After installing (which you can use a free trial to check things out), launch iTunes and you should have a new sidebar with all sorts of options. Some include finding missing song details, getting album artwork, finding details about the artist or song, and even concert information (the final two I have never tested, they were released after I had finished my testing). I personally also don’t use the album artwork either, because I find iTunes to be great at that already (right-click on a song, and select ‘Get Album Artwork’).

The one thing I did use this heavily for was getting missing song information. My library has grown almost out of control over the years, to where I had songs I knew were mislabeled or missing mass amounts of information. After clicking on the songs and asking TuneUp to process, everything ‘just worked’. There were a few songs that it couldn’t figure out (that other solutions could), but I was able to clean my entire library over a weekend (easily over 400 songs). At the time of my testing, getting album artwork was also just a click away from all tracks that you were processing.

There are a few other apps similar to this coming out on various platforms, but I really haven’t had a need to try any of them yet, and if I did have to do some ‘heavy lifting’ on my iTunes library again, I would be using TuneUp first.

This drive has honestly worked great. Its really fast, was rather cheap, and looks nice just sitting there. But this drive can’t stay awake. All it wants to do is just sleep, sleep, sleep. By default, these drives are set to sleep after 3 minutes of inactivity. That means, 3 minutes between reading or writing to that disk. It will take about 30 seconds to spin back up, which gets really annoying.

Imagine for a moment you decided to put your music library on this drive. And lets say that 99.9% of the songs in your library are at least over 3 minutes long. That means that during each song, your drive would spin down at some point (because it has buffered the song into the memory on the computer, its no longer reading off the disk). When you get to the next song, you need to wait about 30 seconds for it to spin back up again and get the next song.

I personally never did this, but have had data issues when trying to write to a share from this drive over the network, plus just having to wait EVERY TIME I want to save something. This is because even if you are saving to your local machine, the Mac OS is going to read from its volumes to get information about each of them.

But wait, it gets better! If you’re on a Mac especially, the included software will NOT let you change this setting! It can only be changed on Windows. This is a serious design flaw and can really be a pain for most. Since this is actually in the Firmware of the enclosure, you can change this on any Windows machine with just a little work.

Note: I did this and it worked for me. I am not responsible if you lose data doing this. I recommend you backup your entire drive before trying to change anything. Also some people on the web say that this MAY wipe your drive. This didn’t happen to me, and I don’t think it would since your only updating the firmware of the enclosure. But always remember to backup before doing anything like this!

• These steps are written using Parallels. I’m assuming its very similar in VMWare Fusion.
• If you are using BootCamp, or have a Windows PC available, install the FreeAgent software and start on step 6.
• Make sure you back everything up to your computer before starting this.

Steps:

1. Fire up your virtual machine
2. In your VM, download and install the FreeAgent desktop tools and install them.
3. Once running, ‘eject’ your drive from Finder
4. In Parallels, go to the Devices menu, select USB, and then select FreeAgent Desktop.
5. Your VM may need to install drivers for this external drive, but eventually it will say its ready to use (it may not show up under ‘My Computer’ though, mine didn’t. I think this is due to it being a Mac formatted HDD).
6. Run the FreeAgent desktop tool. It should recognize your drive
7. Select the drive that you want to change, and click settings
8. In the setting pane there should be a drop down menu (currently saying 3 minutes) about inactivity time before sleep.
9. Change this to your desired setting. I set mine to 5 hours. Therefore, its not spinning while I’m at work or sleeping. Setting it to Never works fine as well, but some people report overheating drives. Honestly for my work, I could easily just set 1 hour to get the desired solution.
10. Click ok and exit out of the FreeAgent software
11. Your done!
12. If you were using a virtual machine, you just have to disconnect your drive like you added it in step 4, and it should auto-mount in the Mac OS again.

This should solve your problem with the drive sleeping too much. Some people have reported that this change doesn’t actually stick, and if that’s the case, I recommend trying it at least one more time, and then contacting Seagate to get the drive replaced.

For those who don’t know, Mac OS 10.6 is going to be a different type of upgrade than we are used to. Apple usually has a few years between OS revisions, and there are loads of new features in each. But this time, Apple wanted to ‘refine’ the Mac OS more, to really bring the system to the next level. Many Windows Server users may be used to the ‘R2’ revisions of Windows Server, we saw this on Windows Server 2003 and will be seeing it again soon on Server 2008. While there are a few new features in Mac OS X 10.6, its nothing like the change from 10.3 to 10.4, and 10.4 to 10.5

Apple has seen unbelievable growth in the last two years, its still hard to believe at times. To capture even more users (Enterprise users, windows developers, and more), Apple wanted to make the Mac even easier to switch. We see this with some of the new features like:

• Full Exchange 2007 support (heck, Windows doesnt even do this!)
• Changing the default gamma from 1.8 (which has been that way at least since I started using Macs in the early 1990’s) to 2.2, the standard for just about everything else. This means images are finally going to look the same on Windows and Mac, which is a huge boost to designers working on both platforms.
• Major overhaul to Quicktime

I’m actually surprised that the 1.8 to 2.2 Gamma change wasn’t talked about more. While  I don’t know anything, this could also be one of the reasons we have been hearing about the new ‘Charcoal’ look to the Mac OS, as well as changes announced to the Dock and icons as well.

Putting this all at $29 for an upgrade is also unbelievable. It makes one wonder if this would affect the Windows 7 upgrade price. Microsoft has all but acknowledged Vista’s failure. To help those that have been stuck with Vista, the Windows 7 update should possibly be rather cheap for all users. While Mac OS 10.5 isn’t a failure, its 10.6 just makes the better, well…better!

Obviously a lot of users don’t mind paying the $29 update – I sure don’t. But I also don’t think many users know what else they will be getting with it:

• QuickTime has been totally redone, really pushing it beyond anything else today. They also included simple editing, and the ability to get your media to what ever platform you want so much easier.
• Finder has been rewritten – Before 10.6, Finder is still in Carbon, one of Apple’s older frameworks that was available on the Classic OS as well. With it being rewritten in Cocoa, im sure we will not only see new features and dramatic performance enhancements, I am sure in the next year or two we will hear about more API’s to interact with the system as well.

With the Finder also being 64 bit, and new features like OpenCL and Grand Central, were going to see our Macs get quite a speed boost too. Remember, Mac OS X so far has had to work on both PowerPC and Intel hardware. Now the Mac OS can be fully optimized for the Intel processors, and that alone will bring more improvements as well.

Mac OS 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’ is due to release this September. To read a bit more detail about some of the updates, check out this Enhancements and Refinements page on Apple’s site.

1. It’s a major hack – While its very easy to install, and your AppleTV is really running a special version of Mac OS 10.4, its still a hack. The easiest and fastest way to install right now is to use a thumbdrive and make a boot drive. Your AppleTV boots up into a small Linux install, moves stuff around, and installs the installers. You then download XBMC and Boxee through this installer and install. And yes, you may have to try this a few times
2. The AppleTV can’t really handle it – While Boxee itself is growing and becoming more popular day by day, its starting to push the bounds of the AppleTV. I can’t really find what triggers it, but sometimes Boxee is VERY fast on my AppleTV, other times it will easily lock up or take forever to do something. Im ok with it taking a second to load up content, but its frustrating when i have to wait 10 seconds between each click.
3. It makes my AppleTV restart all the time – I’m pretty sure that every time I quit the app, it restarts the AppleTV.  I then have to wait 5-10 minutes staring at an Apple logo to do anything again.
4. It goes away with every update to your AppleTV – Every time Apple pushes out an AppleTV update, it wipes the machine nearly clean, at least removing Boxee from your menus. You then have to go through the entire bootloader process again.
5. NO HD Content – Yup, it may look all pretty on your AppleTV, but nothing you see in Boxee is in HD. While yes, neither is most content on your AppleTV in HD, Boxee will never be. Unless they find a way to use the graphics chip to display this content, the main processor just will not be able to handle it.

What you can do without using boxee:

1. Download your own content, many in HD – obviously it will cost you when doing it through iTunes, but there is so much content (and quite a bit in HD) that you can download from iTunes. I make it a habit to go and download as much of the free interesting content in the iTunes store each week, just to have stuff. In a year, this can become a large library, just from free content.
2. Download content, but a little less legal – Using BitTorrent or Newsgroups, you can download just about any TV episode or movie you would like. There are plenty of tools, but the only one I have used is TED (Torrent Episode Downloder). This came in VERY handy recently, where our Comcast DVR missed a recording of House (which is not in the iTunes Store, and over a week behind in Hulu). In less than an hour, I had an HD copy for us to watch (which we did through the XBox 360, with its native Xvid/Divx support). I am thinking of setting up our recently reformatted PC to auto download some shows to see how it works for replacing Cable TV.
3. Sell your AppleTV, get a Mini, put on Plex – I almost wish I went back and did this. I really wanted the AppleTV for the music, with the added benefit of all the video content as well. Now that I have become so interested with the video content, I wish I had a more powerful machine hooked up to the TV. And then, instead of wasting your time with Boxee, try Plex instead. Its based off the same original code base, XBMC, but its not as bukly, looks much better, and is just so much more awesome. Eventually, we will be doing this.
4. Other minor hacks – I don’t have anything against hacking your AppleTV. While these can always be flaky, there are some good products out there that still work great. Some hacks  I recommend would be: CouchSurfer (Safari on the AppleTV. The only reason I dont use this is that our PS3 also has a web browser), Xvid/Divx/WMV codecs (this would allow you to play much more content nativly on your AppleTV. I installed these, but haven’t used them, since my Xbox supports the same just as easy), SSH (lets you SSH into your AppleTV, mainly to install the various hacks, which one could even use it as a simple web server or SVN host). Remember, if you do install these hacks, they will be removed (or at least have to be reinstalled) when you update your AppleTV
5. Podcasts – Just take a few moments to browse through the huge podcast Video Library in the iTunes store. I found so much content in there, that you easily have a free, interesting content to watch.

In the end, I still am mixed with how I plan or want to actually use it. I removed Boxee with the latest update to the AppleTV, but then reinstalled their new alpha that included the new API, AppStore, and Hulu again (though, most of all this seems to me like a ripoff of what Plex did just a month ago). I plan on giving Boxee one more trial this time, but plan on removing it soon and doing a hard reset on my AppleTV to make it feel all new again.

I’m in the process of launching a new website. While im using a separate email account for the website, its just a forwarder to my personal gmail account (since I’m the only one working on this site for now).  All of these emails will be generated through the website (either for advertising, contact, or signups), so they were easy to create tags for each type, and filter accordingly. I also subscribe to 4 mailing lists, as well as a few folders for various side projects, notes, etc.

But thats when I realized, even though im tagging all of this email, my tags are still hard to navigate! How is that supposed to help!?!?

After looking around online, searching google, and even reading a blog post by one of the people i follow on Twitter, I got quite a bit of inspiration on how to organize mine to not only make me more efficient, but also help me keep with an Inbox Zero workflow, automatically!

The approach I came up with started with renaming some of my labels, and adding a few new ones:

• For messages that are from a mailing list, no matter what their content, they start with ‘list-‘.
• For my new website (or any other project I am working on that needs more than one folder/label for all of its messages), I used an acronym I was familiar with. For example  ‘adc-‘.
• I then have my ‘sub’ tags, for example ‘adc-twitter’, ‘adc-general’, ‘adc-contact’.
• For tags that I would reference most often, I started their name with a ‘*’.  Like ‘*sidework’, ‘*webstuff’. You could also do something very similar and attach a filter or search to as well. For example – everything my wife sends me can be tagged ‘*fromwife’.
• Finally, I have a few other labels I use for general client stuff, or auto messages like Twitter direct messages.

After using this naming convention, I then use label colors to help group them by topic as well. For example, while my new website all is tagged ‘xyz-something’, I do subscribe to a list just for that topic. In that case, that list and this website are all tagged green. For another group of my lists dedicated to Mac development, they are each tagged orange. This allows me to easily see if I need to read something on a particular list or group of labels sooner than others. Also, because of how the names of mine line up, the colors group together nicely as well.

Finally, I use filters to tag and process email as soon as it comes in. I created filters with rather simple settings, usually just checking subject names and who the email came from. These filters are all set to just tag the email appropriately, and archive immediately (skipping the inbox). Therefore I don’t have a bunch of random mailing list messages clogging my inbox, and then devote attention to specific topics when I get the time.

With this combo of tags, colors, and filters, I have much less (if any) mail going directly to my inbox. As I start to notice new trends, I create new filters and tags if this mail needs to be handled automatically. This new method has saved me quite a bit of time already, and also makes me much less frustrated when working with so many types of mail.

I’ve been a big fan of this app on my  phone. While its quite difficult to write long posts on the phone, its great for taking a quick picture and uploading it to your blog, as well as jotting down a quick draft of a post I think of while away from the computer.

The new app has some great new features, including:

•  Ability to manage your comments from the phone
• Page editing
• Updated photo upload interface
• Landscape editing

One of the coolest things about the WordPress for iPhone app is that its open source – anyone can contribute to it. As I continue to learn Cocoa development for both the Mac and the iPhone, I plan on contributing to a project like this in my free time to learn more about the system as well as WordPress API usage.

My wife purchased the 40GB model for me as a birthday present. We have ours hooked up to a Samsung 40” TV, set to run at 1080p. The device can’t actually play 1080p content (it tops out at 720p), the menu system can be displayed at 1080p. After using the Boxee Beta quite a bit on our iMac, I thought it would be nice to have a set top box that would allow us to do very similar things in our ‘media room’ (I will be writing about my AppleTV/Boxee experience soon, but for a short answer – don’t do it). I started doing some research about the actual machine. Some of the tech specs of the device are:

• 1.0 GHz Intel processor
• 256MB of RAM
• 40GB or 160GB Hard Drive
• Custom version of Mac OS X 10.4
• HDMI, Component Video Out, Optical Audio Out
• AppleTV Software -Version 2, also called ‘Take 2’, created a new UI/UX, including: iTunes Store integration (including rental and purchases), enhanced iTunes Sync/Stream functionality, A new interface, more resembling a menu-driven design similar to an iPod

The device is set up to sync video podcasts to its local hard drive, but stream everything from my iTunes Library. I have created a few special playlists specifically for the AppleTV, like Party music, Work music, etc. The streaming/syncing capabilities of the Take 2 firmware works flawlessly. The interface is less focused on the source, but your entire library, no matter where this is. The device by default doesn’t segregate content depending on where its located, only on its type (like Video, Audio, etc). I haven’t tested this yet, but in theory, I could host my video content off another library on another computer (like our Windows machine/File Server), host my Music off of our iMac, and see both on the AppleTV.

We have yet to rent or purchase anything from the iTunes store on the AppleTV, but have browsed the listings a few times to see what content is available. You get to see the trailers (in HD if available), details about content, and possible types of content (HD or SD). The interface is different from the iTunes store, but the content is obviously identical.

Podcasting has been one of the most used features (other than music streaming) that we have used on the AppleTV. Your able to browse iTunes vast and growing podcast collection, and stream or subscribe to podcasts that you enjoy. This allows us to store various new content in a ‘DVR-like’ environment, to watch when we get a chance and can’t find anything on TV (which happens more and more these days). For example, I will carry audio podcasts with me on my iPhone, but only video podcasts on the AppleTV.

Overall, the device is nice, but not for everyone. If you have a portable Mac (or any Mac really), you have most of all these features available to you already. The only benefit you get with the AppleTV is a much nicer interface for ‘surfing from your couch’. While the device is limited if you have a small iTunes library, I have already started downloading and storing a lot more content recently to watch on this device. With the continuous degradation of content on standard/cable TV, being able to choose what I want to watch, when I want to watch, is a big benefit. I also enjoy being able to enjoy content developed more for watching on a TV than a computer screen from the comfort of our couch!

Check back soon, as I plan on writing up a review of Boxee on the AppleTV, as well as various other hacks available for the device as well.

Gmail is a near perfect email solution, but I missed having a good way to keep a to do list through my email and various computers and devices. For a few months, I tried using the new To Do feature in Mac OS X 10.5 Mail.app, but this never worked the way I wanted (Mail.app creates a new to do IMAP folder, and creates messages in there with special formatting). While this would work, you would have to write a specially formed email for it to show back up in Mail.app.

Tasks originally started as a  new feature in Gmail Labs. I set it up as soon as I found out about it, and started creating various lists for personal stuff, side work stuff, and even shopping lists for the house. This work flow worked great, and I could keep my tasks up all day at work and home to manage everything. 

Not long after launching (and im sure this was a reaction to customers loving the new product), Google expanded on Tasks by creating a new iGoogle plug-in, as well as an XHTML version easily available through mobile devices, especially the iPhone and Andriod smart phones. 

After trying so many different Tasks list apps on my iPhone, this solved all my problems. I created a bookmark and added it to my home screen on my iPhone. Now, while I’m away from a computer, I can easily check all my lists, and mark things off as I go along. I also use a mobile list to help me manage ideas or takes notes while out. All of this data is immediately available online, and therefore I always have a live copy of my todo list, no matter where I am at. 

If you haven’t tried this yet, I recommend you check it out. While there are some great other products, like Remember The Milk, Google Tasks is free and VERY easy to use (RTM is free as well, but you have to purchase a Pro account to get features like syncing).  While this is a cool new feature, I noticed not that many people picked it up, nor the iPhone and iGoogle update. Also, with Google’s recent expansion into HTML 5 and its offline caching capabilities, I wouldn’t be surprised if tasks gets this same treatment once its rolled out to Gmail and other products.

I have been using Safari 4 for a few days now as my primary browser on both Mac and PC. As with any beta product, I have noticed a few issues (expect a full review soon). I’ve already sent in two bug reports for Sarfari, including odd rendering on Apple.com’s search bar, as well as incorrect handling of page titles (titles don’t refresh if the page updates them, for example, popular webmail applications that display your unread count as the title).

The new version of Safari touts plenty of new features, some that have been available in the nightly builds of WebKit (the rendering engine below Safari as well as the preview version name). This includes some new tools for developers built right into the application. 

Some other new features are: a newer user experiance (Tabs are on top of the window, refresh icon in the address bar like Mobile Safari on the iPhone, etc), a native look for Windows, Developer tools, Coverflow bookmarks and history, and the ‘Top Sites’ feature. 

If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you should try it out (as long as you do not need Safari as your primary browser). As with any beta product, I also wouldn’t trust it with private data or professional work. I assume that the final version of Safari 4 will be made available around the same time as Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), which is expected sometime this spring.

I plan on covering a range of topics here, including reviews, how-tos, programing, tech news, and other misc. items that come up. Look for the first of these (a few reviews) in the coming week!