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

The iPhone is very cool, but it’s not as revolutionary as the iPod Touch. It may lack a cell phone, camera, and even Mail.app, and it’s precisely because it lacks these features, among others, that the Touch represents a leap-forward, not only a glimpse of the future, but also the future manifested, tomorrow today. Because you could buy the iPod Touch and give up your cell phone, if not yet your cell service. And if you’re like me, you may even lose weight in the bargain!

Here’s a product I discussed on the air tonight. Having sold our so-yesterday physical phones and moved entirely to soft-phones from Counterpath (more on this in an upcoming post), we have been experimenting with various headsets.

Most of our team has settled on Logitech headsets, link here (no, I don’t own stock in the company). I am using the (Premium) Notebook Headset, and am very pleased with its sound quality. I’ve had no complaints about being able to hear me from callers, not even when I have background noise such as air conditioning, other people talking, pandemonium… well, most background noise is filtered quite nicely.

It’s kind of like faster-user switching, but staying within the same Account!

A prospective customer of ours, new to the Mac, found, downloaded and is enjoying the software, and wrote us:

The website is here:
http://virtuedesktops.info/index.php/downloads/

The actual download is not easy to see.
It is here.

http://virtuedesktops.info/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/VirtueDeskt

This is a beta and a non-apple solution.  The upcoming release from apple (leopard) is supposed to have this function built in.  This beta has worked well for me.  The worse thing that has happened is that it has quit once or twice.  So I keep a copy on my desktop to restart it.

At last I met the new Apple Xserve, at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual conference in Chicago last week, where Apple showed up with a team of knowledgeable specialists, 2×24″ iMacs, and a posse of MacPros running a variety of relevant software. Not only is there art and science in the new Macs, but also Apple is into Science, calling OS X “The Platform for Discovery.” Movies and pics of what was discovered follow. Come, visit the Apple booth at RSNA with me!

Have you ever longed for finding similar tunes based on your favorite artists & songs in your iTunes library? It’s only a click away as Pandora’s free web-based music player allows you to do just that!

Created by the Music Genome Project , Pandora offers continuous musical suggestions based on a vast library of song titles that are rated as a as a match for each station (artist or song title) you input into the player. Pandora also allows you to rate & skip songs, which assists in guiding a playlist fitted to your particular tastes while also allowing you to save stations so you can browse different styles of music without leaving the player. If you hear a song you’d like to own, direct links are available to Apple’s iTunes store, as well as Amazon.

Thanksgiving for the mobile set: why pay for mobile email, contacts and calendaring when you can now get it for free from Google ?

While the current, major limitations on the number of supported devices and carriers , as well as the functionality (it’s POP only, for one example, making synchronization challenging), make it the choice for few this holiday season, it’s certainly promising at least for spurring competition and development in mobile data communications. Note one doesn’t need the new app to view Gmail: browse it from most mobile devices using Google’s improved mobile browser .

Where can you meet a professor who figured out how to use 2 Mac optical mice and a ping-pong ball to record and measure the direction and velocity of insects as they respond, and don’t respond, to sounds?

From Monday morning October 16 through Wednesday evening October 18, I attended Neuroscience 2006 at the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta, GA. I stayed nights with my friend from college, a doctor living in Rome, GA, and his beautiful family, which was great, except for the traffic, blech!, which trapped me in the car for 4 hours each day.

For those people in search of alternative web browsers for Mac OS X, and for Windows, too, we keep recommending Firefox and Opera to Mac users, along with Apple’s Safari , but we haven’t yet talked about how to synchronize your bookmarks, or even just move them over! once you’ve made the switch to a new web browser. Given many people horde, er, I mean collect many, many bookmarks (”favorites”), this is potentially an important issue we’ve neglected to address, as my family was quick to point out.

I bought the Missing Sync (www.missingsync.com ) and I have to tell you, for anyone using Palm products and the Palm desktop HotSync software I must tell you it is a GODSEND. I know a client that is using the Sony Clie and I myself am using the Palm Treo 650. Syncing it via usb cable or wireless thru Bluetooth is incredibly simple. Bluetooth takes a few minutes longer, but is still flawless in data transfer. The interface plays nicely with Palm conduits as well as the .Mac sync suite (iCal, Address Book) and even will sync up your tunes from iTunes. I was amazed at the ease of use with it. I have in the past spent many a long workday futzing with Palm HotSync and the conduit setting for my clients. Palm doesn’t seem to proactive as of yet to change the interface of their software, and until then I will gladly recommend this software title to our clients that struggle with the integrated Palm suite.

After the Adium post, Cody writes I’ve got to try Meebo:

http://www.meebo.com

“… It’s web based, does msn, yahoo, jabber and aim coded in ajax and it runs reallllly smooth”