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!

On Microsoft Windows, the application is the window, and you can use either alt-tab, win-tab, or the task bar to switch between windows. On the Mac, there are three main ways to manage windows, here’s a rundown of each, and how to use them to play up the strengths of OS X.

The Dock

The first way most new users to the Mac try to manage windows is the Dock. Clicking on a running applications icon in the Dock will bring that application’s windows to the front, which works great for apps that are only using a single window.

If, however, you have multiple windows open at once, like several TextEdit windows for example, clicking on the TextEdit icon will bring all of the windows to the front, which may not be exactly what you want.

The trick to using the Dock to manage windows is by clicking and holding on an icon. This will trigger Exposé in “Application Windows” mode, hiding all other applications and thumbnailing all of the open windows for that application. Then you can just click on the window you want to come to the front.

Exposé

Now that you’ve seen one part of Exposé in action, it’s time to see how the rest of it works. Open up System Preferences and click on “Exposé and Spaces”. You can think of this part of the preferences as the command center for managing windows.

At the top is “Active Screen Corners”, followed by keyboard shortcuts. Make note of the function key set for “All windows;” on mine it’s F3 to match my Apple Bluetooth keyboard. Open up a few different applications (it helps if one is a movie), and press F3. In one smooth animation, all of the open windows will shrink into thumbnails, with open windows at the top, and minimized windows at the bottom. From here you can click on any window you like to bring it to the front. If there are still too many windows open, you can press the tab key to cycle between the windows of running applications.

Having a function key is great, but too often I find that I need to look down at my keyboard to find the right key. That’s where the Active Screen Corners come in. Each corner of the screen can activate a function of window management. I always assign the bottom left corner of my screen to activating Exposé for All Windows, and the bottom right to Desktop. Then I put my Dashboard in the top right corner, and leave the top left blank. This gives me super quick access to all of my windows, widgets, and files I’m working with on my desktop.

You can also drag files into Exposé. For example, here’s a common workflow I run into all the time. To get a file from my desktop into a window open in the background, I’ll flick my mouse pointer to the bottom right corner to show the desktop. Then, I’ll drag the file to the bottom right hand corner to activate Exposé. Finally, while still dragging the file, I’ll select the window I want to bring it to the front, and then drop the file onto the window. Super easy, and super useful, once you get used to it.

Spaces

If, however, you still find yourself drowning in windows, or you just like to keep things clean and organized, you can enable Spaces. Spaces gives you extra desktops to work with. The default number of spaces is four, but you can assign up to sixteen. Personally, I’m normally happy with just two. I’m a developer, so I work in Xcode all the time. Some development tools, like Interface Builder, open up several windows, and can clutter up the screen quickly. So it’s nice to keep Xcode and Interface Builder in separate spaces. I always assign the CMD+Arrow Keys to switch between the spaces, and F8 to activate the spaces overview.

Once in the spaces overview, you can activate Exposé to see all of your windows, in all of your spaces.

Exposé, Spaces, and the Dock are the three main elements for window management. You can also use CMD-tab to switch between applications, or optionally, check out a third-party application like Witch that can give your keyboard even more control. If you’re new to the Mac, I hope this article helped, if you are experienced and think I missed something, feel free to mention it in the comments.

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Apple spends a lot of time on industrial design and usability, so it amazes me that the process to hook up a Mac to an external keyboard, monitor, and mouse consists of five to seven steps, depending on if you’re using a Bluetooth keyboard or not. As I look at the mess of wires coming out of the side of my MacBook, I’ve got to wonder why there isn’t an official Apple-branded docking station.

Docking stations seem like an idea that should have come out of Cupertino, because they reduce clutter and encourage simplicity. All the cables that would normally plug into the side or back of the computer go into the docking station instead, and there’s a single slot that the computer plugs into. Plug it in, and the notebook is now a desktop.

Apple has a patent for an interesting iMac-like dock for a MacBook, which would be amazing if the price was right. However, actually producing docks has been left to third-party manufacturers. Some have avoided the docking station idea by designing holders for the MacBook, and some have designed docking stations that look absolutely ridiculous.

The best bet for a real docking station so far seems to be Henge Docks, which mount the MacBook vertically.  They look gorgeous, but are only available in a 13-inch size as of this writing, with 15- and 17-inch versions in the pipeline. I’ve signed up to pre-order the 15-inch.

I’ve tried just about every combination of desk layout I can think of. I’ve tried MacBook in front, monitor on the side, no keyboard; MacBook on the left, monitor on the right, keyboard and mouse in front (and vice-versa); MacBook in clamshell mode on the side of my desk where the Dell’s docking station used to be, monitor, keyboard, and mouse in front (what I presently use), and a few other setups that just didn’t seem right.

From Apple’s point of view, the solution is to drop a grand on one of their gorgeous LED Cinema Displays. The display doubles as a docking station, providing power, monitor, and USB ports for the MacBook. It’s beautiful, and certainly reduces the cable clutter, but at a cost that’s hard to justify for consumer-grade use.

Browsing through Shawn Blanc’s “Sweet Mac Setups” I find that most of the setups featured go for the “MacBook on one side, monitor on the other, keyboard and mouse in front” rig. For some, this seems to work, for many others the cabling and accessories start to clutter the desktop. This is the point where I become distracted and want to start moving things around.

One of my favorite “setups” remains none at all. I simply open my MacBook wherever I want to work and start doing what needs to be done. But I’m still left wanting a more complete solution. How do you use your MacBook? If you’ve got a setup that works for you, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

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When an app is launched on an iPad, it becomes the iPad, it encompasses the entire device. In the best case, the iPad then fades into the background, and the experience becomes focused entirely on the application. When an app fades into the background as well, the iPad becomes all about content.

River of News gives me a pop-up menu to choose a folder from Google Reader, and that’s all I see of the app. The rest of the experience is all about scrolling through and reading the latest feeds. No overbearing animation, no surprising interfaces: it’s just me and the morning news. River of News’ focus on text reminds me a lot of Instapaper, another favorite iPad app, which also foregrounds content, leaving navigation and menu items couched in pop-ups.

An alternative application design philosophy looks at what the iPad can do and uses its capabilities to push the functionality of applications further. My previous favorite RSS client, Reeder, fell into this category. Reeder re-imagines how to use multi-touch to navigate through stacks of unread feeds. Pinch out to open a stack of feeds, pinch in to close it. More recently, Twitter released their official iPad application, and like Reeder, it pushes the boundaries of what we expect an iPad app to be.

Twitter for iPad uses panels that can slide on top of each other to show links, replies, and information about the user. The panels can be successive, meaning that you can follow links endlessly, and wind up with a long history of panels behind what you can see on-screen. The interface is obviously very well thought out, and well planned. It’s a very different design philosophy from iPad applications like River of News because it focuses on functionality, not simplicity. When I started using the app, I really didn’t like it. However, after committing to using it for a week or so, and discovering how to navigate it, I find it growing on me quite a bit.

With Twitter for iPad, the gestures are swiping left and right, and tapping. When using River of News, the gestures are more limited. You swipe up to scroll, and articles are automatically loaded at the bottom and marked as read at the top. You can swipe left and right to load other folders, but personally I’ve never found a need for it.

You can also tap to select a folder of feeds if you wish, but I normally just wait a second or two for it to automatically load my unread feeds. The level of activity is different with River of News and Instapaper than it is with Reeder and Twitter for iPad. Not necessarily better or worse, though.

When I began researching this article, I wanted to show why taking the simplistic approach was better, and how trying to make an iPad app too functional would cause confusion. The truth, though, is that the app design philosophy that’s best will depend on usage preferences and the type of app you’re making. It also means there’s room for more than one app on each iPad designed to accomplish the same thing.

How do you feel about application functionality versus simplicity on the iPad? Should all applications fade into the background, or should they give you the choice to be what you want them to be? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

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The announcement of Premiere puts Adobe in direct competition with Apple’s iMovie application that ships with every new Mac. This obviously begs the question, why would you choose Premiere over iMovie? Having just downloaded and installed Premiere, I don’t have the answer yet.

What I can say is that iMovie and Premiere seem very much alike in function and appearance. Both applications tout ease of editing, basic special effects, and simple sharing with online services as their primary draws.

Installing and launching Premiere is a bit odd, unless you are used to the Adobe way of doing Mac apps. The download is 1.84GB, which expands to 3.3GB after installation. After launching, Premiere shows a blank screen with a row of buttons at the top. Clicking on the house button launches a separate application called the Adobe Premiere Welcome Screen.

Adobe Premiere Elements 9

Even based just on this slightly confusing experience, I think Premiere will face stiff competition from the incredibly user-friendly iMovie and iLife suite.

As mentioned, Photoshop Elements 9 is also available for download, and includes some great features from Photoshop CS5. This quote from Adobe’s press release mentions one feature alone that could be worth the $99 price tag:

Adapted from Photoshop CS5’s celebrated Content Aware Fill feature, the content intelligence in the Spot Healing Brush analyzes what’s in the image and quickly de-clutters or repairs photos (like removing tourists from a crowded scene) with a swipe of a brush, magically filling in the background.

Photoshop Elements 9 and Premiere Elements 9 are available from Adobe for $99 each, or as a bundle for $149.99.

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iOS 4.1 includes bug fixes for proximity awareness, Bluetooth, and performance on the iPhone 3G. The iPhone will now be able to take High Dynamic Range photos, upload HD video over Wi-Fi, and rent television shows on the go. Also making its debut is the Game Center, which is all about social gaming on iOS devices.

Using High Dynamic Range (HDR), the iPhone takes three photos: one at normal exposure, one under exposed, and one over exposed. iOS 4 then combines the three photos using “advanced algorithms” to create a single high-definition photograph. Both the normal exposure picture and the HDR picture are kept in the photos app on the iPhone, making it easy to choose one or the other. The demos look amazing; the HDR photos bring out features in the background that you couldn’t see in the normal exposure.

The Game Center will be a very interesting addition to iOS. There will be both features built into the operating system, and a standalone app. You’ll be able to play interactively with friends, or be auto-matched with other players. You’ll be able to compare scores, and see what your friends have been up to. Game Center brings natively to iOS what several developers have been doing on their own.

iOS 4.2

Also announced to be coming out this November is iOS 4.2. iOS 4.2 will bring all of the features of iOS 4.1, finally, to the iPad, and presumably unify the platform. The biggest addition to the iPad looks like it will be wireless printing. Being able to print directly from Pages or Mail will be a huge benefit to people who still need to be able to show things on paper.

Multitasking looks slick on the iPad as well, smooth animation, and super fast switching between apps. When Steve Jobs demoed opening a link in Mail and switching to Safari, the transition happened so fast it made me wonder about the apps that have built-in browsers. Will apps still need built-in browsers if switching to Safari is that fast?

Overall both updates look solid, and while I’m happy to be getting 4.1 on my iPod touch, I’m really looking forward to 4.2 on the iPad.

iTunes is particularly poor at window management, choosing to display the mini player when the button is clicked. Safari and Finder seem to resize themselves without rhyme or reason. We’ve covered other aspects of window management here a few times, but my favorite way to manage my window size is now a little app named Divvy.

Divvy uses the OS X support for assistive devices to automate resizing windows. By default, Divvy is activated by clicking a status bar icon. Once clicked, you can select the size that you’d like your frontmost window to be. When you release the mouse, the window will be resized, and the Divvy window will disappear.

However, if you have multiple windows open, there’s an option to allow Divvy to stay open until dismissed. This helps by letting you choose each window, then select its desired size instead of having to recall the app for each window.

Like all great apps, Divvy’s usefulness is enhanced by keyboard shortcuts. You can define a system-wide shortcut to call the app, and then create shortcuts for common window positions. I’ve created shortcuts to make windows go full screen, center, and take up half-left or half-right positions.

I enjoy Divvy as it is, but I can think of a couple great enhancements. For one, it would be nice to be able to call a shortcut from outside the application, instead of having to call Divvy first. I’m not sure exactly how that would work internally, maybe through some Apple Script or Automator magic. The other addition I would love to see is something similar to Windows 7 and Cinch’s ability to resize windows by dragging them to “hot edges”.

What’s your favorite way to manage window size? Any tricks or apps that help? Sound off in the comments!

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If you are a MobileMe subscriber, you might be aware that you can use iWeb to create a simple web page that’s good for sharing pictures and stories with friends and family. What you might not know is that the same servers that host your iWeb site can host HTML generated by any app, including Sandvox, RapidWeaver, or a powerful blog generating tool named Jekyll.

Jekyll is a command-line Ruby app that takes a directory of HTML and Markdown files and directories and then generates a blog. The main problem with blogging with MobileMe is the lack of PHP and MySQL, which is required for most common blogging platforms like WordPress. Jekyll gets around this by generating the entire site in static HTML each time it runs, so there’s no reliance on an interpreted language.

Getting started blogging with Jekyll and MobileMe takes a bit of tweaking, but the end result is a simple and powerful blogging platform for people who want complete control over their site.

Step One

Install Jekyll. Since Jekyll is a Ruby gem, installing it is as easy as typing the following command in your Terminal window:

sudo gem install jekyll

Step Two

Next, choose a directory to keep your local blog files. I chose to put my directly in Sites, since I don’t use that directory for anything else.

Step Three

Set up a basic “skeleton” of files. Follow the directions detailed over at OStatic to build the skeleton site.

Step Four

At this point, you should be able to type

cd ~/Sites; jekyll --server

into the terminal, browse to http://localhost:4000 using Safari, and see your “hello world” site.

Step Five

This is where the Mac magic kicks in, and why the blend of Unix and Mac makes for the best computing platform. Open Automator and create a new Workflow. Choose “Ask for Text” for the first action, and “Run Shell Script” for the second. In the “Question” field of “Ask for Text” put Title, and check the box that says “Require an answer.” In the “Run Shell Script” action, change the “Pass input” drop down box to “as arguments” and paste in the shell script below:

NAME=`echo $1 | sed s/ /-/g`
USERNAME=`whoami`
POSTNAME=`date "+%Y-%m-%d"-$NAME`
POST_FQN=/Users/$USERNAME/Sites/_posts/$POSTNAME.markdown
touch $POST_FQN
echo "---" >> $POST_FQN
echo "layout: post" >> $POST_FQN
echo "title: $1" >> $POST_FQN
echo "---" >> $POST_FQN
/usr/bin/mate $POST_FQN

In this case, the script will launch TextMate as my text editor, but you can substitute any text editor available from the command line here. Your workflow should look like this:

Go to File > Save As Plug-in and choose “Script Menu” under the drop down menu labeled “Plug-in for.” Name your new workflow something meaningful, like “New Blog Post,” and save it. You should now have a script menu icon in the menu bar, with your new workflow available.

Step Six

Create another Automator workflow, this time only running a shell script, and paste this script:

USERNAME=`whoami`
cd /Users/$USERNAME/Sites
/usr/bin/jekyll > /dev/null
/usr/bin/jekyll --server  > /dev/null 2>
open "http://localhost:4000"

This will run Jekyll and open your site for previewing in Safari. Save this as another plug-in, exactly as before, and name it something like “Preview Site.” Unfortunately, this script will also let Jekyll run in the background indefinitely, so you might want to create a third workflow with these two lines of shell script in it:

PID=`ps -eaf | grep "jekyll --server" | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $2 }'`
kill $PID

That will shut down Jekyll.

Step Seven

The last step is syncing the exported site with MobileMe. Apple makes this very easy by mounting the iDisk under a “Volumes” directory, so you can create a fourth action containing a single script:

USERNAME=`whoami`
cd /Users/$USERNAME/Sites/_site/
rsync -avz . /Volumes/$USERNAME/Web/Sites > /dev/null

Make sure you adjust the paths to match where you decided to put the site. I chose the Sites directory, but you might want it somewhere else. To be safe, you might want to run this in the terminal the first time, just to make sure that you have all of the settings correct.

Last Step

That’s it! If you already have your personal domain pointed at MobileMe, then you are golden. If not, you can browse to http://web.me.com/username, replacing “username” with your MobileMe account.

Setting up Jekyll and MobileMe as your blogging platform does take a bit of work, but once it’s setup with the Automator scripts, its super easy to maintain. Jekyll takes care of all of the details, leaving you room to do what you really wanted to do in the first place…write.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Operating System Upgrade

The first thing I did was upgrade the operating system to Leopard. It’s too bad Apple decided to drop PowerPC support with Snow Leopard, but I can understand why it did. The move to Intel chips has been a phenomenal success for Apple, and I don’t think anyone can argue that it was the wrong thing to do. Thankfully, Leopard is pretty close to Snow Leopard. It’s close enough that I’m only missing a couple of features, and it has the same look and feel as a modern Mac. A lot of my favorite apps have dropped support for Tiger, but not too many have dropped support for 10.5 just yet.

Cleaning House

[inline-ad align="right"]The next thing I did was clean house. Opening up the hard drive in Finder was an interesting look into how normal people use a Mac. There were aliases to nothing, a few shared folders, old disk images, and, of all things, Netscape Navigator (hello, what are you doing here?) in the root of the hard drive. People drop files everywhere. There was also an outdated version of Norton AV running…that got the axe pretty quickly. The scattered files reminded me of how neat and clean iOS is when compared with OS X. OS X didn’t seem to mind where the files were as much as I did though.

App Installation

With the filesystem cleaned up and the operating system upgraded, I set about finding my “must have” apps. I created an “Applications” folder in my home folder, and downloaded TextMate, Twitteriffic, OmniGraffle, CyberDuck, Yojimbo, CoRD, and NetNewsWire. I don’t run apps like Yojimbo or Twitteriffic in the same fashion on the G4 as I would on a MacBook. In the interest of saving RAM, I’ve found it best to close any background apps. When I need them, I launch the app, then quit it again when I’m done. The same goes for Mail and Safari, apps I’d normally leave running constantly on a newer machine.

Slow, Middle-Aged Champ

The PowerMac still runs like a champ, but a slower, more middle-aged champ. He’s not the thoroughbred he used to be; it takes a bit longer for some apps to start, and from time to time the dreaded pinwheel pops up for a few seconds, but nothing earth shattering. Unfortunately, there’s still a couple of Windows apps that I need to run, so I keep my Dell laptop on the side to run the latest version of Lotus Notes and VMware VSphere Client. It’s not the perfect setup, and I’ll be upgrading to a MacBook Pro to replace both of them soon, but it’s been fun finding out just how useful the older G4 can be. There’s very little I’m unable to do with it, and I think if I had more RAM, the system would be much, much faster.

The same setup I’ve got now can be had on eBay for less than $200, maybe even with a monitor to go with it. With a good Time Machine backup for peace of mind, and a little patience, a PowerMac G4 can still be a great day-to-day computer.