Alfredo Padillia over at The Apple Blog have begun a discussion around whether or not web based software will lead him away from a Mac. I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few months and I used to think the same thing. Now I’m not so sure.
Cloud computing, the idea of running all of your applications on the web, sounds like a great concept. The author’s notion of cloud computing is that all of the applications he uses are browser based. His examples are GMail, Google Reader, Remember The Milk, etc. While these applications are indeed running “in the cloud” I think it’s the wrong way to look at things.
The problem with web applications is not that they aren’t powerful enough to get the job done, it’s that they don’t operate efficiently together. I tried using the Google suite of applications. They are nice, but god forbid if you want to integrate them into anything else. I tried for months to come up with a solution for synchronizing my Google Address Book, GMail and GCal to my iPhone. There are some hacks to do it but in the end, I settled on using Spanning Sync with Address Book and iCal to keep my Mac client apps in sync and iTunes to sync those to my iPhone. Another great example is bookmarks. If I need to go to a specific website, am I going to go the the delicious website first or will I use the delicious plugin for Firefox. The plugin has a much tighter integration.
Where cloud computing shines is the idea of a ubiqitous data store. I like that I can drop ont a friends PC and in a pinch, check my calendar, or email. It doesn’t mean I still miss the convienience of interoperability between these applications. Standards based data formats will give me the best of both worlds and when we get there, cloud computing my finally get some legs.
If you are one of the millions of people traveling through airports this holiday season, you are going to get the opportunity to surf the net for free thanks to partnership deals between WiFi providers and Google.
Before you jump on the internet though, you want to make sure your Macbook is protected from others trying to steal your stuff. Follow the instructions in this older post to get your Macbook Firewall configured.
The 10.6.2 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes for:
an issue that might cause your system to logout unexpectedly
a graphics distortion in Safari Top Sites
Spotlight search results not showing Exchange contacts
a problem that prevented authenticating as an administrative user
issues when using NTFS and WebDAV file servers
the reliability of menu extras
an issue with the 4-finger swipe gesture
an issue that causes Mail to quit unexpectedly when setting up an Exchange server
Address Book becoming unresponsive when editing
a problem adding images to contacts in Address Book
an issue that prevented opening files downloaded from the Internet
Safari plug-in reliability
general reliability improvements for iWork, iLife, Aperture, Final Cut Studio, MobileMe, and iDisk
an issue that caused data to be deleted when using a guest account
Has everyone made the switch to Snow Leopard? I’m still holding out. If you are too, we’d love to know why.
The folks at Mac Heist bundle interesting Mac software and make it available for a great low price. They do this a few times a year and have sold a boat load of software My guess is it gives smaller software companies the opportunity to gain some word of mouth marketing around their software.
This month, they are releasing their latest bundle totally free. It includes a number of cool programs including:
Shovebox
WriteRoom
Twitterriffic
TinyGrab
Hords of Orcs
and if they get 500,000 participants, Mariner Write
Head on over and get your free downloads today, only a few more days until the offer ends.
I’ve been using OSX for a few years now but every once in a while I run into one of those obvious features of the OS that I never knew about. This happened just the other day with the Address Book.
The Mac Address Book has a very full featured print facility which lets you print envelopes, mailing labels, even a pocket address book. You just need to select a card or range of cards and select Print from the menu. Check out the video below to see the entire process.
Have you come across anything about OSX that you never knew existed, tell us about it here.
