Techies moan endlessly about the iPad’s lack of a physical keyboard and how “no one can do real work on that.” I have to wonder what they mean when they say “real work?” Are they suggesting, for example, all computer users regularly commit themselves to Jessica Fletcher-esque writing marathons? Do the vast majority of us really write 10,000 word screeds every week? Of course not. Most everyday computing consists of a few minutes of light email and web surfing. If a 10,000 word essay is the goal, the iPad might not be the ideal platform (though I suspect we’ll see plenty of people doing very lengthy prose with the optional keyboard). However – not being ideal out-of-the-box for essay writing doesn’t invalidate the utility of the iPad. There are a great many other complaints about the iPad, and they all end this same way.

To those techies fond of finding fault with the iPad, I say this; the iPad is not for you. Instead, the iPad is designed for everyone else in the world, the colossal majority of non-techy folk who simply don’t care about cameras, physical keyboards or “closed” operating systems.

Imagine this scenario;

Meet Carol, a busy wife and mother. She just saw her eldest two kids off to bed and the baby is (finally!) asleep in her arms. This is a rare moment of blissful peace and quiet. Carol settles on the couch, baby in arms, and watches those episodes of Modern Family that have been sitting on the Tivo for three weeks. She giggles as Manny and Gloria bully Jay, and then suddenly remembers she must e-mail Mom about the kids’ soccer game this weekend.

A geek would put the baby aside, deploy the dedicated laptop table and boot-up their 17” unibody MacBook Pro. Carol is no geek. She has precisely zero passion for, or interest in, computers. And she definitely doesn’t have the free arm for laptop-deployment strategies.

Here, the iPad shines. Carol checks the baby is comfortable (yep, still sleeping!) and then with a single button-press the iPad is ready to go. She composes a new e-mail to Mom, pausing for a moment to chuckle at the TV (Cameron is flaming). While it’s on her mind, she adds a note to the family’s shared calendar.

The commercials are on, and while she’d normally skip through them, she takes advantage of those three minutes to follow the link cousin Linda sent a few days ago. It’s a photo gallery of her summer vacation. The iPad’s form factor makes it the ideal tool for this, it’s like she’s holding each photo in her hand. There’s even a short video, too, which reminds Carol she really should use her own camera more often…

The commercials are finished. Carol is done with her ‘computer’. At this point a geek would continue surfing (probably checking RSS feeds or leaving withering comments at the end of another infuriating diatribe from Liam “Doesn’t know what he’s talking about” Cassidy) …but not Carol. She switches it off, tosses it onto the nearest chair and forgets about it.

Carol, by the way, is exactly like all the other non-techy people in the world who could benefit enormously from the ease and simplicity baked into the iPad. The “computer as an appliance” solution is, for non-geeks everywhere, a welcome respite from the inherent complexities of more conventional computers.

Careless and Lazy

Tech-heads argue, “We do all those things with our laptops and smartphones already, so the iPad has no utility and is stupid, dumb and pointless and bah! to Apple and their overpriced toys!” Well, maybe so, but a smartphone is often too small and fiddly (particularly for those of us who are getting a bit long in the tooth), while a laptop is almost always overkill for common light tasks. (I haven’t forgotten the netbook; it remains, in my opinion, an exercise in compromise and frustration for anyone but the most patient geek or undemanding road-warrior.)

This backlash often accompanies new appliances. Consider the humble Microwave Oven; when it first appeared it was expensive and, for a great many people, seemingly-pointless; “But, we already have a real oven. Can a microwave oven brown? Can it roast? Can it grill? Can it warm plates and roast a turkey and heat my coffee at the same time? It can’t do even half the things my real oven does. It’s overpriced and unnecessary and I don’t need one. And no one else will, either.”

If you ask me, that’s a pretty careless – even lazy – conclusion. Yet, it’s precisely the same argument I’ve seen repeated in comments and articles all over the web.

Of course, the microwave oven isn’t criticized today because its utility has been proven. Indoor plumbing, gas central heating, automobiles and even the personal computer all were criticized for being unnecessary and, as the tired old phrase goes, ‘a solution in search of a problem’. Nor has the microwave oven replaced conventional ovens. In fact, most of us have both appliances in the same room of the house. Having one does not automatically relegate the other into obsolescence. They each have their place, and they each offer their own utility and value in a modern home.

And so it will be with the iPad. Only, you won’t be able to pop corn in it.

Related GigaOM Pro Research:

• Web Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits Right Notes
• 5 Tips for Developers Targeting the iPad
• How AT&T Will Deal with iPad Data Traffic

Earlier this month, Dare to be Creative announced MainMenu 2.0, an update to its system maintenance utility for OS X. This lightweight application allows you to clean up your Mac, improve system performance and free up hard disk space — all directly from the system menu.

The new release offers a range of improved functionality, an informative system menu icon, and integration with the Growl notification service. This review will offer an overview of MainMenu’s key features, and explain how the software can assist with running a fast, healthy Mac.

The Interface

The Main Menu

MainMenu resides in the OS X menu bar as a small icon, offering a compact drop-down menu when clicked. This details the various categories of maintenance functions that can be performed, relating to the system, network, user, disk, and applications. It is also possible to run pre-defined batches of tasks together.

The final item in the menu provides access to MainMenu’s preferences, covering options such as whether the application should launch automatically, the appearance of the menu bar icon (several options are available), and whether the application should display a visible log as maintenance runs.

Improve System Performance

A number of options within the menu can help cut back on clutter and speed up your machine. These include the ability to re-build your Spotlight index for faster searching, and repair disk permissions to improve disk access speeds.

None of these are guaranteed to provide a dramatic increase in system performance, but can certainly have a noticeable impact when combined with clearing temporary files and caches (see below).

Re-claiming Disk Space

A variety of operations aim to delete unnecessary temporary files eating up hard drive space. These include the ability to remove Logs, Temporary Files, .DS_Store Files, and various system caches.

Clearing Browser Cache

Usefully, the menu also offers a central point for cleaning up your browser cache — across any (or all) of the web browsers you may have installed on your system.

Regular Maintenance Scripts

OS X has a variety of scripts (cron jobs) built-in for performing system maintenance, set to run automatically at a particular interval. Main Menu offers an easy way to execute these maintenance operations manually.

Time Savers

A degree of the functionality offered centers around quicker access to operations that would otherwise require running commands in the Terminal (or deep within System Preferences). A few of my favorite time-savers are:

• Showing or hiding invisible files in the Finder
• Relaunching various services such as the Dock, Finder, Airport, or Menu Bar
• Disabling Dashboard (a great way to speed up older machines)

You’re also able to Force Quit or Force Restart any application currently running. This is particularly useful if, for some reason, you are unable to Force Quit an app through the Dock.

Batch Mode & Growl Support

Another useful feature allows you to create a batch of several commonly performed tasks. A batch can be executed with one click, not requiring you to select each maintenance operation individually.

Batching Tasks

The limitation apparent here is that only one “batch” can be created. It isn’t possible to create several different sets of actions, each with a different name — a feature that could be particularly useful.

The latest release of MainMenu adds one final feature: Growl integration. This is a useful way to notify you when a maintenance task completes, and can help to streamline all your system notifications through one central system.

Conclusion

After experimenting with MainMenu for a few days, I can see it being an application I continue to use regularly. Although it seems a little unnecessary to run maintenance operations every few days, I certainly appreciate the in-built shortcuts for restarting services and adjusting Finder display preferences.

Whether you’re a seasoned Mac user who understands the need to flush your DNS cache, or a beginner looking for a simple utility for keeping your machine clean and tidy, MainMenu is certainly worth looking into.

MainMenu costs $20, and a trial is available as a free download from the MainMenu website. It runs initially in a 15-day trial mode with all features active — more than long enough to experiment with the utility and determine whether you use it enough to purchase a license.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Green IT Wrap-up: Q1 2009
• Report: An Open Source Smart Grid Primer
• Report: IT Opportunities in Electric Vehicle Management

Despite being an avid OS X user, there are deficiencies in this great OS of ours and many of the ones I focus on center — unsurprisingly — around security.

In the plethora of accurate claims of superiority in Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads, one counter-example is the ability within Windows to encrypt individual folders. While Microsoft’s EFS is no panacea of security and usability, it does work and there has been no practical parallel yet within OS X. Until now.

A Twitter post early Thursday morning from the legendary Matt Gemmell quietly announced Espionage from Tao Effect software (Greg Slepak & John Ashenden). This $14.95 utility (for OS X 10.5+) uses some interesting tricks to bring folder-level encryption and/or privacy to your workstation. Read on to see what’s going on under the covers and to find out if Espionage is the right solution for you.

Encryption Choices on OS X

Without bringing in additional tools, such as TrueCrypt into the mix, Apple offers two ways to secure your information. The first is with FileVault (which has some security and usability issues of it’s own) where you can choose to encrypt your entire home folder — but only your home folder — to keep prying eyes away.

The second is to use Disk Utility to create an encrypted disk image and then mount that whenever you need to store or retrieve data. This is a cumbersome, but effective, process and is ultimately what FileVault is doing under the covers to work it’s magic.

If only there was a way to associate these secure disk images with folders and have the mounting be handled automatically…

A Peek Behind the Curtain

Normally, the inner- and inter-workings of an application are either too-intricate (e.g. Photoshop) or too mundane (e.g. TextEdit) to cover during an app-review. However, when it comes to security, very few details are insignificant and one of the prime uses of Espionage is to secure your data and control the access to it.

Espionage has two basic features, enabling general encrypted folders (using the same “trick” as FileVault) and providing a way to “lock” folders and require a password to access them.

It performs the latter through a kernel extension named “iSpy” that is installed upon first run of the application and can be seen by dropping into the Terminal and issuing the following command:

$ kextfind -case-insensitive -bundle-id -substring 'com.taoeffect.' -print
/System/Library/Extensions/iSpy.kext

“Protected” folders show the typical “restricted access” icon when locked:

And prompt you for an access password (which you create when “securing” the folder):

Because it operates at such a low-level, this “protection” exists even when using command-line utilities to access files in the folder. That is, even attempting an “ls” from the Terminal will bring up the access prompt (provided you have not already unlocked the folder). This “protection” only works on the system the folder was “protected” on and requires the kernel extension to be running. If you disable/unload the extension or just boot in target disk mode, you will be able to access the data. The Tao Effect developers make no claims of security with this method of protection and even go out of their way to warn you.

But, What About Encrypted Folders?!

Ah, yes. The main reason you will want to use Espionage is to take advantage of the encrypted folders. As I have indicated, they use the same slight-of-hand that FileVault uses and create a hidden, encrypted sparse disk image that then is mounted and linked with the folder you specify. For existing folders, it creates this disk image, copies the files and folders from your target selection into the new disk image and sets up the linkage behind the scenes after deleting your old files. I should warn you that it did not do a secure delete of the “expenses” directory and I was able to find it and the contents therein in the “Trash”. This could easily be recovered and is a pretty serious oversight in an attempt to make your digital life more secure.

As part of the magic, you will see that there is a new folder in your “Volumes” directory (this is where all mounted disks get placed by default) where Espionage keeps mount points for all these sparse images.

And, you can also see just where Espionage stores these sparse disk images via the Terminal or through Disk Utility.

Since it is just a disk image “hack”, Espionage also provides a way to specify the default size and filesystem type:

So, What’s The Verdict?

Espionage does have some very interesting capabilities and I was impressed that the installer (which puts the kernel extension into place) includes full details as to what it is doing.

The application also includes other niceties such as support for Growl notifications and the ability to always enable or block application access to a particular folder under the watch of iSpy — and, you will need to make use this feature if you plan on utilizing any type of automated backup solution that will include that folder in the source path list.

However, due to the deficiencies with the way it initially creates encrypted folders and also some quirks during the operation – especially when performing multiple operations on the test “expenses” folder — I, personally, will have to continue to use my existing methods of securing data. As you saw from the FileVault screen capture, I do not use FileVault, but I do use secure disk images locally, on USB sticks, fileshares and when I am backing up sensitive data to my offsite provider. I also use TrueCrypt when I need to ensure my disks are fully protected.

I strongly suggest, however, that you do watch for future updates to Espionage as the developers will no doubt work the kinks out of this initial release and provide a very solid solution to fill the gap left by Apple. Since I am not aware of any features of Snow Leopard that will obsolete the functionality of Espionage, it should continue to fill this gap through the next release of Apple’s desktop operating system.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

The program works by either monitoring ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) traffic or issuing ARP queries. Where DNS maps names to IP addresses (e.g. test.example.com has IP 192.168.1.10), ARP maps IP addresses to the vendor-assigned MAC address of the actual device (so, in the below example, 192.168.1.47 maps to 00:1B:63:D9:CE:09).

Why is ArpSpyX useful? Well, with it you can:

• Actively or passively collect all the MAC & IP addresses of the devices on your network (with the ability to export this data)
• Quickly identify new clients on any network you’re connected to
• See if you are falling prey to ARP Poisoning attacks

The only real downside is that it requires modifying Unix permissions of your network devices, something Allen Porter (the author of ArpSpyX) has identified as a potential improvement.

While you’re tinkering with ArpSpyX, you can learn more about ARP via this helpful About.com page, download the source to ArpSpyX via it’s Google Code home or explore vendor MAC address prefix assignments via this helpful search utility.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks