The First Thing? Reinstall the OS

This might seem like craziness to some people, but the default OS X install has a bunch of language files, fonts, and printer drivers that you will never ever use. I immediately get the restore disc out and do a clean install of OS X (in this case, Snow Leopard). To do this properly, once you boot from the install disc and select your language, click on Tools in the Menu Bar and open Disk Utility. From there, select your primary hard drive from the column on the left and click on the Erase tab on the right hand side. Ensure that Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is selected and hit Erase. Now you’re ready to hit the ground running.

Quit Disk Utility and you’ll be brought back to the Installer. Click continue until you arrive at a screen with the “Customize” button in the lower left. Click on that and uncheck everything in there so that “Essential System Software” is the only thing being installed. You’re already well on your way to a leaner, meaner system.

Update Everything, Install Only One Program

Even on my brand new machine, the first thing I had to do after booting up for the first time was apply critical system and security updates to OS X. This may take you a few restarts depending on how old your installation disc is, but with my method you’ll never need it again. After your system is completely up to date, open Disk Utility again (located in Applications > Utilities), select your partiton from the left (usually named Macintosh HD), and click on the button that says “Repair Disk Permissions” under the First Aid tab. I generally do this after applying large amounts of updates just to ensure there’s no data corruption now or in the future. If you want to know a little more about this process, check out Apple’s Support Document on the topic.

The hard drive should only contain the freshly installed-and-updated system: none of the programs you use, none of your user files like pictures, music, etc. I download only one program at this point: SuperDuper!

Time For the First of Many Backups

Some people swear by Carbon Copy Cloner, but I love the speed and interface of SuperDuper! — In reality both programs are amazing at what they do: creating a bootable backup of your system. The one feature of the new MacBook Pros and iMacs that got me jazzed was the inclusion of a dedicated SD card reader. The first practical application I thought of, beyond the obvious quick retrieval of photos and videos, was a bootable SD card backup and that’s exactly what I did. You’ll need at least an 8GB SD card for this to work, and I’d recommend Class 6 or higher. The Class of an SD card is a measure of it’s speed; Class 6 cards usually range in the 20-24mbps range, which is plenty fast for our purposes.

Insert the SD card into the dedicated slot or into a card reader connected via USB, open Disk Utility and select it (not its indented partition, but the device itself) in the left column. Once you’ve done that, click on the “Partition” tab on the right side. Under Volume Scheme, select 1 Partition, then click on the “Options…” button. From here, make sure to select the GUID Partition Table, which will make this SD card a bootable OS X device, then click OK to come back to the main Partition section. From here you can optionally name your volume or just hit the Apply button. Disk Utility will format and partition the card and it will appear back on your desktop. Quit Disk Utility and switch over to SuperDuper!

The interface here couldn’t be simpler: In the first drop down, you select your primary hard drive, in the second you select your SD card, and the one underneath should have “Backup – all files” selected. Once that’s done, click on Copy Now, enter your user password, and go grab a sandwich.

First Backup Done, Initialize Offsite Backup

You now have a fresh, up-to-date version of Snow Leopard you can restore from in the future should you ever want to start over or deploy a basic installation quickly on a new machine. Remove the SD card, flip the switch into the “Lock” position, and store the card away somewhere safe.

The next thing I do is install an off-site backup manager. There are literally dozens to choose from and after giving them all a fair shake I decided to go with BackBlaze. Here’s a quick list of other services you can choose from for the sake of fair-and-unbiased-ness:

• Mozy
• Carbonite
• iDrive
• Crashplan
• JungleDisk
• ElephantDrive

They all vary slightly in price and implementation, but all work great. I chose BackBlaze because it’s $5/month/computer for unlimited storage and installs itself as a simple System Preferences panel. All of these services say that the initial backup takes the longest, which is why I still don’t put any of my files on the computer at this point: I basically want  a working duplicate of my computer in the cloud. Your mileage will vary from mine at this point depending on your internet connection, but you basically have to upload roughly 12GB of system files onto the internet. This is something I let run overnight, while I sleep soundly knowing my data is being secured.

Finally, Move Your Files Over, Install Your Apps

I assumed a lot from you going into this article, not the least of which was that you had your data safely stored on some sort of external device or computer. Well, now’s the time to bring all of your goodies into the fray. Add your music, movies, photos, etc and order them however you’d like. If you’re as particular about your folder structures and naming conventions as I am, this could very well be the longest step. Also feel free to install all of the programs you use as this point.

More Backing Up

We’re almost at the home stretch, so now you’re probably thinking “What the hell more could we do to secure our data?” Well, we’ve already started on one: Backblaze.

After I moved all my files over and installed the programs I use on a regular basis, the amount of space I was using jumped from 12GB to 204GB. Backblaze (or whichever service you’ve chosen) will back all of that information up. For me, it took roughly 3 weeks (all the while adjusting how much bandwidth I wanted BackBlaze to use: more at night, less during the day, etc), so that’s pretty much a background thing that will be happening for a while. The last thing to set up is OS X’s own Time Machine.

Taming Time Machine

I love Time Machine; before it was introduced in Leopard I never had a backup/restore plan. I figured if I lost everything (thankfully that’s never happened), I’d just start over again from scratch — the force (of  laziness) was strong in this one. Time Machine made it easy and important to me to back up everything digital. Though it isn’t without it’s flaws, it’s certainly the solution a majority of people who use OS X are most familiar with. I don’t use any third party tools to control the times of day it chooses to back up, but I am very particular about what it backs up. Below is a list of folders that I explicitly tell Time Machine NOT to back up and why. If you’d like to save a little space on each back up, you can add any or all of these folders by going to System Preferences > Time Machine > Options.

• /Applications — This folder changes so often and drastically that I’d prefer to manage it on my own. If I need to get an app that I accidentally deleted, I’ll make sure to get the latest version from the company’s website.
• /Library/Audio — After installing Final Cut Studio and Logic Pro, this folder jumps up to a whopping 32GB. Again, if I accidentally delete something from here (unlikely), I’ll reinstall from the disc.
• /Library/Caches — Non-vital files that can accumulate in size rather quickly and change even quicker. No harm here.
• ~/Library/Caches — Same as above
• ~/Downloads — This folder changes so often that I’d rather not have anything in here backed up. I do pretty regular maintenance to keep this folder clear anyhow.
• ~/Dropbox — I’m a mega Dropbox user. If you haven’t heard of it, you should really make it a part of your life. Anyway, Dropbox files already live in the cloud (and usually on many other computers) and have the ability to go back multiple versions. No need to back this stuff up.
• ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync — Only applicable if you’re an iPhone user, but definitely worth looking into. I’ve synced my iPhone 4, which is loaded with video, to my MacBook only a handful of times, but this folder clocks in at 18GB+ for me.
• ~/Movies — I only use this folder as a drop point for DVDs I rip before storing them on an external drive. This is another situation where the folder changes so many times I’d rather not waste the time having Time Machine back up huge, temporary files.
• ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts — This folder might have a slightly different path depending on whether iTunes has updated your library recently, but I never bother to backup Podcasts since I download so many of them at a time, watch them, then delete a majority of them.
• ~/Documents/Virtual Machines — This is the folder that VMware uses to store Virtual Machines in. If you use Parallels, VirtualBox, or something else you’ll have to find out where they store these massive files. Basically, every time you boot into the virtual machine the files within are changed slightly, but since the Finder (and, ergo, Time Machine) only see this as one large file, it will back up the whole thing again and again. Needless waste of space here.

Dropbox and Alternative Approaches

Some files I choose to keep in my Dropbox folder for easy access: documents, some pictures, application data, and more. Dropbox is as good a backup solution as any if you’re willing to pay a little more for a very fast, very convenient service that offers a native app as well as a web interface.

It’s worth mentioning that you don’t need to back up to an SD card, but it’s a method I chose because they’re inexpensive, reliable, and fast. You could just as easily follow the same steps on an external USB or Firewire hard drive. Hell, you could even use a USB memory stick if you had one of those lying around. Another option would be to save that step until after you’ve moved all of your files and programs onto the machine and then create a bootable backup of your entire system. You can even automate this with the paid version of SuperDuper so if your primary hard drive ever fails, you literally boot into your backup and pick up where your last backup left you off.

Recap

Here’s how I roll, in list format:

1. Clean OS X Installation
2. Update OS X via Software Update
3. Repair Disk Permissions in Disk Utility
4. Create a bootable backup of my primary hard drive using SuperDuper!
5. Install BackBlaze for off-site backups
6. Move all of my files onto the hard drive, install all of my apps
   1. BackBlaze passively continues to back up all of these files
7. Set up Time Machine on my Mac, excluding several folders that are greedy with my gigabytes
8. Revel in the fact that I’m safe should my MacBook’s internal hard drive bite the dust

In Closing

There are clearly a variety of ways to ensure that your data is safe. None of them are perfect and a few of them (I’m thinking my way, for sure) are a hell of a lot of work to maintain, but when your primary source of income can be crippled because of something as small as a corrupted hard drive, it’s a good feeling to know that you’ve taken steps to make sure you won’t be out of commission for too long.

Getting Started

This part couldn’t be simpler: You open the program and are immediately greeted with a status window where you can start or stop media sharing and choose which types of files to share: Movies, Music, and Pictures. Within seconds of clicking start, your computer shows up on your PS3 and you’re ready to stream.

By default, Playback shares pretty much everything you have, but also offers you the ability to pick and choose what to share. For instance, under Movies you can share iTunes Movies, iPhoto Movies, EveTV Recordings, and even add specific folders. The same level of customization is also available for Music and Pictures – you can share as much or as little as you want.

One interesting feature, absent in almost all other programs of this ilk, is Access Control. Playback allows you to specify which devices on your network you’d like to share with and what specifically to share with them. This allows me to share all media types with a Windows PC and just share video and music with the PS3. Pretty nifty.

There are some other little niceties like Growl support, automatic generation of QuickLook thumbnails, and even the ability to limit bandwidth (though I can’t think of a reason why you’d want to do this). Codec support is also quite wide, with Playback offering the ability to share anything that PS3 supports.

Score One For the Nerds!

One bonus that really appeals to the nerd in me is the ability to convert high definition MKV files into an MP4 that PS3 can play. Most people will never even come across an MKV in their lives, but I have a few lying around from my days of ripping HD-DVDs. My test material for this was David Fincher’s “The Game”, which if you haven’t seen is your first mission right after downloading Playback. Anyway, the MKV file I converted was 1280×544 @ 24fps, with a file size in the neighborhood of 4.4GB. The Playback output file was quite literally almost identical in size except it was now an MP4. I tried to play this previously unsupported file on my PS3 and, viola!, it streamed (and looked quite glorious I might add).

Bottom Line

Playback fills in the gaps that Sony left when choosing to support only one protocol to share media across devices. Could I set up a UPnP server on my Mac? Probably, but the hassle and headaches aren’t worth it when a program like Playback makes sharing media this easy and effortless. There are a handful of programs that aid you in sharing media to your PS3, and while some of them are quite good, none hold a candle to Playback.

PS – I guess it’s also worth noting that Playback works equally well for Xbox360, though it’ll take a lot more than that for me to even consider buying one of those!

The Foundation: Text Editors

There are a veritable plethora of text editors for Mac and nearly everyone you ask uses a different one they’re fanatical about. This speaks volumes of the quality and diversity of the software available, but in the end it really comes down to your personal preference.

The best way to describe TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software is to say that it feels like TextEdit on steroids. You can use it as a simple text editor for sorting out content, but it also supports syntax highlighting for over 30 programming languages, one of the most robust find-and-replace actions of any text editor out there, and the ability to open and save files via its built-in FTP browser.

Though no longer under active development, Smultron is another free text editor that feels decidedly more Mac-like in its appearance. It utilizes an always-open sidebar similar to iTunes where you’ll view small (but resizable) thumbnails of all your open documents. Some extra niceties that Smultron has over TextWrangler is the ability to edit in full screen mode, view code in split view, as well as a pretty nifty snippets manager for quick access to frequently-used code.

You can’t talk about Mac text editors without a very vocal show of support for Textmate. It’s easily one of my most used applications and for very good reason: it’s literally packed with features and functionality, some of which can’t be found anywhere else. The web development features that are particularly useful include a built-in code preview (using Webkit), inline W3C validation for all of the HTML-ers, code snippets, and bundles, which can be written freely by anyone and add even more functionality to the editor. Textmate isn’t free, but for all it does, the $55 price tag is a steal.

Moving and Shaking: FTP

The clear winner for free FTP program (and possibly coolest icon) on the Mac goes to Cyberduck. It supports multiple protocols including: FTP, SFTP, WebDAV (MobileMe), Amazon S3, and even Rackspace Cloud Server access. It has excellent OS-wide integration and, perhaps more important, plays well with most text editors. You can right click on a remote file from within Cyberduck and edit it with your favorite text editor, then once you save it Cyberduck automagically uploads the file back to the remote server with no intervention needed on your part.

The guys over at Panic know great design, which is why it should come as no surprise that Transmit is one of the best looking and most functional FTP clients on the Mac. One of its killer features is the ability to create droplets: think of them as mini-Transmits that allow you to upload files without even opening the program. Additionally, it supports nearly every protocol you can think of and sports advanced editing of a variety of files remotely (most notably images). All of this packed into an elegant, intuitive UI makes Transmit the best $29.95 you’ll ever spend.

A relative newcomer to the Mac is Flow, a robust FTP program that was a big part of the last MacHeist and has been gaining more and more momentum. When you launch Flow, you’ll immediately notice it breaks away from the standard FTP interface for something that’s considerably more Finder-esque. Compound that with some advanced features not found in many other Mac FTP programs like multiple connections for simultaneous file uploads, right clicking to copy remote URLs, and bulletproof QuickLook integration and you have yourself one fine file transferrer. $25 and it could be yours.

Save the Environment

As far as I’m concerned, the only testing environment you need to set up on your Mac is MAMP, which stands for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The latest version clocks in at a hair over 200MB. It’s self-contained and can live anywhere on your hard drive, essentially making it the ideal portable development environment. All of your webpages are viewable in the htdocs folder contained within the MAMP directory and can be accessed, by default, simply by visiting http://localhost:8888 while MAMP is running. Get MAMP absolutely free now and start your rapid development.

Test Your Code, Not Your Patience

The bane of any web developers existence is Internet Explorer and while we might not like it, it needs to be accounted for. Boot Camp is a good idea in theory, but would severely break your workflow should you have to reboot every time you made a change. That’s where virtualization comes in: boot up Windows (or any other OS, really) from within OS X for rapid testing and debugging.

Sun’s VirtualBox has come a long way over the years and in many respects can stand toe-to-toe with the paid virtualization clients out there. It fully supports multiple versions of Windows all the way back to 2000, many distros of Linux, and even BSD variants. It’s fast, intuitive, and gets the job done while leaving your wallet intact.

Holy layer of abstraction, Batman!

I won’t get into the Parallels vs VMware Fusion speed debates (though I already have) because with each new version released one becomes faster than the other. Priced identically at $79.99, these programs offer incredible speeds, loads of configuration options for power users, and enhanced graphics capabilities (for when you take a break from coding for a quick frag-fest). You can sometimes get Parallels at a discounted rate if you follow software sales like MacHeist or MacUpdate Promo (actually happening right now, including Parallels!), so some users opt to wait for that and save a bit of green. Beyond minor aesthetic details, each of the programs behaves similarly and in the end should cut your Windows testing time down significantly.

That’s All, Folks

Hopefully with all of the aforementioned tools you’ll be able to quickly and effortlessly jump into Mac web development while keeping your bank account at a respectable level.

What it offers

At it’s most basic level, MobileMe provides a dead-simple way to keep all of your contacts, calendar events, and Apple-provided me.com email account completely linked up.  This means that if you add a contact on your iPhone, it’ll automagically get sent to “the cloud” and be synced down to your computer’s address book application.  You could also add a series of events to iCal or your Outlook calendar, give them a label, and color code them and within minutes they’ll appear on your iPhone calendar exactly as you’ve added them. If you mark an email on your @me.com account as read, and move it to your ”Follow Up” folder while in Mail.app,  that’s exactly how and where you’ll find the email on your iPhone.

I think you get the picture about how tight the integration is.  The best part is at no time do your iPhone and computer have to be connected, this all happens wirelessly and instantaneously.

Stacking it up

Two out of three of those features (Address Book and Calendar syncing) can be acquired for free from a similar service called Google Sync.  You can see my write-up and review of that on my Google Sync Follow Up article.  The difference between the two is as simple as whether you prefer Google products or Apple products.

With Google Sync, you’ll be working within the realm of Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar. Your Gmail account also won’t be Push, which is probably a negligible feature for the casual user.

Using MobileMe, Apple’s Mail, Address Book, and iCal will be your primary desktop programs for viewing and editing contacts, events, etc.  Notice that when using Google Sync your information will be stored online at all times whereas with MobileMe your information is accessible from the web (via me.com), but can also be manipulated with desktop applications quickly and easily.

The extra mile

The aforementioned features alone weren’t enough to persuade me to the MobileMe side of the fence.  It was the additional value adds that Apple tacked on which sweetened the deal and made it a worthwhile purchase.

1. Bookmarks Sync
   This might seem like a small thing, but for someone like me who’s constantly bookmarking articles and interesting things for later consumption and classification, this is a life (and time) saver.  Anything I bookmark on my phone gets synced back to my computer and vice versa, so I’m never away from my bookmarks.
2. Back To My Mac
   This has proven to be indispensable for me since I’m not always home to access my computer.  Basically, you log in to your MobileMe account on your primary Mac and then when you log in to MobileMe on any other Mac (on the same network or 500 miles away), you’ll be able to access all of the files on your home machine AND share the screen.  In the past I’d often find myself forgetting a snippet of code or image file when working on a website remotely and would pretty much have to make do without it, but now with Back To My Mac it’s as easy as mounting my home machine on the desktop as a disk and continuing on easily and painlessly.
3. iDisk
   Apple goes ahead and throws you 20GB of space  and 200GB of monthly bandwidth to divide up however you’d like.  By default it’s split evenly down the middle between file space and mail, although you can adjust it however you’d like from the me.com control panel. I’ll reserve my comments about iDisk for the next section
4. Gallery
   This is a dead simple and damn sexy way to look at your photos and videos.  On a desktop web browser you’re given a few options for how you’d like to browse and when viewing on the iPhone it looks identical to skimming your photo albums.  It’s such a rich experience it almost feels like you’re using a desktop application.  You can view one of my photo galleries right here: Bella Ragazza.
5. iLife Integration
   I use iPhoto for organizing all of my pictures and the integration of MobileMe makes sharing my albums a piece of cake. I just select any number of pictures, an album, or event, click the MobileMe button and it publishes the gallery just like that.  The same is true of iMovie and iWeb, although I don’t routinely use either of those programs so I can’t vouch for them personally.
6. Me.com
   I’m not personally a big user of the Me.com website, but it would be doing a great injustice to the service if I didn’t at least mention it.  Everything I’ve mentioned above is accessible from one central place at Me.com.  You can view your contacts, calendar events, galleries, and iDisk files from the rich web applications Apple has set up.  Everything is interactive and makes you feel like you’re on the desktop and if you’re not an iPhone user this would be the best way to access everything quickly and easily.
7. iPhone 3.0 Features
   Find My iPhone, by all accounts and measures, is an awesome service that lets you find your phone and even if you can’t locate it, you have the option to remote wipe it to clear all of your data if a less-than-honest individual was trying to access it from afar. The iDisk App isn’t available yet, but looks like a great way to access your files on the go, like a lite version of Back To My Mac aimed squarely at iPhone. I’m eagerly awaiting this to tie my digital lifestyle together just a tad more.

It’s not all butterflies and rainbows

There are definitely certain parts of MobileMe that are lacking.  The one major sticking point I have is the speed of the iDisk when transferring files thru the Finder.  It mounts on your desktop just like a regular hard drive and by default mirrors the folder structure of your home directory (Pictures, Movies, Music, Documents, Sites, etc). This makes it easy for newcomers to understand how to move files to their iDisk, but the transfer speeds are attrocious.  For a standard video file of 100MB, I clocked my upload speeds thru the Finder at roughly 8kbps to 19kbps on my 16/2mbps cable connection.  Compare that to when connecting via FTP (any clients with WebDAV support are capable of this) with the same video file transferring at an average of 114kbps and you can understand why I’m a little baffled by this.

While on the subject of iDisk, another tiny problem I have is the lack of options for adding more storage space. By and large, most users won’t ever have to worry about hitting the 20GB ceiling, but for someone like me who stands to benefit from storing uncompressed video files or moving large amounts of music to and from my iDisk for safe keeping, the option to purchase additional space by the 10’s of gigabytes as opposed to a system like Amazon’s S3 where you only pay for what you use seems teensy bit archaic.

My only other gripe is that I’m not crazy about having to use iWeb to create a webpage on my allocated web space.  Beings that I’m a designer/coder by trade, I’m curious to see how fast an Apple server would load my pages to the masses and don’t really want to use a WYSIWYG editor to test that curiosity.

In Summary

If you’re an Apple computer user and have an iPhone, then MobileMe is really a no brainer.  For $99 a year, you get the convenience of, well, everything… everywhere.  Access your contacts, calendars, mail and more from a variety of platforms and programs.  Serve pictures and videos attractively from the MobileMe Gallery. Store and access your files on “the cloud” or just get them directly using Back To My Mac.  Despite the one or two complaints I have, they’re certainly not enough to outweigh all of the convenience and ease of use MobileMe has provided me for the past three months.

Preface

As you all probably know by now, I’m an avid Twitter user.  That said, I also realize that Twitter, by it’s very nature, can be distracting.  I chalk this up to that fact that it’s so easy to update and ingest multiple (and oft-unrelated) small pieces of information so rapidly that you just get lost in it all.  Because of this, when I look for a Twitter client (be it on the Mac or the iPhone) I’m looking for something streamlined that organizes the chaos rather than heightening it. There’s also this little voice in the back of my head that cries foul whenever I see a non-native interface on my screen. I’m looking at you, Adobe AIR.

So all I look for in a Twitter client is a clean, streamlined UI written in the native OS language (whether it’s Mac or Windows).  To some that might be unfair because I’d hazard a guess and say that a majority of people I follow on Twitter use either TweetDeck or DestroyTwitter, both of which use non-native interface widgets.  Regardless, this is my take on the subject and if you want to chime in, that’s what the comments are for.

On Tweetie

So we get to Tweetie, which isn’t a port of the iPhone app by any means, but brings what you could call an “iPhone-esque” experience to the desktop. In a world of Twitter clients that want to inundate you with as much information as possible and take up so much screen real estate, Tweetie plays it pretty close to the chest and breaks things up in the same fashion you’d find in many iPhone Twitter clients.

Very slick and takes up only a fraction of the screen real estate of some of the other Twitter clients.

Along the top you’ll also notice breadcrumb navigation that tells you exactly where you are if you’ve explored inside of a particularly lengthy series of @replies, DMs, searches, etc.  It’s a great way to show how you arrived where you are, but also functional in the sense that it lets you backtrack by clicking earlier in the breadcrumb trail.

The main timeline is concise and clutter-free.  To the right of each of your follower’s tweets is an arrow that allows you to shoot back a quick @reply and clicking on a @username takes you to that person’s stream.  When you receive new tweets, the menu bar glows blue and within the app itself blue markers appear to indicate what’s been received (stream updates, @replies, DMs, etc).  It actually makes zipping through all of the conversations easy, organized, and most importantly: intuitive.

Speaking to the ‘Verse

The weird thing about Tweetie, and I know I’m not alone on this one, is the position of the New Tweet button which is tucked away, very small, in the bottom left hand corner of the program.  Being a keyboard jockey, it really isn’t too much for me to just hit Command + N, but for some people it could take a few moments to realize it’s a clickable button.

Once you find the New Tweet button, you write your tweets in a window separate from the main program, which at first I thought was kind of a silly idea; especially after having used the Mac version of Twitterriffic for so long. Turns out, it’s grown on me and has proven to be a distraction-free way to write tweets that works especially well when you want to add links or images to the mix using drag and drop.

Additional tools built in to the compose window allow you to shorten URLs and add images.

The preferences of the program allow you to select from both a wide variety of URL shortening services as well as image hosting solutions.  For URL shortening I vacillate between bit.ly and tr.im, and both are fully supported which makes me smile.  As for the image hosting, all of the usual suspects are included: YFrog, TwitPic, Twitgoo, or Posterous.  The amount of tools packed into such a small window is actually quite impressive.

Summing It Up

As with any software, your mileage may vary from mine.  If there’s one thing that’s for sure though, it’s that Tweetie accomplishes the goal of taking a massive amount of data and funneling it in such a way that makes general consumption easy, fun, and usable for both beginners and pros alike.

There are some things that I would change about it: ability to remove the dock icon, add a refresh button (maybe opposite the new tweet button),  add the ability to delete tweets, and a few others, but overall for a 1.0 release it’s already shaping up to be one hell of a program.

1. Raises money for a variety of excellent charities
2. Gives otherwise unknown developers a moment in the spotlight
3. Offers users an incredible set of programs for a single, deeply discounted price

The question this raises year after year is: Does partaking in MacHeist make you a cheap bastard?

The MacHeist bundle is an oft-rebuked concept year after year. Its critics say that it’s unfair to the developers who offer up their hard work for a mere fraction of the normal selling price.  Case in point: the value of this years bundle, when fully unlocked, is $950 and sells for “the insanely low price of $39″.  I’m not a software developer and I don’t profess to know the payment structure of a participating MacHeist dev, but if I had a product that I stood behind I would be happy to give it such widespread exposure and help worthy causes in the process. Hell, open source software developers are often hailed as modern-day Robin Hoods for giving away their hard work for free.

Some folks, however, seem to be downright opposed to the idea of anyone scoring such a massive deal on a software bundle.  Take Simone Manganelli, for example, who has waxed intellectual on the subject of MacHeist since it’s inception.  He goes on to end his long diatribe with the following line:

If you’re buying MacHeist, you’re a cheap fucking bastard, and it makes me queasy that so many in the Mac community would buy into such a thing. Source →

His justification for all the cursing is that the participating devs only receive a very small piece of the proverbial pie. He goes on to liken MacHeist to a record label and the devs as its rockstars:

Put it this way: would you rather pay $10 to Universal Music Group for a music album, or $15 directly to the band in question?

The problem with this argument is that people are buying the software via this promotion because of the huge discount. Keeping with the theme of music, it’s akin to buying a ticket for a huge summer music festival with a glut of bands.  To see each band individually, you’d pay well over the price of a single festival ticket, and it could very well end up being a less satisfying experience. The reason bands participate in these festivals is the same reason the developers participate in MacHeist: because they realize it’s not always about the money but the exposure.

I’ve been a Mac user for close to a decade now and until I checked out the MacHeist offer I’d never heard of five out of the twelve programs offered. Guess what? Now that I see them, I’ve found a few that fill a gap in my software collection or consolidate a previously lengthy workflow. If I choose to purchase the MacHeist bundle, I’ll get access to a variety of great programs and support for the current point version. That is to say: If I buy a version 1.0 app, I’ll mostly likely receive updates and support until the developer moves to version 2.0.  If I was satisfied with the capabilities of the program and wanted to continue using it, I would gladly pay the upgrade fee and continue supporting the developer directly.

In the end, I don’t think anyone in their right mind could pass up the chance to get such a variety of excellent software at such a reasonable price. If Best Buy marked a $900 TV down to $39, you can bet your ass people would flock to it like moths to a flame. Further, I highly doubt there’d be any naysayers complaining that it’s not fair to Sony or Samsung that people are getting such a good deal (except, of course, Sony or Samsung).

• Before starting, open Address Book Preferences and uncheck the “Synchronize With Google” box.  If you don’t, just about everyone you’ve ever emailed will start showing up in your address book.  Not good.
• It’s a wise idea to clean up your Gmail contacts before you get started because, again, everyone you’ve ever emailed will show up as a contact on your phone.
• If you want iCal to sync with your Google Calendar and thus with your phone (since your iPhone no longer directly communicates with either Address Book or iCal for syncing), your best course of action would be picking up a copy of BusySync. It’s seamless, works like a charm, and is completely unobtrusive in your menu bar.
• Every now and then after adding a few contacts I’ll export them from Google as VCards and import them into Address Book just to keep things nice and tidy.
• Be mindful that “My Contacts” is the only group that gets synced from your Google contacts list.
• Push Email through your Gmail account isn’t currently supported, but we can hope!

The biggest features of Safari 4 that Apple is championing are as follows: an updated interface, speed enhancements (particularly to the Javascript rendering engine), and Coverflow integration for a visual take on your browsing history and bookmarks.

For general use and day-to-day browsing I use Safari because it’s fast and integrates seamlessly into OS X. On the other hand, the web developer in me loves the extensibility of Firefox using it’s plugin architecture, so for all of my projects Firefox runs the show. Firefox is great for the functionality it extends me but I find it a bit sluggish on my machine (which is no slouch, either).  It locks up when loading pages that are heavy with either Flash or Javascript, which continually leads me back to Safari. When I heard about the further speed improvements that Apple was boasting in this newest beta, I didn’t think it was possible.  After 3 days, I’m a believer.

A Speed Explosion: ‘Nitro’

I always take Apple’s claims with a grain of salt. That’s not to say that they’re lying, but I’ve found they do have a slight tendency to stretch the truth. Here’s an excerpt from their Safari 4 performance page:

Safari executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SunSpider.

In addition to superior JavaScript performance, Safari offers top-flight HTML performance — the best on any platform — loading pages 3 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and almost 3 times faster than Firefox 3.

I don’t run benchmarking tests and really have no desire to. I base my speed judgements on actual usage and by all measures, this browser is fast. My test basically involved browsing to a few of my usual haunts: Digg, Vimeo, Youtube, this site, etc on Safari 3 and then installing the Safari 4 beta and revisiting.  Everything just felt snappier and more responsive.

A Big Talking Point: The Interface

Apple seemed to have borrowed one or two things from the Google school of browser design for this latest version. Two interface elements in particular stand out: Tabs on the top, and “Top Sites”. We’ll cover them in that order.

Apple has turned the title bar of their browser into the tabs area, something which many will undoubtedly have to get used to.  Comparisons have been drawn to Google’s Chrome browser, which is only available on Windows at the time of this writing. Here’s a picture for your review:

Safari on top, Chrome on the bottom in blue

I think Chrome has the slight edge here only for a few reasons: I like the fixed width tabs better than Safari’s auto-width tabs which resize to span the length of the title bar.  Also, in Chrome the URL field doubles as the search bar, which is not just a wonderful bit of minimalism, but also serves to keep the interface nice and clean.

Another addition to the Safari feature list is Top Sites, which displays a list of live thumbnails of the sites you visit most.  Again, this is a feature that Chrome introduced when it first launched, but Apple decided to be a bit more ostentatious and add a bit of perspective to their list.

In all fairness, both “tabs on top” and “Top Sites” had been in the Opera web browser for quite a while.  Though not quite as sophisticated as Top Sites or Chrome’s Most Visited, Opera’s Speed Dial served as a handy way to reach your most visited pages.

The final interface change is 100% Apple: Coverflow for browsing your History and Bookmarks. I’m in the crowd that uses Coverflow to show off OS X to impressionable friends and family members, but not for much else.  The implementation in Safari is just another place for me to ignore it entirely, though I do think it has practical application in the realm of browsing your history, which are sites that generally aren’t bookmarked and can be more easily recalled by layout/design as opposed to name. I’ll give it an honest try, but I’m not sure how useful it will actually be.

In Summation

Safari 4 is definitely a worthy upgrade in terms of speed and a big stride towards a more minimal browsing experience. The repositioned tabs may take some getting used to, only because we’ve been conditioned to expect tabs under the URL box for so long, but I was back in the swing of things by the end of my first full day of browsing.  When you subtract all of the glitzy features that Apple has added, namely Top Sites and Coverflow, what you’re left with is still an incredibly fast and powerful browser. Just what I was looking for.

Let me first say that this program is so feature rich I haven’t even scratched the surface of it’s capabilities.  However, the user interface is so completely alien to the Mac platform that I had to make mention of it somewhere:

The interface is written in Java. Users of the late Azureus will recognize similarities, especially in the tabs.

An interface like this will intimidate people who really just want to engage in the simple task of streaming media. For someone like myself who’s pretty well versed in video encoding and streaming this makes sense, but I think it’s safe to assume that the layperson doesn’t have a clue what “Force framerate parsed from FFMpeg” means. If cleaned up and made more, pardon the term, Mac-like, its appeal would instantly be broadened and people would flock to this incredibly powerful piece of free (as in beer) software.

A great program along the same lines that takes something complex and breaks it down so that anyone can use it is Handbrake.  Through the use of tooltips and plain English, Handbrake gives the user great insight into what are otherwise complex video encoding settings.  Its standard icons-across-the-top interface give you access to the most important actions of the app and through the use of native UI tabs, your options are further broken down into logical settings like Video, Audio, etc.

Handbrake advanced settings window

I don’t profess to know how daunting it is to build and maintain a program, especially one that fuses two things as complicated as networking and video, but I think we can all agree that clean, intuitive interfaces work well for everyone.  That little extra bit of polish is what can really hurtle your program ahead of the rest.