For the most part I love my iPhone. There are about 5 or 6 nit-picky things that I would like to see, but for a mass market device, it’s almost perfect. On the iPhone 3GS there is an option for Voice Control. The ideal is that you can press a button and “speak” some basic commands to the phone. The commands I think most people use concern making calls. So on the iPhone I can activate Voice Control, say something like “Call Kristen Tabor on Mobile”, and the iPhone will find Kristen Tabor in my address book and call her mobile number. Simple, except when the iPhone doesn’t quite understand me and calls my sister-in-law, Christina Tabor, by mistake. Fortunately, the iPhone does gives me back confirmation that its are calling the wrong number, but leaves me scrambling to terminate the call before I have to explain (again) to my bothers wife why I called her.

Now as I said, no voice recognition system is perfect. But I have used some that are better than the iPhone Voice Control. Not in terms of actually recognizing my voice, but in terms of usability. For a few years Microsoft has had a voice recognition system for their mobile platform called Voice Command, and I used the system when I was a Windows Mobile user. While I can’t really compare the quality of the voice recognition between the systems, I can say that Microsoft’s usability was I feel better than that of Apples. While it took a few more seconds to make a call on Microsoft’s Voice Command, the chances of making a wrong number call were much less.

On Microsoft’s Voice Command, a call was made like this:
1. Press Button to active Voice Command
2. After tone, I would say “Call Kristen Tabor on Mobile”
3. Voice Command would ask “Call Kristen Tabor on Mobile Phone?”
4. I would say “Yes”, and dialing would start.

While the steps 3 and 4 confirmation were simple, they dramatically reduced errors in dialing. Should the phone have miss-interrupted my voice and said “Call Christina Tabor on Mobile Phone?”, I had the option to say “no”, and the phone would prompt me to try again.

Additionally Microsoft’s Voice Command could give me more information than Apple’s Voice Control. Voice Command could tell me my schedule, next appoint, battery and single levels, control the media player, and announce incoming calls. Aside from dialing, Voice Control only has limited iPod operations. Of course Microsoft’s Voice Command was $50 add-on software package where Apple’s Voice Control is free with the iPhone 3GS.

I like the fact Apple is taking some initiative in this area, but having be burned by false dialing and missing the call announce feature, I’m going to hold off using Voice Control until it matures a bit.

The first case involves a Food Service Management System from Aldelo Software. These guys are classic case of “what not to do” when it comes to software. There business model seems more based around forcing you to purchase their yearly maintenance contract. Now this in and of itself is not necessarily a “bad” thing, there are quite a few companies (me included) that encourage their costumers to commit to service contracts. What make Aldelo so bad is the brutal nature in which they enforce their maintenance contract. Basically, if you do not have one of these agreements, then there NO support after 30 days, even on issues which are clearly driver, database, or other wise low level software related. The funny thing is that Aldelo wanted me to purchase a maintenance contract before they would even confirm if a problem was software related.

In most cases when a software vendor pushes this hard for annual maintenance agreements the front-end cost of the software is kept low to encourage a high rate of adoption. But Aldelo’s font end costs are still highly elevated ($900ish per station).

Aside from the maintenance contract foolishness. Aldelo also has some pretty harsh “Software Activation and Registration” hoops you have to jump through. To it’s credit Aldelo does offer a 30 day demo of it’s product, but you have to provide them with quite a bit of personal information (so that can market/harass you later) before you can download the demo. The demo version is a complete running version, except it’s impossible to tell how your receipts and kitchen chits are going to look because they have “DEMO DO NOT MAKE” and “DEMO NOT A REAL RECEIPT” plastered over everything and on EVERY OTHER LINE of the receipt. Also, do not attempt to load a backup of your database into the demo version, because when you do that all bets are off, and the software locks down waning you to activate it. (so much for testing or having a back up system on standby should something crash)

The software activation is pretty straight forward if you have an internet connection. There is an on “over the internet” registration and activation scheme. However this convenient system only works once or twice, after which you are force to call Aldelo and registrar and activate manually. This means that if you have hardware failure (which is common in a food service environment) then your stuck having to call them. The manual system involves A LOT of very long alfa-numeric codes and of course messing up a single digit in that code means you have to go back and do it all over again. Not something you want to do from a touch screen only terminal. In my one case of having to do this without internet (so far) it took over 40 minutes to register and active manually. Not something that can be done during an dinner rush.

This system of registration and activation presumably prevents someone from installing 3 terminals when they only have license for 2. But if you ADD additional terminals to your network, then you MUST go back and re-registrar and re-activate EACH of the terminals to accommodate the new ones.

Needless to say, I have not been impressed with Aldelo. It is hard for me to recommend a product that frustrates it’s legitimate users in a draconian (and ultimately futile) effort to stave off piracy. What makes this completely bizarre is the MASSIVE hole in their “registration and activation scheme”, which makes sealing the product much easier than dealing with the headaches Adelo puts you through when you try and do the right things.

The ONLY number Aldelo asks you for on a new installation is the “serial number” that can with the software. In fact, it is the ONLY number of note and differentiation when you purchase the software. When you are talking with Aldelo you give them this serial number. If this number is unused they will then “bond” that number to you in their registration and activation system. The ludicrous thing is that this number is printed on the OUTSIDE of the retail software box. Twice now, I have had situations were I have purchased copies of Aldelo new-in-box still with the shrink wrap on it, only to discover that someone else had used the “serial number”. I’ve been lucky. I both cases I was working with a software vendor who worked with Aldelo to fix the issue. In one case I know the software vendor had to buy a new license from Aldelo then resell that license to me at a loss so he could honor our purchase agreement.

Now I DO NOT condone software piracy. But is seems a little disingenuous of Aldelo to make the end users suffer in a effort to “fight piracy” (i.e. squeeze every last dollar out of their software market), and yet do something as inane as put the most important number on the outside of the box.

Other than the registration and activation nonsense, and the constant badgering for a maintenance contract, the software does a pretty good job. It uses a Microsoft database back-end, so it is subject to needing constant reworks and compressions, but the Back-Office part of the software allows for that. Back-ups are also a must when using the MS databases because they are not very crash tolerant.

The Menu building in the software does have a learning curve, but once your done a couple of items with multiple modifiers, it becomes easier.

Back-Office reporting is about what you would expect.

At the end of the day, Aldelo is not a “bad” program, and the service staff who use it seem to like it. But the vices of getting it up and running outweigh whatever ventures it has in daily use. All the more annoying because those vices are artificial introduced on top of whatever normal problems occur when you are setting up a new point of sale system.

I’m have cried and moaned over Quickbooks before. My last issue was in converting my Company data file from Quickbooks for Windows to Quickbooks for Mac. Apparently there are people at Intuit who do care somewhat about their companies image, because a few weeks after posting that whine, I received an unsolicited email from a support person inside Quickbooks asking if they could help me. I exchanged several emails with them about my issue, but it all boiled down to them saying “Send us your company file” (not an option) and me saying “Please provide logging and errors codes so people like me can diagnose there own problems.”

See, that was my problem in a nut shell. Quickbooks would not convert, I had NO ideal why and no ideal where to start looking in my 15 MB data file because all the conversation program would tell me is that it “failed”.

Then months later, I received another email from a certified genius named Marc Druijts who suggested that I look for Manufactures Part Numbers in my Items list. Sure enough, I found a single obscure part where someone had put in a MPM. I removed it and the conversion to Mac fired off without a hitch.

I decided to hold off doing a total conversion to QB for Mac until January 1, 2009. It is now almost the end of January and sadly I have yet to make the change.

The issue now is Online Banking and downloading transactions. It would seem a couple of my chosen Finical Institutions are “incompatible” with Quickbooks for Mac. This is shown out by error messages like:

General Error
The message from your bank was:
[ofx.unsupportedClientApplication]Client application or version is not supported by this server.

Now unlike my last error, this one has some nice words that I can put into Google. After reading several dozen pages of posts there seems to be many people having this problem, and a massive finger pointing match going on between Intuit and “X” (Where “X” is the name of any number of Financial Institutions). Intuit claims that the problem is that “X” has not update their side to allow for QB for Mac to Work. “X” seems to always claim that the problem is with Quickbooks. I can see both sides of this argument. But I think in the end I have to blame Intuit, and here’s why…

A Financial Institution’s job is not to write and keep track of consumer accounting packages. I think that if they want to provide electronic access to their customers finical data, they have an obligation to provide such data in reasonable and standard way. There is such a reasonable and standard way already in use around the world called Open Financial Exchange. Which Intuit help start in 1997, and seems to have sense walked away from.

As long as the Financial Institution provides their data in a reasonable and standard way, and does not change that reasonable and standard way, then I feel that it is the responsibility of the software maker to get that data into their application. Now, I’m sure that Intuit will argue about the finer points of the “reasonable and standard way”, and cite any number of reasons why Financial Institution “X” is not being complainant. All of Inuit’s finger pointing and well articulated resonating falls flat on its ass in the face of this single statement: “It works on the PC”.

When you deal with online transitions of any type, be them financial or simply browsing the web, your computer makes a request of a server and receives a response in a highly scripted dialog called a “Protocol”. This protocol is supposed to be agnostic, meaning that two machines, of any type, can exchange data. For some reason, Quickbooks feels a need to tell Financial Institution “X” what version of the software is being used. Why can Quickbooks simple take the SAME data and processed it to fit either Quickbooks for Mac or Quickbooks for PC?

It seems I’ll be staying with Quickbooks for PC for a while Longer….

The first thing to mention is that battery life is not so good. The phone came off its charger at 6:55 AM, and by 4:30 PM it had to go back on to charger. It takes about 30 minutes to get a full charge. Now my days use today was pretty typical for me, I spent 78 minutes on the phone, 54 of those minutes on speaker phone. No bluetooth. I did have the GPS turned on all day, and I used WIFI for about 20 minutes. The phone is set to auto sync with my Google Apps account. I did travel about 75 miles today, crossing some areas where I lose cell signal for about 15 minutes. I can only use edge, because there is no T-mobile 3G in Crossville, or all of Tennessee for that matter.

Oddly, the phone is crashing my 10.5 Macbook when I try to plug it into the USB port to charge. It does this both with USB storage turned on or off. I don’t think it’s my G1, because it plugs in fine to my 10.4 eMac at home to charge. So I think it might be my Macbook, it has some other issues anyway.

The interface is kind of kludgy, but I’m warming up to it pretty quick.

I use my own domain with Google Apps, and the Phone had NO PROBLEM syncing up and keeping me up-to-date with Emails and Calendar reminders. My Google Calendar has a couple of sub calendars on it, Business, Personal, Public, etc. I can only add stuff to ONE of those calendars, but the UI seems to have a spot where I could select another one, but no other one shows up. I’m guessing that it picked the default one for me to enter stuff in on. Entering an appointment is a little awkward, the UI for selecting time seems a bit inconsistent.

Email, I can read and reply to my messages, however, when I went to put in a signature, I could only “see” a couple of lines, but it seemed like I could enter more. Looks like a UI bug.

Contacts. BAD BUG!!! My contacts pulled down from Google, images and all. However, those contacts which are only a company name, are not showing up in the Android Contact list by the Company name, but rather by the phone number. (or just by the address for one contact that is only a company name and mailing address). There seems to be no way to adjust the view or sorting of contacts, they come up alphabetically by last name. I fear that contact feature on the phone is as bad as the contact feature on G-Mail.

Voice Dialing. Having been spoiled on Microsoft Voice Command, this feature seems very lacking. However, the voice recognition did work rather well, and was quiet accurate. However, you still have a UI button to confirm the call, so it’s not quite as nice as you think it should be. Also, no bluetooth activation of the feature. The good news is that the hard part of voice dialing is the accuracy of recognition, and android seems to have that licked, so if that polish up the apps functionality it might be a fair competitor to MS Voice Command. Also, Company Names do not work here, only first and last name, and the tag line “on mobile” or “at home” only changes the ORDER in which the number confirmation UI is given to you.

On a funny side note, the “flick to scroll” feature of the phone is messing with my head. My multi-touch Macbook has a feature to scroll pages. However the interface for scrolling “up” and “down” is exactly reversed between my G1 and my Macbook. On the Macbook the multi-touch gesture is designed to emulate the mouse wheel. To move down a scrollable page, your fingers move down the trackpad. But on the G1, it designed to emulate moving a peace of paper, which is the exact opposite motion. To move down a scrollable page, your finger moved “up” the screen.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a phone that had a movable screen, and even then I used my bluetooth headset 90% of the time. Now, when holding the G1 o my ear, my fingers feel the slide-out screen move ever so little, and it just feels odd.

All in all, it was a good day. In the world I am in now, with Google Apps and Macintosh, the phone made me feel more productive than my t-mobile Dash. However, it still did not have the same feeling of productivity as my T-mobile Dash did when I was in the Windows, Outlook, and Exchange world.

What will make or break this phone will be third party apps. As a phone by itself, it’s ok, but without the additional functionality of apps, it would not be worth it.

If you look at the iPhone, it survived the first year without third party apps, because it had the iTunes integration to fall back on, and a great web browser. Android does not have that “fall back” position of a media infrastructure. (yes, it did come with the Amazon MP3 store, but the lack of a headphone jack and/or bluetooth stereo, and NO video player, makes this phone a non-starter for a Portable Media Player.) So the only thing it can rely on would be awesome third party apps.

So comparing Android to iPhone on the merits of third party apps, I think Android has the greater potential. Yes, at this moment, there are tons of apps for the iPhone, but as a third party platform the iPhone biggest problem is Apple’s obsessive need to control it. Android has no such road block, it is free and open, and yes that will lead to chaos and we will see apps that can brick phones, but from that will emerge better applications that push the envelope. The four strongest advantages that Android has are, off web application installs, background processes, an open source os, and tight integration with Google, thus giving us “free” push email. If the iPhone had these, then there would be no market for Android. That is a danger, because there is no technical barrier to Apple doing these things, only artificial contractual issues.

If Apple opened up, just a bit, I fear that it will kill Android a borning.

I’ve done this before, and I’ve not liked it. A few years ago when I decided to try the ill-fated “Microsoft Small Business Accounting” package, I spent the better part of a year in pain and confusion. Both before and after that test I had used Quickbooks, but the transition away from and then back to Quickbooks was difficult, and in essence broke my consistency of data. I looks like I will have to go down that road again if I want to move completely to Mac.

On the bright side, the conversation back to Quickbooks for Windows from Quickbooks for Mac will most likely be an easy one, should I decide to do so.

It will be the first of the year before I can give a comprehensive review of Quickbooks 2009 for Mac, and even then I’ll want to use it for a few weeks just to make sure I’m honest about it. On the face of it, Quickbooks for Mac 2009 shows some nice cosmetic improvements over Quickbooks for Mac 2007, but the cosmetics seem to be all they have done. Quickbooks for Mac still lags WAY behind the same version year for Windows.

I’ve never really understood why Intuit seems to cripple it’s Mac Products. On the one hand it seems obvious that because Mac’s have a smaller market share, then few resources should be spent in developing for it. However, when you talk about feature and usability implantation, this argument does not hold. Most of the hard leg work in programing comes from the developing the underlying logic and code, which should be mostly interchangeable between PC and Mac. Unless of course Intuit has completely forked the development of Windows and Mac versions, in which case Intuit is showing astoundingly poor judgment.

I’ve considered using other accounting packages for Mac, but the simple fact is that Intuit has cornered the market in Bank Data downloads, and this is a huge time saver for me.

<disclaimer and rant>I have a very low opinion of the United States Postal Service. Most of this stems from my interactions with the local post office personnel. I will not allow my venomous loathing of the American Postal Workers Union and the apathetic laziness it cultivates to negatively impact my review. </disclaimer and rant>

I do a lot of mailing and for the most part the less I interact with postal workers the better. While I have found a few postal employees that have been really helpful, far to often I have encountered people who seem to actively try to thwart my attempts to use the service.

For many years I printed out labels from my printer and spent a few hours affixing labels and stamps to #10 envelopes. At the end of 500 mail peaces, I was lucky to get the label on right side up, much less straight. At some point we managed to get a printer that would print directly on to envelopes, but ever after that, we had to spend time putting stamps on.

A few years ago, I discovered the on-line postage printing system, Stamps.com. This system allows a person to print postage with just a computer, Printer, and #10 envelopes. SWEET! So my work load was cut down dramatically and I’ve been using Stamps.com happily for the most part sense shortly after they started.

However, I have always been miffed that Stamps.com did not have a Mac client, and truth be told the windows version was slow and kinda buggy, but it was better than lick’n & stick’n, so I suffered on.

With my Desktop Mac Change over, I have found a need for Postage on my Mac. For the first couple of runs, I used Stamps.com in Parallels, but this sort of defeats the purpose of trying to convert to Mac. After posting some of my thoughts on my transition, a person wrote in to tell me that there was indeed a postage system for Mac, called Endicia.

At first glance, Endicia for Mac is pretty much like Stamps.com for Windows. It costs $15 per month, plus postage, and has similar features to Stamps.com. Oddly, Endicia does have a windows client, but the monthly cost is much lower than Stamps.com (because it lacks some features most people will never use), but the Mac client was the full $15.

I of course had to sign up before I could download the software. The service does have a free month to try, but you have to give up payment information right off the bat to get a look at the software. Fantastically, there was a screencast of the Mac software I could watch, so while I could not use the software with out singing up for the service. This answered many of my off the cuff questions.

There was a bit of trouble signing up. I went through the online process of registering, and got an email back with my combination, but I could not log in to get the software. I gave it 24 hours, but I could never get in. Now while this was a bit deflating, it did give me a opportunity to “test drive” their technical support. My first few calls to the tech support number, 800-576-3279, netted me only a voice mail box for tech support. I did leave a message, and sure enough, a few minutes later Mike called my back. After about 90 seconds on the the phone with this guy I was logged in and downloading software.

What was THIS tech support call that sold me on the company. When I first called and got the voice mail box for tech support, I though they were busy, but playing with the phone tree I soon realized that the company seems quite small. While taking to the support rep, I could here other people talking. What struck me at first was that EVERYONE seemed to be speaking American English with west coast ascents, this seemed to jive with my impression that it was a small well run company doing its own in house support. The people I spoke where not generic paid support people reading from a script, they seemed to me to be real people who cared about the company they worked for. Also there was none of the artificial “have I helped you with all your issues today Mr. Tabor?” BS that I get when I talk to Mumbai. It was refreshing.

As far as the software itself, it’s pretty straight forward. It installs like most other Mac Applications.

Of course I did not have any postage so I had to add $10. I had to provide my Credit Card when I signed up, so it did not ask for it again, nice touch.

Setting up my custom Mailing Graphic and Fonts was easy. Setting up the printer was a bit more diffacult. This is where I figured out that the Macintosh OS 10.5 Driver for my HP 7410 All-in-one does not recognize the second paper tray. I found a couple of forums talking about it and it turns out to be a driver bug from HP, not related to Endicia. About the only thing I had trouble finding was the option to do a sample print of postage just to see if I got the setting right. In Stamps.com you have to do a big walk through to make sure you have the envelopes pointed the right way, and you wind up burning two envelopes in the process. Annoying if you have to do a reinstall of the printer, but helpful burning a first setup. The second burned envelope in this possess is an full sample showing you exactly what the finished product will look like. Stamps.com also has a quick “sample” button to see the effects changes you make to the return address’s font or size will have on how the envelope looks.

I spent several minutes looking for a “sample” button in Endica, but could not find one. The printer setup process does not send anything to the printer, which is in contrast, to Stamps.com. Ironically, the setup process does have a print dialog window, complete with a “print” button, but a dialog warns you that clicking “Print” will only save your settings and not send something to the printer.

After 20 minutes, I decided I would burn $0.42 cents, just to see the envelope print, and clicked on the “Prepare Envelope for Printing..” button on the main window after filling out all the required stuff.

Much to my surprise, this did not “Print” anything, but did bring up a window showing me the finished product, and here is where I found a “Print a Test Envelope” button.

I’m glad I did this, turns out the my HP Officejet 7410 had some issue printing to the edge of my #10 envelopes. I wound up fixing the issue by manually adjusting envelope size in the Printer Setup in Endicia from 9.5 inches wide, down to 9.15 inches wide. This tricked my printer into printing all the way to the edge of my #10 envelopes, the thus getting all of the bar code.

I’ve only done a couple of mail peace through Endicia. So far I’ve really liked it. the only draw backs I’ve noticed have been things not related to Endicia, such as my Business Addresses being trapped in Quickbooks Premiere 2008 for Windows. Endicia does work with Apple’s address book, and I can do batch printing. I lost my USB scale to a coffee spill some time ago, so I cannot test the interface, but Endicia does came to work with them.

Like Stamps.com Endica does have an option to just print “stamps”, Called “Netstamps” in the Stamps.com world and “InstaPostage” in the Endicia world. I have used Stamps.com photo stamps service in the past (a grade christmas gift for grandparents is a sheet of stamps with their only grand daughter on them ), and Endicia seems to be matching Stamps.com on this as well.

Now only if I could print those “Forever Stamps” with a photo on them.

All in all I have been every pleased with Endicia, and I am looking forward to using it more.

If you think about it, you can separate out the tasks you preform with a computer into a couple of different broad categories. My challenge this week was to compare MY work experience on a Mac to that I had with Windows.

Here are some of those broad categories:

Web Surfing and RSS Reading

Accounting and Bookkeeping

Communications

Scheduling

Entertainment

Creation of Information or Data

Management of Information or Data

Web Surfing and RSS Reading. For both Mac and Windows I use Firefox as my web-browser. So using a Mac this week was not that big of a change. The interface was about 90% the same, and my favorite add-ons and plugins still worked. The big difference was RSS reading. On my Windows system, I use Feed Demon, on the Mac, NetNewsWire. Of the two I found NetNewsWire to the easier program to use.

Accounting and Bookkeeping. I use Quickbooks for doing my business financial management. When I first started it was hard for me to get used to the ideal that Quickbooks was JUST a bookkeeping software package, and NOT a comprehensive consulting firm management solution. So my use of Quickbooks is straight forward. However, while there is a copy of Quickbooks for the Mac, I was unable to move my data from Quickbooks Premier 2008 to Quickbooks Pro 2007 for Mac. In the end I still have to use Quickbooks on Windows.

I also use a program call Stamps.com to print my postage. Sadly, stamps.com is Windows only.

#### BIG EDIT #####
(this is why I love visitor feed back )

I’ve just been told that there IS indeed a postage system for Macs, http://mac.endicia.com/. It’s priced on par with Stamps.com ($15 per month plus postage). I’ll be downloading this and giving it a try. It also has a Windows Version as well.

Thanks William!

Communications. This is a big category. To me communications is everything from E-mail, to phone, to VOIP, to Blogging.

I’ll start with VOIP. I use Skype to communicate with my clients and friends in Europe and Africa. Skype is about the same on both Windows and Mac, but the Mac hardware make Skype so much easier.

Blogging on Windows was done with Word 2008, which has a simple “post to blog” feature. On Mac I used Mars Edit. It’s hard to compare the two, Mars Edit is a comprehensive blog management tool, while Word is a VERY powerful text editor. In the end, Mars Edit wins out because while Word is great at editing text, you cannot use those features on a blog site.

Phone, Contacts, and Email are touchy subjects, and perhaps (along with Quickbooks and Stamps.com) is the largest single failing on the Mac. In Windows with Exchange and Outlook, my Contacts and E-mail (with schedule) are all kept well synchronized. There simply is not a comparable solution on the Mac side. While there is the up and coming “Mobile Me” from Apple, it is not doing well, and requires an iPhone, which does not have all the features I need on a phone. I am hoping that Google’s Android platform will address this failing VERY soon. If I can get a truly open smartphone platform that supports syncing my Contacts, Email, tasking, and Schedule with my phone, an online source, and my computers, I’ll jump on it.

In the end I still have to use Outlook on Windows.

Scheduling. As I said, on Windows I used Outlook. However on my Mac there is iCal, which I am now using with Google Calendars “CalDev” feature. My website also is current with my Google Calendar via WordPress Plugin. I like iCal a lot, and want to use it as my primary Scheduling system.

Entertainment. For me, the Mac wins hands down. I do not do a lot of high end computer gaming (I have consoles for that). However, simple games and quick diversion are great on my Mac. I can also play my old emulated games on my Mac (which I can do with my Windows system, but it’s so much nicer on my Mac). But with my Apple TV and iPod, the true Media entreatment winer is Mac, hands down. Yes, I know Apple TV and iPod will work with iTunes for Windows, but the integration is so much cleaner and nicer on a Mac.

Creation of Information or Data. This is anything from Word Processing, to Programing, to Photoshopping, to Web design.

I have office for the Mac, which is pretty much like Office for windows, except Entourage is a poor reflection on Outlook. So the spread sheet and word processing experiences are petty much the same.

Ironical, I’ve been using a port of a Mac product on my Windows Box for Years. In WIndows I have use an editor call “e”, which is just a clone of a really good pseudo IDE (Integrated Development Environment) called Text Mate. I do not really do any hard core programing, so I cannot comment to those.

Photoshop is photoshop.

On Windows when I needed to to a quick HTML page, I would use Front Page, (later the awful Expression Web), then cut out the bits I needed with e. I’ve not really found a good WYSIWYG html editor for Mac. I’ve played with Nvu, but I was underwhelmed. Oddly, I am moving away from webpage editing in favor of using Content Management systems like WordPress. So my days of coding HTML may be on the decline anyway.

Management of Information or Data. Here I found Macs to really come through. The default way Windows Manages data files is very klugy. With Mac, Images are managed by iPhoto, Media by iTunes, general files go in Documents, however you want. I never really understood how Windows Media Player managed music. There are even some great plugins to allow me to upload and publish data to the “cloud”, like Picasa, Youtube, and my Blog. There is also very little “support” files cluttering up the place. In windows an application gets installed into Program Files, but bits of it can get put all over the system. On a mac, 99% of the time an application is a single file (yes I know it’s really of folder), in the Applications Directory. Need to move it to another Mac? Just drag and drop the file.

In the end, I still have Windows XP running in Parallels on my Mac. I simply cannot operate without Outlook, my Phone, and Quickbooks, and at the moment to keep all the features I have now, those have to stay on Windows. The first 4 days of the week were spent trying to find alternatives to Windows on the Mac. Next week I will try living with BOTH Mac and Windows side by side, and see how that goes.

Just as a review, VNC stands for “Virtual Network Computing” as is just a fancy way of allowing remote control over a system. Literally a VNC client has control over the VNC hosts mouse and keyboard, and the video is sent from the host to the client. This allows me at my office to remote service a client anyway in the world. In an extreme example, I used the system when I was in Ghana West Africa to fix systems back here in Crossville. But on more day to day bases, I use it to service clients I have in Nashville, Knoxville, and Atlanta, without the need to spend 4 hours in a car to do a 2 hour on site job.

Now there are commercial paid VNC applications and there are free and/or open-source ones. For my part, I looked at 3 freely available VNC systems, RealVNC, UltraVNC, TightVNC.

Both TightVNC and UltraVNC have a file transfer system, which allows easy movement of files between the host and client computers. But I found both systems file transfer systems to be a bit klugy. You browsed a directory system that did not look or feel like a standard windows interface. The systems were also mutually excusive to send files from client to host, both had to be running the same VNC system, TightVNC Client could not send to UltraVNC host, or vice versa.

UltraVNC has a “chat” system with allows two people setting at either side of the VNC link to “chat” communicate. I however was not impressed by this feature because in my line of work I normally have the person on other end of the VNC link on the telephone.

Of the three I found RealVNC to be the fastest. Response times were much faster using RealVNC than either UltaVNC or TightVNC. I also found that the screens just looked better with RealVNC than they did with the other two.

All systems encrypt the password for authentication. But only UltraVNC has an option (an additional plug-in) that encrypts all traffic.

Of course all three system could interoperate with each other for the basic VNC functions, with are Video, Mouse, Keyboard. I found that all three could use the Linux VNC host. However, I could only get TightVNC to work with the native Apple Macintosh OS 10.5 (leopard) Desktop Sharing / Remote Desktop system which uses VNC. For my Macs I like to use Redstone Software’s Vine Server (a.k.a. osxvnc) for the VNC host.

All three systems do a “listing” mode for their client, and a “connect to client” mode for their host. This means that a person setting at the host computer can initiate a connection to a client. This is good for security, because it allows the host machine to ONLY allow connections when the user of that host machine specifically starts one. Also this is good for firewall purposes, most often in my line of work a host machine is behind a firewall and NAT. With this “reverse” connection I do not need to adjust the clients firewall when they need help. I simple have a rule in my firewall here at the office to allow incoming reverse connections.

Of the three systems, the interface for RealVNC seemed the most polished. TightVNC very much looks like a Windows 200 era application, and UltraVNC looks better than TightVNC, but not as good as RealVNC.

Side note on Macs: There are only two VNC clients I have found, Chicken of the VNC and Jollysfastvnc. Of the two I’m prone to Jollysfastvnc because it can do screen rendering to fit larger resolution hosts on a smaller resolution client.

In conclusion, I have opted to use 2 VNC systems. I will keep using RealVNC for the speed, but I will keep TightVNC on hand both for the Macintosh Leopard compatibility, and the file transfer ability, which might have some use, despite it’s difficult user interface.

Both Systems can be downloaded via the Software section of the website.

However, I made an odd discovery, it seems that despite early statements from Grisoft/AVG (thanks timd442@gmail.com for pointing out my earlier misspelling), AVG 7.5 is still running smoothly and getting updates. While I do not know how long this will last, I’m going to use it for as long as I can. So AVG 7.5 is back on my system. Yea!

I have posted both AVG 8.0 and 7.5 is the Software Section, should you want to get them.

First, I’m not all that thrilled that AVG includes an “anti-spyware” component now. I know that Grisoft has had an anti-spyware program, but I have always chosen to use Windows Defender. Now it’s seems that if I want to continue to use Windows Defender I am going to have to double up the load on my system. BTW, Windows Defender is a mandatory part of Windows Vista. So if you use AVG 8.0 with Vista you by default WILL have two programs running, and thus adding more load and reduced speed to your system.

However, even more invasive than the extra spyware scanner is the installation of a browser add-on into Firefox. Now when I do a Google Search I get these green check boxes out to the side of each line.

This is NOT wanted behavior. AVG seems to be doing “pre-scanning” of all the webpage’s I get in a search return.

The feature I liked MOST about AVG was how unobtrusive it was about what it did. It sat in my task bar, scanned each night, and did scans when I looked at files and directories. It scanned my e-mail. These new features have caused me to question if I want to keep AVG on my system at all.

Finally, AVG is much more aggressive about marketing it’s paid version to me. It actually kicks back an “alert” indicating that my system could be Enhancely Protected. Again a major selling point of AVG Free to me and my clients was that AVG Free did not have all of this invasive “enhanced” crap.

I’m going to play around with the install to see if I can remove some of these “features”, but if I cannot, I have to say AVG is coming off my system today. Of course I’ll let everyone know what I move to. I feel betrayed by Grisoft over this.