The Migration: Switching From iTunes to Songbird

Those of you that follow me on Twitter have been hearing me talk/complain/rejoice about this for a while now – and I’ve finally gotten the time to post about it. Before I even start, I want to say something about why I decided to move away from iTunes. I’ve had a lot of people ask me whether Songbird was really that much better, or whether it was about principle, and I was really just trying to “buck the system” and be different. And, to be honest, it’s a little bit of both.

We all know I love open source software, for many reasons – and I won’t get deep into that now. I was fed up with iTunes for a lot of reasons – those old DRMed tracks (which would not only not work on the Droid I’m hoping to get soon, but are also causing authorization problems in my five-computer family), even more DRMed videos (Apple won’t let me play HD videos on my external monitor because, essentially, it wasn’t made by them), etc. And while these things could be fixed and I could still use iTunes, I was just so ticked about Apple and their bullcrap that I decided to move away. At the same time, though, the app itself was just running slowly – I was getting beachball after beachball after crash and it was starting to get excessive (and if I were on a Windows machine, I’d probably want to kill myself with how badly iTunes runs on those suckers). So like I said, a little bit of functionality mixed with just being fed up with Apple and their annoying, proprietary ways. And, oddly enough, those annoying, proprietary ways made switching all the more difficult, what with their strange methods of handling things like album art and playlists (seriously, what do you have against .m3u, Jobs?) – although now that I’m free, switching to any other media player would be a snap. Hmmm…that should tell you something, Apple.

REGARDLESS, I don’t want to fill this up with iTunes hate. I don’t actually hate it that much – I think Apple has done great things with it and that there’s a reason it’s so popular. It’s incredibly easy to use, and I wouldn’t recommend anything else to most users – unless they were geeks, like me (just like how I wouldn’t recommend Linux to non-geeks). So if you are a geek, especially an open source geek, here’s what you need to know about Songbird nowadays.

At the time of this writing, Songbird just released 1.4.2, which is a pretty big update from 1.2.0 (their last major release – yeah, they decided to skip 1.3 after it was done and just wait until 1.4). In fact, without the 1.4 beta last week, I couldn’t have made the switch – 1.2 still hadn’t incorporated the ability to write AAC metadata – which is a problem if you’re switching from iTunes, and all your bought/ripped songs are in AAC format. But it’s there now, and as long as you’re not going BACK to iTunes it works great (yeah, there are still a lot of bugs – more on that later). Also new for the Windows version are CD ripping and syncing support for non-iPod devices – fantastic for those of us looking to get a different portable media player (although there were already add-ons that worked for many of these devices, this new update should rock our socks). I’m not missing the CD ripping yet, although I hope they get that on the Mac version soon, because I’m sure I’ll want it the next time I buy a CD (though it’s going to be weird for me to start ripping in OGG format). There still isn’t video support, but I don’t consider that a necessity by any means – and there also isn’t podcast support, but with the watch folder feature, all I need to do is set up Juice on my Mac to download into the watch folder and they’ll be automatically copied and imported right into my library.

Which leads me to my first favorite thing about Songbird – they’ve taken most of the great things that iTunes had to offer, such as “keeping the media folder organized” – or, as it’s known in Songbird, managing files. Songbird even steps it up by allowing you to choose how they’re organized – both the folder structure and the file names themselves. If you don’t want to completely re-organize your library, they’ve also made it incredibly easy to use it concurrently with iTunes – you can not only import your iTunes library and keep an eye on it for changes, but you can export changes you make in Songbird to iTunes (although this doesn’t always work, depending on what you’re changing). They really are trying to make this as easy for people as they can, and they get mad props for that.

The other big thing I love about Songbird is that, like Firefox and all other Mozilla stuff, it’s super extensible – and there are some great extensions available. Whether it’s mashTape, which gives you all sorts of info in the sidebar about the artist and song playing, great Last.fm integration, or just some damn good looking skins (among many, many others) – the extensibility is no doubt one of the app’s highlights. Third party extensions abound, and there are even a bunch by the Songbird team that really enhance the experience, like iPod syncing or the ability (on Mac and Windows computers) to play those gosh darn DRMed files from iTunes. The team and the community don’t disappoint in this area. If you do try Songbird, take their recommended add-ons when you first start it up – and then, after that, browse the rest of the add-ons and you’ll be surprised at how much is available.

Lastly, and this is strange to me and certainly won’t be the case for everyone, but despite it’s basically being a Linux port (from the looks of it), I’m getting better performance from this than I was iTunes. Even though this takes up nearly twice the RAM on my system (see above), I’ve gotten barely any beachballs or crashes, where with iTunes I was getting them constantly. And it moves along pretty fast, too. I hear from friends that Songbird doesn’t handle large libraries well, so as the size of your library increases your mileage with Songbird may decrease exponentially to the point where iTunes is clearly the better choice. I don’t know, it’s just something I heard from friends, but this is what I noticed myself and was very happy to see. First time I haven’t cared that an app wasn’t native to OS X.

The bad? Well, apart from the missing features above, it’s still super buggy in places. Check out the release notes and see for yourself – it’s a little ridiculous. However, I wouldn’t let that stop you from at least giving it a try – you might be fine (the only bugs that have gotten me are COMPLETE lack of iPod support – but until I figure it out/they figure it out, I can still just add the files manually to the iPod using iTunes [blech]. I also had a strange bug with album art getting mixed up, but there is an okay solution on that page, and I haven’t seen this in about a week, so maybe it’s gone now). All in all, this is the first release of Songbird that I’ve considered seriously usable – like I said, I couldn’t have made the full switch before 1.4 and been happy, but I have, and I really, really am. I converted all my old DRMed tracks, set up my podcasts in Juice, and moved all my songs over to Songbird to manage – I have completely emancipated myself from iTunes (except for that pesky iPod issue that only I seem to be having), and I couldn’t be happier. I don’t miss iTunes one bit – which is surprising, even to me.

Read this whole thing and wonder why it’s in the how-to category? I planned on talking about the switch itself a bit more, but now that 1.4 is out of beta most of it is pretty self-explanatory, except for the issue of how iTunes handles album art. I found a great solution and posted it over on Lifehacker, so if you’re considering the switch, you’ll have to embed all your album art with that script before you get rid of iTunes. Other than that, it’s fairly self-explanatory. You can either import your iTunes library and use that, or, like me, enable management in Songbird and drag all your music in, creating a whole new library (don’t forget to delete the old iTunes one so you don’t run out of hard drive space). I had to manually recreate all my playlists, but that didn’t take nearly as long as one would think – and really, that was all I had to do besides get rid of my old DRM. And unfortunately, I didn’t use any special method – I searched and searched and searched and didn’t come upon anything easy that just stripped DRM, so I decided what I needed to keep, what I kind of figured I might as well keep, and what I could trash, and I upgraded some tracks to iTunes plus, re-downloaded some albums on BitTorrent, and trashed the rest. Actually, I had to burn about 4 audio CDs of tracks I couldn’t upgrade to iTunes plus and I couldn’t find on BitTorrent (or were singles that just made more sense to burn). That was the longest process, but man do I feel free after all that. So the biggest thing is the album art – get that working, and everything else should work itself out nicely.

P.S. I’ve been working on this article for about a day now, and I JUST got the double meaning of the title “The Migration”. It’s funny, because it’s SongBIRD, and migration is something BIRDS do…ha…ha…seriously, that wasn’t intentional, but I’m going to pretend like it was to make myself feel more clever.

Blog Overhaul

Woah, where’d all my posts go? And where’d all these new ones come from? I’m scared…

That’s right, Eaten by Some Linux has gotten an overhaul. All the news-y type stuff is gone; that was for a class – well, this blog was for a class – but now I’ve imported my old blog, Seriously Tech, into this one because WordPress is far superior to Blogger. You’ll notice the old posts kind of look like crap – I noticed, and I’m probably not changing it. The import function worked pretty well, but the fonts are small and the pictures are small and honestly, I don’t feel like going through and fixing it. I don’t even know how, and it would take a long ass time. Half that crap is obsolete anyways – you’ll notice on many I’ve posted updates that say so, don’t get used to it – I only did it because I was going through them all adding tags. But that’s ALL I’m going to do (well, maybe I’ll go update the linkbacks too, since I’ll probably delete the old Blogger blog pretty soon here).

EDIT: It looks like the small font is actually just on the blog home page on old posts – permalinks have normal sized fonts for post bodies at least. The pictures are still small though. Whatever.

Anyways, you can find more info about the blog’s newfound purpose on the revamped About Me page, as well as listening to me rant for another minute or so. The old ideas of Seriously Tech still stand – but I’ll probably be widening everything a little bit. This will probably turn into a bit more of a personal blog, so while the reviews, how-tos, and other such things will still be a regular phenomenon ’round these parts, you’ll probably get random commentary/updates/whatever from me. Anything that prompts me to open up my big mouth larger than can be contained in physical space. I will be updating much less frequently, though, because again, that was for a class – and I’m moving to the type of stuff that you can’t really write about that often, since it’s pretty niche. For more frequent software tomfoolery, you can always read my posts over at Lifehacker. Yeah, I pulled that shameless plug. What did you expect?

Anyways, enjoy the revamp. I know I will (except for that damn title that can’t have capital letters – maybe it’ll force me to get used to that type of crap, but maybe not).

This Post is More of a Train of Thought

Whew. It has been a long week. I’ve actually been busy for the first time in my life, and I’m not sure how to handle it, so I haven’t posted since the beginning of the week. I’ve got a new gig at Lifehacker (yeah – that Lifehacker) has kind of taken a hold of my life at the moment. But it’s all good, because…I mean…it’s freaking Lifehacker.

So, that was my shameless plug.

Anyways, I’ve been trying to decide what to write about today. There was a recent piece on AppleInsider about Microsoft’s retail stores – an interesting conundrum they have; definitely worth checking out if you have the time.

I decided not to write about it, but it did get me thinking about Apple’s customer service, which is incredible (mostly – read on), and so I decided maybe I’d write about my strange experience I recently had there. Then I realized this whole Snow Leopard bug was a pretty big deal and that maybe I should write about that. Then I realized that the two are, in fact, related – and can provide very good advice to the average computer consumer.

/rant

So, earlier in the week, some reports surfaced of Snow Leopard eating files. There is a guest account on all Apple computers, that, upon logout, deletes its home folder. Which makes sense, because, you know, you don’t want to keep guests’ files on your computer. However, in Snow Leopard, it appeared that there was a bug where, upon logging out of the guest account, OS X deleted a few too many files – including the home folder of the actual owner.

THAT, my friend, is a bummer.

Now, look, it may be because I am biased toward OS X (I know, my Apple-related biases are confusing – love OS X, hate the iPhone, Steve Jobs, and the rest of the company in general, really), but I’m not about to start hating on Apple for this. I mean, yeah, it is a pretty serious bug, but bugs happen – especially in new software. Leo Laporte was right when he said if you don’t have to upgrade to SL yet, then wait. It’s always a good idea.

More than that though (and here’s my transition), is that you should always back up your data. Do you hear me? ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA. It’s not just for geeks anymore. Not only do Macs come with Time Machine, one of the greatest backup utilities of all time, but hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper – they are a seriously good investment, in my opinion, for any computer user. Even moreso if you have important files (say, financial stuff) on your computer. So seriously. Go buy one of these drives and DO IT (no, I don’t work for Seagate, those just come really highly recommended. Also, I love USB bus-powered drives).

What? You need more convincing? Okay. On to the real story.

Recently, my mom’s MacBook Pro stopped booting properly. It would get to the white screen and the Apple logo, but then just sit there – for about a half an hour. If it ever did get past that stage, it would show the dock but never load the desktop or anything else. Basically, it turned on, but was completely unusable. And also really freakin’ hot.

So naturally, I took it into the Apple store. Because they have some of the greatest customer service ever, right? But this trip was interesting.

They couldn’t get the computer to boot. Not from it’s own drive, or any of their external drives that they have for just such an emergency (that’s not the interesting part, keep reading). The genius told me that the hard drive was probably failing, and that I could get it replaced for free as it was still under warranty and all that. No problem, right?

Except all my mom’s data was still on that drive.

And Mr. genius said that data was not recoverable since he couldn’t boot it from their external drives. There were options for me, but they cost a whole lot of money, a whole lot of time, and something called a “clean room” where people wear crazy white suits and stuff. No thank you.

First of all, I’ll say again: THIS IS WHY YOU BACK UP.

Second, and more important to the story: After all this crap at the genius bar, I took my mom’s computer home, put in a Linux live CD, and booted it up in about 3 minutes.

So, um, why would I have to pay $800 and wait more than a week to get my data from creepy spacemen? It took me $0 and a half hour.

Is it because Apple only wants to use their software at the genius bar, and if it doesn’t boot into OS X, tough noogies?

THAT is obnoxious.

After all this, I called the Apple store and talked to a representative there. She said as far as data recovery goes, sometimes there are other options, depending on the level of knowledge of a genius. Some geniuses are a little bit more experienced with certain things, and that she has seen geniuses do crazy things to get data back for customers, just because it was part of their own personal knowledge and they wanted to help. But none of that is part of genius training or anything like that – the only thing they are trained to do is try their external drives loaded with OS X. Nothing else.

Uh, why the f*** not?

I’m not being a computer snob here. Booting off of a Linux live CD is probably about the easiest thing ever, especially on a Mac. In fact, I know that geniuses know how to boot a CD, since they have to know how to boot the OS X install disc to “repair disk permissions” all the time (which is the biggest piece of bull**** that company has ever spread, there’s never anything wrong with your disk permissions). So why isn’t there a 5 minute segment in genius training where they go, hey, here’s how to use Ubuntu, it looks like every other operating system ever. If a customer needs data recovered, this live CD will boot in most cases where hard drives won’t, and you can just drag and drop the files onto an external drive.

Seriously, you just boot it from CD (something they are trained to do), and then drag and drop (something I really hope they know how to do if they are a genius at the Apple store). I could teach my grandma to do this. No, seriously. And she’s a real grandma, not, like, a geeky grandma or anything. Just the regular type.

The fact that without having me for a son, my mom would have either lost all of her data (which includes pictures from the past few years, videos of my sister in her horseback riding competitions, etc. etc.), or had to pay a ridiculous amount of money and wait forever to get it back is UNACCEPTABLE. I can’t even explain how furious this makes me, that Apple, known for their incredible customer service, has just so completely and utterly failed in this area. I know that technically, Apple is not responsible for your data, and blah blah blah. YOU are responsible for your data (seriously, have I told you to back up lately?). But the fact that this situation (and many like it) could have been easily avoided if Apple had fit one simple thing into their protocol is not okay.

I really hope someone is listening. Pass this along, people. I’m no journalist; I don’t have the kind of exposure someone at TUAW or Gizmodo would. But I feel like this is absolutely ridiculous, and needs to be heard.

From You, The Readers: Unlocked iPhone on T-Mobile Worth It?

Recently, I was asked a question in the comments that would have taken me a lot of time to answer – in fact, I’m not sure if there are limits on how long comments can be, but if there are, my answer would surely surpass it. SO, since more than one person has asked me a question in the comments before, I will be starting to answer some of these in posts – you guys go ahead and keep ask any tech-related question in the comments of any post you want and I’ll go ahead and give a verbose answer in a new post. Sound good? Good. On to the iPhone. Julien asks:

silly question for you whitson, but what is your opinion on jailbroken iphones? i’m still debating after having my first ipod touch for just 3 weeks of just going ahead and slapping down the too much cash so i can have one on t-mobile

Ha. This may have seemed silly to you when you asked it, but you’re about to get a much more detailed answer than you expected.

To start, I’ll admit that the iPhone really isn’t that crappy of a phone – it really does have some great things going for it. It’s got good guts – fast processor, good RAM, and a fantastic camera for a phone. The sensitivity and intuivieness of the touch screen is superior to that of ever other touch screen phone on the market today (seriously). And the App Store, while it’s my biggest beef with Apple, also is one of their biggest strengths. The competition it has created has led to the development of some amazing apps – Facebook’s newest iteration of their app, Tweetie (seriously the best Twitter client on the face of the universe), NetNewsWire and Pro RSS – the list goes on. Now, to be fair, that’s not really because of Apple, in fact they they just hinder the App Store from being even better. The reason so many amazing 3rd party apps exist is because of the competition created by the iPhone’s massive market share, so Apple really doesn’t deserve credit. The App Store rejection/acceptance process is still convoluted, closed, and downright ridiculous and offensive to me as a geek and a consumer. But that’s just me. If you’re not a geek or a Google whore like me, you may have no problem with the App Store’s business practices, and thus one of the biggest flaws is not a problem.

That said, a lot of the iPhone’s other flaws belong to none other than AT&T, such as crappy crappy service. And, were you to jailbreak and unlock (two different processes, the latter requiring the former to be done first) your iPhone and use it on T-Mobile, you might bypass a lot of those issues. BUT, I would warn you – it is a scary process. I would be wary of attempting this, not because you couldn’t succeed, but unlocking is dangerous territory – if you mess up badly enough, you could brick your phone (render it unusable). So you need to decide if the benefits outweigh the risks.

Now, that’s me trying to be objective. You asked for my opinion, so I’ll give it to you. If you really want that iPhone badly, consider it, but I won’t stop you if you think that you want to plop down the cash and take the risks. It’s okay, I won’t berate you at all ;-) BUT, before you do so, I’d consider the other options. If you’re on T-Mobile, you have access to some of the greatest smartphones on the market today – Google Android, as of right this second (but not as of two months from now) is exclusive to T-Mobile (aaaaaand there’s the Google bias coming through). The MyTouch is supposed to be a pretty great phone. The G1 is supposed to be mediocre, if I am right. And Motorola’s newest Google phone, the CLIQ (which I think should be out on the 11th of November) actually looks pretty sweet – especially if you’re really into social networks like Facebook and Twitter (look up MotoBlur on line and see what I mean). And if you’re willing to switch to Verizon, the Droid might prove to be one of the greatest smartphones in existence upon it’s release in November.

Of course, no matter what you do, no phone will have apps as good as the iPhone, even with MotoBlur’s social networking features – BUT, seeing as you have an iPod Touch, you can pretty much get the best of both worlds. I, too, have an iPod Touch, and I plan on getting a Google phone and getting all the perks of that, and using its mediocre Facebook and Twitter apps on 3G, while enjoying the iPod’s gloriously powerful apps when I’m near wifi. And, of course, no phone beats the iPod as a music player, so there’s also that.

So my suggestion? Before you go venturing to riskily hack a sometimes-good device, look a bit closer to home. Head on over to a T-Mobile store and check out their selection of Google Android phones (and, if you’re not already against them, Blackberries). If you find something you like, you still have the iPod Touch and I don’t think you’ll miss the iPhone all that much. BUT, if you are unsatisfied with T-Mobile’s offerings, getting an iPhone and unlocking it isn’t a horrible idea – you may be very happy with that set-up. I know I’ve just given you essentially a homework assignment (actually two, if you count reading this ridiculously long post as one), but you’ll be much happier in the end knowing what is out there. Good luck!

P.S. One final note – if you are a Mac user, and you want the iPhone because of it’s seamless integration with the Mac as far as Mail, Contacts and Calendars go, don’t let that stop you from getting a Google phone. Snow Leopard’s release has seen the vast improvement of Mac-to-Google syncing ability – both Address Book and iCal on the Mac sync really well with Google now, so all you need to do is turn it on and you’ll have everything synced wirelessly to your Google phone. :-)

Verizon and Google: A Love Story

I had to keep this one for posterity. Not quite in the vein of most of this blog, but I’m branching out. So here’s Verizon and Google: A Love Story.

Once upon a time, there was a wireless carrier named Verizon and something that can only be described as an internet overlord named Google.

.

Google had just been through a rough divorce, but was already on the mend and out on the town, looking for some action.

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Verizon, long having the reputation of being self-centered and a giant pain in the ass (albeit the nation’s most reliable pain in the ass), met Google, and immediately decided to change it’s selfish ways, proving it’s love by showering the world with Android devices that totally work with Google Voice and aren’t all closed off and stuff.

.

The iPhone was lonely.

(I love happy endings).

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I may be biased in my extreme excitement about this because I have turned down the possibility of an iPhone, and really want an Android, but this really is meaningful to the world. Not only will Verizon have some not-completely-sucky phones, but they are totally on board with the whole “open” platform thing, including Google Voice. Which for Verizon is quite a shock – they usually mess with all their phones so you get the worst experience ever. They’ve done a complete 180, and the world should be excited – because Verizon just became the best wireless carrier, hands down.

MobileMe Review

I started using the two-month MobileMe trial about two weeks ago, and I’ve already made my decision: hell no.

What a waste of $99 this would have been.

Let’s go through each separate aspect of MobileMe and show why it was a completely half-assed attempt at a useful service.

Yes, I know the picture was obvious and not clever at all. But it’s how I feel, okay?

Mail

Oh, Where to begin. First of all, the fact that one would pay $99 a year for an e-mail address is just silly. Do you really think you’re going to pay $99 a year for the rest of your life? One day, you’ll realize that you want to stop wasting your money and then you’ll be stuck changing your e-mail address – again. And all your friends will hate you (thus, if you don’t listen to a word I say today and still want MobileMe, at least route Gmail through it).

The biggest failure (and it is a BIG one) of MobileMe mail is the lack of server-side filters. If you want to use filters in your mail at all, you have to do it in Mail.app. Which seems fine, but then when you go to me.com to view your mail, your incoming mail won’t be sorted (until you log in to Mail.app next). Even more offensive about this is that you’ll have the same problem on the iPhone. MobileMe was made for the iPhone. This is pathetic – a service (have I mentioned it’s $99 a year?) that was made for syncing your data leaves all filtering data on your local machine. You don’t even have the ability to make local filters on the iPhone. Wow.

Lastly, as I mentioned in my earlier post about MobileMe and Google, one of the coolest parts about MobileMe is that it is push. Well, not 5 minutes before I started writing this post (lucky I waited a few days to sit down and do this), Google made Gmail push on mobile devices, including the iPhone (using Exchange – I’ll go into more detail about this later). So the one good thing it had going is now gone. Fail fail fail.

Do you really need more than that?

Contacts & iCal

Okay, these parts actually work pretty well. However, now that Address Book and iCal have superb syncing with Google (whereas in Leopard it was just okay), there is once again no reason to pay $99 for this service. And Exchange will put it on your iPhone (seriously, read on).

iDisk

Oh God. I don’t even know where to start. Look, 20 GB of free space in the cloud is nice and all, but the method in which you upload stuff is ridiculous, especially if you are trying to use it as a backup of your documents and stuff. Either you make a local iDisk on your computer (and store all your documents there instead of in your local Documents folder), or you constantly upload your stuff to iDisk, which sucks even worse. iDisk should be a Dropbox-like service, but it’s not even a pale imitation. It’s just cloud space with no useful program behind it. Not only that, but I’ve had more problems with it than I care to solve. Just recently it started telling me it only has 3GB (out of 19) free, even though I’ve only uploaded 700MB worth of documents. The engineers at Apple are literally trying to figure out what’s wrong with it right now. No thank you.

What to use instead of MobileMe

Do you even have to ask? Google!

Since Snow Leopard came out, Apple’s syncing services with Google are fantastic. Contacts syncing syncs two ways, and includes pictures and everything. Just turn it on and your Gmail contacts will be identical to your Mac’s Address Book. iCal is similar, although you need to start with a Google Calendar and then sync that with iCal (it’s easy, just export your iCal calendars, import them into GCal, then start syncing). For Gmail, just use Exchange which has Google support (and PUSH GMAIL!!!). Your iPhone is just as simple – add a Mail account, choose Exchange, and type in your Google information (the server is m.google.com). Mail, Calendars and Contacts will be synced over-the-air. Congratulations, you now have a free version of MobileMe that also doesn’t suck.

Seriously, don’t use MobileMe. Ever. Take the two-month trial and try to argue against me. You can’t. Because MobileMe is the most half-assed service Apple has ever created (and trust me, there are a few – iPhone, anyone?), and it has been since it’s inception (remember all the launch problems it had? Yeah). Save yourself the $99 (times however many years you would waste on it).

A Desktop Google Voice Set-Up for Mac

Putting the GV Interface in a Menu Bar Icon with PUSH Growl Notifications

There’s been a lot of talk out there about Google Voice set-ups that aren’t web-based (damn you, Google, for alienating us native desktop app lovers!), but I was far from satisfied with them. I don’t want it in my dock, and I want the Growl notifications to be pushed to my computer. Otherwise my phone will just vibrate before my computer knows I have an SMS message; it’s just annoying. So I thought I’d share my set-up. It’s not perfect, but it’s not too shabby either (also, I should note right now, you need MobileMe or some other form of push e-mail linked to Growl to make this work – if IDLE is working for you in Mail.app [it's been flaky for me in the past], that should work too. If you haven’t already paid for MobileMe, don’t). Here’s how to set it up.

First of all, for those wondering, I did go the Fluid route. For those of you that don’t know, Fluid is an app that makes SSBs (site-specific browsers), which means it displays a web site as a separate app on your computer. This is very useful for all things Google – for example, if you love Google Reader more than all desktop apps, you could make a Google Reader “app” that shows an icon in your dock, and when clicked on, displays your Google Reader (generally with the navigation bar and all other “browser crap” hidden). Fluid can make a dock app OR an app controlled by the menu bar – which is what I did – in the picture above, you just click on the phone icon and your Google Voice Inbox drops down. It’s quite nice. But that’s not the best part – the part I really wanted was push Growl notifications for SMS and voicemail.

The popular solutions out there involve installing some sort of Google Voice-to-Growl plugin to the SSB, or something of the sort. Not only do you need Firefox for this to work (as far as I can tell), but your notifications are still “fetched” and don’t even have the message – they just say “1 unread message from Google Voice.” Very recently, though, Google released a feature that lets you forward all SMS messages to your e-mail! Thus, instead of having a Growl plug-in for the SSB, I just have all my SMS and Voicemails forwarded to my e-mail address – for which I have Growl notifications, obviously. This way, SMS messages are immediately “Growled” upon being sent. Nice!

Those are the basics. I had to make a few tweaks to really get it to work the way I wanted. For example, I really don’t want my e-mail inundated with SMS messages and voicemails from Google. So, in Mail.app, I just set up a rule that took all messages from Google Voice (From contains: txt.voice.google.com) and did two things to them: moved them to a folder, and then deleted them. Anything else and I wouldn’t get a notification – I think the app just didn’t have enough time to recognize the incoming message. That is, while it’s being moved, the Growl notification has time to register and pop up, but then once it has, Mail.app has moved on to deleting the message. If you just have it delete the message, you won’t get Growled. That’s just the way it works. What’s nice about this is you can put it in any folder you want (I have a separate folder for Twitter messages, so I just threw it in there), because it’s just going to get deleted a second after you receive it. Not bad at all.

The other caveat is that each person’s SMS is sent from a slightly different e-mail address from Google – which means that if you want the GV icon in your notification (as shown above), you’ll have to manually add each person that texts you into your address book. Otherwise you’ll just get the generic Mail.app icon in your notification. This isn’t too bad, as I only text, like, 5 people, and once you find out what their address is, you can put it in Address Book. I contemplated adding the e-mails to each person’s vcard, but that would have been really ugly to look at scrolling through my Address book – so I opted to just have one REALLY ugly card (called Google Voice and with the picture being the GV icon) in lieu of having people’s Address Book pictures show up in the notifications. Besides, it’s gotten to the point that Growl integrates with so much stuff on my computer that when a person’s face shows up in a notification, I can’t tell whether it’s an email from them, an IM, a facebook post…so I don’t mind that it’s just the GV icon. It says who it’s from in the title anyways.

So that’s that. This may seem very simple and pretty dumb to some, but it took me a while to come up with this, and sadly it’s the only real “push” option I have at the moment, so I thought I’d make a quick post. Hope this helps somebody.

UPDATE: This is pretty much obsolete. There are lots of other better ways to handle Google Voice on your Mac…a quick Google search of Lifehacker reveals a couple (Yeah, okay, I wrote like half of them), and there’s also GVXMPP, which is what I’m currently using (with Adium). It’s pretty convenient.

Getting MobileMe to work with Gmail and Google Apps

I’ll admit, I’m a little behind the bandwagon with the whole MobileMe thing. But I signed up today and I am super excited about it – storage in the cloud, push mail, not having to dock my iPod and wait a year and a half for it to “back up” just because I want to keep my contacts and calendars up to date…it’s like the world is my oyster. Almost.

The thing is, I still really like Google. I love having my custom iGoogle page with my mail and calendar on it, I love using Google Voice (especially on my jailbroken iPod Touch), and my mom and grandma will be mad if I tell them I changed my e-mail address again. Plus, even though I plan on using MobileMe for the long haul, it is a pay service – which means that one day, if I want to stop using it, it’s nice to have Gmail to fall back on (with all my stuff archived). Sadly, though, Apple and Google aren’t exactly besties – so their services don’t exactly work together easily. It takes a little elbow grease to keep everything synced in two clouds (?), but I’m here to tell you how. Now, everyone is different, so for each section I’ll describe what I wanted the relationship to be and how to do that, and from that it shouldn’t be hard for you to tweak whatever you want to fit your needs. The basic idea behind mine was to keep everything synced with Google, without The G interfering with my MobileMe stuff. So, with that in mind, let’s see what we can do.

MobileMe and Gmail

For the reasons outlined above, I don’t want to get rid of Gmail. Unfortunately, Apple really pushes the @me.com address with MobileMe – it’s pretty much what the service revolves around – plus it’s push! So, I set up all of my e-mail to route through my Gmail account. That is, everyone still sends mail to my Gmail account, but I get it in my MobileMe mailbox. And when I send mail from my MobileMe mailbox, it goes through Gmail’s servers and arrives at it’s destination looking like it came from my Gmail address. This way, I can use my MobileMe mailbox to it’s potential, but still have everything archived in Gmail and no one has to learn my new address. Plus @gmail.com is WAYYY cooler than @me.com…No, seriously…Alright, let’s do this.

Note: The only downside here is that mail you delete in MobileMe will not be deleted in Gmail. For me this was not a problem since I hardly ever delete anything anyways, and besides, we’re really using Gmail as an archiving tool anyways so it doesn’t really matter.

The first thing you need to do is copy all your existing messages over to your MobileMe account. Because of Gmail’s weird threading system, and labels, and all their ridiculous stuff, we’ll do most of this in Apple’s Mail program (hereafter referred to as Mail.app). For the purpose of this article, I’m going to assume that you already have Gmail IMAP set up in Mail.app. If you don’t, go ahead and add it in and let it download all your messages. You need Gmail IMAP in Mail.app for this whole thing to work. Copying the messages over is pretty easy, it just takes a while depending on how much stuff you have (I never delete anything, so I have a few thousand messages). Just go to your Gmail inbox, select all, right click and hit Copy To > MobileMe. It will copy all your messages over to your MobileMe Inbox. Repeat this process for your folders, Sent Mail, Drafts, and whatever else you have mail in (obviously, if you want to create equivalent folders in the MobileMe account, do that first). At this point you can set up any filters you want for the MobileMe account as well, to make sure that your e-mail continues to act the way it did before.

Next we’re going to head into web Gmail. Go to settings and then Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Set up forwarding to your MobileMe account, and choose what you want to do with the mail after it’s forwarded. I don’t like to archive things, I like to keep them in the inbox (after all, if I archived it, it wouldn’t show up in my Gmail gadget in iGoogle), so I kept them in the inbox. At this point, I also created a filter to mark all incoming e-mail as read, since I won’t be reading it in this inbox. The (sneaky) way I did this was to create a filter in which all e-mails not containing a certain improbable string of text were marked as read. “asdfaejbcaioufnhasiucxx,” to be exact. All e-mails not containing “asdfaejbcaioufnhasiucxx” were to be marked as read. Yeah, that’ll probably cover everything.

Now that we have the receiving of e-mail down, it’s time to work out the sending. In Mail.app, go to Preferences > Accounts and go to your Gmail account. Under Advanced, uncheck the box that says “enable” (that is, if you don’t want Gmail to show up in Mail.app anymore. Which I don’t imagine you do because your MobileMe is going to be essentially a clone of it. But the account still has to “exist” in Mail.app for this to work; this just hides it). Then edit your MobileMe account, and under Account Information, use smtp.gmail.com as the outgoing server. Now, all your outgoing mail from your MobileMe account will use Gmail’s servers, which means your e-mails will show up from your @gmail.com address and a copy will be archived in your Gmail’s sent folder. Also, the recepients will automatically reply to your gmail address and it will be routed back through. Pretty wild, huh?

So that’s mail. You should have, essentially, push Gmail now. An important note, though: You can’t send mail from MobileMe’s web interface and have it show up from your Gmail account; it will always show up from @me.com. In this case, you would have to send it from Gmail’s web interface (which you should really do anyways, it’s just better) and somehow copy the message over to MobileMe if you wanted to (rather than re-enabling Gmail in Mail.app, it might be faster to just BC your @me.com account and drag it into your sent folder later on. It’s not a perfect solution, but I hardly ever use anything but IMAP so it’s not a problem for me).

If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you’ll want to set it up the same way. It’s pretty easy, just dock it and sync it with your computer, and your MobileMe account will be on your iPhone. Under Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > MobileMe > Account Info, you can set the outgoing server to smtp.gmail.com here to. Then go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Gmail and slide the Account button to “off” to hide Gmail. Now you’re set! (This is also where you turn on push for Contacts, Calendars, and the like, in addition to the Find My iPhone feature).

iCal and Google Calendar

There are a few ways you can go about this. None of them are perfect, but they’re pretty good. If you’re using CalDAV to sync iCal and Google Calendar, you have two options for syncing it to your iPhone – CalDAV and Exchange. Exchange is better, but you can’t have more than one Exchange account on your iPhone – so if your work or school uses Exchange, then you have to go the CalDAV route, which is a pain in the ass. Exchange is easy, just set up an Exchange account in Mail, using m.google.com as the server – you’ll be able to choose to sync contacts and/or calendars (UPDATE: you can do Mail now, too, but in this situation I don’t think you’d want to because you’re using MobileMe). Pick calendars and you’re good – your Google Calendar will show up in iCal. This is the only way to get it working on all 3 systems – iTunes will not sync Google Calendar delegates, you have to put them in your iPhone yourself.

In order to do CalDAV, you have to add an account under Mail, Contacts and Calendars, but this time choose CalDAV. You’ll have to add each calendar separately, and copy and paste the long-ass URLs (the best way to do this is email each one to yourself from your computer and then copy and paste it on the iPhone) of each calendar into each account. Have fun with that.

There is one other way, but your calendar will be read-only on GCal (it will be read/write on your Mac, your iPhone, and me.com). Instead of syncing your Google Calendar to iCal, you will sync your local calendars in iCal to Google – this is pretty easy, you just go to each calendar in iCal, right click on it and click “Publish.” The first option is MobileMe. Choose your preferences, click publish, and it will give you the public URL of your calendar. Then you just go into Google Calendar and subscribe to that calendar (in the “Other Calendars” box on the left, click the “Add” button on the bottom and use “Add by URL”). That’s it! Again, it’s read-only, but if you aren’t going to be editing it on Google (say, if you just wanted your calendar displayed on your iGoogle page), this is more than fine.

Address Book and Google Contacts

So, in Leopard, this feature was introduced to Address Book but didn’t work very well (or maybe it was because I didn’t have MobileMe). Either way, as I have it, running Snow Leopard and with MobileMe syncing on, I can also sync to Google Contacts very easily. In Address Book, just go to Preferences > Accounts and check the box that says “Synchronize with Google.” That’s it! It’ll ask you to agree to some junk and input your information, and from now on it will also sync your Address Book to Google. Simple as that.

So there you go. This may seem dumb to some, but for those of us that love and use Apple and The Google, it’s nice to have these (roundabout) options available. Now all my stuff is still Googlified, but I get all the perks of MobileMe! And until Google buys Apple (in it’s no doubt last move to take over the world), this is probably the best set-up we’re going to get. So until that day (and boy, will that be a day), enjoy!

UPDATE: I’ve decided, after a few weeks of using MobileMe, that it’s the dumbest thing on the planet. Check out my review here.

Mac Browsers: Safari vs Firefox vs Camino

I know what you’re thinking: “yawn…it’s been done before.” And you’re mostly right. But most of the comparisons on the net now focus on just Safari and Firefox, and the few that include other browsers are either outdated, or their forum threads, or something else less informative. So I did one myself. This post’ll either be a huge success (like my post on rEFIt icons) or a huge flop, but I don’t care, I haven’t posted anything since the Linux Box epic. It might be more successful with more browsers, but I’m trying to stay with at least the top 3 here. And I’d include Chrome, but it’s still pretty far off. I mean, didn’t it just get Flash support, like, a week ago? So Chrome will be sitting this one out. And I could talk about Opera and OmniWeb, but honestly, I’ve never used them, and their glory days seem to have passed. So three it is.

Disclaimer: This post isn’t about which browser is the “best.” If you’re anything like me, you switch your main browser every six months, and each time it’s for a different reason. I merely mean to make a comparison of features between the three for you to decide what your browser of the month will be.

Safari

A lot of people use Safari just because it’s Apple, and it came with the computer and provides that integration that we all love Apple for. And they’re not all wrong – Safari does integrate perfectly with OS X, the keychain, Mail, etc. Especially if you use Safari/Mail’s built-in RSS, which is actually pretty nice. And this is one thing that some other browsers (I’m looking at YOU, Firefox) are really missing. Not only does Firefox’s RSS system kind of suck, but it doesn’t even work with OS X’s keychain – a big turnoff for some people. So that’s one of the best things Safari has to offer.

The other big “pro” of Safari (and the other reason so many people use it) is that the WebKit engine is FAST – really fast. Safari is by far the fastest browser out for the Mac, there’s just no disputing it (at least as far as page rendering goes). The app itself as of late has been a bit laggy for me, especially after long periods of use but that very well just may be me (it also may be the WebKit nightly builds, which I’ll get to in the last section this post). I don’t think I really need to say anything else about it – speed is king for a lot of people, and if that is you, you might as well stop reading now. This is the browser for you.

Safari is not without it’s cons, however. A big one (for me, at least) is it’s not very pretty to look at. Firefox has it’s cosmetic issues too (read on for my solution), but Safari is just bland to me. The bookmarks bar especially is just blah. And favicon support is pretty bad, making the bookmark menus almost as bad. Maybe that seems small, but it matters to me. And, while Safari 4 has added lots of new features (autocomplete in the address bar similar to Firefox’s, Top Sites, etc.), it’s still missing a lot of things some power users want (or it has them, but implements them poorly). Session saving and adblocking pop to mind (Note: I understand the need for adblocking on some sites, but I personally don’t support it’s constant use – that’s how websites make money, and one day you’ll miss all the free information because too many people blocked ads to). And, as OS X continues evolve, addons for Safari become more and more difficult to use (what’s with the hating on InputManagers, Apple?), which makes these shortcomings more difficult to bypass. So, if you’re willing to sacrifice a bit of speed for some more functionality, read on.

Firefox

Slower than Safari but customizable as all hell, Firefox has become a favorite among many techies, including those using Macs. As far as cosmetics go, it does look a little out of place compared to other Mac apps, and it’s not fully cocoa, but it has come a long way in the recent past – to the point where it’s really usable on the Mac.

We all know what the draw with Firefox is – addons. Addons really make Firefox whatever browser you want it to be. I’m not going to get into too much detail about the best addons and such, because there so many – that could be a post or two on it’s own – but the thing that’s really great about them is that a lot of Firefox’s shortcomings (my personal favorites are the really crappy history menus and horrible RSS implementation) can be solved by addons (in these cases, History Submenus and Google Reader Watcher, respectively).

I know that’s broad, but that’s what Firefox is: a million opportunities to make the browser you want. However, there are a few real cons that are difficult to work around. Like I already mentioned, it doesn’t integrate fantastically with OS X. It doesn’t work with the keychain (though it does have it’s own built-in keychain-like feature). It can’t share RSS with Mail and the rest of OS X like Safari can. You can’t sync your bookmarks with your iPhone or iPod Touch (not Firefox’s fault, that’s Apple’s, but it’s worth mentioning since it is a pain in the ass if you have an Apple mobile device). It could be worse, but it could be a lot better.

And then of course, there’s the speed. Not only is the program a bit heavier than Safari, but the Gecko engine just isn’t nearly as fast as WebKit, plain and simple. If you want unlimited customization, this is the browser for you. If all you care about is benchmarks, then why did you read this far? I already told you to go Safari. Wait, you wish there were a happy medium between the two? You want a native Mac app that’s lightweight, pretty (with customizable looks) and functional? Well, then keep reading! Camino to the rescue.

Camino

Now, I’ll come out and say it, Camino is my personal favorite (at least at the moment – I go back and forth between it and Safari). But don’t let that lead to distrust here, I admit that it’s far from perfect. There are a lot of things I don’t like about it, but like the others, they’re things that come with the territory.

But first, the pros. It’s pretty, with it’s much more aqua-like interface. It’s lightweight. It’s got a few addons, and it comes with some really nice features you don’t get in Safari (session saving, built-in really awesome ad-and-flash-blocking). And, it’s got a little bit of COLOR. Favicon support sucks in a different way than Safari’s (it has a very inefficient cache), but at least you get to see some nice icons in your bookmarks bar. And speaking of icons, half of the addons are icon sets for the browser (you’re right, the default IS ugly – problem solved!). You can make the buttons look like Safari, or you can go another direction altogether, just like in Firefox. It doesn’t have the super functional addons like Firefox does, but it does have some nice small things (including those iconsets) over at PimpMyCamino.com. It’s Mac native and integrates with OS X pretty well, such as the keychain and applescripts. It is Mozilla, meaning it uses Gecko instead of WebKit, but due to its light weight, it’s still faster than Firefox, which is nice (again, though, WebKit rules all).

One note about Camino’s addons: it does not have an addon manager like Firefox. All of the addons are a bit more manual in nature (replacing files in the package itself, etc.), but if you’re reading this blog then you can probably handle it. I just wanted you to know what you’d be getting into.

The one thing that sucks about Camino is that, as a more low-profile browser, it’s a bit behind in development compared to the other two. It has a much smaller team, and thus just isn’t up on the latest stuff as the other two – new features tend to come out a bit slower. For example, It uses a slightly older version of the Gecko engine, and thus can’t use greasemonkey scripts and stuff as well as Firefox (in fact, the only way to use them at all [and only some work] is with the Geekmonkey addon). Things like this are a little annoying, so if you want to be on the cutting edge, this isn’t the browser to go with. Similarly, some things, like RSS, just aren’t there at all. But if you’re the type that uses something like Google Reader or NetNewsWire (both of which I highly recommend) you probably won’t care. The development power just isn’t there for all this stuff, because Camino’s just not Mozilla’s priority. For me personally, though, it’s the perfect option for something in between Firefox and Safari, and for that reason, it is my current main browser.

Speed up all three of these browsers

Now, no matter which of the three you use, I have discovered a really nice way to improve the browser you’re using: optimized/nightly builds. In the case of WebKit, this means heading over to WebKit.org and downloading the latest nightly build of the WebKit engine. It’s essentially another copy of Safari on your Mac, using all of your existing Safari preferences and everything (without getting rid of your existing app), but with the latest build of the WebKit engine. It’s a little less stable, but it is screaming fast.

For Firefox and Camino, the speed boosting solution I recommend is a bit different. A lot of developers do custom builds of browsers, optimized for Intel Macs and the like, and often these can be pretty awesome. I personally am a huge fan of Chris Latko’s builds (hit up the Downloads page). His Firefox builds (codenamed Shiretoko for the current version) do give a really nice speed increase to the program, although some of your addons may not work with it, so don’t delete Firefox until you check (although turning off compatibility checking should solve this problem). His builds of Camino won’t break anything, and, according to him, don’t look on paper like they’re any faster, but both he and I do see a slightly noticeable difference. You don’t really have anything to lose by getting it, so why not? At any rate, these are some options if you’ve really got the need for a lighting-quick browsing experience.

So I hope this has helped someone make their decision for the month, or at least killed 15 minutes of boring time for you. This isn’t really comprehensive; that would take a long time. I’ve tried to be as brief as possible, and break down the main differences between the three.

UPDATE: Chrome is now pretty stable and mostly completed on Mac, and it pretty much blows everything else out of the water. So…use Chrome. Seriously. Unbelievable.