If you’re a casual or power user of Metapad I hope this article teaches you at least one new trick that you can use to make your text editing more productive.

1. Portability Mode (a.k.a. INI mode)

The newest feature in Metapad is actually fairly hidden — for better or worse. It’s called portability mode and it allows you to save all of your Metapad preferences in a local file (called metapad.ini) rather than in the Windows Registry. This is very handy when you’re moving Metapad around on a thumb drive or if you want to re-install Windows. Even better: you can sync your Metapad settings across multiple computers with Dropbox — just run metapad.exe and metapad.ini within a folder in your Dropbox (it will take up about 0.01% of a free 2GB account).

As a convenience, I added a little feature in Metapad 3.6 that will allow you to migrate your Metapad settings from the Registry into the metapad.ini file. Just type “metapad /m”, as in the following screencap, at the command prompt:

Migrating to INI mode via command prompt

2. Quick Buffers

Quick Buffers are like having 10 extra independent clipboards to work with. You can set their contents using the Settings dialog (see image) or by selecting some text and using shortcut keys (Alt + Shift + [Number 0-9]). You can “paste” their contents into your Metapad files by pressing Alt and the number key corresponding to that Quick Buffer.

Editing Quick Buffers in Settings

(I’m surprised that more text editors don’t have a simlar feature.)

3. Launching Viewers

There are 4 different commands that launch things from within Metapad.

First is a new Metapad window (or instance, hence the ‘i’ in Ctrl+I for the keyboard shortcut). This is different than New File (Ctrl+N), which clears out the current file and starts an empty one. New Window will also create an empty file but will keep your existing file around in the background.

Launching viewers from the menu

The next two commands are for launching the primary and secondary viewers, corresponding to the “1″ and “2″ toolbar buttons (or use keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+L and Ctrl+J). These viewers are customizable and can be set to run any other program installed on your box. Metapad will pass the current file you’re viewing or editing to those programs. Set the paths to these viewers in the General Settings tab. Common uses are setting web browsers to view your web content (e.g., one for Firefox and the other for IE) or beefier editors that take longer to load but may offer features that Metapad does not.

Lastly, there is the “Default viewer” (Ctrl+D). This will open the program that has been associated with the current document’s file type (or extension). For example, if your computer’s default web browser is Chrome, you could launch the current HTML file you’re editing in Chrome with Ctrl+D and keep the other two external viewers (the primary and secondary) associated with two different browsers — say Firefox and IE as in the example above.

4. Quote and “Un-quote”

There are a number of handy text manipulation tools under the Edit | Convert Selected and Edit | Block menus, where a block refers to one or more lines of text that have been selected prior to using those commands. The following two commands in the Block menu are fairly unique to Metapad and may not be familiar to many folks.

The Quote command (Alt+Q) allows you to prefix each line in the block with a certain customizable string. The default quote string, editable in Settings, is “> ” which, once long ago, was commonly used to indicate lines in an original email that was being replied to. Quote can be used for other things, for example the string “    * ”, could be used to instantly bullet-up a list.

Setting the Quote string

When I added Quote, I also wanted a corresponding “unquote”, which is what the Strip First Character feature (Alt+Z) can be thought of as. This will delete the first character on each line of the selected block. Strip can be very handy for cleaning up things such as code copied from the web that has embedded line numbers.

5. Unwrap lines & Commit word wrap

Lastly we have another pair of tools that I believe is unique to Metapad (at least it was for many moons).

Unwrap Lines (F9) will take a file that has embedded carriage returns (i.e., new lines) and strips them all out. An alternate version Unwrap Lines w/ Space (Alt+F9) will replace carriage returns with a space to ensure wrapped words don’t get improperly joined. Running either of these effectively leaves you with one, potentially really long, line. (Aside: these effects can also be done using the basic (stressed: basic) regex support in the Replace dialog if you are so programmatically inclined).

Wrapping and unwrapping via menu commands

Having one really long line usually isn’t so nice unless you turn on Word wrap mode (Ctrl+W or toolbar button). With wrap enabled, your document text will automatically fit the Metapad window, no matter what its line-length. Once in this mode, you are now able to run the complementary Commit Word Wrap (Ctrl+F9) which looks at how the document is auto-wrapped and sticks in carriage returns in the right spots so that each line’s wrapping is persisted, regardless of how wide the window is.

For example, say you have a document full of writing that has a bunch of lines, each no longer than 60 characters. To make each line at most 80 characters long, you would first ensure Word wrap is on (Ctrl+W if not), then Select All (Ctrl+A), Unwrap Lines (F9), resize the window so that each line is no longer than 80 characters (move your carret and watch the toolbar) and then finally do Commit Word Wrap (Ctrl+F9).

I hope these tips are at least a little enlightening. They were fun for me to remember and write about.

Download Metapad 3.6 here

So, what’s in it?

Metapad 3.6 has: a new high resolution app icon, UI & usability updates, a new feature that remembers folders across sessions, better defaults for general settings, UTF-8 file support and the biggest new feature: portability mode.

What is ‘portability mode’?

Portability mode allows Metapad to properly run and save settings on an external or thumb drive and it will not leave any trace on a friend or family member’s system. This is also very useful when you are setting up an additional computer or migrating to a new one – copy over your Metapad directory and simply pick up where you left off.

A glimpse at metapad.ini

Technically portability mode means that all settings, window attributes, menu options, find/replace and recent file histories are stored and loaded in a local text file called metapad.ini (instead of the Windows Registry.) To enter this mode simply ensure that a file named metapad.ini exists where metapad.exe does – or use the one time command line option /m to migrate all your registry settings over.

Cool. So why wait almost 9 years till a new feature update?

About a year ago, after I released the Metapad source code, a fellow named David Millis sent me a code patch with a new feature he wrote for UTF-8 file support. This inspired me to get the code up and running again but I still wasn’t sure that I would get around to releasing a new version.

Then when Windows 7 came out at the end of 2009 and I played around with it I was a little irritated by how shoddy the Metapad icon looked in the task bar (due to the lower resolution scaling up poorly).

Windows 7 taskbar scales Metapad's icon poorly

That feeling inspired me to refresh the icon which was lots of fun. Once that was done I knew a release was forthcoming so I slowly added the other features in my meagre spare time through 2010.

Why is 3.6 twice the size of 3.5?

Thats entirely due to the updated icon. Metapad’s new icon is almost 100 KB which makes the compressed download about 100 KB instead of about 50 KB. But hey, we’re still talking about kilobytes, here – not megas or gigas.

Future proofing Metapad with a massive icon

How did you make the new icon?

I used a neat little app called Opacity for the bulk of the design. I then used the slick tool IcoFX to clean up the pixels on the various size and color palette variations.

Progression of Metapad icon with early 3.6 concept

Wait, isnt Opacity a Mac app?

Yes and 3.6 was mostly developed on a Mac using Parallels to run a virtual Windows 7 machine.

Weird. Will 3.5 language translations work in 3.6?

For the most part, yes although you won’t see the new UTF-8 menu item and some of the settings dialog usability improvements. You will also get a warning upon startup which you can disable via command line option /s (and you might want to stick that into a shortcut to avoid typing it each time at the command prompt.)

What was the hardest part for development?

First, getting Dev-C++ to generate a small binary or one that used the latest common control visual styles (I eventually gave up). Then getting Visual C++ to generate a binary that actually worked on Windows XP without an additional DLL.

What changes are in the beta releases?

Beta 2 was posted on Feb 26, 2011:

• Fixed “Randal Munroe bug” where Shift+Enter inserted invalid newlines (thanks to Curtis Bright)
• Fixed Metapad 3.6 not loading on Windows 2000 or Windows 98
• Fixed INI mode leading/trailing spaces bug for quote string, find/replace history and quick buffers
• Updated external viewer toolbar icons with numbers for better usability (idea from Gerard Juan)

Beta 3 was posted on Mar 9, 2011:

• Open/save folder is remembered across launches with option to disable (thanks Paolo)

Beta 4 was posted on Mar 12, 2011:

• Fixed bug where “save options menu” wasn’t persisting in settings dialog
• Fixed convert to Title Case bug where apostrophes counted as word boundaries

Beta 5 was posted on Mar 26, 2011:

• Minor visual refresh to the toolbar buttons

How can I provide my feedback?

Please email “metapad-feedback” at this domain, liquidninja.com. Thanks!

Check out the Metapad homepage for more details and the Metapad twitter feed for news.

Git, a powerful version tracker, is easily becoming one of my essential software tools. I now use it on every creative project at home and increasingly at work too.

But you might say “I get versioning automatically with Time Machine or Dropbox”. Sure and that’s nice but when you consciously manage versions yourself you can track simultaneous changes across multiple files and you get comments on each version to help you know what changed when. You might say “I already have decent version tracking at work with Subversion/Perforce/CVS”. Well you can still get a great benefit by running Git locally — think of it as a layer of private versioning on top of the shared, published repository.

Although Git’s known as an SCM, or source code manager, Git is also useful for non-coding projects such as graphic art, music, spreadsheets or word processing — things built using tools that typically have no native version management (other than undo and save as). Initializing a new Git repository takes only a couple seconds (!) and tearing one down is just as quick (“rm -rf .git”).

So, deploying?

Okay, we’ve established that Git is awesome but one of my favorite uses of Git is to utilize its distributed nature to maintain and deploy website files. Before I get into the techie details on setting this up, let me explain the benefits of this technique.

Typically, website files exist on a local machine (e.g., laptop) and on a server (e.g., your hosting provider) and one would edit changes locally and then (testing locally is optional) FTP the files to the server. This process is error prone — for example you might forget to transfer one of the files or, even worse, make emergency changes on the server and never make the change locally and later overwrite those server changes, losing them forever.

By using Git and the technique outlined below, you will still have two copies of the files but the synchronization is much simpler. Primary benefits include:

• You deploy the site by simply typing git push on the local box (or through a visual tool, more on those at the end)
• Edits made on the remote host can be synchronized locally via git pull
• After a bad push, roll back by running git reset –hard ORIG_HEAD on the remote host
• Oh yeah, if they weren’t already, all your website files are now version controlled. Awesome!

How to set your site up with Git

First, if they aren’t already, stick your local website files are in a Git repository.

git init; git add .; git commit -m "Initial import"

(Read a good Git tutorial for more on these commands and how to use Git day-to-day.)

Then, FTP (or scp) the hidden “.git” directory that was created by those commands to the server in the corresponding location in your files (assuming they’re already on the remote host — otherwise send everything over including “.git”).

Next, add the remote host config to the local repository:

git remote add prod ssh://user@example.com/path/to/site

Now, to make a push result in updated files on the remote host (as opposed to only an updated repository record) replace the remote’s .git/hooks/post-update file with a copy of the hook script linked to in this FAQ entry.

Then, to eliminate a warning that Git spits out add the following to the server side .git/config:

[receive]
    denyCurrentBranch = ignore

An optional but recommended step is to set up passwordless SSH to make things super fast and clean. It is also strongly recommended to ensure your server’s .git directory is not allowed to be viewed by anyone browsing your site (see htaccess or the equivalent for your webserver). Also you will want to configure the local repo’s default remote so that you can run “git push” or “git pull” without specifying any other parameters:

[branch "master"]
    remote = prod
    merge = refs/heads/master

Git Tools

If you’re on a Mac and you use TextMate, there is a decent Git bundle that you can add in. (I don’t love the flow but it works.) Also, GitX is a nice graphical UI for Git on OS X. On Windows I’ve enjoyed using Git Extensions. And lastly, here is a nice Git cheat sheet with some more advanced stuff in it.

Instapaper

Marco Arment’s software product is actually a combination of a website, a bookmarklet and a stellar iPhone/iPad app. If you prefer to do your medium-form reading (e.g., news articles, blog posts) in a more controlled and focused manner this tool is definitely for you. For me it also acts as a general purpose cross-platform and cross-app bookmarking platform. For example when I’m reading Twitterrific on the iPhone and I see a link to something that I’d rather view on a bigger screen I simply add it to Instapaper. Similarly for NetNewsWire and probably many more mobile apps.

Daring Fireball

John Gruber’s professionally curated blog is my current favorite. It has a notable Apple focus but with plenty of general tech and hints of various other things that he finds interesting. You might think the somewhat scattered focus could make for a challenging daily read but the man has tastes that I (and likely many other readers) share.

Netflix & Blu-ray

This combo delivers 95% of my movie watching right now and although I don’t watch as many as I’d like, movies are easily one of my favorite ways to relax. The Netflix plan with 3 discs at a time seems about the right number for us right now so we haven’t really needed to delve into the streaming aspect of Netflix. Blu-ray on a big HDTV is absolutely awesome and can even make a lousy film enjoyable (e.g., if the cinematography is worthy even though the dialogue or plot sorta stinks.)

jQuery

This front-end web development technology is very powerful and surprisingly revolutionary. jQuery’s an add-on library developed by John Resig that extends the power of the web browser’s scripting language (Javascript) and data model (HTML DOM). Rarely is a library met with such enthusiasm by the web developer community. The programming style (use of CSS-style selectors) takes a bit of getting used to but results in no looking back.

iPhone & iPad

Few would not admit that Apple is at the top of their game and these two products are their flagships. From the (controlled) leaks, to the product keynotes, to the release day shipping and beyond, these are easily the most exciting and dramatic consumer technologies available right now. When I started building this list, the iPad was a new acquisition and I wasn’t sure how much I’d love it. Well, I absolutely do — it simply feels great to use and is amazingly conducive to casual computing.

Twitter

I must admit that for random, bite-sized reading entertainment and discovery Twitter is outstanding — once you put some work into figuring out exactly who to follow. My preferred twitter client is IconFactory’s Twitterrific for the iPhone. I love this app because it: a) Saves exactly where I was reading last, b) has a beautiful dark theme optimized for reading in low light, and c) integrates with Instapaper. I consider these all essential. I use the free version that has ads, not because I don’t want to shell out (I’ve paid for MANY worthy iPhone OS apps) but because I find the ads (provided by The Deck) interesting and not intrusive.

Hulu

There are a few shows that I like (e.g., The Office, Community) and Hulu, hooked up to the TV by way of MacBook, definitely does the trick. I love the Hulu app (Mac/PC) which has a streamlined interface that remembers your video quality preference and works wonderfully with an Apple Remote.

Amazon Fresh

Currently a Seattle only thing but oh, how awesome home delivered groceries are.

Although I’ve become a pretty strong Mac convert (both at home and at work), I recently took the opportunity to play around with Windows 7 for a few hours. Although Microsoft as a whole fails to impress me these days, there is still a small soft spot in my heart for Windows. I was especially interested to see what kind of user interface improvements were added to this version; Vista was pretty lacking in that department.

Immediate Thoughts

• Installation was painless and quick
• User Account Control doesn’t bother you every few mins. Woohoo!
• For once, most of the built in themes look nice
• Ugh… the sound effects are rather awful
• Glad to see the widget sidebar go away (you can still add widgets anywhere)

The Taskbar

The new improved taskbar is easily the star of Windows 7′s UI — a much needed upgrade of an ancient feature.

Microsoft has obviously taken some cues from Apple as this new improved taskbar resembles the OS X dock in a number of (good) ways. The most obvious change is that running apps all show up as an icon without a title. Apps can be “pinned” so that they stay on the taskbar even when the app is not running. Running apps are each subtly highlighted. And you can (finally) reorder running apps by dragging them. Doesn’t this all sound familiar?

Win7's taskbar

OS X's dock

The smaller size of each app makes the taskbar better suited for running many apps at once. Also notice that windows that stack are visually represented (in the image above IE has two tabs open). Subtle yet effective!

I was quite impressed with the hover popup for Internet Explorer (see image below). This is arguably more intuitive than Snow Leopard’s exposé because you don’t need to click and hold — you just hover. And you can navigate right to a particular tab within that app (although it isn’t supported in Chrome or Firefox at the moment if ever).

Taskbar app "tooltip"

Another minor but welcome Mac OS X influence to the Windows 7 taskbar is the monochrome system icons in the tray.

Win 7's monochrome system tray icons

OS X's system menu icons

Other Stuff

The new Aero Snap is interesting. Basically dragging a window to the top of the screen will maximize it. Dragging it to the left or right edge of the screen will cause the window to take up that half of the screen. Dragging away restores the original size. I was worried that this feature would be cumbersome but in fact it works pretty well.

The usability key here is that it doesn’t trigger the snap when the window touches the screen edge. It happens when your mouse cursor hits the edge (and to make this “magic” more evident to the user the mouse pointer glows when the snap is triggered).

Aero Shake, where you shake a window with your mouse cursor to hide every other window, seems cheesy but might be useful for some people. I envision frustrated Grandmas shaking their entire laptops.

As a keyboard junky I really love the new window manipulation shortcuts, especially Windows + Up, Down, Left and Right to maximize, minimize or snap left and right.

I also appreciate a minor Alt + Tab improvement: if you pause for a moment everything other than the selected Alt+Tabbed app will fade away.

Alt+Tab now makes other windows transparent (simulated screencap)

Conclusion

Due to Microsoft’s long lackluster product track record I didn’t have much hope for Windows 7 but it actually feels pretty nice. Not nice enough to tempt me to switch away from my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard. But easily nice enough for me to recommend it to friends and family who aren’t interested in Macs.

PS. And thanks to Microsoft’s blessing-and-curse of backwards compatibility, metapad seems to run flawlessly under Windows 7.

While it appears that blogging is alive and well, some are of the opinion that feeds and feed readers are dying.

And lately I do find that I spend increasing amounts of time consuming tweet streams on my iPhone which means less time in my trusty Google Reader.

But when I do find some time to spend in Reader, the quality, depth and speed of my information consumption is so far superior to anything else I know of on the net. The main challenges with Reader are knowing what feeds to subscribe to (and unsubscribe from) and constantly re-sorting so that you can easily read your favorite feeds first. (The same thing can be said of Twitter to a large degree, minus the sorting).

Love him or hate him, Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch is arguably a premier news source and usually one of my daily favorites. But it’s a medium- to high-volume blog and recently I’ve found I simply couldn’t keep up with it. I generally enjoy posts written by Arrington as well as most of co-editor Erick Schonfeld’s. I also like about half of the rest of the staff writers there and sometimes the guest posts are worth checking out. Their blog does provide individual feeds for each of the writers but that approach would get me too many feeds and I’d miss out on any new staff and guest writers.

To solve my problem I turned to Pipes, one of Yahoo’s most interesting offerings today. Pipes offers a visual interface to allow you to slice, dice and even glue together any feeds on the net. (It uses HTML5′s Canvas feature to provide an impressive graphical UI.)

One of my hacked TechCrunch feeds in Pipes' sweet UI

With Pipes, I created two filtered versions of TechCrunch: Editors Only and No Noise. The Editors Only feed (pictured above) contains only posts by Arrington and Schonfeld. The No Noise feed filters out some of the writers that I find report on more mundane stories (it also filters out the two editors so I don’t have dupes). The reason I created two separate feeds is to provide more granularity for my feed reading priority list.

One annoying bug that I discovered on my first attempt at these pipes was that the post author’s name wasn’t showing up in Google Reader. Luckily I worked out a fix for that: add a rename mapping for “item.dc:creator” to “author”. Another minor annoyance with Pipes is that they don’t seem to refresh nearly as often as the original source feeds (e.g., expect up to an hour delay). But that I can live with as I simply don’t have the time to refresh my feeds all day waiting for something new to pop up.

With my two new “piped out” feeds I’m now able to keep up with TechCrunch without spending nearly as much time tapping the j-key in Reader.

I hadn’t heard of the Nike + iPod system until I found the tucked away setting in my iPhone 3GS and then happened read a good Wired article on it. In brief, the system will measure and record your run or walk workout including distance, time and calories burned while letting you listen to music and giving you audible workout feedback. Then iTunes will sync your data to the cloud so you can follow trends. The article inspired me to give it a go but this little experiment would require a few small purchases before I could start.

Setting Up

I’ve been into running off-and-on for about 7 years now but haven’t ever had much luck integrating a music player into my routine. My manager recommended the Tuneband ($13) which is a rubber glove for an iPod and a velcro strap for your arm. Seemed simple enough so I picked up the version for my 8gb iPod Nano G2.

Next I ordered the Nike+ sensor kit ($29). This comes with a sensor for your shoe and a small receiver for an iPod. If you have a newer iPod Touch or an iPod 3GS the receiver part is not needed (it’s built in already) so you could save 10 bucks and get the sensor alone. But the thought of running and lugging an iPhone versus a light Nano was a turn off — unless you’re single or in sales and need to be on the grid 24/7. One side note is that the unboxing wasn’t very pleasant — obviously Apple didn’t design this packaging.

The last thing I needed was something to affix the sensor to my shoe. One could simply do as Nike intends and get a pair of compatible Nike+ runners (which have a special compartment under the insole). But since I haven’t worn Nikes since grade school (Agassis FTW!) this dedicated New Balance guy needed something else. After researching online I settled on the Marware pouch ($9) which looks pretty slick and works great. Simply insert the sensor face down (this is critical) and strap tightly to your laces. Ready to rock!

Marware's shoe pouch

The Tests

My first test consisted of a brisk walk to the post office on Saturday. I was more interested in running but I had a pack on my back full of packages to mail so a brisk walk would have to do. I picked a playlist (Oakenfold’s latest) and set off and everything just seemed to work.

On Sunday I tried a short run. I decided to skip calibration because I thought I could do it after the workout. Unfortunately after my run I found out that is only possible using a G4 Nano or a Touch/3GS — annoying. I later used the awesome Gmap Pedometer to measure my run distance and it turns out the Nike+ was off by about 10%. I hear this error is somewhat enhanced when you use a shoe pouch so for my next run I’ll do a proper calibration by running a known distance.

At one point early on in my run the workout stopped because the sensor got dislodged (either by the tuneband case or by not inserting it fully). This resulted in one actual run being split into two workouts which is a little annoying. Unfortunately there is no way through the iPod software (or later through iTunes or Nike+) to merge two workouts into one. Next time I’ll try having the iPod upside down in the Tuneband so the sensor is at the top. I think it may be easier to read the screen that way too.

Impressions

The first notable feature is the pleasant female voice feedback (male is available too) that fades into your song and reports your current time, distance and pace (cool!) whenever you hit the center iPod button. There is useful pause option if you get stuck at a red light or want to stretch. They also added a nice touch when you beat your longest workout record: a famous athlete’s voice will congratulate you.

The Data

One part of my first Nike+ run

You can view some workout stats on the iPod itself but when you next sync it with iTunes, you’ll be asked if you want to upload the data to nikeplus.com. It’s pretty easy to get going but you’ll then need to create an account on the Nike website (ugh, more spam… I mean marketing opportunities). The Nike website immediately shows your latest run in detail and it’s pretty cool to see your running speed tracked over time. Unfortunately the site is all Flash and it’s usability could stand to see some major improvements. It also has lots of social components like public goals, contests, avatars etc. which aren’t too appealing to me at the moment.

I’m not sure I love the idea of a sporting goods company storing my personal lifetracking data. I found another online option called runnerplus.com which is supposedly more advanced but also very social. But since all of the pedometer data is stored on the iPod in XML (you can find and even edit it if you want to) there are other options such as the Neki++ open source desktop app that I’m eager to try out. I’d love to find a self hosted, open source web app so I can both own my data and easily share/compare with friends and family.

Overall this product is very cool and adds a new dimension of fun to walking and running. I’m looking forward to using it some more and I wonder if it will introduce a beneficial Hawthorne effect on my exercise regime.

Update (8/8/2009)

My next run was more successful. Before I started I used Gmap pedometer to measure exactly 0.25 miles and then ran and walked it to calibrate. This corrected the Nike+ by about 15% for both walking and running! I also tried wearing the TuneBand upside down which worked out very well.

The Neki++ App

Later, I used Neki++ to pull and display my workout data locally. It doesn’t have a lot of polish visually or feature wise (e.g., no way to switch out of metric measurements) but it worked without a hitch and provides much of the same workout functionality that the Nike website does — without having any data privacy issues.

I am eagerly anticipating a new iPhone 3G S (and OS 3.0) later this week as I write this post on my still excellent first generation iPhone. I am brewing a separate post about mobile phones but I wanted to share a brief observation: most of my favorite apps have blue icons.

A few blue apps worth mentioning:

WordPress – using it to tap out this post in bed right now

Pandora – plug into your stereo and be amazed!

Twitterific – an excellent, powerful Twitter client

Shazam – great accuracy at identifying songs playing around you (I’ve discovered neat stuff on the radio with this one!)

Google – voice search can be super fast and easy. Trying to train myself to use it more.

AirPort photo via Engadget

Last week the inevitable happened: my backup drive failed. I took it as an opportunity to set things up right. (Note: I firmly believe in also backing up to the cloud but only for DR purposes.)

My existing backup solution was a WD 500GB MyBook attached to an old (unsightly) desktop. The box ran XP and was configured to “wake on lan” and then hibernate after a couple hours. Not bad but there was a glaring usability problem: backups were manual. (This setup cannot support Time Machine’s automated backups on the Mac and the wake-on-lan required a manual step for all backups.)

What’s my new ‘proper’ solution? Two new pieces of hardware: the Iomega Prestige 1TB ($100) to replace my dead MyBook and an AirPort Extreme router ($180). Yes, a single Time Capsule gets the same result but it’s a much worse choice since it’s over $200 more and less future proof (for upgrades or disk failures). Update 7/31: Apple just cut their TC prices to be much more in line with my preferred option — but I still wouldn’t get one for the other reason.

$100 for a TB!

The Iomega arrived the next day from Amazon and I first set it up with 2 partitions: NTFS and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) to support Time Machine. Worked like a charm but the physical cabling to each laptop for each backup would get anoying fast.

That’s where the AirPort Extreme comes in to save the day (4 days later via the Apple Store online). This router replaces my very trusty Linksys WRT-g and features nice performance improvements of wireless-n and dual band support. But the killer feature is the Airport Disk sharing — simply plug in any USB drive and access it from any host on your network!

A surprising bonus of this setup is that the ‘airdisk’ works on Windows too and it even provides a Fat32 proxy to the Mac file system. Once I noticed that, I repartitioned the Iomega as a 1TB Mac partition that’s shared between my OS X and Windows hosts (while those last around here!)

Now I can finally say goodbye to manual backups (and hello time machine). Plus, I can retire the last standing clunky desktop mini tower in my home. Oh how ubiquitous they once were.

At work, we have a program in place which lets employees swap their PC laptops in for MacBooks. A couple weeks ago my number was called and since I’ve been getting a bit fed up with my primary computer, a now sluggish 3 year old Dell, I decided to take the plunge. (Hardware wise the Dell is fine — the slow and steady software rot of Windows is mostly to blame). Needless to say, drastically changing one’s primary computer is a pretty big deal for most people, let alone a software professional.

This isn’t quite my first foray into the world of the Mac. For over a year I’ve been administering my team’s Mac Mini as part of our browser test lab and last Christmas I got my wife a sweet Mac Air which she loves and I’ve helped her learn to get around on. But this is the first time that I’ve made my primary computer a Mac and so far I’m digging it. (It probably doesn’t hurt that I’ve been a mega iPhone fan for more than a year.)

For the longest time I’ve been decidedly anti-Macintosh and pro Win/PC. My how the tides have turned! Growing up, my first 6 computers were all DOS and Windows based PCs. Windows 3.x,  Win95 and DOS will always have a special place in my thoughts and I strongly admire Microsoft for what they have done for the entire computing industry. But as software technology keeps moving online (into the cloud) it feels like Microsoft is constantly playing catch up. Their massively critical flops like Vista and the Zune are now just barely offset by productivity stalwarts Excel and Word. But even these are being threatened by the likes of Google Docs, iWork and OpenOffice. For the sake of competition, let’s hope that Windows 7 helps them gain back some of their former glory. 

My first experience with Macs (not counting the green screened one from grade school daycare) was in first year Computer Science at University of Waterloo.  The funky iMacs in the “Mac Lab” were what the Mathematics frosh (aka freshmen) were supposed to use.  I used them a few times but quickly learned to stay away and entered that lab only to print — those machines seemed awful to me. I much preferred to “work from dorm” on my own PC and either use my Linux partition (Slackware!) or telnet into the Unix machines on campus. Much better.

So, how did they make ‘em good?

Apple, under returning CEO Steve Jobs, did two critical things to make Macintosh computers as desirable for computing professionals as they are today: OS X and Intel based hardware. 

The Macintosh Operating System 10  has Darwin at it’s heart, an open source UNIX kernel. In my experience all good programmers will tell you that a UNIX OS is technically the best you can get. It has extreme stability, great performance and the best powerful command line interface. OS X also had the Aqua interface which added scalable graphics, anti-aliasing, transparency, shadows and animation. And they weren’t shy with these UI features.   

Moving to Intel CPUs in 2006 was also an excellent move because of the great success and market penetration of the X86 architecture. This means one can easily run Linux binaries on their Mac or dual boot to Windows or another Intel compatible OS.  It’s hard to disagree that Intel simply makes the best, fastest, affordable chips of this day and age. This is what tipped the scales for me.

The other thing that’s hard not to love about the Mac is the premium hardware. Things like magsafe (the power cord uses a magnet to pop in and out with ease and safety if you trip over it), a nice un-brick-like power brick, fantastic LCD monitors and great keyboard keys really are worth the extra cost and show an attention to detail that most hardware manufacturers just don’t “waste” money on developing.

The trackpad and its gesture support is another thing Apple’s focus has nicely paid off on. Once you start using two finger scroll, and two finger tap (for context menus), you’ll realize the mouse isn’t quite as vital as you once thought.  

Keyboard Junky

For me, the toughest thing by far on making the switch from PC to Mac is my dependency on the keyboard. Macs were really designed for the (one button!?) mouse. Lately Apple has been getting better at keyboard support and they were very smart for making Alt-Tab just work (Cmd-Tab switches apps like just like Windows) since that’s probably the most hard-wired keyboard command for all Windows users.

My biggest annoyance is the loss of Home, End, Page up and Page down keys. To get these key functionalities you will need to use a two key combo (e.g., Cmd+Left arrow instead of Home or Fn+Up instead of Page up). This is bad because not only do you need two hands but they differ slightly between apps!  I also dislike how Cmd+Left and Cmd+Right is overloaded in the browser to mean Home or End if you’re in a text area and back or forward browse if you’re not. Too much thinking is required… I find I’m reaching for the mouse or trackpad more often which simply slows me down.

I also wish one could navigate dialogs using accelerators like in Windows. Some apps have this built in using Option + letter keys but this doesn’t work if the dialog has a text box focussed upon load since Option + letters is also used for extended character typing. 

On the plus side, I much prefer using my thumb for hotkeys since Cmd (where Alt is on a PC) is the main hotkey initiator. That key placement feels far more natural than using Ctrl with my pinky (which is the initiator for most hotkey commands on a Windows PC). It’s kind of interesting that on Windows, the Alt key is now almost forgotten which is sad given it’s prominent position on the PC keyboard.

Third Party Apps

The built in apps for OS X are nice but everyone knows you need extra software to get real work done.

IntelliJ by JetBrains is my IDE of choice. I love its HTML/XML/JSP editing capabilities (which Eclipse just can’t seem to get right) as well as its built in support for Tomcat and Maven. It works on the Mac just as it does on Windows which is also great.

For text editing I’ve been impressed with open-source Smultron. I’m not using it for code editing but as a scratch-pad it’s working out nicely. (And of course, it doesn’t do everything that metapad can, but I’m sure it does stuff that metapad cannot ;)

The Butler app was something I discovered to solve a particular problem: make F2 edit a cell in Microsoft Excel. Butler allows you to set up hotkey interceptors for specific Apps. It also does a bunch of other stuff that seems cool, like a clipboard storage menu but I haven’t delved into much else yet.  

For a shell terminal, iTerm is nicer and far more customizable than the built in Terminal app. And I’m using iStat Menus (pictured above) to monitor memory and CPU. 

I’ve been rather dissapointed with Microsoft’s Office suite on the Mac as well as Adobe Fireworks CS4. Mac Office is not nearly as full featured or customizable as the Windows versions and, yes, Entourage sucks way more than Outlook. Fireworks could be great but somehow Adobe forgot to test Fireworks CS4 on the Mac. Shame on them.

Know of any other nice (preferrably free) OS X apps? Leave a comment — I’d love to check them out.