If you told me as a 10 year old that we would have devices like the iPhone I would not have doubted you for an instant. Of course we would have a sleek little device that fits in our pocket, allows us to communicate with (essentially) everyone in the world, and affords access to the complete sum of world knowledge (again, essentially). Not having an understanding of cellular telephony, computers, or the Internet certainly made this idea seem much more feasible when I was 10 than when I was 20.

A little over a week ago I got an iPhone. I’d wanted one since it was announced, but delayed my purchase due to the upfront cost, the monthly bill, and the slow death of my notebook computer to which it would sync. All of those issues became meaningless or were remedied with time. And now I have one.

And it is just like the future. Sure it’s built on a set of technologies found in many other wireless devices. And sure there have been smart phones for years that did many of the same things the iPhone does. They just don’t do them nearly as well¹.

Now I am finally free to explore the wealth (or glut) of iPhone apps. As a follower of Apple news it was oftentimes very frustrating to continually hear about exciting new applications that ran on a platform to which I had no access. I’ll share my absolute favorite application today. It’s a little app called CameraBag and it’s terribly damned clever.

See, despite all of its advances, the iPhone still comes bundled with a pretty lousy camera that takes pretty lousy pictures like you would see from any run-of-the-mill mobile phone camera. CameraBag takes that flaw, and turns it on its head. It’s an app that takes a photo from the camera and applies one of a number of filters to it that emulate cheap cameras of the past. Suddenly your crappy mobile phone picture looks like a crappy snapshot that you found in your parent’s attic. They look a whole lot cooler that way. For $2.99² it makes taking photos with your little iPhone camera a whole lot more fun.

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¹ With the exception of email, I’ll grant you that. While the iPhone’s Mail application is functional, I’m sure it doesn’t hold a candle to that of a Blackberry, say.

² If $2.99 is just far too spendy for you, they make a lite version for $0.99 that has the three most popular filters.

It’s official, new MacBooks will be announced next week. I’ve been waiting for these quite a while. My 5-year-old PowerBook G4 has been steadily dying over the past few months. This Sunday — or was it Saturday? — I knew she was finally done.

It must have been Saturday because I had followed a link to a temporary YouTube video from SNL mocking the recent vice presidential debate. Flash has almost always been a difficult thing for my PowerBook to handle, more so in recent versions. YouTube usually does pretty well, many other Flash video sites do not. This time the playback stuttered and limped along. I could sense a general wheezing slowness to every part of the OS. Tinúviel had a failed hard drive.

Backups with SuperDuper! failed repeatedly. No matter what I did I continued to have I/O errors at some level. I gave up on a full backup and concentrated on the Users folder. After deleting several files I had success, and I shut down both the PowerBook and external hard drive with a sigh of relief.

It was time, without a doubt, to say goodbye.

Rumors had been swelling for what seemed like months about new MacBooks. I had heard that October 14th was the date we’d see a refresh. I had a rough couple of days checking rumor sites for any news. Surely, if these new notebooks were to be as drastic a revision as we expected Apple would want to do a big event. But I despaired as each day passed without an invitation. I couldn’t risk buying a new MacBook if new ones were so close, but what if they weren’t? I’m just not capable of living without my own computer.

So, now they’re definitely coming. I’m ordering one as soon as the Apple Store comes back online.

This PowerBook is my first Mac. With my most recent bout of schooling drawing to a close it was time I thought about getting a real job. I would need to create a résumé. I would need to email said résumé to prospective employers. My father thought I might need a notebook.

At the time — 2003 — my computer was a somewhat elderly PC cobbled together from parts I had been hanging onto in some cases for years. It had something in the neighborhood of 15 to 20GB of hard drive space on two different hard drives purchased years apart. I had built the whole damned thing from scratch. Finding a heat sink to fit the oddball motherboard I had purchased took at least 4 tries.

I don’t know what I had decided on a Mac. Not long ago I had railed loudly against the platform to my housemates. I was doing a bit of web design at the time, struggling with CSS. Safari hadn’t yet made any inroads. Firefox was still in its infancy. Neither one existed at all at the time of my ranting (2002). We had Internet Explorer and Netscape. Maybe Opera, but I never touched it. As most of the web designers used Macs, most of the ones who talked the loudest online, I heard a lot about IE5. That it was so much better than anything on PC, and that any problems I was having couldn’t possibly be blamed on it. Maybe I’m exaggerating but one fact is abundantly clear: Coding CSS was a lot harder then than it is now.

So when my father announced over Thanksgiving break that he was going to buy a notebook for me we looked at some Dells and some HPs, but that wasn’t what I really wanted. I must have indicated as much because he asked what I really wanted and I pulled up the iBook page. I distinctly remember him asking if that was what I really wanted because I remember saying “Well, no, what I really want is…” and then pulling up the PowerBook. There was a much bigger difference between the PowerBook G4 and iBook G4 than there is between the MacBook Pro and MacBook, at least there seems to be where I’m sitting.

So, we ordered the PowerBook. It arrived a few days later and I was struck, immediately, at just how goddamned right it was. I’d been using a computer since our first 386 — or was it a 486? — many years ago. I thought I knew how these things worked.

I was wrong. They could be so much better.

Everything was where it was supposed to be. I was used to hunting for things. For just knowing things. I was used to autoexec.bat and config.sys. I was used to the registry. These were the things you grimly accepted on your way to being able to use a computer. But it didn’t have to be.

I can’t remember any sort of learning curve. If anything, there was an un-learning curve. Remarking on the process of switching I’ve often said that it would probably be easier to pick the Mac OS if you had never touched a computer before in your life. It just worked the way you’d expect it to.

In my years of using a computer these past 5 have been the best. I wish I’d gotten here sooner, but that’s ignoring a pretty substantial dark period of Mac history I took no part in. The important thing is I got here.

And, on Tuesday, I get to make another important step: I get to order my second Mac.

I was particularly keen to see the details of yesterday’s keynote as I had recently received the okay from the wife to upgrade my deceased iPod to a shiny new iPhone. While my desire to purchase one was never officially stymied by her, she had previously expressed a general disinterest in the product that was largely directed at the price¹. I might have purchased an iPhone myself, but it would come bundled with a hefty serving of marital antipathy. It wasn’t as if I had the money at the time anyway.

In any event, when the iPhone 1.0 shipped last year I did not get one. I said I’d replace my iPod with one. Lo and behold, a few short weeks ago my 4G iPod up and died on me. “Such timing!” I thought to myself, “The new iPhone will be surely be announced in June.” And, as we all know, it was. Now I had a hat trick: dead iPod, wifely consent, and a brand new device. Not only that, but the release date just so happens to be a day I have off from work. This was kismet, assuredly.

I’ve spent the last few days in a buzz of excitement. The new iPhone is coming, and I’m going to get one.

And then, AT&T went and spoiled my buzz.

First, the new iPhone requires in-store activation. Opening day is doing to crawl. I don’t know if they’ve figured out some extra special way to move people in and out of the store, but I have never been able to get a new phone, activate it, and leave a store in less than 45 minutes. That even excludes shopping, as I knew precisely the phone I intended to get the minute I walked in the door. Second, they raised the price of a data plan, presumably to defray the cost of 3G². Third, the subsidized price drop means I presumably will have to pay an undisclosed increased price as being a loyal AT&T customer without a 2G iPhone I am at the whim of AT&T’s upgrade policy. My date of eligibility is September 29, 2008.

What I don’t know, as mobile phone companies seem to thrive on this sort of obfuscation, is whether I could just sign a new contract and get the discount or if I can even buy an unsubsidized phone at all. It would appear that either way I’ll be getting an extension of my contract, which I don’t really give two shits about. It gets even more complicated when the type of plan I have is considered. Last year the wife and I made the ill-advised move to a family/shared plan, thinking it would save us money. It did not. In fact, we spend more now with a family plan than we had individually while getting fewer minutes. Thanks, assholes.

I’ll be getting one, AT&T shenanigans or no. I just wish this year’s sale could be more like last year’s.

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¹ A few years ago she expressed nearly identical opinions at length regarding the iPod before ultimately caving in and buying one herself. I think it’s a consumer defense mechanism.

² A raise in price has the nasty side-effect of forcing much of the country to pay for a service they can’t have, as 3G coverage is far from universal.

Over the weekend I picked up a second generation iPod shuffle — an orange one. Having a respectably large digital music library — not to mention a collector’s zeal about completion — the shuffle had always seemed a largely unnecessary addition to the iPod lineup. Hell! It seemed contrary to the entire damn point of the iPod, which I had seen the sheer volume of storage available. Why on earth would I ever want to buy a screenless player with a fraction of the storage, no matter how tiny?

That was before I joined a gym. Faced with the prospect of listening to the drone of equipment over the blaring whatever pumped out of the speakers a very small device that did the one thing I needed — to play music — seemed pretty good. Wouldn’t you know it? The damned thing is good!

Owning this new shuffle has made me think about the entire iPod brand as a whole. Now, I don’t have sales figures on hand with unequivocal proof that iPod shuffles sell very well, but I’ve got a pretty good hunch that they do. And it’s funny, because Apple has essentially taken the MP3 player back to its roots, so to speak. Meaning the iPod shuffle is essentially the same device that Rio and others introduced back in the late 1990s, albeit smaller.

The shuffle is a great example of how Apple has built the iPod brand down from the top with great success. I think, again without any data to prove it, that the iPod line has made significantly more money by continuing to introduce iPods with less features. Adding more and more only appeals to a certain segment of the population: the geeks, the early adopters, and the gadget-crazed. By exploring the way people actually use these products Apple is able to find customers in the actual people who buy 90% of everything and not just the analysts screaming for more space, wireless headphones, and the handful of other unnecessary crap you might read certain folks asking for. A less confident company might give in, try to add all of the features people think they want, and watch their product collapse under its own weight.

So, yeah, I like my tiny iPod shuffle. I’m also quite fond of the new earbuds. They don’t look much different at first, but after 30 sweaty minutes of cardio mine were still firmly in my ears. I doubt the old ones would have been. Were I not going to a gym, I might not have bothered. That’s just the thing though, the shuffle fits at the gym, and so I bought one.

This is installment two of my series on Mac software I’ve found useful enough to pay real honest-to-god money for in the hopes that you too might find something you love. I started cataloging all of the applications I’d purchased a little while back to contrast against the amount I’d spent on software (excluding games) as a Windows user. The two figures are not even close. In all fairness, I didn’t start using a Mac until around the time I got a “real job” and steady income. Still, I spent a hefty sum on PC games and very little on other software, choosing to make do with freeware or unregistered shareware. Take that to mean whatever you will.

Salling Clicker

Salling Clicker is quite possibly the nerdiest app I’ve ever paid money to use. It turns your Bluetooth enabled mobile phone into a robust remote control for your Mac. I was so excited about the possibilities of it that it influenced the phone I bought — an aging Sony-Ericsson T616 that I still use to this day despite a bent charging connection because I hate every other phone offered by the major phone carriers. At the time — way back in 2004 — finding a phone with Bluetooth capabilities was no easy feat.

As it uses Bluetooth you don’t need to worry about line-of-sight as you would with an infrared device. So long as you can stay connected (and with the Bluetooth receiver in a G4 PowerBook that’s unfortunately a bit iffy) you can browse your iTunes library, check for new email in Mail.app, or do any number of other nifty little things. Not only that, it’s scriptable with AppleScript. Now that the current line of Macs (aside from the Power Mac variety) come with Front Row and remotes it might not be as novel to control a Mac with a remote control, but Salling Clicker makes up for that with increased expandability and compatibility.

Salling Clicker costs $23.95 and is available at salling.com. There’s even a Windows version available.

Cha-Ching

Before I got a checkbook I started writing all of my incoming and outgoing cash flow in a little notebook. By the time my checkbook finally came in I realized that I hated writing in that little register and I kept using the wee notebook. Well, now I don’t write it down anywhere. I use Cha-Ching.

Cha-Ching is a great example of what differentiates a Mac app from a Windows app. It’s simple, pretty, and effective. Using Cha-Ching is no more complicated than my little notebook solution, nor should it be. You enter a transaction, Cha-Ching does the math for you. Once you’ve entered a transaction you can assign tags and make smart folders (in case you ever wanted to see just how much you spent on software recently). It integrates with Address Book to autofill fields. Cha-Ching even lets you take photos of the stuff you bought with iSight. You can back up your data to .Mac. It does what it needs to do and never gets in your way.

Cha-Ching costs $14.95 while in beta and is available at midnightapps.com

NewsFire

When it comes to Mac RSS readers there are really two choices: NewsFire and NetNewsWire. Preference is split divisively between the two camps. I took them both for a spin and my choice was NewsFire.

NewsFire, like many Mac apps, is an attractive one. It’s got your neat fades. It’s got your rounded buttons. It’s got pizzazz. When a feed is updated it swoops up to the top of the window. NewsFire also lets you create Smart Feeds much like other “Smart” groupings in OS X. You want to know which feeds have audio? Video? NewsFire can do that. Not keen on the iTunes podcast system? NewsFire has an integrated audio player. And because it uses Safari’s WebKit engine news posts appear exactly as they would in Safari, embedded YouTube videos and all.

NewsFire costs $18.99 and is available at newsfirerss.com

So there’s part two. Agree? Disagree? Have an alternate list? Comment away!

Macworld 2007 was a bit of a bust for the Mac. All of the major announcements being consumer products with nary a mention of Leopard or iLife to be found. Which is not to say we aren’t still excited about the iPhone or the AppleTV, they just aren’t Mac products. So I decided to make a list of software available for the Mac that I found to be excellent enough to put my hard-earned money down. Over the next couple posts I’ll bring you lists of some terrific applications the Mac community has developed in the hopes that you too might find worthy of your support.

TextMate

When it comes to serious text editing on the Mac there is contentious debate between two camps: those who love TextMate and those who love BBEdit. While both are excellent applications and justifiably beloved there are two very good reasons to choose TextMate over BBEdit:

1. Ruby on Rails – TextMate is the editor of choice for Ruby on Rails development and, from what I’ve read, handles it significantly more gracefully than does BBEdit.
2. Price – TextMate costs about $75.00 (depending on the exchange rate) less than BBEdit. That made a pretty big difference to me.

It’s no simple task to detail precisely why TextMate is such a worthwhile purchase. Unless you have need of a powerful text editor, and many of you might not, you won’t find much to love here. Web developers and software authors, however, have a great deal to love in TextMate’s tag completion, macros, and color coding. TextMate is expandable by means of Bundles and has the support of a devoted cast of developers. If it doesn’t support a desired language “out of the box” chances are good someone has put together a Bundle for you.

TextMate costs €39 and is available at macromates.com.

FlickrExport for iPhoto

Flickr is great and all, but wouldn’t it be even greater if you could upload your photos directly through iPhoto and saving yourself at least two steps? That’s precisely what FlickrExport does. Once installed an extra option is made available in iPhoto’s Export screen. Before uploading you can set tags, change the photo’s title, add a description, and scale the photo as needed. After that it’s just a click and your photos are on Flickr. I can’t imagine using Flickr without it anymore.

FlickrExport costs £12 and is available at connectedflow.com. A version for Aperture is also available.

Keyword Manager

Dealing with iPhoto’s keywords using the default set of tools leaves a bit to be desired. I never made much headway into putting them to good use until I picked up this plugin. Keyword Manager adds a few extra windows to your iPhoto allowing you to easily and deftly add keywords to your photos and keep them organized. First, it allows instant access to keyword additions directly through one window and keyword organization through another. Keyword Manager keeps your keywords in hierarchical order. Family photos could be tagged with a name, which is kept under a family category itself nested under the primary category “Family.” Or photos of particular buildings in a city might be categorized under that city (itself under the country in which that city is located). Anal retentive taggers rejoice! Your ability to create Smart Albums will be drastically improved.

Keyword Manager makes a great companion to FlickrExport above as all of these keywords assigned in iPhoto will automatically be posted to Flickr. Your Flickr photostream will thus be kept just as organized as your iPhoto Library.

Keyword Manager costs $19 and is available at bullstorm.se

That does it for my first catalog of Mac applications. Stay tuned for another batch of apps you’ll wonder what you ever did without. Disagreements? Suggestions? Your comments and critiques are appreciated.

And we’re back! My apologies for the delay in updates. Over the course of the holidays my PowerBook decided she was tired of having two RAM slots and kicked the bottom one to the curb. This, apparently, is known issue with the 15 inch PowerBooks. Repair is out of the question due to financial considerations, even if I suspect my RAM failure is a direct result of the replacement logic board Apple installed in March. I’m currently trying to decide if I should buy a new 1GB DIMM card. 512MB of RAM is just not nearly enough to run Tiger as hard as I like.

This has tempered my interest in computing and thus my interest in posting. My apologies, dear reader, it’s just a painful experience to use a computer with too little brainpower.

Soldier on I must. Uncle Sam might just be able to buy me (and my wife while I’m at it) some new RAM once I get my W-2. I told myself I’d start seriously considering upgrading to a MacBook once the Leopard release is imminent and a 1GB DIMM might just carry me through.

It’s hard to keep the priorities straight after yesterday’s keynote though. I’m talking, of course, about the iPhone (not to say the AppleTV is not an attractive device for those of you with fancier televisions than I). My slavering desire for the iPhone is something terrible already. I’ve been excited at the prospect of a phone, any phone, with some smartphone capabilities that will effortlessly sync with my Mac for some time now. That the execution is as elegant as it is only makes the iPhone that much more exciting.

A funny thing I’ve noticed already is that most of the folks I talk to think of it as the new version of the iPod. One of the local “new rock” stations mentioned the iPhone this morning. Something to the effect of “If you got an iPod for xmas this year Steve Jobs has one thing to say to you, ‘Sucker!’” I suppose, from a money perspective it might be difficult to swallow the price of this iPhone had you just put down the money for an iPod. Hell, it might be difficult to swallow the price any way you look at it. It probably does signal a fundamental shift in iPod design. I’m curious to see if this “Multi-Touch” interface overtakes the iPod’s “Clickwheel” or if both can exist simultaneously.

As good as the new iPod interface might be it doesn’t really affect how I feel about the iPhone. I’d be just as excited about the iPhone if it played nary a single track and were just a phone/Internet device that synced with my Address Book and iCal.

As an Apple user and ardent proponent of the hardware and operating system I feel I would be remiss if I did not mention last week’s announcement. If by some peculiar reason you have not heard of it — say you were lost in a desert or fell into a short-term coma — suffice to say that it allows the new Intel processor Macs to boot Windows XP SP 2 and if you can look at any technology blog to read more sordid details. While personally intrigued by the possibility of dual-booting, I’m not going to get the chance to do so for a good long while now. This PowerBook G4 is going to have to last. I just can’t afford some fancy-pants MacBook Pro.

The arrival of Boot Camp has helped push a coworker over the fence towards a shiny new MacBook. A few days earlier she asked if I had any buying advice about a new notebook computer and still managed to act mildly surprised at my answer. Unless you come to me with some incredibly specific request, say you need a computer that can run a 9-year-old piece of Windows software produced by a company that once lived in an obscure Eastern European nation that no longer exists due to civil war, plague, or other monolithic disaster I am going to tell you to buy a Mac each and every single time. She was concerned because of my frequent loud outbursts against companies that do not appreciate web standards or even block Mac browsers from viewing their web pages (I don’t particularly feel inclined to link to any of them). I felt chagrined, not for my ranting against these lazy developers, but for misrepresenting the quality of the platform. Boot Camp allayed some of her fears. Hopefully she’ll follow through. I’d hate to see her packing a Dell or some shit.

So, at least it got her thinking more seriously about a Mac. That’s really the whole point of Boot Camp, isn’t it? A crutch? A rather expensive crutch (potentially) to make switchers feel less intimidated?

Boy, it sure would be pretty nice to have a copy of Windows XP available for gaming. Hell, just for game demos. I sometimes get so jealous when I read that some new demo has just dropped and everyone is all excited. Then I realize that they mean for Windows only. I should really be used to that by now.