Mountain Lion – Adding Value

Lighter, faster, iOSified –  with lots of polish.
Behold OS X Mountain

With my iMac being a 2008 edition, Mac OS X has had 4 OS upgrades over the last 4 years, going from Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion and culminating in this weeks release of Mountain Lion.  Windows in this period of time has had Vista and Windows 7, not withstanding service packs.

In terms of day to day experience, Snow Leopard was certainly the memorable release in terms of speed and ease of use between Leopard and Lion. 2011's Lion, I was always troubled with. Slow to start up and generally less than satisfying as an user experience.  I started to think that future demands of the iMac would no longer be up to the task of future OS X releases, due to the sluggish nature of Lion.  Essentially I've been planning an iMac replacement, sporting an SSD in the next 12 months.   

I also wondered if this was justified, since one should be able to get very good mileage from iMacs. Notwithstanding the SSD, which I believe is essential as time moves on, upgrading to Mountain Lion has revealed that Lion's engineering performance was likely to be the source of the problem as much as hardware specs and expectations on my part. With no metrics or benchmark to hand,  Mountain Lion contains a speed bump which is markedly positive and reverts the iMac performance back to the Snow Leopard days. In addition there are 2 other things which are stand-out of this release for me

Safari – this was surprise. It now has the Chrome-like omnibar and it's damn fast. I mean faster than Chrome. Yes, I said that.  It's also more likely to be more stable and less memory leaky or be the cause of white screen crashes. And that's with Flash still enabled. With Xmarks to keep by bookmarks in tow, Chrome has just been overthrown.  I didn't see that one coming.

Airplay Mirroring – restricted to my 2011 Macbook Air, I can finally stream FoxSocerTV and Hulu to the big screen (I've given up on it ever coming to Boxee).  And I've been pleasantly surprised, the scaling on Airplay mirroring to my Sony flat screen looks nice and is perfectly watchable.  Not HD, but decent quality watchable.  Of course, AirParrot has been around for a number of months and replicates the Airplay mirroring feature for pre 2011 Macs of all sizes.  Using AirParrot, my iMac does take quite a performance hit on the CPU, due to the lack of support in the then ATI graphics chip GPU for encoding and scaling which is of course is now built into the Sandy and Ivy Bridge processors of latest Mac lines. 

Beyond that, I'm ignoring all the other useful features such as Notification Centre, iCloud support, Gatekeeper security and integrated sharing with Twitter for  most OSX updated apps added to all the other iOSification touches. But you can read that across the dozens of other great mainstream reviews like this one at Ars.  

All this for £13 ($20). Now that is what I call added value.

A Jelly Bean surprise

A couple of weeks ago I got a welcome surprise on my unlocked Galaxy Nexus. The over-the-air Jelly Bean (Android 4.1 OS) update had come through. At 144Mb in size, it had already downloaded on the home network and was ready to install.

It was all very straightforward and within 5-10 minutes it had installed and checked through the 100 or so apps installed on the Nexus for optimisation to get up and running.

Jelly Bean add some nice polish
to the Android mobile OS

As I've previously posted, I rather liked the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). In fact, I like it a lot and use it daily. With Jelly Bean, it's not so much about new functionality, it's a smoother and faster experience overall.  The 'Project Butter' set of enhancements have definitely improved the scrolling, sharper imagery, orientation changing and general polish of the device and software. The damn thing just feels nicer and perceptibly quicker — a good example where Chrome is loading pages from links.

The more apps you install, the more you notice the number of updates coming through. A number of them have been Jelly Bean optimisations to resolve minor glitches which you may notice on the odd application.

Wi-fi performance in terms of signal bar strength and consistency is also improved, given a volume of feedback on the Android support forums and my own experience which lead me to set it up on a 5Ghz network.  I now consistently get 50-65Mbps performance around the house. The feature I've yet to explore in any depth is Google Now, but the basic testing voice based searching is accurate and fast. A post on that will follow in due course.

The morale of the story for me, is purchasing a pure Google stock device, not tied to any telco.  How long will Samsung or HTC skinned Android models need to wait before Jelly Bean come to these devices?  If you want to get into Android and not stuck to an old OS, this is the way to go.

I'm looking forward to the new iPhone — as the competition has really caught up and has made innovative strides in areas which are better than iOS (think task manager).

Tweetbot for Mac

Tweetbof for Mac -
the best twitter client available

Today, those great guys at Tapbots released a public alpha for the incredibly popular Tweetbots for Mac. While I've enjoyed using Osfoora and particularly its ability to run separate accounts in different windows, Tweetbot has already bumped it from daily use. Seamless, unified execution across iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Home maintenance

In the last few months, I'd noticed an increasing number of system freezes on my iMac 24 from late 2008. As you will all know, these sorts of things feel generally random and happen at the wrong time when producing or creating something - so they are especially annoying.

The odd one every few months is okay, but in recent weeks web browsing, on-line gaming with Football Championship Manager or editing in iBooks has seen a frequency of freezes get to the stage of being particularly troublesome and worrying. My overall aim for the iMac 24 is to see it through the next 12 months into 2013 (dreams of a retina display iMac + SSD). This summer it will see its fourth OS upgrade in the form of Moutain Lion, and the Mac will probably be a a bit slower again as  result.

Wondering if something was up, it was time to run the key checks on the disk and other subsystems. In terms of quick checks, I did the usual repair permissions with Disk Utility.  But another freeze occurred afterwards,which suggested to me with all the spate of freezes which required power recycling, I'd need to do a directory rebuild using DiskWarrior.   Since doing that, the iMac has felt a bit snappier.

DiskWarrior is an essential utility and well worth the investment

I also took the opportunity to upgrade TechTool Deluxe which came with AppleCare to TechTool Pro 6, which now provides a range of background preventative monitoring tasks as well as range of test across al subsystems across the machine (disk, memory video memory,etc).  It's certainly a comprehenisive tool and again another one worth the considered investment in self-maintenance before calling for the vendor repair option.

TechTool Pro 6 is a worthy tool for a wider range of tests

So far, so good. Beyond, some directory damage to some minor directories, all looks good.  From a browsing standpoint, I decided to disable Flash on Chrome and leave it available on Safari when I do need to watch Flash based content.  It's good to know that HTML5 video has come on leaps and bounds as the preferred video content standard since the advent of iOS and Android devices.

So, time will tell if this has made the difference and if I'm sitting on a major hardware failure. While a disk verification runs in my scripted SuperDuper backup clones of my hard drive on a monthly basis, I think a quarterly directory rebuild in DiskWarrior is the task I'll add to my schedule from now on.

MoneyWiz, the personal finance app I've always wanted?

Yup, I'm a geek enough to like to locally manage my finances across my portfolio.  As a corporate manager responsible for a significant budget for services and daily operations, apps like these are where I've learned the trade of watching and predicting where the precious pennies will end up and taking corrective action before the bank realises something's up ;-)

Going back a number of years, when I was a daily Windows guy, MS Money was the staple of champions (well that and Quicken). It allowed 'my types' to input or import transactions from on-line accounts which supported MS Money, do reconciliations and run reports to see trends and pattens and take action in real life.  They also have basic investment portfolio trackers which were okay for general use.

Since going Mac about six years ago, running MS Money on a virtual machine (vm) was a bit of a pain, for the obvious reasons of having  to open a memory intensive vm to run a personal finance app.  Added to which trying to share the data across Dropbox to another vm on my Macbook just didn't work. In the end, I was forced out of MS Money for the sheer reason of moving the vm and therefore MS Money to Windows 7 and it was no longer on the compatibility list once Microsoft had withdrawn support.

Next up was Jumsoft Money for Mac and iOS.  Importing account transactions from MS Money was a no-no, since it produced some erratic results and essentially did not work. It was a painful evening once I stopped MS Money to get set up everything up (accounts, recent transactions, scheduled transactions, reports) in Jumsoft Money and to get efficient with the user interface and overall experience. It was good, but not great.

Beyond being a native Mac app, the other benefit was for the first time being able to do updates on the move to the iPhone or iPad version and do local wifi sync to the desktop application. You would think I'd be happy, but the syncing would from time to time not work, coupled with the iPad version being removed by Jumsoft and prompting me to upgrade (£) to another version of Jumsoft Money. There was always the issue of being tied to syncing between the iOS device and the physical home machine, which after a while became restricting. A few conversations with support around Dropbox support for multiple Macs leading nowhere lead to a level if distrust with the developers and where they were headed with the roadmap. I've continued to use Jumsoft Money for the last 2 years.

MoneyWiz - made a good start..time will tell..

A couple of months ago, I saw a new app on the block: MoneyWiz. It seemed to get a higher than normal 5 star ratings on the Apps Store and I was intrigued. Most importantly, it featured a separate cloud sync option which all iOS and Mac instances talked to. I could have my cake and finally eat it for a personal finance program.

Importing data from Jumsoft Money was relatively straightforward and at more than 90% success, imported cleanly into MoneyWiz. There are some categories which need removal of duplicates due to the number of account imports I did, but on the whole, I was up and running almost immediately. First time sync to their cloud (which is based on email & password set up) takes a bit time, dependent on the number of transactions to process, but it does work. I often wonder  what sort of infrastructure and hosting is in their cloud, but on the whole it works and if the cloud is not there, I'm able to work locally anyway.

The interface is well designed and intuitive to follow. Not too many shortcoming, although I'd like to know more on the cloud sync particularly from a security perspective (is the transmission over SSL, is the cloud storage encrypted, etc).  I'm using it side by side with Jumsoft Money, having not decided to make the clean break yet. Time will tell.

If you want to get a closer look at the features of MoneyWiz, MacStories ran a useful post a a while back.  I certainly think it's worth a closer look.

Getting Things Done – Using OmniFocus

Being an advocate of the Getting Things Done GTD approach to work by Dave Allen, smartphones, tablets and PCs are great ways to use tools to keep on top of what I do on a daily basis.

At work and using the your corporate desktop image based on Windows 7, this is primarily achieved by using ToDo functionality in my mail client calendar.  The key to managing stuff is in terms of:

• Capturing and updating on items of works as you get through the day in new to dos
• Having a simple level of prioritisation, which should involve:
• Spending greatest time on items which add real value and deliver things
• Ensuring you're on top of the items which can bite you (pissing off wrong influencers/decision makers)
• Disciplining yourself to a habit of evaluating the list of GTDs at the end of each day

For me and not saying I adhere to every aspect to the GTD methodology, it work well enough, given the limitations of tools. From an outside of work perspective, I get to put this into practice with the tools I want to use. As I use a phone, tablet and PC - the key value differentiator is finding the piece of software which allows me to use across all devices and allow cloud syncing wherever I am.

Now in answering the question of what tools in the personal life space, I have a number of scenarios to cater for:

• Quickly capturing something and pin a target date on it. (A simple description and date). In this space, I use Due for iOS and Mac
• Capturing a more fully formed ToDo which is part of a aspect of my life and a theme important to me (say blogging, learning or doing something creative)
• Grabbing notes and thoughts just to dump them and have a place of record which I can go back to use. Of course, Evernote is the stand out app and extends also to Android.  I use this approach a lot at Seminars and Conferences
• Anything I capture on the web to go back to read and possibly use in the future. Instapaper is still king for me. It recently became available on Android.

OmniFocus for iPad - my daily staple

For a number of months now, I've been using OmniFocus across the iPhone, iPad and Mac for the fully formed ToDo stuff. Of all the solutions out there, OmniFocus ticks all the boxes in terms of how I wanted to work and with a reputed solution which others had tried and tested. It's the most expensive with individually priced apps across both iOS devices as well as the additional cost of an OSX version. But, in terms of value, it's been an excellent companion and hugely reliable to date. David Sparks' recent review at Macworld highlights the good areas as well as its downsides.

What's most interesting in my experience here is how I actually prefer the iOS touch  interface to OSX, which I find clunky, cumbersome and visually unappealing. In fact, most captures and updates are done on the wonderful iPad version, which as you would know, forms the mainstay of my daily experience outside of the office. The only downside, is that it's not on Android, and neither does it look like it ever will be.

The other solution I had invested in is Things for iPhone, iPad and Mac. At the time of writing, the cloud sync version is still in Beta (I have the wifi sync version at the moment), which I'll post about as soon as its out of beta.  The UI on Things is deceptively simple across all platform and it had been a design award winner at WWDC a few years ago. That said, not much has been added in terms of functionality and the cloud sync version seems to have been in development for what feels like forever. Not a good sign.


Finally....yes, I know, I could use one software solution for most of my needs. But I'm a geek and where's the fun in that?