Following my review of Adium's new ability to use Facebook Chat, I started thinking more about my idea that everything was starting to come together. I realized that something like Adium could play a key role in accomplishing this.

This morning, I looked once more through Adium's supported services list. For those of you who haven't seen it, it is quite long and includes virtually every semi-mainstream to mainstream services out there. To the right is a screen shot to prove my point.

One feature of Adium that I absolutely couldn't live without is combined contacts. Put simply, you can combine two 'buddies' into one contact. For example, I have a few (read: dozens) friends that have an AIM account or two and maybe an MSN or YIM account, then there are some more tech-inclined ones that have accounts with services below that first line. Having each of these separate accounts listed separately would wreak havoc on my screen, so I group all of a person's screen names under their actual name (which also helps me keep track of who somesn9845 is).

Of course, adding Facebook Chat threw in a couple hundred new screen names into the list, and I dutifully combined each of those into my friends' main listing. I then decided to go ahead and add MySpace IM to the mix, throwing in another couple hundred listings, which I then combined again.

My thoughts then moved onto Adium's potential as an all-in-one communications hub. Since I've already connected it to two of my social network and all of my instant message accounts, I thought about how little needed to be done for it to connect to everything else. Even if the functionality is not built into the main application, Adium has a very nice plugin architecture that would allow these connections to be made.

Here is a list of a few things that I think would enhance Adium, or another similar application, and help it become more of a communications hub.

• Adding Twitter support that will show their latest tweet as their status


• Adding FriendFeed support that will show the latest three items in some way


• Adding links to a person's social network profiles in a contextual menu


• Adding the ability to send an email via a contextual menu link

Of course there are probably tons of over things that could be added, and my ideas may not have the best implementation, but that kind of functionality would be great.

One last note is that while I focus on Adium here, it's not just this application that should have this functionality. Applications on both Windows and Linux are also needed to help bridge this gap in communication and bring everything together, and other Mac applications are welcome as well. I only focus on Adium because it's what I already use and I hope that it can help lead the way in becoming a communications hub for the future of the internet.

It has been circulating for a few weeks that Adium was adding Facebook Chat to their already bursting list of supported services. Just today, version 1.3 was released, finalizing the feature. Adding Facebook Chat to Adium is a huge step in communication because it is the first (that I know of) successful attempt of getting the feature out of the browser.

Playing With It

My good friend Allison Sheridan helped me out with my first venture in testing out the new feature. We started in AIM, where I asked her if she would help me out, which she kindly did. She then went into the web interface while I logged in via Adium. In her contact list I appeared as away, which is a little odd, but owell. She was able to start a conversation with me successfully and up popped a new chat window in Adium. At first her screen name was just a bunch of numbers (her profile ID on Facebook), but her next bit of text showed her name as she appeared in my contact list as well.

Allison then downloaded the new version of Adium and setup FB chat and started using it with me. She was successfully able to receive messages simultaneously in the web interface and Adium. I then attempted to do the same, to a very different result. First, I had to login to the web interface, which was odd since I was just logged in and browsing not 10 minutes previously. Then once I had logged in, a few things happened in rapid succession. Adium freaked out and disconnected from FB chat, a moment later the web chat disconnected (it showed me the small alert icon in the bottom rather than the chat bar), and then Adium reconnected to FB chat. I didn't think much of it, until I tried to go to another page on Facebook only to find I had been logged out of Facebook entirely. I didn't try and log back into Facebook right then, but an hour or so later I did attempt it, thankfully I did not encounter the same problems the second time around.

Why This Rocks

There are a few reasons that I am so excited about this new feature. The first is that it makes Facebook Chat a heck of a lot more useful. It was nice before, but really unfortunate because it was tied to the browser window, which meant that if you didn't have that window (and in my case, tab) in front of you, you missed any messages that came in. In fact several times people would see me online and try to message me about something semi-important, only to be left out in the cold because I was doing something in another application that was covering Safari, or even better, I was in Safari, but doing something in another tab. But this way, all my messages will pop up just like messages from all my other screen names, and the chat logs will all be in one place.

The second reason is that it is yet another signal that everything we do online is starting to become a little more consolidated and walls are starting to come down, whether willingly or not. I still think that a world were full identity management across platforms and data portability is a few years down the road, but we can make huge strides towards that goal today, and there are people that are working towards that goal.

Recently, a major security vulnerability was discovered in DNS, the system that allows the internet to function using domain names (such as ryanboswell.com or google.com). The vulnerability allows malicious hackers to pretend to be someone they're not, taking phishing schemes to the next level. For example, previously a phishing scheme might send you to paypal.net.directory.com or something similar and pretend to be PayPal and get your account information, but now they can take over a DNS server and even if you really go to paypal.com you could be at a phishing site.

Luckily, software companies have been working on security updates to DNS servers and just now have released the patches and simultaneously releasing the details about how the vulnerability works. While many people will be safe due to updated software, there are undoubtedly thousands of people that are not. To check if you're safe, DoxPara Research has a check that you can use. Unfortunately for me the DNS server I use is behind a firewall and so it cannot check it for me (my ISP is Verizon for the record).

If you get similar results to me or it says that you are unprotected, or you don't want to take any chances, you may want to consider changing your DNS to OpenDNS, at least until you are sure you are safe.

I'm sure everyone has heard by now of the sad saga of the switch from .Mac to MobileMe. Originally Thursday night at 6pm, .Mac would go out and MobileMe would go up by midnight. Then they pushed it back two hours, so it started at 8pm.

Well, it did go out that night at some point. Friday morning I awoke eagerly to test out the new service because if everything had gone as planned, it would all be running fine that morning. Unfortunately it was not to be. Mac.com redirected to the all-too-familiar .Mac maintenance page. Me.com redirected to Apple's MobileMe splash page that has been up since WWDC. No login links, no update notices, nothing.

A few hours later I tried me.com again, still nothing. I tried again, success. I was able to login to the new MobileMe service. My first impression was great, everything looked beautiful, and for the most part it all worked perfectly except for one small problem I had with the contacts. The first few I opened (just to look around and see how it all worked) did so fine, then it started to only load the name and company information. Then nothing at all. I tried to refresh the page, but I was redirected to the MobileMe splash page once more.

So, over the next few hours I tried several times, every once in a while I would get lucky and catch it on a good moment and be able to login. However, I would be redirected out after no more than 10 minutes using the service. So I gave up for the night.

This morning I awoke and thought that they must have all the problems sorted out by now. So a quick trip to me.com took me to a newer page, one that we all find familiar, yet new. It was the MobileMe version of .Mac's old maintenance page (which at this point was still showing upon visits to mac.com).

Another piece of the MobileMe puzzle that has been eluding many is the OS X update to tie all the loose ends that Apple left in the previous update and finally get our machines to stop looking for .Mac and move on to MobileMe. TUAW.com reported that it was available in Software Update (along with many others that bring support to the new iPhone/iTouch software), but I couldn't get it to show up on either of my machines. So sadly I'll have to wait until this is released fully before I can really get into it, and I have a hunch that Apple won't do that until they finish fixing whatever is wrong with MobileMe. Let's just hope that the similarity in the maintenance pages is not foreshadowing of further similarities in service reliability.

Apple includes a very valuable, but often overlooked application in OS X, Software Update. They keep this application to themselves and only push Apple branded application updates through it. While it may be true that we could all get along without it, since Apple allows most (if not all) of the updates released through it to be downloaded as disk images and manually installed. But the simplicity of just pressing a few buttons, agreeing to software licenses, and letting it run is enough to have anyone prefer it to manually installing updates.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, Apple only pushes updates to their own software through it, meaning that end users are left to find out about updates to 3rd party software on their own. Yes, there have been great strides in software development to where there are a few 3rd party applications that will mimic Software Update's functionality with a number of other apps. Unfortunately you usually need to launch this application regularly for it to be of any use. Sparkle is a nice framework bundled with a great many apps today that will automatically download and install updates when they appear, however this also requires the said application to be running.

But what about those applications that you don't run all the time, the ones that you have to update every time you launch it because it's been so long. Or what if you just wanted to bundle all of your application update tasks into one application? Software Update is perfect for that. If Apple would just open up the software update application to 3rd party developers, things would be fantastic. Since Apple already has an impressive software downloads section on their website, they could tie that into Software Update. The application would compare a list of applications on your computer and their versions with the library of applications in their downloads database and the current versions and then prompt you if there was an update to any of them just as it does with Apple's own applications.

I think this would be a godsend to many developers who want to get their user base upgraded to new versions as quickly as possible. It would also not be difficult at all for one of Apple's many developers to spend a day or two implementing this simple functionality to a very important tool.

As you might know, Firefox 3 was released earlier today in a huge celebratory event to get a world record of the most software downloads in a day. I joined in the fun and downloaded a copy for each of my machines and starting playing.

First Impressions Are Vital

In the past I haven't been terribly impressed with Firefox's performance on OS X. Unless I downloaded a specially ported version for my specific system, it couldn't compete with even Camino on OS X in terms of performance and reliability. I've been hearing great things about this release though, and it was good enough to get me to try it one more time.

Once I had downloaded Firefox, I installed it and opened it right away. In less than 40 seconds I had imported all my Safari bookmarks and history and was looking at the Firefox welcome page. Now, admittedly on my iBook it was just over a minute. I dove right into browsing and started moving around. I only stopped once for a brief moment to open up 1Password and install the browser extension. In another 30 seconds I was back to browsing and logging in to various websites.

Speed and Performance

Lately Safari just hasn't been cutting it for me, it been slow and opening more than 3-4 tabs slows it down unbelievably so, which is another reason I was anticipating FF3. This release blows the native Safari out of the water in my opinion, and on my machines. While it's not quite as quick as I've known Safari to be, it definitely gets the job done better.

Interface

The default interface for Firefox is pretty nice, I like it since it seems very Mac-like. However, I took it one step further and installed GrApple Yummy to make it look even more like Safari.

So, after about an hour of playing with it, I'd say that I'm gonna be using Firefox a bit more now since it seems to have proven it's worth against the native Safari and Camino.

[For reference, the two browser windows at the top: in the background Safari, in the foreground Firefox with GrApple Yummy installed.]

If you've followed my posts for any time past the life of this blog, you may know that I tend to re-organize all my email about once every 4-5 months, and I like to post about it. My reasons for doing this are pretty simple, I'm just trying to find the best way to sort and store my email. Eventually I'll get it right, I hope, and I'll stop having to do this, but until then I press onwards.

One Stop Dumping Ground

One of the things that I've always wanted to try was to just dump all my email into one folder after reading and dealing with it. This would save me the trouble of having to manually file away email into different folders. I had started doing this last year and it was working very well. Back then I used POP3 Gmail in Mail.app and MailTags with Smart Folders to achieve the effect I needed of having one dumping ground and yet being able to quickly find groups of messages.

Trouble in Paradise

When I started using IMAP Gmail, I had to stop the one mailbox idea because MailTags didn't quite work right with storing tags on remote messages, and so they only way to 'tag' something was to use Gmail's label system, which unfortunately was turned into folders in IMAP. So I was back to hand filing emails into folders. What made this more annoying was that even to delete messages I had to drag it into the Trash in the IMAP directory since Mail didn't actually delete the message off the server when emptying it's own trash.

Free at Last

When I got my .Mac account last weekend, I setup a single folder in it. I was going to keep that as simple as possible and only use one mailbox. I then got the urge to try and work it out again with Gmail. So I decided that I would stop using Gmail's labels and I deleted all of them in both Gmail accounts I use. I then setup Smart Folders in Mail that effectively replaced those labels.

I still had one more problem, I was still dragging messages myself into the 'All Mail' folders in Gmail and the Archived folder in .Mac. I remembered Mail Act-On that I had used a few years ago to help with sorting messages quickly. I downloaded it and setup three simple rule sets. The first was to archive messages. Below you can see the rule I created for archive my Work messages. I setup nearly identical rules for both my Personal Gmail account and .Mac, the only difference was the 'Account' the message was from and that the messages were moved to each account's respective 'archive' folder. For my purposes, I kept the keyboard shortcut the same, in this case 'a' for archive, that way no matter which account a message was, I only have to use one shortcut and Act-On will apply the relevant rule.

The other two sets were for Trash and Spam. Trash simply moves the selected message(s) to its account's respective Trash folder and Spam moves it to the spam folder. In case you were wondering the keyboard shortcuts are 't' and 'j' respectively.

So that is my email solution for now. Do you have any interesting email archive solutions? Comment below.

After they WWDC 2008 Keynote, I had pretty much made up my mind to get a .Mac/MobileMe account as soon as possible. For years I have put off buying the service because I didn't feel that the reliability (or lack thereof) and features justified the somewhat steep $99/year price tag. With the upcoming MobileMe release, the features problem was solved, and I can only pray that reliability becomes a reality.

So, I went ahead and ordered .Mac from Amazon.com (since it's about $20 cheaper than buying it from Apple) and while I wait for it to be delivered, I setup a 60-day free trial account to get myself started.

Getting Setup

I decided to get started right away for a few reasons. One is that I'm traveling next week and I wanted a nice easy way to get important information synced between my iMac and iBook. Two is that I want to get settled in a little bit before the transition to MobileMe, since I'm sure there will be some issues with migration and all the new users they are likely to get once it launches. The third reason is kinda geeky, but I wanted to be able to grab a mac.com email address before MobileMe arrives and they won't be available. I imagine that in the future, the mac.com addresses will become a novelty of sorts since they won't be available anymore.

When opening my account, I tried to find out if it was possible to migrate an existing AppleID to a .Mac account. Unfortunately this is not possible, so I now have one of each account. I really do implore Apple to institute the ability to merge accounts together because those of us that get .Mac/MobileMe accounts after already having had an AppleID for a few years have a problem of having all of our information stuck in an old account. And frankly it is probably better for Apple to have these accounts merge-able because it may lighten up the load on their servers a little bit and it will provide them a nice history of one person's activity in one account versus being spread over 2 or 3.

Syncing Hell

The first feature that I tried out was syncing. This turned out to be quite a bit of a pain in the posterior. The problem was probably all my fault though, and I'll explain why I think that may be. First, know that I have two machines, and previously the address book and calendars were sort-of being kept in sync with Plaxo (which I have now dumped, more on that in a later post). But after not having that running for about a week and a half, the data on the two machines differentiated quite a bit. Luckily, everything that I wanted was on my iMac, so I had a master copy in one place, rather than having to deal with new things on both machines. When I started the syncing, I began with my iMac, allowing it to upload everything to .Mac. Once that was complete I started up my iBook, and that's where the problems began.

For the next 6 hours, I encountered more than a dozen sync conflict pop ups that let me know that there was conflicting information between the two data sets, and also that in a few cases more than 5% of the data was going to change if the sync went through. I already knew that the iCal data from my iBook was borked up and so I wanted to be able to replace that with what was on my iMac. Unfortunately it kept wanting to overwrite my iMac, so I finally did an iCal backup to save the real data, let it sync, and then restored from the backup. I encountered the same problem with the Address Book data, and used the same solution to remedy the situation.

I then continued to encounter small conflicts between some calendars, and so I wiped the calendars on my iBook clean, let that propagate through to my iMac and then restored from the backup again. That seemed to solve the calendar problems, but then I began having the same issues with the Address Book. So I once again followed the same fix, and it worked.

Unfortunately through all of this, my keychains, bookmarks, and Mail rules were merged and no notification of the changes passed by me, so I was confronted with the changes when all of a sudden passwords weren't working and incoming emails were acting oddly and my bookmarks were all out of order and ones I had long ago deleted returned. I spent the next hour and a half sorting through everything that was synced on my iMac, making the proper adjustments so as to restore everything to the way it was supposed to be. As it stands now, I have been problem free for around 40 minutes and I continue to hope that it stays that way.

Thinking back on the problems I had, it would have been better if I had just cleaned out what was on my iBook and let .Mac fill it all in.

The Future

That is pretty much the extent of my experiences with .Mac as of yet. I'm still keeping my hopes up for the future though, since I haven't encountered any other problems with the service yet.

In the future I do plan on exploring more features of the service, especially once MobileMe launches, and writing up reviews.

So everyone that does not live under a rock now knows that the iPhone 3G is real, .Mac is being replaced with MobileMe, and Snow Leopard will be out in a year and won't have any major new features. Pretty much everything was leaked and 'predicted' more than a week ago, which is unfortunate. I remember when Apple was so secretive that no one had any idea what would be announced. So, here are my thoughts on what was announced.

iPhone

Thinner, Faster, Cheaper. Three great selling points for almost any tech gadget. Coupled with all the ther improvements in the new iPhone, it makes for quite a sell. So much so, that my decision to forego purchasing it is all that much harder.

My reasons are actually fairly simple, and fairly common for a lot of people in my situation. Previously AT&T had iPhone specific plans that included unlimited data, the base plan started at $59.99/month (450 minutes and 200 texts). Now they have gotten rid of these specialized plans in favor of their standard plans for all their other data phones. It is now $30/month for unlimited data and for voice it starts at $39.99/month. That totals out to just under (pennies under) $1680 over two years, plus $199 for the 8GB iPhone itself. With just the data plan it comes down quite a bit to $720 over two years.

As sad as I am to say it, I don't have the kind of money to pay $70/month for a phone, it's just a little bit too much.

MobileMe

Everyone has known for over a year now that .Mac was on it's last legs, whether Apple was going to kill themselves or it was going to drown itself in its misery. Finally Apple took the initiative, pulled out the shotgun, and silenced the poor thing in favor of it's older brother.

MobileMe has very attractive selling points as well. Although in all honesty there isn't a whole lot that changes feature-wise from .Mac to MobileMe. The big ones are push-everything for all platforms (it is biggest for the iPhone/iPod Touch though, since it is the most mobile device(s) they have), and the new web-baesd interface. The disk space boost is another biggie, but not quite as great at the other two.

Apple is indeed laying the ground-work for a fantastic platform that encompasses everything that someone may use technology wise. Every kind of computer you'd need, from ultra-mobile travel to heavy-lifting professional work. Watching video and listening to music/aubiobooks/podcasts/etc... on the road. Mobile phone that is basically a mini-computer itself. The one piece they were missing was what tied it all together. Now they have that too, MobileMe. I won't get into it too much in this post, but the key that makes me confident that Apple will do it right this time is the way they approach it. 'Your desktop everywhere' is one of the things they advertise, and this is really shown through the push everything that will automatically send updates to MobileMe and then to all your devices anytime anything is updated on any device.

Snow Leopard

Ok, so I was partly wrong in my prediction since I was very skeptical that this would be announced. But I was party right because I said that if everything is true, than it makes sense that this release wouldn't take as long to get out, and why the name isn't something brand new (it still has the 'Leopard' part in it). Since there's no big distinguishing feature, Tiger had Spotlight and Leopard has Time Machine, a big distinguishing name isn't needed. Since the changes will be more like what you'd expect in a minor upgrade (like 10.5.4 or something), the name is only a minor change from the current version.

Twitter

One last tidbit about the heroics of the Twitter team. As far as I know (and this is just from gathering around from the lack of news on it since I was away from my computer the whole day) Twitter stayed up almost the whole day. Apart from an apparent 12 minute drop sometime during the day, they were alive the whole time. Of course reading the updates from their status blog, it seemed like it was a hectic day at the office for them, and that they barely managed to scrape through alive by virtue of cutting away any service that was not essential to the core functions when the load got too high.

So hats off to the Twitter team for some fancy maneuvering today.

Just saw this a few minutes ago while checking out Twitter from the web interface. This does not bode well for the future uptime of the platform during the keynote. They've got just over 3 and a half hours until show-time.

As a small sidenote, I refreshed and it worked fine.