Backup is vital and may be getting a bit easier

At a client job last week, I was discussing their current backup regimen — backing up their data three times each week to an external hard drive. This isn't uncommon in a business environment, but finding a similar setup at home is rare.

Backup is a lot like flossing: You know you're supposed to do it, but few people do it consistently. I can't blame them. Backing up a computer has always been difficult for novice users.

Both Apple and Microsoft have tried to ease the burden with their latest operating systems. All you need to get started is an external USB2 or Firewire hard drive.

Windows Vista includes the Backup and Restore Center, which has the ability to back up documents and photos to either an external drive or writable CD on a schedule the user defines. If the machine is running Windows Vista Ultimate and Business Edition, it also has the ability to do a complete backup of the system, which can get it back up and running quickly if the entire drive were to fail.

Apple's latest OS, Mac OS X Leopard, introduced Time Machine, a completely hands-off backup solution. I like Time Machine more than Vista's Backup and Restore Center because it's much easier to set up. Once you plug an external drive into your Mac, OS X will ask if you want to use that drive for Time Machine. Leopard will then take care of scheduling and backing up data automatically.

Time Machine and Vista's Backup and Restore Center can provide peace of mind against hard drive death and accidental file deletion, but it does little to protect against fire or other disasters.

Until recently, off-site backup was too expensive for the consumer market. As the price of hard drives and bandwidth drops, so has the cost of off-site data storage.

Amazon offers a cheap online storage service, S3, that costs pennies to transfer gigabytes of data. S3 was designed with developers in mind, but a company called JungleDisk offers a backup service for both Mac and Windows using S3.

JungleDisk allows users to schedule backups much as you can using Vista's Backup and Restore Center. It will then transfer files over your high-speed connection to Amazon's S3 servers. Depending on how much data is being transferred, the initial upload can take a few days, but subsequent backups will transfer only files that have changed since the last backup.

I may be more paranoid than most when it comes to losing data, but that's only because I have been the victim of it before. Once you lose something important, you want to ensure that it never happens again. A good backup regimen is the best way to do that.

Justin Williams is a local blogger and the owner of Second Gear, a local Web and software development firm. He can be reached at justin@secondgearllc.com.

Originally published in The Evansville Courier & Press

Small firms release many good products for Mac

Last week's Macworld Expo offered major companies such as Apple and Microsoft a chance to introduce their latest hardware and software offerings. Apple introduced its MacBook Air and Apple TV updates, while Microsoft released Office 2008.

If you've bought a Mac in the past two years and have been using Office 2004, you will definitely want to get the upgrade. The speed improvements are well worth the investment.

Macworld isn't just about the large companies, however. My favorite part of the conference is finding the small companies that are releasing great products for the platform.

If you're an eBay-aholic, iwascoding's $29 GarageSale 4.0 makes setting up and keeping track of auctions a breeze. GarageSale is a full-featured auction creation tool that runs natively on the Mac. It features several premade templates that can give your auction a professional look with minimal effort.

Storyist is the application I was most excited about on the show floor. The $59 application is designed to aid novelists and screenwriters during the writing process. The application has a full-featured word processor, but the real power is in its ability to storyboard. You can generate story sheets for each character that reference major plot points and allow you to define physical traits. When you're writing a 300-page novel, it's a great way to organize your thoughts and plot ideas.

If you have an Airport Express or want an easy way to send audio from one Mac to another, Rogue Amoeba's $25 Airfoil 3 is the best solution I've found.

By default, the Airport Express is capable of sending audio from iTunes to your home stereo. Airfoil expands the device's capability to allow you to send audio from any application or audio source connected to your Mac, such as Quicktime or the audio from your current My favorite feature of the new version is Airport Speakers, which lets you create virtual Airport Express on each of your Macs to send audio to iChat conversation. If you're having a party and want to stream the same playlist of songs from your Mac upstairs to other machines in the house, it's as easy as a few button clicks.

If you have young kids or just want to play like one for a few hours, plasq's Doozla makes drawing and coloring simple and fun. Doozla supports free form drawing on a blank canvas as well as a predefined set of pictures your child can color.

If you have an iSight or other webcam, you can also snap a photo within the application and draw on top of it. At $24.95, it's priced less than its main competitor, KidPix, and is easier and more fun.

If you're looking for software for your Mac, my favorite site is Apple's own downloads page. The Mac's resurgence in the past few years has also meant resurgence in great software available exclusively on the Mac. The reasons to stick with Windows are shrinking by the day.

Justin Williams is a local blogger and the owner of Second Gear, a local Web and software development firm. He can be reached at justin@secondgearllc.com.

Originally published in The Evansville Courier & Press

Ultra-thin laptop was Macworld highlight

I headed west this week for the Macworld Expo, the yearly gathering of Mac faithful that spotlights third-party hardware and software being released on the platform. It also gives Apple CEO Steve Jobs a chance to take the stage to reflect on the previous year, introduce products and share his visions for the year ahead.

On Tuesday, Jobs announced several new products and revisions during a 90-minute presentation, the biggest by far being the introduction of the MacBook Air, an ultra-slim laptop less than an inch thick.

The MacBook Air is a marvel of design. Photos and video do not do it justice. When you actually hold it and feel how light and thin it is, you realize that this is the computer futurists promised us for the 21st century.

However, the futuristic design comes at a premium. The low-end MacBook Air comes with an 80GB hard drive, but Apple offers the option to replace it with 64GB of solid-state flash memory. Flash is the same type of memory found in digital cameras and iPods and is infinitely smaller. The flash-based drive shaves six-tenths of an inch off the height of the device, but packs $1,200 on to the price tag.

The other major announcement from Apple was an update to the struggling Apple TV receiver. Jobs unveiled the device at last year's Macworld, but has referred to the product as a "hobby" for the company. Though specific figures have never been officially released, it's assumed that the device has not sold well.

Apple hopes to change that with its upgraded software, removing the dependence on synchronizing content between the device and a user's Mac or PC. Instead, the new software has built-in integration with Apple's iTunes Store to download movies, television shows and music directly — no computer required.

Rather than marketing the device as a middle man between the television and computer, Apple wants to highlight the device's movie-viewing capabilities. Part of that shift is the introduction of movie rentals through iTunes.

When the new Apple TV software is released in a few weeks, movies from all the major studios will be available. Rentals will cost $3.99 for new releases and $2.99 for library titles.

If you want to watch it in high definition, tack on another dollar. The terms of the rental: 30 days to start watching the film, and 24 hours to finish once you press "Play."

I doubt Apple's new rental model will get me to cancel my Netflix account. If I have a sudden urge to watch a movie, it's priced low enough that I wouldn't think twice before clicking the "Rent" button.

Next week, I'll cover some of the great third-party hardware and software I found on the show floor.

Justin Williams is a local blogger and the owner of Second Gear, a local Web and software development firm. He can be reached at justin@secondgearllc.com.

Originally published in The Evansville Courier & Press

Consoles aren't just playing games

Watching the NFL playoff games over the weekend, I couldn't help but notice the number of advertisements for Sony's PlayStation 3. The advertisement shows a PS3 console expanded out like a Swiss Army knife, with each 30-second spot highlighting a different aspect of the system.

The ad I saw most often highlighted the system's ability to play Blu-ray DVDs in addition to games. This is a departure from the advertisements that air for the Wii or Xbox 360, which focus more on gameplay and titles.

Blu-ray is one of the two competing high-definition DVD formats and was co-developed by Sony.

Warner Bros. Studios and New Line Cinema recently announced they would deliver their films exclusively in Blu-ray format. The announcement leaves HD-DVD with only four of the 15 major studios in its camp.

It's been no secret that the PlayStation 3 had a rough start with Sony's attempt to demand a $600 premium for the system, when competitors were $200 to $300 cheaper.

Couple that with the lack of first-party titles to compete against Microsoft's Halo or Nintendo's Mario and Zelda franchises, and it's easy to see how Sony ended up in this predicament.

While Sony's focus on its new console's multimedia capabilities feels a bit desperate, it brings to light that next-generation consoles are more than video game systems. Currently, both consoles play audio, video and photos you transfer over.

Both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 also play high-definition movies.

Microsoft offers a $130 add-on HD-DVD drive that connects to one of the 360's USB ports.

In late 2006, Microsoft began offering high-definition video through its Xbox online store. The Xbox Live Video Marketplace allows customers to rent high-definition movies via download for $3 to $6 and to purchase episodes of popular TV shows that are stored on the system's hard drive.

At CES last week, Microsoft expanded its video offerings to include content from ABC, Disney and MGM.

The new partnership will allow Xbox users to download HD versions of TV shows such as "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" the day after their aired. It also expands Microsoft's offering of HD movies to include films from the three studios.

Microsoft's next advancement for the 360 is its announced support for IPTV. When available, the service will offer live streaming broadcasts through the Internet and allow users to do things such as play a game on Xbox Live while recording a show in the background.

The days of touting a console solely for its gaming capabilities are behind us.

Microsoft seems to be embracing the media hub principle more than Sony at this point, but if Sony hopes to regain its dominance in the console space, it needs to begin offering similar services.

I picked up a PlayStation 3 over Christmas, and the lack of great exclusive games have relegated it to being little more than a DVD player.

Justin Williams is a local blogger and the owner of Second Gear, a local Web and software development firm. He can be reached at justin@secondgearllc.com.

Originally published in The Evansville Courier & Press

New Flock is very sociable browser

Web browsers, such as Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, are at the center of daily Internet access, delivering news, e-mail and strange videos on YouTube.

Unfortunately, browsers are slow to adopt new features. The last major advance was the introduction of "tabbed browsing" and pop-up blockers.

A new Web browser called Flock hopes to spark more innovation. Flock is based on the same source engine as Firefox but adds native support for a variety of Web applications and services.

The browser integrates especially well with social Web services such as Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. When a user logs into one of the sites, Flock detects it and offers to add content from the site to the browser's sidebar.

From that point, users can see whenever someone updates his Facebook or Twitter status, leaves a comment on a photo or uploads a video.

Flock also has a media bar that displays all the photos and videos from a site side by side.

A photo or video stream can be bookmarked for later access.

Flock has an uploading tool for distributing photos to Facebook, PhotoBucket or Flickr. The uploader lets you specify titles, tags and descriptions for each photo.

My favorite feature by far is Flock's take on bookmarks. While it supports traditional local bookmarking, Flock also offers the option of automatically archiving bookmarks on delicious.com or ma.gnolia.com.

Saving bookmarks to either of these social sites not only allows me to share what I'm reading with friends and colleagues, but it also easily synchronizes my bookmarks between multiple machines.

Because the bookmarks are stored at an online Web service, both Macs and PCs using Flock will be able to read in the bookmarks.

When I'm writing a column or researching something for work, Flock's Web clipboard feature is addictive. When enabled, it creates a sidebar into which links, photos and text can be dragged. These items can then be organized in various folders for future reference.

I've used third-party utilities such as Bare Bones' Yojimbo to do this, but having this functionality in the browser is welcomed.

If you visit Facebook, YouTube or Flickr regularly, Flock is definitely worth trying.

Its integration with Web applications and services is a trend I hope will trickle down to more mainstream browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer.

For now, I use Flock as my primary browser, and I'm enjoying it.

Justin Williams is a local blogger and the owner of Second Gear, a local Web and software development firm. He can be reached at justin@secondgearllc.com.