Apple has a service called .mac that fanboys love and unwitting consumers are convinced to buy when they buy a new mac. To me, I’ve never thought of buying this $100/year service that includes a mac.com email address, 10GB of web storage cutely named iDisk, web hosting, and some synchronization and backup tools. I’ve got an email and web server / webdav server already, and $100/year seems like a lot of bread for some sync capabilities. They also have something called Back to My Mac which is effectively just VNC access to your home machine without having to forward a port through your home firewall.

There is a great young project out there appropriately named Dotmac for folks with their own server that don’t mind fighting through some incomplete documentation. $0/year is a good price for those sync features I’d say. I’ve got it running and I am pretty impressed. It is running happily on my home server and just works. Stacey and I have a nice shared address book now and I’ve got backups for things like my keychain, calendars, and dashboard widgets. Not too shabby.

office suite – OS X does not come with an office suite. For the most part I can get away with Google Docs, but sometimes you just need a rich client. For years I’ve been praying for Aqua port of OpenOffice, which someday will exist. Until then, I can run X11. iWork may or may not be good enough – don’t know. MS Office is still a PPC app, so my Intel mac uses rosetta to run it (slow with a memory bloat bonus).

media management – iTunes is great for music. I love coverflow and smart playlists. It still angers me though. iTunes breaks DAAP sharing – ensuring that only iTunes can share with iTunes. Yet another dirty little lock-in. Podcast management sorta stinks – but I can mostly solve this with smart playlists. Movie and TV show management doesn’t work well. I either need special applescripts and mov reference files to make iTunes somewhat of a usable movie tool for my existing media, or just buy everything fresh and new from the iTunes store. I’ll never use iTunes music store because it’s expensive and DRM laden. On Linux – I can use Magnatune and Jamendo on Rhythmbox or Banshee. Oh, and DAAP works in both Rhythmbox and Banshee as well.

instant messaging – The A/V features of iChat are top notch, but mostly I chat with text. I want a single client that does Yahoo, GTalk, and AIM and puts them in a single buddy list – iChat doesn’t do that – so I’d use Adium anyway. Pidgin, the built-in IM client on Ubuntu does.

browsing – I use Firefox over Safari. I love my plugins, like Adblock plus and FoxyProxy. Safari is fast, but that doesn’t matter much – the Firefox addons almost guarantee that I can browse how I want.

media playback – Quicktime is okay I guess. The interface is a bit bulky for me and of course to make it work with most media I have or find I need to install the Perian codec pack. I then use a program called NicePlayer because the interface is cleaner. MPlayerOSX is quite a bit better if you want to go away from the Quicktime backend – hmm, isn’t MPlayer called “the movie player for Linux”.

address book – Stacey and I both use a mac and since I’m too cheap to pay $100/year for .mac just for Address Book syncing I use a ghetto fabulous rsync script to the same end. I tried syncing with Plaxo, and that was a let down. Address book is quite cool with smart contact lists – and it ties in with Mail.app and iChat quite well… its just too bad I don’t use either of those applications anymore. On Linux rumor has it that Evolution can be used with Conduit to sync contacts and calendars all over the place.

mail – Like the rest of the tech savvy world, I’ve moved to gmail. I battled with Mail.app and my own IMAP server for years. I still have the IMAP server and Mail.app, although for the life of me I can’t figure out why I would want to use them. On OS X I go to Google and install their notifier application so I know when new mail arrives. On Linux the Mail Notification program that is built right in can notify me of new mail in my gmail inbox. Hmm.

calendar – I loved iCal like no other app… that is before Google Calendar came out. Come on – it’ll SMS notify me of events and I never have to sync? Add to that private URLs and easy sharing of the same calendar. Game, set, match. On Linux Evolution has just about feature parity with iCal, but the cool thing is that when I click on the little clock in the toolbar I can get a quick glance of what is going on today, cool. Evolution also can connect to my Exchange server at work so I can keep both my work and home life in one calendar. Oh, and I can share that back with Google calendar.

vpn – I have to install the Cisco VPN client on OS X to connect to work. I can use vpnc right from the application repositories in Ubuntu. It’s pretty easy to set up right through Network Manager… sometimes.

sync – Another thing I loved about the mac was its ability to sync my calendars and contacts with my mobile phone. Well I have a crappy Windows Mobile phone now, so I’m kinda out of luck. I paid for Missing Sync to solve this problem. Now I moved to Leopard and I am screwed. I’m not paying again.

photo management – Each time a new version of iLife comes out I obtain (through questionable sources) this new must-have version. Most folks use Flickr, PicassaWeb, Smugmug or the like – I’m no exception. Of course that’s not built in… but if you pay for .mac you can do photocasting. I am a Flickr Pro user. I paid for a plugin for iPhoto that lets me export to Flickr. The latest version of iPhoto was just plain broken for me under Tiger. Actually not just broken, it caused my machine to be quite crashy. Now it seems fine with Leopard, but in any case its a slow memory hog. Hmm, F-Spot is less flashy but has export to flickr, picassaweb, smugmug, and 23hq (whatever that is) built right in – loopy. Oh, and it doesn’t crash my computer.

advanced photo editing – I normally secure a version of Adobe CS3. These are great programs chock full of features that I have no idea how to use. Photoshop CS3 is $400 or more. I’m not sure the price of the whole suite, but I’m sure words line-of-credit would come into play if I were to obtain an legitimate copy. The Gimp and Inkscape do much more than I’ll ever be able to figure out, but they are a little more rough around the edges. I can run these on OS X, but of course need to install X11. What a kludge.

mouse – To keep my setup all maclike and pretty I bought a bluetooth mighty mouse. Of course, Apple has a different idea of mouse acceleration than any other manufacturer – so I had to seek out third party tweak tools to make me happy with the mouse. Hmm, the mouse works in Ubuntu without too much trouble and with familiar acceleration curves.

dorky stuff – The new Leopard tabbed terminal is great, but under Tiger I used iTerm because it was just better. I’m not sure why they disable anti-aliasing by default. Gnome-terminal is pretty solid as well.

I was super excited when MacFuse came out – a port of the FUSE userspace file system implementation for OS X. It lets me use things like sshfs to mount up my server. Oh, I can do this right out of the box with GnomeVFS and Nautilus – don’t even need FUSE. If I do need FUSE though, there it is, built right into my Linux distro.

application integration – I’ve tried going with an all Apple solution for a long time (everything but .mac) because when you drink the kool aid, life can be good. The tables are starting to turn though. Yes, iChat ties into Address Book contact details, ties into Calendar with the birthdays, ties into Mail.app email addresses ties back into iChat. That’s great. I don’t use iChat, Mail.app, and just use iCal a little. Apple is falling on its face when it comes to innovative ways of tying their OS into web apps. In Gnome pidgin ties into evolution (contacts) ties into evolution (calendar) ties into evolution (mail) ties into system clock. I’d say Linux is just slightly better for me, since I actually use Evolution at work. I’d need a doctorate to figure out how to sync my Windows Mobile piece of shit.

I don’t really find setting these things up to be particularly enjoyable. I’d like a system that I can install, fill in a username and password, and be done with it. If I can then “just work” I’m a happy camper. I’m just noticing that over the years I am doing more and more to make OS X work how I want to. In that time Ubuntu, Gnome, and Linux in general has pressed forward. I can see a move to all Linux in the not too distant future for me.

I’ve gone through the obvious steps to try and breathe life back into iPhoto. I’ve blown away all my preferences. I’ve repaired permissions. I’ve even done the super secret command-option start and had iPhoto rebuild the entire library and all thumbnails. I’ve got a somewhat big iPhoto library – almost 10,000 pictures, but should that really matter? I store my library on an external HFS+ formatted firewire 7200rpm drive… could that be a problem? I have maybe 100 albums. These all seem reasonable to me.

On the plus side, I actually can run iPhoto now. It still locks up my computer, takes gigabytes of memory, and crashes constantly (I have been able to work with it for almost 15 minutes before a crash though). Poop. I tried just opening iPhoto and patiently watching Activity Monitor. The real memory usage eventually grows to over 1.5GB and the virtual memory creeps to over 2.5GB and iPhoto just crashes hard. Under disk activity I see 6MB/sec being written pretty consistently – which seems to correlate with the virtual memory creep I suppose.

My photo needs are meager. Crop, rotate, a twist of brightness or color enhancement – combined with the ability to share with friends and family on Flickr make me happy. Unfortunately, iPhoto ‘08 can’t crop on my machine and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got a macbook that is less than a year old. I of course maxed out the memory to 2GB. Just opening iPhoto and doing nothing takes up 318MB of memory. My CPU spikes up to 48% according to Activity Monitor without doing anything. All of this may be fine, but when I try to crop a picture, I now am presented with a box in the middle of my picture that I have to drag, resize, and move. When I drag the corners of this box, both CPUs spike up to 100% and the machine becomes laggy. If I need to resize this box one, two, or three times in a row, I need to wait for perhaps a full minute for this operation to complete. THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. Grrr. I just opened iPhoto, flipped between events to photos (to see how many I have), then back to photos. Now iPhoto is pegged at using 70% of both cores. Again, I am doing nothing. I don’t know what I am going to do. The new iMovie is designed so you can make a video in a snap. How about focusing on cropping a photo in a snap. This is crazy.

Ok, quick opinions in no particular order. I got this mouse because my old Logitech got all jumpy on my desk and drove me insane.

Uncomfortable.
Looks great and matches my macbook.
Side buttons impossible to actually push (but who really cares).
The trackball is kinda silly and not too natural.
It tracks well on my desk.
The preference pane gives no acceleration option – only a slow to fast slider for tracking.
Expensive.

So you have all these pictures that you organize into a folder structure and thats how you like to work with them. Picassa web and Flickr are just confusing. Enter PicassawebFS and Fuse.

RSS Feeds as a file system. Gmail as a file system. An LDAP directory as a file system. Anything as a file system. That’s what FUSE is all about. This is seriously badass and Google has released this early version of FUSE for the Mac (which has been popular on Linux for a year or two).

Watch this video and become one with MacFuse.

There are people out there that put away their 12 sided dice just long enough to perform benchmarks on disparate computing platforms. They test floating point operations, 3d gaming frame-rates, and if they’re feeing particularly pragmatic, office productivity metrics. One thing they’ve never quite been able to measure well is FUN.

I know there are plenty of people out there that punch their time card, sit at a desk for eight hours, then go home – never caring in the least whether they enjoyed their computing time. Not me, I actually like working on computers that do fun things. If my computer took three times as long to open an Excel spreadsheet, had half the Quake 4 frame-rates, but I never yelled at it in frustration and smiled every once in a while at its coolness – my friends, that would be the computer for me (disclaimer – I don’t use Office Productivity applications or play 3d games).

OS X has had a corner on the market for fun computing for quite a while. The lack of spyware and viruses is just a bonus. Now, my happy dual G5 has taken a back seat in the fun department to my wonderfully beautiful Linux desktop. Thanks to my new hero David Reveman over at Novell, the next generation of Linux desktops will be chock full of eye candy – or as many would say “useless eye candy”. Those that say that of course find no utility in fun… they also roll 12-sided die, shower infrequently, and the closest they’ve been to a woman is watching reruns of the Golden Girls.

I’ve got virtual desktops that are finally usable. I’ve got kick-ass ways to switch between applications, both with a cool alt-tab function and with the Expose’-done-right knockoff feature. Lets not forget the true transparencies and crazy zoom accessabilty feature. Thanks to all these features (and wobbly jello windows) I can interact with my computing environment in a much more organic way. I love it. Get Ubuntu, use it, become one with it.

A couple weeks ago Apple released new iMac G5s, and along with it a new piece of software called Front Row. Although mac enthusiasts have been clamoring for media center software for some time, the announcement did not excite many. Nobody wants to shell out $1,299 – $1,699 just to be able to watch downloaded TV, listen to iTunes music, and view their iPhoto galleries on a G5 screen. This simplified interface needs to be available on your TV.

Predictably, the software was pulled off of the iMac and made to run on machines it was for which it was not intended. To my delightment, this hacked version became available on bittorrent last night. Without the remote control which is included with the iMac G5, the functionality of Front Row was somewhat limited. I had to use the escape and arrow keys to move around the menus, but it was still nice to see the interface and play around with the movie trailers.

After mostly moving over to Stacey’s place, I had been without dual monitors until I hooked up my G5 to her TV. We had been kicking off movies with the ol’ double click until tonight.

Tonight, I found over on the Salling Clicker forum a nice little script that lets me use my cell phone to control Front Row… exactly what I was looking for. Even though I had pretty similar interface with my XBox, this is a really nice touch.