Gadgets, software can make plane trip go smoothly

I'm preparing for my annual trip out to San Francisco next week for Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference. Being a geek, I carry a lot of gadgets and gear with me when I travel. I'm sure my bag is a real treat for TSA agents.

Though I don't fly but a few times a year, I have become somewhat seasoned at dealing with security checkpoints, cramped coach seating and the screaming infant in seat 13B. I've also found a few gadgets and software that can make the trip go by smoothly.

Before I leave, I try to plot out what I want to accomplish on the trip in Microsoft Word or some other text editor.

I've replaced my pile of Word documents with Tiny Planet Software's Knapsack. Knapsack is a Mac application that organizes your trips. You can plan activities, create packing checklists and even see a map of your previous trips. Once the information is in Knapsack, I can print out an itinerary that has everything.

If I am going on a trip for business, I most likely need remote access to some of my most important documents. I used to carry the files around on a thumbdrive, but have recently started using Dropbox, an online storage service that automatically synchronizes a folder with your Mac or Windows PC. Whenever I update a file in my Dropbox folder, it is automatically pushed up to its servers and then updated at my home computer.

Once I'm on the plane (and without Internet access), there are a few things I need to make the trip more enjoyable.

I like to watch movies on my iPhone, so being able to reduce background noise is important. Noise-canceling head phones, such as the Bose QuietComfort series, reduce the ambient noise, including the hum of the plane's engine.

I've also found Joby's Gorillapod Go-Go works great as an impromptu iPhone stand. Just affix the iPhone and then wrap the Gorillapod's tentacles around the seat in front of you. No more neck strain from looking down for several hours.

One gadget that I've yet to add to my travel arsenal is an eBook reader such as Amazon's Kindle. I had my credit card in hand earlier this week to purchase one, but slid it back in the wallet because neither of the books I was interested in reading was available in Kindle format.

The allure of being able to replace a hefty hardcover book with something as tall and thin as a pencil is hard to resist.

Sadly, unless Amazon can offer a Kindle version of any book I want to read, it's hard to justify the $350 price tag.

Until then, I'll keep lugging around dead tree editions of my favorite books in between all those electronic wires.

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.

User-created apps shine on Mac OS X

It's no secret that I prefer using a Mac as my primary computing platform. I first switched to the Mac from a Windows PC in 2001 with the release of Mac OS X.

One of the smartest things Apple did with Mac OS X was to offer software development tools for free to anyone with a Mac. Apple therefore made it easy for anyone to create useful and innovative Mac applications. Until recently, Microsoft charged several hundred dollars to acquire a similar set of tools.

Here are some of my favorite applications:

SpamSieve: OS X's email client comes with spam filtering, but I have found C-Command's SpamSieve to be much more reliable.

SpamSieve learns what you consider spam as you mark messages. Since I started using SpamSieve a few years ago, I have gone from dealing with dozens of spam messages a day to two or three at most. SpamSieve also works with third-party e-mail clients such as Microsoft's Entourage and Mozilla's Thunderbird.

Things: I usually have several personal and professional projects going on at one time. Cultured Code's Things keeps track of these projects. Things allows me to create a project and then associate a variety of tasks that need to be completed in order to accomplish the project's goal. When I was plotting this column, I created a project in Things with tasks for researching, writing, editing and submitting the column.

Acorn: I used to be a fan of Photoshop for resizing images and other rudimentary alterations, but it always seemed too heavy for such a small amount of image editing. Flying Meat's Acorn image editor is 1/13 the price of Photoshop and accomplishes most of its basic editing options.

Delicious Library: I own a lot of books, DVDs and video games and have always wanted to keep them organized and searchable on my Mac. Until a few years ago, it seemed a chore. When Delicious Monster released Delicious Library, cataloging went from being a tedious process to enjoyable. The main part of the interface shows the covers of DVDs, books and games on a wooden shelf that can then be organized and filtered.

My favorite feature of Delicious Library is the ability to scan new titles in by holding the bar code up to my Mac's Webcam.

If you are looking to find other new Mac software, the best place is Apple's downloads section at www.apple.com/downloads.

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

1Password is good tool to manage accounts

Ask anyone who knows the basics of computer security, and they'll recommend having a unique password for each Web site — it creates an extra layer of protection should a given account be compromised.

Unfortunately, most people have accounts on dozens of sites, and remembering a unique password for each of them isn't easy. I've been using an application on my Mac called 1Password (www.1password.com) to help manage the more than 200 accounts and passwords I have scattered around the Web.

1Password allows me to keep track of multiple logins for the sites I visit. For instance, I have multiple Paypal accounts, and I can store each account's password in the application for later reference.

1Password is both a stand-alone Mac application and a browser plug-in. Its usefulness shines when you see how it integrates in your Web browser. The application adds a toolbar button to Safari, Firefox and all other major Mac browsers that will detect login forms on a Web page.

When I go to the Paypal site, I can click the 1Password icon in Safari's toolbar and select which account I want to login with. 1Password will then pull the respective login and password from its database and automatically log me in. It is such a timesaver.

Beyond just passwords, I'm also able to store my identities (business and personal) and credit card information in 1Password for easy retrieval when I want to purchase items online. I'm more trusting of an application on my Mac to store my credit card information locally than I am keeping it stored at various online stores around the Web. It's also easier for me to update my credit card information if I lose my card or it expires, because I have a single place to edit it.

There are similar solutions for Windows users. RoboForm (www.roboform.com) offers an excellent alternative to 1Password for the Windows platform. It seamlessly integrates with both XP and Vista machines and is browser neutral. RoboForm integrates with Firefox, Internet Explorer and several other browsers available for Windows.

RoboForm is great for mobile users because it saves passwords and identities to Windows Mobile- and Palm-based PDAs. 1Password can also synchronize with Palm-based PDAs, as well as Apple's iPhone.

RoboForm offers both a free and pro version. The pro version has the added benefit of letting a user store more than two identities in the application, among other features. Most home machine users will be fine with the free version.

Both RoboForm Pro and 1Password retail for $29.95 and offer a free 30-day trial. Just as we've become accustomed to relying on our cell phone's address book rather than remembering individual numbers, after using a password and identity management application for a few weeks, I find it's hard to imagine using a computer without it.

Send e-mail to Justin Williams at justin@secondgearllc.com.

Originally published in The Evansville Courier & Press

Mac upgrade has put real polish on the OS X experience

Apple, the small computer company in Cupertino, Calif., released five versions of its flagship operating system, Mac OS X, in the time it took Microsoft to transition from Windows XP to Vista.

Apple has now released the sixth version of OS X, Leopard — its answer to January's Vista release.

Leopard initially was scheduled for release in spring 2007, but it was delayed because of other products in production at Apple — particularly, the iPhone.

The iPhone and AppleTV both run the same Mac OS X core as the Mac desktop or laptop. Uniting three products from a single foundation is no simple feat.

The first thing you'll notice when you purchase Leopard ($129) is that there is a single version for all users, home or business.

Unlike previous revisions of OS X, Leopard doesn't have a must-have feature, such as Dashboard, Expose or Safari. Instead, Apple has spent the 21/2 years since OS X Tiger polishing the Mac experience.

That's not to say Leopard is without new features.

Time Machine, the new backup solution, is widely touted as the major feature of this release.

Usually, backing up computer files is seen as a chore or an out-of-sight task, but Time Machine has been designed to be something you want to use. It requires an external Firewire or USB2 drive, and automatically backs up your hard drive throughout the day.

When you need to restore a file, clicking the Time Machine icon gives the desktop a space motif with a day-by-day history of the hard drive so you can navigate back in time and restore files as appropriate.

My favorite feature of the new release is Quick Look, which eliminates the need to open applications such as Word or Excel to look at the contents of files.

Each Finder window has a Quick Look icon that opens a semitranslucent window containing an instant preview of the file.

After 30 seconds of using Quick Look, you wonder how you ever lived without it.

Quick Look supports all major document and image formats out of the box, and developers have the ability to add support to their applications in the future, which will make the feature infinitely more useful.

Much to the chagrin of 14-year-olds everywhere, blocking MySpace has never been easier. Apple's new parental controls offer easy-to-use functionality for limiting how and when a child uses the family Mac.

Parental controls sets up usage limits by time of day (separated by school nights and weekends) or a total number of hours a day.

Sites can be restricted, as well as e-mail and chat.

And let's not forget Boot Camp, which allows Intel-based Macs to run Windows. Though available as a beta in Tiger, this is the final version.

For most cases, I use VMWare Fusion to run Windows on my Mac, but if you're a gamer or use more resource-intensive applications, Boot Camp runs Windows as fast as it would on a regular PC.

Additional, smaller changes, such as the addition of notes and to-do functions in Mail, a system-wide grammar checker and the new Finder make Leopard an excellent upgrade.

If you have a G5 or Intel-based Mac built in the past four years, Leopard should run just fine.

After using both Leopard and Vista, the dichotomy between Apple and Microsoft is blatantly apparent.

Microsoft hasn't done anything interesting with Windows since XP and has offered nothing to entice XP users to upgrade.

The number of Vista users is growing only as fast as new PCs are shipped with the new OS.

Apple, on the other hand, has a new operating system that is not only better than previous revisions, but it offers more than enough features to warrant the upgrade fee.

It's a good time to be a Mac user.

Justin Williams is the owner of Second Gear. You can purchase his new book, "Getting StartED with Mac OS X Leopard" at your local bookstore or Amazon.com.

Originally published in The Evansville Courier & Press