Jun 14 2010

MacMerc.com is Back!

MacMerc.com is back… but why did it go?

I’m happy to announce the return of MacMerc.com and my intention to resume production on MacMerc.TV. It must have seemed strange after so much attention and effort was made to launch an ambitious podcast that was so well received (thank you all for that) to then not only stop producing that show but to take down the site that hosted it.

Believe me, it wasn’t part of the plan.

Let me take you back a year or so and I’ll try to explain.

Shortly after I launched the podcast, I started up a friendship over Twitter with Greg Grunberg ( @greggrunberg ) from NBC’s HEROES. He is an amazing guy with all kinds of projects on the go. At the time he told me about an idea he had for an iPhone app that would bring up coupons based on where the user was in proximity to the stores. He wanted to know if I knew anyone who could develop it. I did, of course. I connected him with my friend from my days on The Wizards of Technology, August Trometer ( @august ).

That was the start of the whirlwind of activity that became Yowza!! Mobile Coupons ( @yowza ). In the early months it took over a lot of my time and even distracted me from my day job a fair bit. I had no time to write blog posts, much less scripts. There was definitely no time for shooting and editing.

In the midst of all that, a hacker came a-hackin’ (it’s what they do). Somebody was repeatedly compromising MacMerc.com’s security and posting all kinds of filth and horror. With all the other stuff happening in my life, I couldn’t handle this as well. The only person that knew the site well enough to defend it was also the guy I recommended when Greg asked if I knew any coders, and he was busier than me.

I was sunk.

My only defense was retreat.

Through my friendship (and internship) with Cali Lewis at GeekBrief ( @calilewis ), I had met some amazingly wonderful people and made some great friends. One of them, Daynah ( @daynah ) came to my rescue and put up a “be back soon page” and went to work converting the data from my antiquated pre-Typepad content management system over to WordPress. She did a great job and I am so thankful for her help.

My participation with Yowza!! is much less than it was and I, once again, have time for blogging, script writing and podcasting.

Let’s dig in!

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Apr 27 2009

5 Things to do with your new iPod touch

The iPod touch is a beautiful little machine. Thanks to powerful
hardware and the creativity of developers it is capable of all kinds
of things – even controlling your home automation setup. Here’s a
short list of some of the more powerful things you should be doing on
your iPod touch:

Present on your Mac

Fresh off the Keynote demo, the new href="http://www.apple.com/iwork/">iWork 09 will allow you to
control Keynote presentations from your Mac. Not keen on waiting for
09 to ship? Try Mocha
VNC or VNC Lite from the app store. VNC will give you complete GUI
control of your Mac. And let’s not forget Apple’s own href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?mt=8&id=284417350">Remote,
that allows you to take over iTunes to play songs, movies or podcasts.

Capture ideas on your iPod

evernote 5 Things to do with your new iPod touch

Ideas don’t always conveniently strike while you are at your keyboard.
Fortunately, there are some on-the-go solutions for jotting things
down for use later. The first is href="http://evernote.com/about/download/iphone/">Evernote. This
free (with paid option) service comes with an iPhone app that lets you
jot notes for upload to Evernote. It works offline and, when you
upgrade to the iPhone, it will capture pictures as well. In turn,
Evernote’s online service lets you sync, organize and even scan
pictures for text.

If you don’t care for a hosted service, href="http://carbonfin.com/">Outliner Lite (also comes in paid
version) allows you to quickly outline thoughts and email them as an
OPML file for later analysis.

Take Knowledge Offline

Sure its great, all the things you can find on the ‘net on your touch,
but what about those times when you’re offline? Shouldn’t you set
aside some of that space for some info you might need on the bus,
train plane or school?

wikiamo 5 Things to do with your new iPod touch

Wikiamo thinks
so. This app will let you browse Wikipedia and stash pages for
off-line reading. But why stop there? You can take your own Google
docs offline with apps like href="http://iphone.iusethis.com/app/mightydocs">MiGhtyDocs and href="http://www.savysoda.com/Documents/">Documents.

Listen to Music that isn’t Yours

While you have that network connection, put it to good use. Streaming
music from the Internet is nothing new. But the way href="http://www.pandora.com/on-the-iphone">Pandora goes about it
is. On Pandora (iPhone, web or Mac app) you create a ‘station’ by
giving Pandora a song you like. Pandora, though some fancy magical
algorithm streams you hours of related music. Not only is it a great
way to listen to music you will probably like, it is also a great way
to find new music.

pandora 5 Things to do with your new iPod touch

If you don’t care for Pandora’s client, you might try href="http://www.last.fm/group/Last.fm+for+iPhone+and+iPod+Touch">Last.fm
- who also has a client for you iPod touch.

Swap files with your Mac

One of the few lacks of the iPhone OS that separate it from grown-up
operating systems is file management. Wether or not the iPhone needs
file management is a debate for another time. For those of you that do
want to store and swap files from your iPod touch there are solutions.

The most Mac-ish app is href="http://www.heymacsoftware.com/">Briefcase (and its little
brother Briefcase Lite) which allows you to browse Macs and send files
back and forth. Like the other app I’ll mention, it allows access to
the files on the device itself.

If you’re looking for flexibility, the free href="http://iphone.iusethis.com/app/discover">Discover allows you
to browse the iPod from any platform on the network via web-browser.
Rather than give you access to the computer via iPod, Discover works
the opposite as Briefcase – accessing the iPod from your Mac, Windows
or Linux machine.

discover 5 Things to do with your new iPod touch

With the App store quickly filling with fart apps, it is nice to know
you can get some serious things done on your iPod.

Brian

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Apr 27 2009

Freeloader Farewell– The Best Freeware of 2008

With less and less time to devote to the series (and less and less frequent episodes) it is time for a change. Fortunately, the amazing power of the Mac’s free software community has been here long before Freeloader and will be around for years to come. With the welcome addition of iPhone freeware, the future is bright! But enough nostalgia, let’s get to the list:

Best on the Web

I have to admit, I cheat on Firefox all the time (most recently on the PC side with Chrome) but I always come back. There are worthy contenders but the extensibility, community and recent version 3 enhancements to make it more ‘Mac’ make Firefox the workhorse of the web.

Winner: Firefox 3.0, but don’t forget Safari, Opera and Camino.

Freeware Classic

For years, Mac users had to suffer through the accusation that the Mac OS lived and died by Microsoft’s support of Office for Mac. Fortunately the support of Sun, the work of Open Source programmers and some missteps by Microsoft have ended the validity of that argument. Apart from whatever the ‘ribbon’ is and erroneous new file formats, Office has not changed – but OpenOffice has. In its new Aqua-native flavor, OpenOffice not only brings a robust office suite to the Mac (for free) but also includes an Access-compatible relational database app called Base. With the latest version OpenOffice also includes support for extensions, a la Firefox.

Winner: OpenOffice.org

Best App Killed by Apple

This category features an app rendered useless by Apple. With the App Store emerging as the crowning achievement of the iPhone, it is easy to forget that Apple was not the first to deliver 3rd party apps on the most exciting new platform around. While many contributed to the Jailbreaking of the iPhone, one company was a bold sponsor of rouge 3rd party hacking: Conceited Software. They supported jailbreaking on every version of the OS up to 2.0. Where are they now? I guess you could say they moved on with the rest of us. You can find several of their excellent 3rd party apps in Apple’s app store.

Winner: Conceited Software (App Store apps).

Best System Extension

The move to Intel opened up all kinds of possibilities for running other operating systems on the Mac. While Boot Camp works, Parallels and VMware quickly provided support for running Windows apps along side Mac apps. Our friends at Sun released a powerful emulator similar to an old mac favorite VirtualPC. VirtualBox brings Windows to Intel Macs without a reboot, and allows the management of multiple virtual machines.

Winner: VirtualBox.

Best Mac-Only

It is a shame that this award has to be given postuously. For years, the process of encoding video for the iPod or Apple TV was a much better experience on the Mac thanks to iSquint and its paid older brother (the Swiss army knife of video conversion, VisualHub). Sadly, both of these have been discontinued.

Winner: iSquint, honorable mention goes to AdiumX and Cyberduck.

iPhone App

I love Apple and Apple design, but I find myself pretty frequently unsatisfied with a feature gap in OS X or the iPhone OS. One might argue the biggest outstanding feature gap in the iPhone is file access. BriefCase was one of the first to conquer this, and thanks to a lite version, allows free (and ad-free) access to a file store on your iPhone as well as the files on your Mac.

Winner: BriefcaseLite, honorable mention to Mocha VNC Lite and
Pandora.

Rookie of the Year

This one goes to an app with a lot of potential that hit the Mac scene about a year ago. This vector drawing app looks great and has a good and growing feature set.

Winner: DrawBerry

Lifetime Achievement Award

Backing up your Mac will never go out of style. One app has leveraged OS X’s Unix power with a slick aqua interface for years. Carbon Copy Cloner brought bootable backups to the Mac, and continues to support optimized backup on the fly or by a schedule. And, its always been free!

Winner: Carbon Copy Cloner

Hats off to the many skilled developers that have made the Mac rock for all these years! And what of the Freeloader? While the Freeloader Series is complete, stay tuned for more great reviews, features and tutorials.

Thanks for reading!

Brian (blog | twitter)

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