eugene gordin

Maybe it’s the fact that it’s the last day of 2011, but I find myself looking back on the last year in terms of technology and can’t help but think that it’s been a wild ride. Between Steve Jobs passing away, the release of the iCloud, and starting the Simply Apple podcast, there was definitely no room for boredom.

With that in mind, Mark and I present our last episode of 2011, ending the year on a high note with a jampacked show and our very first interview! We interviewed Nathan Douglas, a DEVONthink power user who helped us understand what the app is all about. I’m not completely sold on it (still in love with Evernote‘s simplicity and device ubiquity) but there’s a lot about this app that interests me after the show.

So check out the episode, and as always, let me know what you think. The best new year’s resolutions are the ones you wouldn’t have thought of yourself.

Happy New Year!

After what seemed like a lifetime (but was actually only 2 weeks), the latest Simply Apple episode is now posted. Mark and I discuss Apple’s attempted Dropbox purchase, the venerable 1password (which I’ve praised before on these pages), and the best time to upgrade your Apple products.

On a personal note, I must admit that I’ve really been enjoying preparing and recording the Simply Apple podcast episodes, and really believe in the podcast as an excellent medium for sharing all of the things I’ve neglected to write about on my site. We have quite a backlog of topics to cover on the podcast, so here’s to hoping that we’ll get through it all in due time. Meanwhile, I have a couple technology posts that I’ve been working on and will hopefully soon publish on this site.

As for Simply Apple, we’re always looking to improve our work, so please use the feedback and tip form on the Simply Apple websiteto let us know what you think so far!

Simply Apple Episode 7: The Legend of Simply Apple
Subscribe on iTunes or everywhere else.

This week Steve Jobs passed away, creating an massive outpour of appreciation and sadness for the loss of a man who’s life work touched us all. On this week’s Simply Apple episode, Mark and I examine why his death affected us so much. We also discuss the new iPhone 4S, and the incredibly useful Dropbox.

We added a feedback and tip form to the Simply Apple website, so please let us know what you think of the podcast so far!

Simply Apple Episode 5: Steve Jobs and Beyond
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The latest Simply Apple episode is jam-packed full of Appletastic goodness – Mark and I cover a wide variety of topics, including several hints in terms of how to try out or beta test new software on your Mac without worrying about stability. As always, thanks for subscribing and please do let me know what you guys think of the show so far!

Simply Apple Episode 4: The Halo Effect
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Just a quick note that a new episode of the Simply Apple podcast is now online! This time we discuss highly useful but little known Mac applications, ejecting hard drives, Android for female consumers, and more!

Find out more on the Simply Apple site or subscribe today on iTunes. Would love to hear what you guys think!

I wanted to let the 2.5 people that still read this site know that I’ve started recording a podcast called Simply Apple, dedicated to all things Apple with the excellent Mark Degen of AppleHits.

Our initial concept was to look at Apple and Apple products from a business perspective (both Mark and I run small businesses which solely run on Apple machines), but we’ve since branched out to discuss just about everything in the Mac and iOS world.

Although we didn’t have a name for our podcast for the first two episodes that we recorded, that’s all changing with this week as we’re revealing our new podcast name: Simply Apple!

To subscribe, add this link to your favorite podcast app or to iTunes. We should be listed on iTunes shortly. On iOS, I love and use an app called Instacast to manage my podcast subscriptions. If you’re on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you can click here to subscribe to Simply Apple.

Below are links to the individual episodes for play in the browser and download.

Episode 1: The MacBook of CEOs
Episode 2: Their Best Chops

Let me know what you guys think!

I’ll say up front that this post is aimed at those looking to do web coding/design on their iPads, which is a non-trivial problem and is solved very well by a great app called Textastic. Here’s my experience with it:

Whenever I travel for longer than a few days, I generally keep an daily online journal of my adventures not only for the friends and family back home but also for my own personal reflection later on. For years I’d have to have my MacBook with me, dragging it from stop to stop and dealing with the fallout of a damaged laptop on the road. Recently however, I’ve been content to travel simply with my iOS devices, first traveling with my iPhone and writing journal entries from there and now with my iPad.

Since the days leading up to my trips are quite hectic, I do very little to prepare my site for another online journal, opting instead to do the backend WordPress theme coding on the road. In order to do it on my iPhone, I used an app called FTPontheGo, which was a pretty clunky and limited solution. On my most recent trip however, a very talented developer named Alexander Blach provided me with a promo code of Textastic, an advanced text editor for the iPad. As someone who has tried to do coding in plaintext on an iPhone, I can personally speak to the merits of Textastic’s highly useful syntax highlighting, which made editing my WordPress PHP a breeze.

In addition to connecting to my site’s FTP server, Textastic also allowed me to connect to Dropbox, which served as an intermediary between the photos on my phone and the iPad. Textastic has a wide variety of different connectivity options and is highly customizable. My only complaint is that the connectivity window is a bit difficult to find at first, but once you’ve found it, everything works without a problem (its the little globe in the bottom left hand corner).

But the best part of Textastic is how well it integrates within iOS – it is so well implemented and so well designed, that it almost looks like a native application, particularly with the paned views and animations. Although I just used the app once I got it, the Textastic manual can be a great resource for learning about all of the features.

So if you need to do some coding on the go, I highly recommend Textastic for iPad.

After a friend emailed me today saying her PayPal account was hacked to launder money, I finally decided to write down my recommendations for password security. This is very important topic, and luckily one that can be addressed in three relatively easy steps.

My friend recalled that I had mentioned 1Password when a similar thing had happened to her in the past, and I still highly recommend 1password, but it is only the third and final step in locking down your online identity.

The first step is to realize that in order to be more secure – ironically you can never be too secure or completely secure – you have a different strong password for each account/website/service that you use. That is absolutely vital because if you only have one (or even a couple) passwords that you use, then when (not if) someone somehow gets that password, you’ve just given away the key to the city. As time goes on, this will become an ever increasing problem online and in general – so the earlier you switch to different passwords for different accounts, the better.

Having a different password for each account can obviously become an evil game of Memory quite quickly, so the second step is to come up with a simple system to generate and then recall your passwords. The ideal system consists of a baseword and a few rules to modify that baseword for any given account. So if your baseword is the Japanese word “masago” – foreign words written with Latin letters increase your security – you can develop rules to modify that word when you need a password for your Google account for example. There are lots of potential rules – see this excellent Lifehacker article with a few good rule examples in it – but the idea is to end up with a rule system that has the following qualities:

1. You can easily generate the password in your head – (without any computers, pens, or papers)
2. Baseword is at least 6 characters
3. The resulting passwords are at least 8 characters
4. The resulting passwords contain letters and numbers
5. You have a rule when sites require passwords with non-alphanumeric characters (spaces, symbols, etc.)

1Password is the third step, because it essentially creates a very very secure database for all of your different passwords (and their respective accounts). Once installed on your Mac (or PC), 1Password can automatically fill in login forms for you, as well as ask you to remember new passwords. There is a whole lot more to 1Password (it can securely store your credit card information for autofilling, secure notes, etc.), but mainly it just makes it much easier to not have to remember all of your passwords. There are even iPhone & Android apps which work great too.

1Password’s name comes from the fact that access to your encrypted 1password database is secured by a single password. This single password shouldn’t adhere to your rules above, because it needs to be much more secure (its literally the key to the city). That’s why I use and recommend a passphrase for 1Password access, such as a short poetic verse, lyric, quote, etc, including capitalization and punctuation – Weezer’s “I’ll bring home the turkey if you bring home the bacon” is a great example (if only for its obscurity).

So there you have it – three steps to a significantly more secure online identity. I recommend them to everyone I can because data breaches can be horrific in terms of the depth, breadth, and duration of consequences, and they are an unfortunate reality of technology today. It is also important to remember that no password system, rule, or application will keep you totally safe, but learning more about online threats and staying careful online will go a long way to improving your security.

Finally, I want to mention that I did not come up with these three steps on my own, but rather they are the result of countless articles about online security and passwords (the venerable Lifehacker has covered these subjects extensively). I have benefited greatly from their wisdom, and I hope that all of you do too.

Today, John Gruber said that “the only people who aren’t using Dropbox are those who haven’t tried it,” and I have to agree. Dropbox is an ingenious application that syncs your files with just about anything or anyone. I’ve been using Dropbox since it was a closed beta, and it has quickly become one of the most useful apps on my Mac. It’s difficult to sum up all of the amazing things that Dropbox does in one short post. Instead, here are my top 3 reasons to use it:

1. Free, Reliable Backup: Dropbox gives you 2GB of space to sync your files to your online account, your iPhone, and any other computer you wish. Change a file on one computer, and the changes are reflected everywhere else.
   
   
2. Simple Sharing: Dropbox lets you easily share entire folders with other Dropbox users, and files with anyone else. Place a file in your public folder, and Dropbox will give you a public link to paste anywhere you like.
   
   
3. Painless Revision Control: Dropbox keeps old versions of the files in your Dropbox folder for up to 30 days. Open a file in your Dropbox and save it. Each time you change it and save it, Dropbox will store a the old copy for you, just in case you want to revert back.

There’s a whole lot more you can do with Dropbox, but those are the three main reasons I swear by it. So go sign up for a Dropbox account today, and if you’d like to get an additional 250MB on top of your free 2GB, use my referral link.

There are very few applications these days that completely change the way I use my Mac, but Cinch is definitely one of them. Cinch lets you resize your application windows to be fullscreen or half-screen, just by dragging a window to the edge of your monitor.

Drag a window to the top of your screen, and it becomes full screen. Drag it to the right hand side of the screen, and it takes up the right half. Very simple, very straightforward. Although it doesn’t work for all applications (including Parallels windows in Coherence), but Cinch does work for most.

The other amazing thing about Cinch is that it’s actually based on a Windows 7 feature called Snap. It’s hard to believe that such a great usability feature would come from such an unusable operating system.

So go download Cinch – it has a free trial but it’ll be $7 well spent.