• How many times a week do you forget your online banking credentials?
• How often do you find yourself surrounded by scraps of paper covered in scribblings?
• When last did you actually scan and file notes from your last telephone call or minutes of a meeting?
• Ever just wanted to jot down a few words in a safe place as you think of them?
• How do you remember the list of items you need to discuss with Joe when next you meet?

If you’re anything like me, paper just doesn’t work for such moments. If I don’t lose that scrap of paper between the office and home, I’ll almost certainly forget to scan and file it for later retrieval. People like us need “a system”. Here’s mine:

Storage

Everything I write gets stored in one or more text files. You’d typically open such files in TextEdit or Notepad. As of today, my notes directory contains 433 .txt files. This gives me the freedom to open access my notes in any application I choose and the peace-of-mind of not being tied to a single piece of software.

Desktop Writing

This is where the magic happens. What we want in a note-taking application is the ability to quickly and efficiently search for information. I’d like to introduce you to two applications: NotationalVelocity (for Mac) and ResophNotes (for Windows).

NotationalVelocity was developed in 2002 by software developer, Zachary Schneiro to solve his problem of tracking short, unrelated snippets of information. Resoph is a great alternative for Windows users that works in a similar way.

Let’s divide the user interface into three parts, top to bottom:

1. Text field (highlighted in yellow, below),
2. a list of notes sorted by their last modified date, and
3. the text editor.

The Text field has the uncanny (and awesome) ability to both search and create notes. As you type, a full-text, incremental, live search is done across all of your notes. That is, within both the filename and file contents. If you hit Return (or Enter) at any point, you generate a new note with its title set to whatever you just typed. From there, the cursor is automatically moved to the third area – the note editor, and you just start typing your note. It feels incredibly natural.

The list of notes shows every note in your notes directory – along with a preview of their contents and date last modified. As you search, this list will update in realtime to show matching notes.

Notational and Resoph also save automatically as you type, so you’ll never lose a note again.

Syncing

But what use is a folder of notes on one computer? We need to get our notes onto “the cloud” for safe keeping and easy access. Enter SimpleNote.

SimpleNote is an online note-syncing service that automatically syncs with NotationalVelocity and ResophNotes. Simply sign-up for a free account and give Notational or Resoph your username and password. In next to no time, you’ll have access to your notes offline and online.

Going Mobile

And it get’s better: If you have a iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, you can download the SimpleNote iOS app (again, for free) and have access to all of your notes – complete with searching and tagging. This is great for note-taking during meetings, conferences and calls.

So, go and get that set up and let me know how it goes. I’ll post some power-user tips in the coming days.

Links

• Notational Velocity for Mac
• ResophNotes for Windows
• SimpleNote
• SimpleNote for iOS

“Hello, Windows 8? This is iPad. You win.”

That’s Paul Thurott tweeting from //Build/ (yes, the forward slashes are required) where a developer preview for Windows 8 was released this week. You can almost feel the simultaneous relief and collective glee of the Windows community as their mainstream OS becomes cool again.

Apparently the above was actually tweeted in jest:

Made a joke yesterday. Here’s what I really think. iPad, Win8 tablets, and Amazon tablet will all own some part of this market. Obviously.

Interesting choice: iPad, Win8, and Amazon tablets. Notice how only one of those devices actually exists in the market? The Amazon tablet remains a rumour and, while there is no official release date, it seems like Windows 8 is only slated for a September 2012 release. Yes, that’s a year from now. A year.

Microsoft struck gold with DOS, Office and Windows in the late eighties and dominated the consumer technology space in the nineties. By surveying what competitors were releasing and responding rapidly with a commodity solution, they were able to monopolise the industry.

But their game plan hasn’t changed ever since. They’ve applied the same basic strategy to every innovation that has popped up on their radar. Sometimes this has found disastrous results, while in general they’ve just been so late to the game that their imitation is outdated by the time it reaches market.

So let’s consider some innovations (in this case by Apple) and the number of days it took Microsoft to imitate them and bring a product to market:

• 1984 Macintosh (GUI) to Windows 3: 2995 days
• 2001 iPod to Zune: 1848 days
• 2007 iPhone to Windows Phone 7 Series System Series Seven: 1228 days
• 2008 MacBookAir to Windows on Ultrabooks: 1339 days
  (not strictly a Microsoft imitation here - more-so Intel trying to prop up Microsoft’s business in an attempt to ward off ARM)
• 2010 iPad to Windows 8 Tablets (assuming a Sept 2012 release): 882 days

Put simply: Microsoft has accelerated their rate of imitation to meet changing industry demands, and this has become the sole-focus of the corporation. When last did something industry-changing came out of Redmond?

Remember how, until recently, a certain tablet manufacturer literally had people queuing through the night for a chance to buy one? You can bet that’s going to happen again early next year when the third generation device is released.

So, bravo Microsoft on building (sorry, //building/) what seems to be an impressive new entry into the touch OS arena. However, being a year away from having anything comparable to today’s industry champion is just not reason to announce victory.

iLife, iWork, MacBookPro 17-inch, and iTunes is finally DRM-Free!

It was, by all accounts, one of the most anxiously anticipated Apple Keynotes in recent history. Just 24 hours prior, Steve Jobs had finally released a letter to the community detailing the reason for his dreadful weighloss over 2008, and subsequent absense from Macworld.

At 9am PST, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketting, Phil Schiller, took to the stage to deliver the 2009 Macworld keynote-of-death. A visibly nervous Schiller cracked: “Good morning everyone, I can tell you how excited I am to deliver the Macworld 2009 keynote. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you all showing up.” (Laughter) [GDGT]

Apple had come out in mid-December ’08 with a statement that Steve Jobs would, for the first time in over a decade, not be delivering the much-anticipated Macworld “Stevenote”. The announcement also indicated that this would be Apple’s last year at the IDG Macworld Conference & Expo. They would instead be focusing on their own Apple-controlled events and product launches from now on – a dire mistake, in my opinion. But more on that later.

For the first time, I got to enjoy live audio from the keynote thanks to Chris Pirillo’s live feed – complete with the odd Leo Laporte & co. commentary! I also had GizmodoLive, Technologizer, and MacRumorsLive open for the text and visuals. Sadly for MacRumors they were careless and left some passwords available for anyone to see – soon 4chan.org had control of their live stream and hilarity ensued.

Phil had three things (and one last final thing) to talk about, and executed them in a style Sir Steve would surely have approved. Here’s the summary:

iLife ’09

iPhoto:

• Face recognition, searching and tagging (Picassa-style, but much better).
• Export photos to Flickr and Facebook (Goodbye Third-party plugins, hope you enjoyed putting food on the table).
• Places: GPS geotagging and search of photos.
• Slideshows: Uses the Face detection technology to correctly contruct “Smart Slideshows”

iMovie:

• Automatic Image Stablisation of imported video (thank goodness!)
• Brand new Timeline editor for Video and Audio (together or separately).
• Drag and Drop video or audio anywhere on the timeline.
• Video Special Effects

Garage band:

• Teaches you how to play an instrument.
• Comes with video instruction from professional musicians.
• Nine basic lessons included.
• Additional downloads can be purchased from within Garageband for $4.99 each. Clever.

iWork ’09 and iWork.com

All I can say is, goodbye forever Office! I’ve used iWork ’08 exclusively as my office suite for the last six months and have always enjoyed it, barring a few niggles. This year’s update changes all of that.

I’ve installed it and have enjoyed a quick look around the Three apps this evening. I’ll be using it extensively tomorrow and will report on its performance.

Keynote:

• New transitions: “Magic Move” will animate (tween) movements of like objects upon transistion. It works insanely well when you play with it.
• Chart options: Great new charting tools.
• Keynote Remote app for the iPhone and iPod Touch to control Keynote wirelessly.

Pages:

• Full screen editing of documents. Think WriteRoom… kinda.
• Dynamic outlines (finally).
• Mail Merge with data from Numbers
• Integration with MathType and EndNote.
• 40 great new themes.

Numbers:

• 250 new functions (and a great new Function Browser)
• Table Categories

iWork.com

• Online collaboration suite (think Google Docs, Zoho Office)
• I’m in the beta and it seems really interesting. Will be testing tomorrow.
• Built on the SproutCore Javascript library (as is MobileMe’s web interface).

New 17-inch MacBookPro

Featuring the new Unibody case design and a huge 8-hour (non-replacable) battery, the new High-end MBP is the laptop to rule them all. Let’s see what’s in the 0.96inch deep box:

• Three USB ports
• Mini DisplayPort
• Firewire 800
• 320Gb HDD or 250Gb SSD
• nVidia 9400M and 9600M
• Max RAM: 8Gb 1066Mhz DDR3
• Digital audio in/out
• Expresscard slot
• Gigabit Ethernet (finally! Yay!)

There’s also a $50 anti-glare option available for those of us normal human beings who can’t stand the glossy look.

One More iTunes thing

Not so much a thing, but probably the biggest story of all. iTunes is going DRM-Free. As of today, 8 million of the catologue are being freed (and users can upgrade to iTunes Plus for free). The balance of the catologue will be completed in the coming months. In April, the price-plan will change to a three-tier model. Songs will sell DRM-Free for 69cent, 99cents and $1.29 depending on the label.

Conclusion

It was no Macworld keynote 2007. There was no new iPhone, no new iMacs, and perhaps worst of all – no new Mac Mini. It was, however, a solid and interesting keynote. Great hardware is only as good as the software it runs, and the ’09 editions of the Apple apps will take strong advantage of the new NVidia-based notebooks that we rolled out in September ’08.

I suspect that we’ll see a Desktop Mac refresh in April. This Special Apple Event would include lots of news about Snowleopard, a new iMac and (finally) a new MacMini.

[Watch the broadcast at: Apple Events]

Due to the latency on South African DSL connections and the fact that the application is quite chatty, he is installing database servers within company intranets. This tutorial goes through the basics of making this work on a network where there are no static public IP Addresses available.

Decisions

Start with a piece of paper. Draw the network including any cables, routers, computers or switches that you think are important. This will give you a broad understanding of where your server fits into the picture.

The computers on the network will access the server you are setting up via its IP Address. Ask the network administrator for an open address which you can use.

Configure the computer to use this address as a Static IP.

Tutorial: Setting up a Static IP on Windows (Read)
Tutorial: Setting a Static IP on OSX (Read)

MySQL Installation

Start by installing MySQL. If all you want is the database server then head over to the download page on MySQL.com and grab it. If you need a full Apache+MySQL+PHP stack then take a look at WampServer (Windows only) or XAMPP (MacOSX, Windows, Linux, or Solaris). Both packages include very cool GUIs for installing and controlling the server.

MySQL Management

You’ll no doubt want to change the root user password and upload your database scheme to your newly installed server. I personally use Navicat – a great GUI for MySQL which comes in both a paid and free version. Give it the IP address you chose earlier, and the username and password of ‘root’ and blank (nothing, empty string, etc) respectively. In no time at all you’ll be browsing your database.

At this stage, all the other computers on the local network should be able to reach MySQL on the IP address you specified (remember, it serves connections on Port 3306).

Accessing it from the outside

The next step is to make your database accessible from outside of the local network. If you’re a consultant working from home or a different office, you’ll undoubtedly want this sort of access. Similarly, you may want clients to be able to connect in via the internet.

You need to tell your router to accept all incoming mysql traffic and push it to that server. We call this Port Forwarding. We are going to forward all traffic (on mysql port 3306) to our mysql server on our local network (also port 3306).

Follow the instructions on PortForward.com to configure your router.You want to forward all incoming traffic on port 3306 to 10.x.x.x (or 192.x.x.x) on port 3306.

Likewise, if you’ve got an Apache, MySQL, PHP setup on the server, you’ll want to access the website/webapplication by going to a URL from a web browser. The trick is to sign-up for a free DynamicDNS account at www.dyndns.com and add that to your router’s configuration.

I trust this helps! Suggestions and thoughts, please

After a little messing around I located the XML file which describes the podcast’s RSS feed. It was on Leo Laporte’s server at leoville.tv/podcasts/mbw.xml. I opened it in Firefox and noticed that the feed didn’t have the new podcast in it either.

I decided to try and clear my browser cache for the page with a Cmd+Shift+R (something like Ctrl+F5 on Doze) and lo! and behold, iTunes started downloading the new podcast!

So, today’s iTunes Podcasting tip is: “Clear you’re damn Firefox cache!”

I ran into a small problem in that the Command-Line-Interface PHP binary was different to the one running on my Apache+Mysql+PHP stack so the CLI PHP didn’t know which MySQL socket to attach to:

Warning: mysqli_connect(): (HY000/2002): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/mysql/mysql.sock’

The solution is simple. I am using Mac OSX 10.5.4 Leopard and XAMPP.

1. Find out which PHP you are using from the terminal by typing ‘whereis php’. It is no doubt /usr/bin/php.
   
2. Create a php.ini in /etc. Type ‘sudo cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini
3. Then open this new file in something… I did a ‘sudo nano /etc/php.ini’.
4. Edit the mysqli.default_socket parameter (or mysql if you aren’t using the new improved driver) to point to the MySQL socket Apache is using. Mine was at /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/var/mysql/mysql.sock (your’s may be at /tmp/mysql.sock)
5. Be sure to save this new php.ini. Remember, /etc is protected so you won’t be able to save the file unless you have sudo’d yourself admin rights.
   
6. Commenter ferzkopp kindly reminds us that an Apache restart may be neccesary to get this activated. Thanks for the Tip!

Hope this helps!