Mobile Notes

I have been using an iPhone for several years.  From the beginning, I have been disappointed by the inability to sync notes between my computer and my phone.  For a long time, the best workaround involved sending myself emails that I could then access on both platforms.

I had high hopes for Google Notebook, but unfortunately they abandoned development.  And while the desktop functionality was decent, the mobile functionality was somewhat lacking.

About a month ago, I found an article on TUAW about SimpleNote on the iPhone and its ability to sync with JustNotes on the Mac.  I downloaded both programs and gave them a try.  SimpleNote is, as the name implies, a simple notebook app for the iPhone.  It provides basic functionality — plain text notes and the ability to sync online.  The app is fairly well polished and ran without any issues.  JustNotes is a similar app for OS X.  It looks nice, but there were  several bugs, especially when syncing and deleting existing notes.  It’s just beta software, mind you, so the developer will hopefully continue to improve on the product.  I emailed him with a question at one point and he responded quickly with an answer.

Just this past week, I found out about Evernote.  They provide a free iPhone app that allows you to make text, voice, and picture notes that sync with their online service.  There is a web client as well as client software for OS X, Windows, Android, and Blackberry.  One of the things I particularly like about it is the “Clip to Evernote” bookmarklet.  If you have ever used Google Reader, this works just like the “Note in Reader” bookmarklet.  You can highlight some text on a webpage, click on the bookmarklet, and it creates a new note with the highlighted text and a link back to the page.  I won’t try to list off all of the features they provide, you can find out about them for yourself if you’re interested.

I have been using Evernote for the past week and really like it.  It looks like I have found a solution to my mobile notes sync problem.

Xcode Documentation Browser Popup

I just learned a useful little trick.  In Xcode, hold down the Option key and the mouse pointer will turn into a crosshair.  When it does, double-click on a symbol to find that symbol in the documentation browser.  The screen shot below shows it in action for the UIApplicationDelegate protocol.

Xcode Documentation Browser Screen Shot

From there, you can click the book icon to open the documentation or the .h icon to find the declaration of the symbol.

Useful Firefox Add-Ons and Mouse Gestures

I was surprised to read today on Engadget that Internet Explorer still has about a 63% market share.  Fortunately, Firefox and Chrome are making gains in market share, with Chrome passing Safari for third place.

I have been using Mozilla Firefox for several years now.  It suits my needs pretty well.  I particularly like the variety of add-ons that are available (more on that in a bit).  Once Chrome supports add-ons/extensions under OS X, I’ll give that a try again.

I use several add-ons on a regular basis.  I have some that are developer-centric that I’ll do a separate post on some other time.  The good, general-purpose ones are:

Adblock Plus
Simply put, ads suck.  This is the web equivalent of recording a program on your DVR and skipping through the commercials.

Secure Login
This gives you one-click login to websites.  It also can help prevent cross-site scripting attacks.

Tab Mix Plus (The developer’s site seems to be down at the moment, but you can get it from mozilla.org.)
Being a bit of a control freak, this lets me tweak the tabbed-browsing preferences until they are just right.  I’m not sure how much this is really needed anymore, but old habits are hard to break.

1-Click Weather (honorable mention: Forecast Fox)
I have this configured to show the current weather and tomorrow’s forecast in the status bar of my browser window.  I used to use Forecast Fox, but I found that The Weather Channel’s 1-Click Weather looked and behaved better under OS X.

Under Windows XP/Vista, I became a fan of mouse gestures.  If you haven’t tried them, I highly recommend them.  I have used several over the years; I think the last one I used was Optimoz Mouse Gestures.

As it turns out, Firefox on OS X supports some MacBook trackpad gestures natively (i.e., without an add-on).  Doing a (three-finger) swipe left goes back and doing a swipe right goes forward.  Pinching in and out zooms in and out.  You can configure what the gestures do by editing your about:config settings.  (Be careful, and note what the original settings were in case you change your mind.)

Here are my settings:

Name	Value	Description
browser.gesture.swipe.down	cmd_close	Close the current tab when swiping down.
browser.gesture.swipe.up	History:UndoCloseTab	I sometimes lose track of what I’m doing and accidentally trigger the “close tab” gesture. This lets me undo it.
browser.gesture.twist.left	Browser:PrevTab	Quickly switch between tabs.
browser.gesture.twist.right	Browser:NextTab	Ditto.

There are several gestures available. Type “gesture” in the filter box to list them all.  I found a good list of available commands here.

Migrating My Music Library to the Cloud

I have a lot of stuff in my iTunes library. Between music and movies, it’s over 80 GB. In my previous laptop, I had a second internal hard drive that was dedicated to just my library. I want to be able to access my music and sync my iPod from my new MacBook, but I don’t want to give up that much hard disk space. I have used external hard drives for this in the past but I was never pleased with that as a long-term solution.

Over the past few years, I’ve been using several cloud services for email, scheduling, software configuration management, bug tracking, and wikis. So, I decided to see if there were any cloud services for data storage.

As it turns out, there are several. I looked at DropBox, Jungle Disk, Mozy, SugarSync, ZumoDrive, and others. After comparing price and features, I decided to give Jungle Disk a try.

Signing up was fairly easy. On the back end, Jungle Disk uses Amazon S3 for the data storage. So, I had to sign up for the S3 service directly from Amazon. This was an attractive feature to me. If I’m going to entrust a large amount of data to someone, I want them to be reliable. Amazon has been around for long enough and is stable enough that I can trust them. Nothing against the other services, but new companies fail all the time for various reasons.

There were some other selling points that made me choose Jungle Disk. I’m able to mount my online storage as a network drive. I’m also able to pay on a per-gigabyte basis, rather than a ratcheted plan (e.g., 50GB or 100GB).

As a trial project, I decided to import into iTunes a CD box set that I got for Christmas. I started iTunes while holding down the Option key to create a new library which I stored on my newly-mounted Jungle Disk. I then went through and imported each of the CDs in the box set.

The Jungle Disk software is smart enough to cache your data to improve performance. As a result, the ripping process wasn’t much different from the way it works on a local drive. However, editing the metadata was pretty slow. Fixing song titles and adding album art took longer than it would have on a local drive. Watching the network activity shown in the Jungle Disk software, I could see iTunes downloading and then re-uploading each of the song files that were being edited.

When I listen to the music in iTunes, there’s no noticeable lag or other effects from streaming the data over the Internet. I haven’t tried to sync with my iPod yet–that will undoubtedly be slower than it would be on a local drive. I’ll post again with my findings.

The benefits of this approach are that I can access my music from anywhere (with network access), maintain a single iTunes library, and have it automatically backed up. Time will tell whether these benefits outweigh the slower performance and additional cost.

Introduction

I’ve been wanting to start a blog for a long time now. I had some time this morning and decided to finally make it happen.

So, why am I starting a blog?

I recently started doing some software consulting work. One of my consulting jobs involves developing some software on a Mac. I’ve been using PCs for as long as I can remember, and had never considered using a Mac. After using the Mac at work for about a week, I liked it so much that I decided to go out and buy one for myself.

As I find my way around the new platform, I wanted to have a place where I could keep track of what I learned. I also wanted to have a place to capture my thoughts on software and technology in general.

Special thanks to my brother Andy for the picture in the header.

Stay tuned. I’ll have more stuff coming soon.