From the “Finally, something good on TV!” desk…

In case you ever thought that Apple would make a great soap opera, you might just get your wish, kind of. A brief blurb over at MovieWebsays that “CBS ordered a go ahead for the comedy pilot, Genius Bar.” If you that name sounds familiar to you, it should. The show, believe it or not, revolves around the adventures of employees of a store that just happens to be kind of like an Apple Store along with workers from a store that just kind of resembles Abercrombie and Fitch. Ah, suburban mall comedy!

Okay, so it’s not exactly a soap opera, and it’s not about Apple itself, but it’s probably the closest to an Apple show we’ll see on TV. Funky.

For the past two and a half years I’ve been using a Targus laptop backpack to haul my iBook (and later MacBook) and assorted school goodies. It’s gone on trips to Southern California and UC Davis and has come with me to school and work on a daily basis. I had to retire my trusty Targus backpack after the zippers on the laptop and main books compartments failed. Since I no longer have to haul monster-sized textbooks with me, I decided to go with something a bit smaller than my large Targus backback. I take the bus to Berkeley on a daily basis and it’s often crowded; there’s nothing more difficult than moving on an already crowded bus than having a giant bag strapped to your back. Today I took a visit to UC Berkeley’s on-campus computer store (which isn’t a hard thing to do being I work there) and bought myself a small STM Sphere backpack.

In case you haven’t heard of it, STM is an Austriallian company specializing in cases and bags for laptops and iPods. Their products tend to be Apple- and Mac-friendly; their Rebound and Glove sleeves come in Mac-specific sizes and STM advertises the Sphere as MacBook compatible. I already owned an STM Glove sleeve for my MacBook, which is part of the reason why I opted for an STM backpack as well.

A good place to start is the overall appearance of the bag. The small Sphere comes in two variations, chrcoal+light gray (various shades…
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In the beginning… well, I’ll stay away from that mess of evolution vs. intelligent design. Let’s start back when the Internet began. So there Al Gore was; supposedly he invented this thing called the Internet. Then some other college kid got bored and decided “Hey! I’m going to delete crucial code from a program until it crashes my computer!” Thus, the first virus was born. Ever since then, more and more Windows users have been placing viruses on the Internet, and every person with a PC is running around like a chicken with its head cut off in fear. Then came the good guys; yes, anti-virus software. Until one day a company named Symantec made Norton. Then the good became the bad. Norton turned the tide for PC users… until after it was installed on their computer. At that point they wondered, “Do I have a virus or is my computer just gooey?” Unbeknownst to them, their computer was infected, infected by the disinfector. Norton anti-virus sucks, and the world despises it. Why is it around? Because Compaq bundles it with their PCs. Geek Squad at Best Buy hands it out to old ladies who can’t even get their monitors on, and Al Gore used it to make his slide show of idiocy (look, I apologize for the Gore jokes. From now on, I’ll only make fun of the French.) With the history laid, here are the top twenty reasons why the world despises Norton.

20. Having to type in your…
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Over at Apple Matters there is an article proclaiming that The Operating System Is Dead. It’s not the first and it is by no means the last, but like all articles of the type it is very narrow minded and essentially just bollocks. I’ve been meaning to write this article for a long time and pretty much the gist of it is that web apps are a nice concept but a bad idea. Let me explain....

Web apps are incredibly powerful things. You can access your data from anywhere, using any computer. All you need is a web browser and an internet connection. This however brings you two problems. First off, if you don’t have an internet connection then you are screwed. Secondly, you have to use a web browser. Not only do different web browsers display the same page differently, but if you say, accidentally closed a window, you have lost all your work. Everything is done through the web browser. This is why I think that web apps on their own are just a fad and will never reach the level that the hype surrounding them suggests.

Then you get the problems with data transfer. Transferring data around a computer system, from the processor to the ram or the disk is ALWAYS going to be faster than transferring data back and forth over a network connection. As such apps that use a lot of data will never make good web apps. Graphics apps, audio apps, video apps, all of…
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Invoices.  Either you love them or you hate them.  If you’re like most people, you like sending them out (yay, payday!) but you hate receiving them (boo… time to pony up).  Creating invoices has never been particularly tricky; you could use a Word template, or you could use any of the programs listed on MacUpdate or VersionTracker.  Today, you can add Billable, a new application from the Pennsylvania-based software company Clickable Bliss, to the repertoire of Mac invoice software.

Upon first launch, Billable presents you with a handy Starting Points window.  This window contains a brief greeting from the developer and several buttons to get new users oriented and to provide some resources for accomplishing tasks and finding information.  Specifically, you can watch a (well-narrated and informative) QuickTime introduction to the program, set up your company’s profile, add/edit/delete clients for your company, view the primary screen, or link directly to the Clickable Bliss discussion forum.  This window stays open until you close it (or quit, of course).

The company profile automatically fills in the fields based on your personal Address Book card.  You can add a logo for your company that will appear at the top of your correspondence, and you can easily drag any image into this image well or navigate to it with the “Choose...” button.  Unfortunately, for owners of multiple businesses, you can only have one company profile.  You’d have to use different OS X profiles (or swap .plist files) to send bills for multiple companies.

Client editing…
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