Erik's Ponderings

Mike Arrington has just posted his 2009 list of products he can't live without. After my own 2008 list, here is my update for 2009 as I think it's fun to observe how our computing environment evolves from year to year. First, the new entries:

• OmniFocus is the best to-do list application I know of. I use the desktop application daily to handle work and personal tasks. It is worth the whole of its $80. As a pure desktop application without an online counterpart it is a step back, but the benefit is flexibility and speed, both crucial to GTD.
  
• Twitter, which I couldn't figure out at all a year ago, has seen 1,778 personal updates so far, and we use it at Orbeon too. I use Twitterrific on iPhone and twhirl on the Mac, but I am not married to either of these clients. Beware: Twitter most likely will kill your personal blog (as if it needed that!).
  
• iPhone 3G: I simply can't imagine switching to anything else before a long time. I use pretty much the whole of it: phone, SMS, web, email, iPod, maps, camera, Yelp, music apps, book readers, dictionaries, you name it. Its biggest flaws are the inability to run more than one application concurrently (e.g. for music apps) and the lack of background notifications (e.g. Twitter and IM clients). I don't care how Apple does it, but these have to be addressed.
  
• Safari has become my second browser of choice after Firefox. WebKit is great (with some quirks), Safari itself not so much. To be really usable, a browser needs: 1) something like the Firefox "awsome bar", 2) an ad blocker and 3) proper tab save/restore. Safari does have some add-ons partly addressing these shortcomings, but Firefox remains the king in this area. So I use Safari for certain specific sites or applications only.
  
• Google Sites handles the new Orbeon Forms wiki. Sites can do better, and it is frustrating that it is incompatible in subtle ways with Google Docs, but it is a start.
  

The strong values:

• Firefox version 3 for Mac is a winner. It is hard to imagine we had to deal with the quirky version 2 for so long.
• GMail: I still use it mostly through OS X's Mail app through IMAP, but I had to disable the "All mail" folder to make it usable. The big change is that I use it through the iPhone mail application as well. I often process (archive) my incoming email on the go, but rarely write more than one-liners on the phone.
• Delicious: I am now at about 4100 entries (was 1900 entries a year ago). Version 2.0, delivered in July, is a success. I add entries mostly through the Firefox extension.
• Skype: VoiP, chat, video, SkypeOut, SkypeIn and soon, I hope, usable screen sharing.
• Google Calendar and Google Maps remain essential.
  
• Google Docs is strong and getting stronger. The new offline support is excellent.
  
• SlimTimer: it is still impossible to live without it at work, although report performance is an issue and development seems to have stalled.
  
• iTunes is frustrating in many ways but unavoidable if you have an iPhone. The new grid view for albums in version 8 is good, and it is still probably the best podcast client around.
  
• iTunes Store: yesterday's announcement of 100% DRM-free music was long due and I may buy again music through iTunes (other than by accident). Movie rentals rock, but the movie selection is appalling.
• Amazon mp3 Store remains appealing because of price, selection, the ubiquitous mp3 format, and the web-based interface.
  
• Picasa is my favorite photo application. I had been using it recently through CrossOver, but I now use the new native version. I wonder if iPhoto 2009 will displace Picasa for me this year? In particular, the flickr integration is very promising, and Google has less incentive than Apple to promote flickr support.
  
• Flickr is still my photo site of choice, but improvements have been slow to come this year.
• Google Reader holds about 270 feeds as of now (was 200 a year ago). The recently introduced new look is refreshing. I find myself using it less heavily as lots of news come from Twitter.

The disappointments:

• Basecamp: we still use it at Orbeon to communicate with our customers. I no longer use it as a personal to-do list as it sucks at that. Basecamp is reliable and cheap, but there are issues with messages, to-do lists, time management, and the writeboards that really don't leave me very satisfied with it at the moment. 37signals is good at rhetoric, but less so at regularly updating their applications (at least Basecamp, which is rumored to represent 60% of 37signals's about $8m revenue for 2009).
• OmniFocus for iPhone is in some ways a better GTD tool than the desktop version. For example it has a built-in notion of next action, and its relative simplicity is attractive. But stability and performance make it about unusable. It often takes 30 seconds or more to start, and much more after a synchronization. I am not the only one with this problem. A GTD app must be snappy and reliable, so this is a big letdown.
  
• Jott: I haven't used it as much as I thought, especially since the iPhone app is unable to send notification emails even with the paying plans. If they fix that I will pay $3/month without even thinking.
• Adobe Acrobat Connect seemed like the best affordable screen sharing application out there, but it can cause browser crashes and handling of screen dimensions is frustrating (try sharing when using a 30" monitor!). Unfortunately, WebEx remains the most stable and powerful solution out there, but it is outrageously priced.
  
• Google Chrome could replace Safari as my second browser of choice if there was a Mac version. I suppose it is coming soon. Or is it, given that it took Google years to release Picasa for Mac?
• Blogger hasn't seen a single visible improvement since last year. Frankly, it is not a very good blogging service anymore.
  
• Feedburner is not that useful anymore given the general decrease in personal and work blogging activity.
  
• YouTube has not really moved beyond its lowest common denominator position. I watch videos mostly through iTunes podcasts, iTunes video rentals, or other sources.
  

Social networks:

• I have been going to the Facebook site more (but not really "using it" more) because many less geeky friends use it. I mostly go to the site when I get an email notification. My guess is that photo sharing and tagging will be the first feature of Facebook I might actually appreciate this year.
  
• I have about 200 connections on LinkedIn (from about 150 a year ago). I still haven't found any actual use for it.
• Dopplr: I entered a few more trips there but it hasn't been really useful so far.

Like last year, I fail to find most social networks either really useful or exciting, Twitter remaining the notable exception.

See you next year!

A few days ago I upgraded my MacBook Pro's hard drive after realizing 320 GB drives sell for USD 110 - which made constantly worrying about disk space ridiculous. This also should extend my old MBP's life a little bit.

Here are the steps needed to replace the drive:

• Buy the new drive ;-) I got mine from Newegg. I picked a 7200 rpm 320 GB drive instead of a 5400 rpm 500 GB drive hoping that performance will be slightly better.
  
• Backup your system. I use Time Machine and Time Capsule so that part was easy. Just make sure you don't do any significant work after the last backup.
  
• Follow the ifixit instructions to open the laptop and replace the drive. Count about 1 hour to go through this, unless like me you have to run to Home Depot to get one of those funny TORX T6 screwdrivers.
  
• Reassemble the laptop.

Now for the software part:

• Boot on the Leopard install DVD.
• In the menu, chose Disk Utility. Use that to partition and format the new drive.
• Make sure the MBP has a way to connect to the network. I connected it by ethernet directly to Time Capsule to shorten the restore time.
• Restart the machine. I had to do this or the Time Machine restore wouldn't see the new drive.
• This time choose Restore System from backup. There you pick a source backup. First, you pick your Time Capsule (if that's what you use), then the backup sparse bundle file, and finally the backup version. For the destination, obviously, choose your newly-installed drive.
• The restore tool then spends a lot of time computing the size of the backup to make sure the data fits in the destination. In my case this took between 30 and 60 minutes.
• Finally, start the restoration process proper. I let this run overnight so I don't know exactly how long this required, but it took less than 12 hours to restore about 140 GB of data.

Et voilà, 174.76 GB of free space! That won't last long...

You may also want to read this excellent post by James Duncan Davidson, with much better photos than the ones I took with my iPhone.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the following caveats:

• Time Machine does not backup the spotlight index, so spotlight will run for a while after your first boot with the new drive.
• The same goes for the Mail.app caches when using IMAP: Mail.app takes quite a while resynchronizing all your email folders.
  
• I had rented a movie from iTunes before upgrading. Guess what: that wasn't backed up either, and I had to pay again for the rental as it doesn't appear you can just download the movie again.
  

Like many, I took the plunge on Friday and bought an iPhone 3G (pictures and videos of the saga here). It was clearly not the most reasonable thing to do to stand in line for hours to get an expensive device associated with an expensive 2-year contract with AT&T (which is not a particularly loved company). But hey, all that was known in advance.

What in the end amazed me was the quality of the shopping experience at the Palo Alto Apple store. I am not talking about the 6 hours spent standing in line: this was partly due to the activation process, already expected to be extremely slow, and which took a turn for the worse due to Apple and AT&T servers being down. But even that was kind of expected and part of the game.

The first thing was the quality and professionalism of the Apple store staff:

• On that busy day, the two Apple stores I called actually had somebody available to pick up the phone and kindly answer my questions about stock and expected wait time.
  
• Employees regularly walked up and down the line, offering water and answering questions.
• At the end of the line, every buyer was greeted and personally managed. The usual wireless device used at Apple stores allowed for just picking a convenient spot in the store to talk and handle the registration process.
• The (tired) employees remained amicable and helpful without being obsequious, providing regular updates, although obviously they couldn't do much about the failing servers.
• When the possibility arose that the iPhones could not be activated before the following day and that instead we would get a voucher for the following morning, the store manager individually talked to all the customers affected and shook hands with them.

In short everything was designed to make you, the customer, feel treated as well as possible given the circumstances.

The second amazing thing is the aura that was put around the iPhone:

• The iPhone was fetched and brought back to you as if it was a unique jewel, in a nice "iPhone 3G" bag containing the quite beautiful iPhone 3G box.
• You were given the opportunity to open the sealed box yourself before proceeding to activation (see the instructions for the retail employees as reported by MacRumors).
• Finally, after all was said and done, the bag was handed back to you like a trophy (and it actually was one in a way given the effort it took to get it).
  

I know, after all, it's really just a phone ("This phone is that important to you?", said a woman passing by the line, "(Sigh) Different generation..."). But with this masterful mise en scène, you really felt that you went through all this for a good reason. Whoever devised this whole process is a marketing genius.