on my Mac and on my iPhone, choose Sync from the iPhone, and wait for it to complete. (Sometimes I need to click through some password errors, too.

2. Open TextGuru on my iPhone and the TextGuru server application on my Mac and copy over any text files I’d like to share between the devices.

3. Open up Stanza on both my Mac and my phone and then open each book I want to carry with me and send it to the phone; one-by-one.

4. Load any files I want to take with me into FileMagnet uploader, open the app on my iPhone, and send them over. (Or, if I’m using Briefcase, turn on remote login on my Mac and browse it — I’ll cover file viewers/transfer apps in a later post.)

5. Open up SpeakEasy Connect to grab any recordings I want on my Mac from my phone.

6. Sync OmniFocus to .me (and then when I open it on the iPhone, it syncs up, so that’s something at least!)

7. Open up ByLine to pick up my Google Reader RSS feeds.

8. Likewise with Instapaper.

9. Did I mention I don’t use Safari as my main browser? So that’s a trip to BookDog to sync up my bookmarks from OmniWeb to Safari so that I’ll have ‘em on the phone.

10. Finally I’m ready to sync with iTunes, but to be sure I get the most out of this sync, I’ll check for new podcasts and application updates.

11. Dangit! I’m out of space for all my new files on my iPhone. Time to trim playlists, swap out movies, etc. I sure wish I could autofill the thing like I could on a shuffle!

And that’s if I happen to be on an available wifi network. Otherwise I also have to deal with Internet Sharing on my Mac!

Yeah, this is a worst-case scenario, of course. I don’t necessarily need to pick up new files or books, and I don’t always need to grab recordings. But if I intend to spend some time on an airplane or otherwise need to keep everything updated, this whole rigamarole can take as much as half an hour of fidding.

But because this is so time consuming, it’s not uncommon for my iPhone to be out of date, so I don’t have my latest passwords from 1Password, or I don’t have the movie I just rented from iTunes or eBook I’ve downloaded. (since I have to transfer it to the one device it lives on — grr!) Likewise, my Mac’s out of date from files I have on my phone. What a drag!

Some of these applications use Mobile Me or some other online service as an intermediary, so that I can sync asynchronously from my Mac or iPhone to a central server. Or ByLine syncs directly with Google Reader, so it acts like a normal RSS reader that way. But if I intend to be outside of wifi range, I have to remember to sync.

Compare this to my Palm handheld (recently retired in favor of my iPhone). I put it in the cradle and pressed the “sync” button. Any e-books or files waiting for transfer would transfer, passwords would be updated, content on the device would push back to my Mac. One click, and I was done. Palm provided a standard framework that developers could use to sync their applications’ data with my Mac and its programs.

Apple has done the same thing in the past, through iSync and Mobile Me/.Mac. However, they failed to extend this to the iPhone. Instead, every developer needs to build their own synchronization solution, with no standards whatsoever. Additionally, since there’s no background processing, there’s no method to keep the desktop and the phone in sync without forcing a manual process of opening every syncing program and doing your business, one program at a time.

Obviously there’s an underlying sync framework in iTunes, which can handle multiple content types (music, photos, email, contacts and calendars) from multiple data sources (Outlook on the PC; iPhoto, Mail, Address Book and iCal on the Mac; Google and Yahoo hosted services; and, of course, video and music through iTunes). And that’s all in addition to the built-in Mobile Me and IMAP services!

Apple dropped the ball on syncing with the iPhone. They need to build a synchronization API for developers, and they need to build it quickly before more programming time goes down the drain building half-assed custom sync solutions.

Wouldn’t you like to have Google at your fingertips wherever you go? Wouldn’t it be even cooler if you had a friend standing by to search Google for you, so that you don’t have to spend the time typing on the go? What if it was a complete stranger working for pennies on behalf of a very cool service named ChaCha?

Here’s what you do: Dial 1-800-2CHACHA (or 1-800-224-2242, if you prefer). A friendly automaton will prompt you to ask a question. Ask away, and then resume your daily business. In a minute or two, you’ll get an SMS message with an answer to your question. Pretty darn slick.

There are a few GotChas with ChaCha: Real humans are finding your answers, and they’re paid for their answers in dimes. (But they make it up in volume, I imagine) So don’t expect the sort of service you’d get from a skilled reference librarian with lots of answers at their disposal. Instead you’ll get a reasonably skilled Google/Wikipedia searcher who will be about as accurate as the same sources.

So it’s great for “I’m at this intersection and I want to find a gas station, where’s the closest one?” or “Who played Iron Man in the movie of the same name?” Not so good for “Where did I put my keys?”

Good stuff. I could easily become addicted to this service.

Hells yeah.

Vanity fair has a truly amazing article which covers the history of the internet, from ARPAnet to today, told entirely in anecdotes by the people behind the internet itself. A great, readable, and very entertaining read.

I’m a software aesthete. I like to spend my life using programs that work elegantly and beautifully. While this is partly why I prefer using my Mac to my PC, it really comes down to the individual software and tasks. There are some phenomenal PC programs that I find are a pleasure to use (Microsoft Excel 2007 is just wonderful to chart and graph in), and there are Mac programs I’m more-or-less forced to use for one reason or another that could really use some more thought into how they work. (I’m looking at you, Script Editor!)

One place that I never thought to see such a divergence in elegance was in recipe software. Look, it’s a database, right? Recipes, cookbooks, ingredients, and even shopping lists. Sounds like a job for unformatted text and a decent search function.

But when my wife bought Cook’n, the best selling recipe software on any platform (or so they claim), I found an amazing study of software design and usability.

I’ve been working on migrating this site to Drupal v6.2. In order to do so, I’ve created some test/development areas to work through the transition. These areas required me to repeatedly copy my live (version 5) database over to various test and staging servers. I researched and perfected a few one-shot command line recipes to handle all of this. I figured I’d share them with the world.

OmniWeb 5 has an excellent ad blocking mechanism. What it doesn’t have is the ability to easily subscribe to or import some of the blacklists out on the internet, such as those used by the Adblock Plus Firefox add-on.

In order to make up for this deficit (at least partially), I downloaded the latest EasyList filter list and modified it so that it uses proper, OmniWeb-compatible, regular expressions.

The one downside with this list is that there is no way to automatically import the blacklist and whitelist files into OmniWeb. Instead, you have to edit OmniWeb’s preferences file directly to add the entries. Instructions on how to do this are included with the rest of the download.

I have no plans to continue updating this list. It’s current as of March 11, 2008. Consider it a good start for your ad filtering and update it manually as needed. I’ve included instructions on how to make your own custom file if you’re so inclined.

When I upgraded to a MacBook, I didn’t bother installed Adobe CS2. It’s a PPC app, it takes forever to launch, and I really don’t use it all that much, although I do enjoy using it since I know it so well.

Since then, I’ve been looking for alternatives to Adobe’s apps that work well, and are reasonably priced. Unfortunately, there’s nothing out there that matches the power and usefulness of Adobe’s suite. (Quark vs. InDesign notwithstanding) But there are some good applications if your requirements don’t precisely match Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.

Also, if you don’t want to deal with the X11 stuff, there’s been a total explosion of new graphics programs for the Mac which are not as broadly feature-filled as Photoshop or Illustrator, but in many ways give Adobe a run for its money.

Image Editors

Nothing matches Photoshop’s abilities for color correction, but there’s many apps that come close. The biggest weakness is that many of these programs use CoreImage filters, which are simply not that good for color adjustments and touch-ups. (There’s no equivalents to Levels or Curves).

The Gimp is a popular open-source Photoshop equivalent. Personally, I prefer GimpShop, which is about the same as The Gimp, but it’s been modified to act more like Photoshop. It runs in the X11 environment, so you won’t be fooled into thinking it’s a native Mac application. (Although it has a MacOS X application launcher so that you can associate file types with it, drag and drop, etc.) It does most of what Photoshop can do, and has pretty good color correction tools. Whether you use one of these other apps or not, I recommend keeping The Gimp around purely for the color adjustment tools, which are unmatched by other apps.

Pixelmator is about as close to Photoshop as you’ll get in a native Mac program without buying Photoshop. Photoshop-like interface with more style, I guess. Opens and saves in pretty darn near every format, thanks to the imagemagick libraries.

Acorn is an awesome tool for “normal” graphics tasks, and has a totally new and intuitive, simple, interface. It does some impressive higher-end effects and adjustments using Core Image filters (the same basis for all these other apps’ filters, so they’re about the same if you’re rasterbating).

DrawIt is hard to explain, but it’s a drawing and painting program that’s very interestingly and intuitively designed. Think of it as iAdobeCreativeSuite or something. While its bitmap abilities are limited, they’re aided by the addition of CoreImage filters, so you can actually get by with most simple adjustments. Since it’s greatest strength is illustration, I’ll leave it be for now.

Painter X, from Corel, which is a very powerful image editor and natural-media painting program which is pretty expensive but very, very, good. Of course, if you’re buying Painter, you can probably afford Photoshop.

ArtRage is a natural-media painting program, a la Painter (but much cheaper), which is totally designed for graphics tablets. It’s fullscreen with a simple and hide-able palette setup that makes it a total dream for just sketching stuff out. It also has a very cool rulers setup where you can create a virtual physical ruler to ensure that you draw a straight line when that’s important to you. It’s also available in a “Starter Edition,” which is free but has fewer tools and no layers. If you have a tablet, there’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t have the starter edition on your Mac.

Illustration

I’m a fan of vector drawing apps, and there’s some incredibly good ones on the Mac, outside of Adobe’s stranglehold. As a long-time fan of Freehand 3.1, I’m happy to report that there’s tons of apps which can equal, if not exceed, that storied program.

Lineform from Freeverse is a very intuitive and straightforward vector program. It has wonderful features for free drawing, with artistic strokes and all kinds of other good stuff.

Intaglio is a powerful but somewhat confusingly designed drawing program. It supports precision drawing and has lots of interesting tools, but it is sometimes frustrating due to some odd interface design.

DrawIt, which I mentioned above, handles vector as well as raster art, and really is at its best in that environment. It has a very simple and intuitive pen tool, and makes it simple to combine raster and vector art as well as text. Where it falls short is in precision: It has no rulers and you can only specify document sizes in pixels. This is a real shame, as the program feels like a welcome resurrection of SuperPaint. I can only assume that this is an intentional design decision, as the program is at a fairly mature version 3.

Inkscape is to Illustrator what The Gimp and GimpShop are to Photoshop. It’s a solid, open source vector drawing program. Like Gimpshop, it runs under X11, and for that reason I really can’t recommend it when there are many native alternatives that are easier to use and, in their own way, more powerful.

Page Layout

I haven’t tried many page layout applications, so I’ll keep this to a quick summary. All are variously underpowered compared to InDesign, but all of them could get the job done. MacKiev makes The Print Shop , Apple’s Pages (part of iWork) , Swift Publisher and Scribus (which is pretty capable except that it’s built in ugh Java).

My personal recommendation? DrawIt is dead simple to use, and also does vector, so if you don’t need precision drawing, I recommend it highly. If you do a lot of bitmap “production” work (resizing, saving in different formats, etc.), Acorn is definitely worth a look. Pixelmator’s pretty, but it suffers from being a Photoshop clone that’s simply not as good. If you want the power of Photoshop, start up X11 and run Gimpshop. Then for pure illustration, you have ArtRage and Lineform, both of which will aid any artist with a pen tablet.

Really, for $150 or so, you can get the basic capabilities of Adobe’s suite and really have some advantages in ease-of-use and some very nifty innovative capabilities. It’s worth checking all these apps out if you have the time and see what you like most. I still need to look more into page layout, so watch this space for updates!

I often find myself wanting to make my Mac do something even when I’m not there. It could be something as simple as “reboot” or something more complex, like, “Add this task to OmniFocus”. Unfortunately, unless my Mac is up and running and accepting remote connections, there’s no way I can do this.

Or is there?

One obvious answer is to set up mail rules that shoot off AppleScripts. When an appropriately formatted messages comes in from the right sender(s), the script runs, and you’re all set to go. This approach has the advantage of being either close to real time (if Mail’s up and running, it works) or asynchronous if Mail’s off — the actions will fire off when you next check email, if your computer happens to be off.

Another option is to monitor various internet feeds to create similar results. I’ve written about Proxi before, and it remains one of my favorite tools for automating my Mac. One thing it can do is monitor network resources, such as RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, Mail, Skype, iChat, etc. This, it turns out, is the key to handling this need for remote automation.

By monitoring an RSS feed, you can set it up to check Gmail (which publishes an ATOM feed of your mail), a blog, or anything else, and have it fire off a script with some or all of the values passed by the feed. One very cool use of this ability is to set up script-firing Gmail rules by just having Proxi parse the ATOM feed and then activate scripts when certain conditions are met. This gives you the best of both worlds: Gmail’s powerful web-based interface, and the integrated goodness of Apple’s Mail program.

Another great tool is Twitter. Twitter’s main purpose is to share little snippets about what you’re up to with the rest of the world. But Twitter can also be used as simply an online notepad. It integrates with both SMS and IM clients, so it’s easy to contact, and you can even use a service like Jott with it, so you can phone in a “tweet” to your Twitter account.

Proxi has a Twitter monitor, so if you set up an appropriate Twitter account, you can have Proxi take action on incoming tweets, just like it can with GMail’s RSS feed.

Lastly, Proxi can monitor iChat and Skype and fire off scripts based on behavior in those apps. (iChat also has some of these capabilities built in if you’ve upgraded to Leopard) This can be an excellent way to have instant access to your computer from a remote machine.

What have I done with this? Well, I set up a Twitter account that feeds directly into OmniFocus so that I can capture a new task anywhere (via the web, SMS, IM, or the phone — thanks to Jott) and rest assured that when I next turn on my Mac, Proxi will pick them up and dump them into my electronic inbox.

Are you tired of seeing news about special iPhone-only websites, when you don’t have an iPhone to try them out with?

Well now you can enjoy the world of really tiny rectangular web pages along with all those iPhonies out there! Either use Firefox and follow this excellent guide or use your browser of choice to change your browser’s user agent to:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419

I just became aware of the Deja Vu font set. It’s based on the excellent Bitstream Vera font set, and is similarly open source. The difference is that the Deja Vu fonts strive for a complete set of unicode characters.

I recently helped a friend with a dead Dell recover his files with the help of Knoppix, a Linux distro that boots right off a CD. I shared this success story with some friends of mine, one of whom wittily commented:

thank you linux… thank you for booting our dead windows computers so we can reinstall windows. You’re a really great… friend.

I know.. i know.. don’t feel sad.. we’ll always be friends.. I just.. don’t like you that way. Ya know?

Linux is the nerd who did your homework for you in high school while you were dating the quarterback.

So true…

[Appleinsider reports that Leopard won’t ship until October.]((http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/04/12/apple_delays_leopard_release_until_october.html) The reason? The iPhone stole the time of too many developers.

Those of us who were concerned that Apple might be devoting more time to iPods that Macs appear to have some further justification for these concerns…

Robert X. Cringely found himself a very interesting rumor:

Now comes the rumor I have heard, that I believe to be a fact, that has simply yet to be confirmed. I have heard that Apple plans to add hardware video decoding to ALL of its new computers beginning fairly soon, certainly this year.

…and it doesn’t just do hardware H.264 decoding, it does hardware H.264 ENCODING, too.

The long-awaited partnership between TiVo and Amazon.com’s “Unboxed” video service finally launched, after weeks and weeks of promises.

I’ve been really excited about this service. Ever since my daughter was born, I’ve pretty much fallen off the planet, Hollywood-wise. So I’m just stoked at the possibility of just jumping online and renting a movie on a whim when the kiddo happens to go to sleep early.