I find this particular useful as I tend to have many windows open across two screens. With the hover-over preview you can see what is currently being displayed in the window, be it open or minimized. The preview is just large enough that I can hover over Lotus Notes to view my calendar without having to restore the window and take focus away from another application.

One enchancement I would like to see if the ability to preview multiple tabs within a browser. Currently it only shows the forefront tab, but I tend to have 5 or more open at any time.

At any rate, the taskswitching view is quicker than jumping into Exposé to find a window or scrolling through an Alt-Tab list.

Check it out at Dockland Software. Currently on offer for $9.99 through end of Sept’08 before returning to full retail price of $14.99. There’s a 15-day free trial.

Now I’ve got one too. Though, as my wife pointed out, the hair doesn’t recede enough… humph!

Check out Face Your Manga.

For the past few days I’ve been able to try out a number of the new apps and enjoy a whole new lease of life for my iPod touch. There are many great free apps and there appear to be many great paid apps.

My initial impression is that I just don’t have enough time to play with all the apps I’d like to, but that means I can take my time and continue to play with new and updated apps over time. But this will really only cover the free apps. With the average paid app under $5 they are cheap enough. Many are even worth $5, but there in lies the problem. How do I know an app is worth paying for ? The App Store offers no ‘preview’ or trail period, plus I doubt there’ll ever be a refund option. So because of this, I’m going to sit back and wait for others to try and review first.

Current favorite apps…

Apple’s Remote is a first class application and one I’ve been wait for since buying the AppleTV. I have it setup to control AirTunes over two Macbooks and our AppleTV. Am I using it, no, not really but I fully intend to find a way to start doing so.

The Facebook application is much more usable than the web based app and I’m impressed just out on the front line Facebook have been at support the iPhone platform. If you’re a Facebook fanatic, it’s a must have app.

Twitterific. I depend on Twitterific on my Macs every days to serve up Twitter’s ‘too many connections’ errors. I don’t know what my day would be without those! Arghh.. Anyway, Twitterific is a beautiful application and they’ve carried that same experience and more over to the iPhone/touch. I’m not a Twitter power user so have opted for the free version.

Tap Tap Revenge is a lot of fun and I’m finding it slightly addictive. It’s a very simple game that takes advantage of the touch screen and accelerometer. If you like a good beat, you’ll enjoy this game.

Band. If you have a musical streak in you, then you’ll really enjoy this application. If has a very innovative UI and simple to use. You can either just mess around and play with the instruments or go as far as recording tracks. Having just spent 6.5hrs on a flight last night I was able to spend some quality time with Band and found myself striking up little beats and rythms.

What I’m really coming to realise is that I really want to do more with these apps and the iPod touch is only capable of so much because many of the quality apps require seemless internet access and the iPod touch just don’t provide that. I’m not prepared to buy an iPhone because I have a company issues crackberry, but if there was a data service only option I’d bite immediately.

Back in 2006 I first started using .Mac to backup key personal data and OS X settings. It also proved a great tool enabling the auto-configuration of most of your settings and reinstalling data when doing a clean install of Mac OS X. From Panther to Tiger to Leopard, all seamless clean installs.

But today is .Mac’s last day. Tonight Apple will take the service offline and lay it to rest forever. So, .Mac, I thank you and bid you farewell.

Tomorrow is all about Me, no not me, Me, as in Apple’s major revision of .Mac known as MobileMe. It will offer pretty much all the same capabilities as .Mac (minus bookmarking and iCards) but will now also enable real-time seamless syncing of data between devices via ‘the cloud’ without any need to wait for or manually run the sync services.

.Mac MobileMe is essential for keeping my work Mac and personal Mac insync as well as the few instances when I need access to the same data carried on my iPod touch. These days Apple’s online services offer so much more than just data syncing and backup. With services such as Back to my Mac and Gallery (both of which I use extensively), not to mention the new web-based access to iCal, Address Book and iDisk, Apple is offering a suite of tools that are essential to how I run my life and enable me to work and store/accesss data remotely.

And I get a cool @me.com email address, though, I never did use my @mac.com address. Oh well.

Launched yesterday, June 9th 2008, StockTock is a free online resource for new and experienced traders.

This is a new initiative I have been working on for the past month with Craig Simons, an ex-Sapient colleague who is now a full-time equity trader. Together we have partnered to build a blog-based resource to provide the average individual trader with hints, tips, resources and insight into the current and future markets. Over time, StockTock will transform into more of a community based service.

Check out the site and I welcome all and any feedback.

I signed up for Plaxo years back thinking it would be a good central location to store all my contacts in ‘the cloud’. But there’s really no point to it any more. For one, I’m a .Mac subscriber which makes my contacts available across all my Macs, online and iPod.

Plaxo was headed in the social networking direction, but with LinkedIn and Facebook as competition, there really isn’t much point to using a third service. Now with the Comcast acquistion, Plaxo’s control of your data just can’t be trusted, IMO. Comcast is notorious for poor customer service and screwing you on the service you get. I’m dropped Comcast years back and after a short stint with DirecTV, I’m fully in the arms of glorvious fibre thanks to Verizon FiOS for TV and Internet and Vonage for VoIP.

So today I’ve deleted my Plaxo account. You can do the same via the following link:

https://www.plaxo.com/signin?r=/delete_account

Plaxo FAQ page.

I’m hoping to free up my Saturday to attend. If you’re interested, check out http://maccampbos.pbwiki.com/

I have two MacBook Pros. One for work, and one at home. They are pretty much identical in spec. On long flights, such as my regular trips to Seattle or Houston, I’d get 4+ hours out of the MacBook Pro by turning off Wi Fi and dimming the screen right down during the flight. Makes for a very productive journey.

Last October I upgraded to Leopard at home. Shortly afterwards I started to notice the battery draining in just over an hour. I just assumed it was a bad battery, but didn’t rush to do much about it.

A few weeks ago I got approval to upgrade my work MacBook Pro to Leopard - finally ! The next day I’m sitting in an all morning meeting and my battery dies after about an hour. Huh? 2 weeks prior I’d sat on 4 different flights and got hours at time out of the battery.

Starting to put two and two together I hit Google to see what was going on. To my surprise I found a lot of people were having the exact same problem. The situation was pretty much the same:

1. MacBook Pro on Tiger = good battery life
2. Upgrade to Leopard on MacBook Pro = bad battery life

And it wasn’t that Leopard was running that much more and sucking up more battery capacity. What was really the case was that the actual battery capacity had halved. Open up System Profiler, select Power under Hardware and compare the full charge capacity (mAh) to the charge remaining capacity. They should be pretty close, though not exactly the same. On both my MacBook Pros, the charge remaining was less than half the full charge capacity. Not good!

My searches pulled up the following 4 steps which some people report having success with to reset the battery capacity, but on my models of MacBook Pro I didn’t have much luck. I’ll post the steps below for your reference:

1. Reset the SMC (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303319)
2. Restart the computer, login, shutdown the computer
3. Reset PRAM (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238)
4. Restart the computer, login
5. Recalibrating the battery (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86284)

In the end I called Apple Care. They simply asked for my serial number, capacity remaining (mAh) and the number of cycle counts. Next morning I had a brand spanking new battery in my hands and 4 hours of battery life. I informed my IT guy at work and he ordered a replacement immediately.

If in doubt, call Apple Care. Worst case, a new battery is $129. Pricey, but half way through a 6hr flight, you’ll be thankful your battery was fully charged before coming onboard.

Incidentally, my wife’s white MacBook didn’t suffer any battery degradation, so I’m thinking it’s limited to a range of MacBook Pro’s, or batch(es) of batteries.

I’d whittled it down to two reasonably clear channels in the Boston/Cambridge out to metro west areas - 88.5FM and 92.3FM. But, depending on the weather and the quality of the recording, my listening enjoyment fluctuated daily. By last week I’d had enough. 2hrs a day on the road and I want to be able to enjoy what I’m listening too.

I have a 2005 Jetta, the new style. Great car and VW offers an iPod Adapter which can be installed by a dealer. But every review I read pretty much stated it was pure crap.

Finally I found the PA11-VW6 from USA Spec. It works great with all ranges of current and most past iPods and runs off the CD changer port on the back of the car stereo. Installation took around 30mins by an experienced car audio guy for a fraction of the cost a dealer would charge. Best price I got on the device was from Enfig Car Stereo.