G-Crushing!

Last week Google came out and absolutely crushed their gMail design by changing around the buttons that allow you to send and delete emails by making them completely image less (CSS). They also created the ability to "Move To" which allows you to automatically label a piece of email and archive it in one button. Even though this may not sound like a huge thing, it breaks gMail away from the shackles of images and allows them to be easily 're-skinned' via themes. Google this week, might have one upped itself with something completely crazy for us iPhone users.

For the longest time there was only one way syncing between iCal and Google Calendars unless you relied on third party software. Perhaps a month or so ago, Google released the ability to sync both ways between iCal and gCal but since they were considered network servers, you could not sync them to the iPhone...until now. Yesterday, or today they set up an Exchange (email on its way apparently) service that allows users of gCal and Google contacts to sync with your iPhone. Unfortunately, if you do this you actually erase all of your calendars or contacts. This is fairly crap-tacular if you relied on all your calendars...however you could boot up iCal, use the collaboration tool to set up your exhisting gCal accounts and drag the local calender items to their corresponding gCal calndar. There really is not a huge work around for the contacts however, I have no need to sync my contacts.

Testing the sync over the air was great and pulled down all the needed information from the Google servers. There are a couple hickups, specifically since you can only sync up to 5 calendars and you actually need to log onto the service via your phone to allow the phone to sync even more then one calendar when you first set up the service (I got crazy tripped up on this issue...maybe I should read the full instructions). Besides a couple of minor bugs everything is syncing between gCal, iCal, and my iPhone. Kudos to Google for getting all of this stuff together and making life with calendars just that much easier. Also a huge thanks needs to be given to Apple for creating an amazing phone along with an amazing computing experience.

As you all can see I am totally psyched about this along with my pik of the day which is something I got hooked up with on the accident:

Mobile Lacie Rugged 500 Gig hard drive (Triple interface: F400, F800, USB 2.0)

Flying High on 4's

No everyone, the title should not allow you to fly in to a drunken stupor about how one should not drive and drink even though you are actually driving in international waters. For everyone else please feel free to beat the crap out of me due to my lackluster support of this (and for any) blog over the past week. What I have been doing though is an amazing testament to the amazing-ness of the capability to learn...with your brain. The test is to be able to learn 4 different things, each over the course of 1 week and spend 40 hours a week on it. This is all on top of actually working part time running an It and Social Media consulting business and designing web experiences on the side. Oh, and also trying to level myself on the way to the new cap in the 'time be damning' World of Warcraft. So what has my amazing brain absorbed in the way of learning this week? The simple answer is Cocoa and Objective-C development.

The complex answer would of course be the total crazyness that is Apple Frameworks and how to develop for a platform that is built on a language that I have really never coded for. All in all the idea was great but things were so complicated that they got changed and re-morphed twice over the span of the week. Happily though, I will be spending the 4th week on re developing my ideas on the entirety of Cocoa programming. The other two weeks will focus on Wordpress development and PHP which should be an equally less daughnting issue. Everyone needs to get totally pumped because it is the weekend and you should have an unlimited amount of time to crush any and all things they love. Continue to be happy all.

Steel Baby, Stainless

Google Chrome is a spectacular browser, no matter what anyone says. It is mind bendingly fast, works very well with Google Docs/Gmail/etc, and against all the hater's ideas, Google did remove the clause in their ULA that claimed anything you posted on the internet through Chrome was property of Google. Of course this is all well and good for the folks who still run a Windows PC as an every day machine and not just for games but, for the people who use Mac OS X or Linux on a daily basis are a little up the river.

We could use the Crossover Cromium port but it really just looks like what you get on Windows XP. So it looks like we are stuck waiting it out until the end of the year (MAYBE!)...or you could check out Stainless. Stainless' simplicity is an almost identical match to that of Chrome; with it's single search and url bar (brilliant), extreme light weight, and how it actually looks like it belongs on the Mac. Personally, I have been using it for a couple of days now and it is blazingly fast and very lightweight (compared to firefox with 1 extension). Of course there are some problems due to it being very early in its development phase.

Sometimes it is so lightweight that OSX does not realize you have jumped from one window to Stainless. The options literally get stuck to say finder or iTunes. This can be solved by simply minimizing and bring the Stainless window back into view. It also does not show you a view of all of your visited sites, like Firefox and Chrome have on their smart bars (which both work very well in my mind). Overall these issues can be overlooked because of the speed and horsepower that the browser brings to the desktop. Check it out here (Leopard Only..segway into previous post) and give me some feedback on what you all think, ciao. Oh, also give share the browsers that you have in your dock, or on your desktop (quick launch). Currently I am rocking 4: Safari, Cruz, Stainless, Firefox.

Post Update

Having just hit the submit button on the last post, I worked my internet sniffing over to digg.com and found this article posted by appleInsider. This seems to be the origin for the Cnet article and definitely contains a lot more information on what is going on with the possibility of a new Mac Mini. The article is worth shooting over to just for the pictures alone and the possibility of ditching the optical drive for a second hard drive. Go and read, y'all!

A Mini Revival

The MAc mini has seen its fair share of haters out there but Cnet, through a horrible article seems to think that it is going to make a return. Although the little scrumptious thing is a throwback to the Mac cube, it seems like it would be a fairly powerfull beast in the right hands. Sure it is not going to run your "run of the mill" high end games, cad software, etc but if you want a machine that does repetative tasks (ie torrenting) then these things would probably bring the house down. Actually I have been searching for a little box just like this to do all my home needs and a revision would sure be intriguing. However, in terms of dollars it would be much cheaper to throw some simple components in an ubuntu powered Shuttle and call it a day. Anyway, long live the mac mini and a great entry level computer for the pocket starving mac user.

Office for the Economy

Microsoft office is a key dominator in the world of office suites. Everyone knows what anyone is getting on about when they refer to the term “word” and everyone has created some kind of material on it in the past years. One thing that we also know is that it is incredibly expensive, bloated, and if most haters have their ways, the new iteration and the ribbon is rubbish. Well if you hate it so much why not move to an open source, free alternative.

In walks OpenOffice. A suite that has always been free and has been hanging around for many years. As of late (Monday actually) there has never been a Mac native OpenOffice. It has always been ported over to the Mac under the name NeoOffice. Well, time to rejoice my Mac loving comrades, OpenOffice 3.0 will work spectacularly under the Mac Intel architecture. Actually, this entire post was written in OpenOffice just to see how stable it was under a simple test. It opens faster then Word 2007, it has all of the basic word, excel, powerpoint, access functions, it does not cost a single dime and is completely customizable. The world of paying for expensive suites, especially when it comes to Mac specific clients, is over. Recommend it to your friends or simply download it here.

A New Breed?

As none of us know because you should be working hard enough to not have time to surf the web during the work week. Or for the folks who actually get paid to do this, take it from me; it is not as glorious as it sounds....well actually it is. Wait, where was I going with this?? Oh yeah! Itunes 8 was released today along with a slew of new ipod nanos and a slick new ipod touch.

Starting with Itunes 8, the big thing is Genius, which compares your music and attempts to make intelligent guesses on other groups you might like. This is basically the same service that Pandora and Last.fm use. In addition, they have introduced grid view which media player 11 had way back in 2005. Beyond all of this, I think Itunes is much faster, it syncs with my Iphone much quicker and easier and seems hands down a much more native app on the Macbook Pro.

Because I own an Iphone I could care less about the Ipod touch but the new 16gig colorful nanos do look very cool. They have a very curvy design and a Zune like accelerometer that allows you to control certain parts of it via shaking the nano or putting it sideways into landscape view (Zune only does landscape). They look very cool and the Nanos seem to be they direction Stevie is going these days. Unfortunatly, I still would rather have the big Classic, but with almost no update to the current Classic today, it looks like this could be the last iteration of the big ipod. Sniff...16gigs is 50 bones cheaper and very small....more then 16gigs needed with genius and smart playlists? What do you all think?