It starts with one device. Maybe it’s an iPod; maybe it’s a first Mac; but from that first product, you discover Apple’s unique take on technology. Apple treats each device it manufactures with care, sweating the little details like font choices and icon design, and thinking about how it all fits together. Each device Apple creates plays a part in the overall ecosystem, and the links between them are clear.

I recently stepped outside the cozy Apple ecosystem and purchased an Android phone, the HTC Desire. It was on sale at a steep discount, and I thought I would be able to integrate it into my work/life flow. I was wrong, and the phone is being returned.

The phone was powerful, and had some very interesting features, but it was so entirely different from the rest of my Mac setup that nothing felt right. I could go into detail about application crashes, frustrating hardware, the sordid Android Market (I wouldn’t let my kids browse through it), and other annoyances, but suffice to say that it simply didn’t measure up to the expectations I’ve developed from using Apple devices.

Apple is the only computer company that creates all of its own hardware and software; they control the entire package. Personal computers are a mishmash of parts and pieces from different sources. Hardware from one company, software from another. By contrast, many modern smartphone and computer makers get hardware from one place, and an operating system from another. BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion is a notable exception to this rule, but a recent interview with their co-CEO Mike Lazaridis seems to suggest the company’s leadership at least has little sense of what smartphone consumers really want.

HP, which recently purchased Palm, is another exception to the rule. The stage is set for the computing giant to build its own tightly integrated smartphone environment, if they have any interest in doing so. HP now sells the Palm Pre, but unfortunately, the Pre, once seen to be a strong iPhone competitor, seems to be lagging behind. Not a single one of these companies can design and test integration between phones, tablets, computers, and online services as well as Apple can, because none controls each of these aspects the way Apple does.

Does Apple’s degree of control occasionally border on the excessive? Yes. But consumers end up benefitting from that control more often than they are harmed. It’s only because Apple controls the entire product line that you can rent Inception in iTunes on your Mac, and know that it will play on your iPad, your iPhone, and your Apple TV. It works reliably, consistently and predictably.

When you live in the Apple ecosystem, you make a deal with Apple: I’ll pay you, and in exchange, you make sure everything plays nicely together. Google doesn’t seem to be interested in providing that kind of tightly integrated experience, at least not yet.  What Apple does best is remember that technology only exists to serve its users, and goes far beyond a list of features and hardware specs. And that’s why Apple will continue to drive the future of computing, regardless of whether Google and others end up winning the numbers game.

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Delicious Library. Delicious Library (DL2), is a cataloging app that can read bar codes through the iSight camera. Hold up a book to the camera, and in a few seconds, DL2 will read the bar code and download information about that book from Amazon. DL2 doesn’t just let you keep track of books though, it can scan and locate nearly anything in the Amazon database. DL2 lets you create a home inventory of books, movies, music, and gadgets: the perfect app for the obsessive-compulsive organizer in all of us.

NetNewsWire. The first feed reader of its kind, NetNewsWire inspired an entire generation of desktop RSS aggregator applications. Since its introduction in 2003, NetNewsWire has been acquired by NewsGator, and ported to the iPhone and iPad. NetNewsWire is easy to customize, quick to navigate, and gives me a single place to check for all the new blog posts and news stories I’m interested in. It’s the first app I open in the morning, and one of the last I close at night.

1Password: Tops on the list of indispensable applications, 1Password manages all of my passwords for my online accounts. Before 1Password, I’ll admit it; I was using the same three or four passwords for everything, over and over, for years. I knew it was bad practice, but I figured identity theft and stolen credit cards were things that happened to other people, until I had my credit card stolen. Now, I’ve taken appropriate precautions, and one of those precautions is that every online account gets a unique, complex password, and I can can keep track of them all thanks to this app.

Dropbox. If you use more than one computing device, say an iPhone and a Mac, or a Mac and a PC, or any combination thereof, Dropbox is perfect. It synchronizes files between systems over the cloud. Just drop a file or folder into the Dropbox folder and it becomes available to all. Quite a few third-party applications already tap into Dropbox for syncing data between iOS and the Mac, and if you use one computer for work and another for home, Dropbox is perfect.

Yojimbo. Over time, you’ll find things that are interesting, or neat, or something you want to keep, and you’ll wonder where to put it. If you don’t already have a place for it, Yojimbo is that place. Yojimbo is a “digital junk-drawer:” a place to shove everything that you’d like to have quick access to. One of my favorite things to do with Yojimbo is to keep articles I know I’ll want to re-read several times. Yojimbo will take just about anything you can throw at it: word documents, PDF files, images, bookmarks, and it even has special formatting recognition for software serial numbers.

iWork. If you are coming over from the PC world, you might think you need to drop some serious cash for the Mac version of Office. Before you do that, you might want to take a look at Apple’s iWork. iWork is actually three applications: Pages, the word processor; Numbers, the spreadsheet app; and Keynote, the presentation app. Pages isn’t as feature rich as Word, but Numbers can hold its own against Excel, and everyone I’ve talked to about Keynote says it blows PowerPoint out of the water. iWork is available as a 30-day trial, so give it a spin.

A new Mac comes with just about everything you need for day-to-day casual use. However, well designed, well thought-out, well-engineered and developed apps like the ones mentioned above are just plain fun to use, even for work. An in the end, isn’t that what owning a Mac is all about?

I know there are a ton of other apps that would be great for new Mac users to try, if you’ve got some suggestions, drop them in the comments!

The last major update to the iPhone’s operating system arrived last June, bringing with it many desired features. Highlights from the 3.0 update included the long awaited copy and paste, in addition to features such as spotlight search and voice control. But what can we expect from tomorrow’s 4.0 unveiling?

Custom Message Alert Tones

A small request and one that has bugged me ever since I bought my iPhone. I simply want the ability to customize my ringtone for when I receive an SMS. If it can be done for calls, why not for texts? But why stop there? When in a room full of iPhone owning friends, it can often prove annoying to hear the email notification noise every few minutes, let users customize that too. Choice is a beautiful thing.

App Navigation

iPhone users tend to have a lot of applications installed, so it comes as no surprise that these app-addicts want a better way to organize their growing collection of mobile software. Thankfully Apple is aware of the problem and introduced a visual way to organize apps in iTunes 9. However, beyond the occasional iTunes reshuffle, the daily on-device swiping to find that specific app is way past tedious.

Many alternatives have been presented as a solution, including stacking, page overviews, category views, and more. A personal preference would be the introduction of folders. A folder could be presented just like any other application icon, which when pressed dug down into a page of specific apps. For example, a folder containing news applications, with another housing all of a user’s games. This would not only make it easier to find a specific app, it would also offer more breathing space to those more commonly used.

Improve The Lock Screen

A locked iPhone currently provides very little information at-a-glance. Adding information such as today’s calendar events, local weather and any missed calls or messages would offer up a much more useful hub for quick scanning. Of course if Apple were to add all this data to the lock screen it could turn off users who prefer the current minimalist version. A simple section in the device’s settings app could make it easy for users to pick and choose what information is displayed.

Wireless Sync

Picture this: You get home and your iPhone instantly connects to your home networks Wi-Fi, within seconds your iPhone realizes that your MacBook Pro is also connected to the same network. Once a connection is made your device begins to sync all your photos, notes, messages and anything else you choose, straight to your laptop, creating a seamless backup, all of which happens in the background, over the air. Sounds great right? Hope it sounds great to Apple, too.

What do you want to see?

The dream-features detailed above are just a representative selection. Plenty of other requests for the future of the iPhone’s OS have been suggested, some great, others not so much. I’d love to hear about your own feature requests in the comments.

Overall, OS X now represents 5.12 percent of the worldwide OS market, up from 4.87 percent in August. While that might seem like a small increase, it’s up 37 percent from a year ago, and the platform is seeing a continuing a steady rise. In contrast, Windows has now fallen below 93 percent, though the release of Windows 7 will likely result in a temporary spike. Nonetheless, OS X is moving up, as is iPhone OS.

Somewhat surprisingly, the increase from August to September was not as great as one might expect for iPhone OS. Despite the recent release of the iPhone 3GS and third-generation iPod touch, iPhone OS is now at 0.35 percent, up from 0.33 percent last month, with the iPod touch remaining at 0.07 percent. Still, 0.4 percent of OS market share represents more than 50 million users, and with the introduction of the iPhone in China, the growth rate will likely increase soon.

As for Safari, version 4 continues to increase its share among Mac users, with three out of four now running the latest version. Considering Safari 4 was officially released in June, that’s an impressive feat. However, Safari still lags far behind Internet Explorer, even losing ground to competitors challenging the dominance of Microsoft’s web browser.

Safari, including the Windows version, now holds 4.24 percent of the overall market, up from 4.07 percent last month, but that increase is small compared with Firefox, which jumped about 1 percent. Even Chrome grew faster than Safari, which showed about the same increase as Opera — ugh. What this means is that there are probably more than a few Firefox users on the Mac, and that Safari for Windows has been an utter failure in taking market share from Internet Explorer.

Nonetheless, September once again demonstrates OS X is running strong on Macs and handhelds, and that’s what really matters.

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NewsGator released todayNetNewsWire 3.2 for OS X. At the end of July, NewsGator announced the ending of its news feed subscription service and released a beta version of NetNewsWire 3.2 with Google Reader synchronization.

The way NewsGator handled the ending of its service and migration to Google Reader left a lot to be desired. After sending out an email advising people to immediately switch to the beta, it received many complaints due to the numerous bugs and the large embedded ad in the bottom left of the window.

The ad was removed for remaining betas — until today, when it was brought back at half the previous size. To remove the ad you must purchase a license for $10. I’m not sure if this is a special introductory price or not, but for me $10 is a great deal and buying a license was a no-brainer.

As well as many bug fixes and speed optimizations, the official release restores the much-loved Clippings functionality that was missing from the initial beta. On the OS X platform there are now a few options brewing for native Google Reader support, providing healthy competition in this area, from which we all benefit.

Also released today was the long-awaited NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhoneOS. In a similar manner to its desktop brother, there are now two versions of NetNewsWire for the handheld devices. The free version (iTunes link) remains available with full functionality but now contains ads. To remove the ads, NetNewsWire Premium (iTunes link) can be purchased. This premium version is available for an introductory price of $1.99 until October, at which point it will go up to $4.99.

As well as the obvious synchronization with Google Reader, version 2 contains Twitter and Instapaper integration. This is a complete rewrite of the application; it contains a new UI and is much faster than version 1.0. It does require iPhone OS 3.0, but I wonder who’s still on 2.2 these days? The ability to forward an article by email without leaving the app is great and I wish all apps would be updated to do that (I’m looking at you, Byline).

The biggest missing feature, which is a deal-breaker for me, is being able to set an article’s status as unread. In the FAQ, they recommend using the ‘star’ function to flag the article instead of a ‘mark as unread’ function, but that doesn’t suit my workflow. While I’m impressed with the improvements, until I can set articles back to unread I need to stick with Byline for my Google Reader syncing. I think Byline is still faster, too. But as I said before, competition is a good thing.

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What can you say when your main competitor, Microsoft Windows, has 93 percent of the market? At least OS X is not Linux, which just topped 1 percent of client usage worldwide. As for OS X, it now measures 4.86 percent, up from 4.7 percent in June. If an increase of 0.16 percent doesn’t seem like much, consider that last year at this time OS X market share measured 3.54 percent. That’s about a 33 percent increase in a year. Next month, it’s possible OS X could see 5 percent worldwide share. OS X is on the way up, though not as fast as iPhone OS.

While iPhone OS measures just over a third of a percent of all operating systems, that represents around 50 million users. It’s also a tenfold increase from when the original iPhone was launched in June 2007, and as the chart shows, that trend is accelerating. With the rollout of the iPhone 3GS worldwide, especially the imminent release in China, it’s quite possible there could be 100 million iPhone OS users by this time next year. Even if that number isn’t realized, in less than two years, the iPhone OS has become the leader among mobile operating systems, at least according to Net Applications.

It should be noted that the above accounts for only 0.88 percent of all OS usage, according to Net Applications. Again, that’s a lot of users, perhaps more than 100 million, and Apple is moving towards a user majority. Speaking of majority, Safari 4 has reached one of its own.

Microsoft can only look longingly at the upgrade rate for Safari compared with Internet Explorer. In less than two months since Safari 4 was officially released at WWDC 09, a majority of users have transitioned to the latest version. Of course, Internet Explorer still commands two-thirds of the browser market, but alternatives, including Safari, continue to make inroads. Safari usage topped 4 percent in July, 4.07 percent to be exact, a new all-time high, and up from 3.79 percent in June. The big boost was likely the result of Apple’s near-record quarter for Mac sales, as new users started surfing with their shiny 13″ MacBook Pros.

July was indeed a good month for Apple, but the good news is arguably tempered by Net Applications’ new policy on weighting the numbers. The company has retroactively adjusted its reports “proportionally based on how much traffic we record from a country vs. how many Internet users that country has.” What this means is that China Internet users, among others, now have a proportionally larger role in determining the numbers. Since the U.S. accounts for slightly less than half of Mac usage, Apple’s numbers have pretty much been halved. Nonetheless, the same trends can still be followed, and those trends point to increased strength for Apple’s platforms, and that matters to OS X and iPhone OS users everywhere.

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As much as we all love our Macs, we still generally live in a Microsoft business world and need to connect and work with Windows boxes. While Microsoft does release its own Remote Desktop application to facilitate Mac users connecting to Windows machine, I’ve never been impressed with the interface for it (on either Mac or Windows). I’ve much preferred using the open-source CoRD project.

Two years since the last release of CoRD, its development team has finally released version 0.5, bringing a whole heap of polish to an already excellent software package. For me, the killer feature that CoRD has over Microsoft’s official client is the ability to have multiple connections going at once, all selectable from a list. The work flow becomes similar to a tabbed interface (although it’s not actually tabs).

A screenshot shows it the best:

CoRD 0.5 with three active sessions

The release notes for 0.5 show a large number of enhancements, bug fixes and optimizations in the multiple areas.

New Remote Desktop Functionality

Support for connecting to Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 has been added. Microsoft’s font smoothing technology, ClearType, can now be turned on, as well as experimental support for disk and printer forwarding. Custom screen resolutions can now be defined in preferences and then applied to connections.

User Interface Improvements

Many nice usability touches have been added, such as being able to set default connection preferences for when creating new servers or doing quick connections. The list of servers now has a search box at the top for quickly locating a server by name without scanning over the list manually. Hotkeys can now be assigned for commonly accessed servers and many other keyboard shortcuts, and small UI tweaks have been added to improve the user experience. You can also configure the application’s auto-updater to fetch the stable, betas or nightly builds to suit your risk level.

Behind the Scenes

Initial support for IPv6 has been put in, along with commandline automation. CoRD is now an Intel Universal (32bit/64bit) binary with full support for OS X 10.5 and 10.6. The general performance of the application has been increased, and many stability bugs have been addressed.

What It Won’t Do

As powerful as CoRD is, there are some things that still need the official Microsoft client. CoRD does not support Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol version 6.0. Windows Server 2008 needs to be configured to not use TLS or network authentication to allow CoRD usage. In addition, CoRD cannot run on OS X 10.4 anymore. While it will currently still run on PPC architecture, the team will no longer be supporting it.

If you haven’t tried CoRD and need to connect to many remote desktop, I’d highly recommend giving it a look.

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While PC users sweat, complain and ponder which over-priced version of Windows 7 they’ll be forced into buying to fix everything wrong with Vista, most Mac users are likely licking their chops at what Snow Leopard will bring, and how little it will cost.

You’ve heard it’s cheaper, faster and even more stable than ever before. Though Apple has stated that, beyond a few high-profile features like a new version of Quicktime, Snow Leopard is more of a maintenance upgrade for Leopard users, rather than the feature-packed blockbuster we’re normally used to with a full version number upgrade. You might call Snow Leopard a comprehensive tune-up.

As is almost always the case with Apple, though, it’s those little tune-ups to Mac OS X that can make all the difference in your daily computing experience. If you happened upon the Snow Leopard Enhancements and Refinements page on Apple’s Web site, you no doubt found at least a handful of things that brings a smile to your face.

Sure, I’m looking forward to a speedier, fully-Cocoa Finder, a fancy new version of Quicktime, and a faster, much smaller OS X installation just as much as the next guy. But of much more interest to me are all of the minor tweaks that will make more of an impact in my daily routine.

Gamma Update

For starters, and one thing near and dear to my heart; Apple has chosen to change the default Gamma from 1.8 to 2.2. For many users the benefit may not be obvious. If you’ve ever noticed photos and graphics on the Web that appear much lighter or washed out than the ones you have on your Mac, it’s because Windows, the Internet, and most television content standardized on Gamma 2.2 long ago. With Snow Leopard, Mac users will enjoy more consistent color across platforms by default.

Finer Finder

iStat calendar menu feature

The Finder’s menu bar clock will soon show the date alongside the time. You can do this now with a finicky hack, but it’ll be handy to turn it on and off with the click of a button. One thing I wish Apple would add here is the ability to display a small calendar with clickable dates that launch iCal without using any third-party utilities, such as iStat. Baby steps, I guess.

Another minor Finder annoyance are the window sidebar headers: Search For, Devices and Places. They can be turned off in Snow Leopard. I always found them to be uselessly taking up space, since I don’t use the search feature, and rarely require Devices and Places. This leaves room for three more folder shortcuts in my sidebar without resizing the window. Adjusting the size of icons via a small slider in every Finder window, saving a trip to the View options window, will be a small, but welcome addition as well.

Apps and Utilities

iChat will see numerous improvements under Snow Leopard such as a lower bandwidth requirement, as will Preview, which will offer improved image scaling and an annotation toolbar. Preview is one of those apps that most users overlook. But if you take the time to investigate, you’ll find it to be quite a powerful and useful little app. For many consumer users, there’s no need to download Acrobat Reader because Preview actually offers more features.

File sharing via Airport Express will be improved for local network users. If you have a Mac acting as a file server over an Airport network, it will continue to share those files, even if the host Mac goes into sleep mode. And now your Airport strength meter will display the signal strength of all available networks before you connect to them. Nice!

Internet Improvements

Safari isn’t the only Internet app Apple has been working on. Mail and iCal have received some much-welcomed improvements, too. Mail’s ability to reorder mailboxes in the sidebar is enough to quench my thirst alone, but I won’t complain about the speedier display of messages, and improved HTML mail composition thrown-in for good measure. iCal will also make it easier to set up your Gmail or Yahoo calendars, and being forced to open a new inspector window for each task will be a thing of the past. While business users will surely love Microsoft Exchange support, most-everyone else could care less; these modest changes will give everyone something to feel warm and fuzzy about.

In Conclusion

While none of these features are game-changing, they’re all extremely useful. In my eyes, they’re much more sexy than Cocoa Finder, OpenCL, Grand Central Dispatch, smaller installation size, and the other big-ticket items. These little features are the ones I’ll interact with on a daily basis, along with faster start-up and shut-down times. I liken it to the cup-holder locations in a new car — it doesn’t mean a lot on its own, but if done poorly can certainly sway your buying decision whether you realize it or not.

For a $29 upgrade price for Leopard users ($169 for non-Leopard users), you’re getting some stunning under-the-hood improvements, and some pretty darn nice refinements that may not be typical Apple front-page news, but are incredibly useful. Finely tuned indeed.

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For May, OS X market share was 9.81 percent, up from 9.73 percent the previous month. While Net Applications counts the iPhone and iPod touch as distinct operating systems, the two combined are 0.75 percent, up from 0.70 percent. Safari’s market share, including the Windows version, is now 8.43 percent, up from 8.21 percent. If these changes seem inconsequential, the trends over time prove significant.

Since the beginning of the Intel Age, Mac market share has more than doubled, and is now approaching 10 percent. While there is concern over the effect of the recession on Apple sales, it’s more likely we are seeing a seasonal flattening. If the past is predictive of the future, by the end of the year the Mac will see double-digit market share for the first time since the early 90s. Unfortunately, Safari may lag behind.

While there are effectively two operating systems, there are now four web browsers competing for market share (sorry, Opera). At 8.43 percent in May, Safari has finally surpassed its previous high of 8.29 percent in January. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Chrome for Mac is imminent, and that it will likely take from Safari market share, as it’s doing with Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer now represents less than two-thirds of web browser market share. Five years ago it was over 90 percent. Unlike operating systems, web browsing is not a zero-sum game, which may be true for the iPhone OS in the future, but not today.

If you don’t think 0.75 percent of operating system market share means much, consider the competition: Android, 0.08; Symbian, 0.07; Windows Mobile, 0.05; RIM, 0.03; and Palm, 0.02 percent. All of them combined equal one-third of the iPhone OS market share. It remains to be seen whether the Palm Pre will live up to its hype, but there can be little doubt the next iteration of the iPhone OS will help Apple pass Linux on the desktop at 0.99 percent.

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Apple today released the next major update to OS X Leopard in the form of Mac OS X 10.5.6 and is now available via Software Update, or the Apple downloads page. It is a 377MB download, recommended for all users running Mac OS X Leopard.

Some of the notable changes and updates included in the release are:

• Contacts, calendars, and bookmarks on a Mac automatically sync within a minute of the change being made on the computer, another device, or the web at me.com. This should go a long way towards making MobileMe more usable.
• Improves reliability of Address Book & Airport.
• Adds a Trackpad System Preference pane for portable Macs.
• Improves Time Machine reliability with Time Capsule, and problems with locating backup volumes
• Includes fixes for possible graphics distortion issues with certain ATI graphics cards, and improvements for several graphics intensive apps (iChat, Cover Flow, Aperture, and iTunes).
• Several improvements to Mail to improve performance, junk filtering and handling of PDF attachments
• Networking enhancements for AT&T 3G cards and TCP connections
• Improved printing for users of Adobe CS3

As ever with updating to the latest software version, Apple recommends that you:

• Back up your computer prior to installing any updates.
• Quit any open applications before starting the installation.
• Do not interrupt the installation process.

They also note that you should take care with any third-party system software modifications installed, or if you have moved Apple applications from their default locations (the /Applications or /Applications/Utilities folders).

For full details and download instructions, see the official release page.

Do let us know how the update process goes!

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