The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

You can now watch a guided tour of many of the 300+ new features in Leopard, Apple’s new version of OS X, version 10.5, here . There are so many new features, and many existing features and applications have been drastically improved upon. This release of Leopard was well worth the extended wait.

“Zimbra Mobile Zimbra Mobile enables two-way, over-the-air synchronization of mail, contacts, and calendar data between mobile devices and the Zimbra server.”

Zimbra Mobile

01.com supports Zimbra mobile, and the Blackberry sync, starting at $4.99/mo for a personal account with Zimbra mobile (Palm and Windows Mobile), providing two-way OTA sync.

1. Blog from 01.com about a comparison of the servers, here
2. Comparison table of Exchange Hosting vs. Zimbra hosting here
3. Business Week blog about the differences, here

Zimbra is a full-featured Microsoft Exchange competitor, that runs on OS X and OS X server, as well as Red Hat and other Linux variants.

Delivering mail, calendar and contact sharing and syncing to desktops and mobile devices from a server, Zimbra integrates with off-line clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, and Apple Mail, iCal and AddressBook. Both Leopard Server’s upcoming iCal Server and Zimbra’s upcoming Zimbra Collaboration Suite version 5 are CalDev compliant, posing intriguing possibilities for even more integration. Zimbra 5 also has full support for Apple’s iPhone, at no extra charge beyond standard licensing costs, with iZimbra.

Nice analysis from an eternal optimist who puts his money where his mouth is.

Fun that this published is on MSN .

David Singer, a friend from high school, has released his new solo album and it rocks.

East of the Fault Line

The first song, Amaranthine, has these lyrics available from iTunes free:

In part, in time, you pick up some habits
from your high school friends.
You sit in the attic planning crimes,
it’s setup this way by design…

Assuming he means bad habits here.

We like Firefox, for all platforms, especially when used in conjunction with Zimbra, the enterprise e-mail, calendaring, contact and document sharing software. And we all know how easy it is to take screenshots on a mac. But have you ever wanted to take a screenshot of an entire webpage, especially one that scrolls beyond the size of your screen? And what about when using Firefox on a PC using WindowsXP or Linux? Well, now you can, with Pearl Crescent, a new Firefox extension. You can get Pearl Crescent here . It comes in both a free basic version, and a Pro version for $15. For independently written software, those are great prices, especially for what it can do. We know around here we are going to be recommending this often to our users.

1. You can’t go to the bathroom without your cell phone.
2. You check your email hoping to catch incoming messages *before* the beep.
3. Every meal out is expensable.
4. You can’t think of more work to do.
5. You feel your phone vibrate even when it’s nowhere near your body.
6. You answer the telephone “hello, how can I help you?” to your mother.
7. A good night’s sleep means dreaming you are productive.
8. When you wake up the first words out of your mouth are “I’ll be right there.”
9. Your boss actually recognizes you.

Joan, thanks for calling in. Here are the links we discussed on the air tonight:

Syncing photos to your iPod from your Windows PC

How to restore an iPod to its factory settings

Updating your iPod’s software

Also, the iPod assistant is worth a shot if none of these help out:

http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/five_rs/

Let us know how it’s going!

Apple has released a firmware update for MacBook Pro users that fixes “battery performance issues…”

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305540 

Use software update to fetch it.  Ran successfully on one system so far.  Requires a restart and that your system be plugged in (to a working power source).

Tech Republic published a quality list of 10 signs you’re not cut out to be a tech consultant. Some of these may inspire self-doubt, some may inspire confidence, most IT consultants will appreciate the list on one level or another. Here’s one excerpt forwarded by an associate back to me:

“All clients want you onsite quickly. Even though many will resist securing your services on retainer, they’ll request you arrive within an hour whenever they encounter the slightest error or interruption. You’ll move several previously scheduled appointments to accommodate them, research and repair the issue (often by having to track down a little-known issue or obscure fix), and then wait months to get paid.”