Admittedly I've taken a very slow approach to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. This is probably the longest it's taken me to fully adopt any Mac OS in history. I cautiously installed it on two of my Macs. I installed it on my personal MacBook Air (2010 model) and my iTunes iMac Media Server. These are probably my two least mission critical Macs. The main reason for my hesitation is because everything I do works perfectly in 10.6.7 (I've had a few issues with 10.6.8). The second reason is that I haven't seen anything in Lion feature-wise that would make me want to take the plunge and deal with potential problems on my work/production Macs. Sure there are a few nice enhancements like the new Mail interface, being able to resize a window from any side (about time), AirDrop, and some of the new gestures are cool. However, none of those features are must haves for me. Also with each cool new thing I could name I could also name a change in the New OS that annoys me. I have no doubt that over time I'll eventually migrate the majority of my Macs over to Lion, but for now I have no immediate plans to do so.

Taking Lion on the Road at the Last Minute!

Last week I headed to Adobe Photoshop World in Vegas. This was also after coming off a 6 week sabbatical. It was my first week back to work. Knowing that we were going to be announcing Adobe Carousel at this show I decided to get my Mac, iPhone and iPad ready to show this new product/service. Little did I realize at the time that the Mac client required Lion! I now had a decision to make. My choices were to install Lion on my work MacBook Pro, Take my MacBook Air (which I had never demo'd on before) or simply not be prepared to show Carousel. I figured the easiest option would be to get the MacBook Air (MBA) ready for not only my Carousel demo, but the rest of the demos and classes I was teaching. I checked first to make sure that my MBA could boot off the same OS that my MacBook Pro (MBP) was running. Luckily it could boot off 10.6.4 or higher. Next I used SuperDuper! to clone my MBP's (10.6.7) drive onto the portable external drive I travel with. This way, worse case scenario I'd be able to boot off that drive if I forgot to set something up on the Lion drive. I copied my demo files onto the MBA's hard drive in a new Demo User Account that I setup and I headed out the door. 

Each night before the next day of classes I tested everything that I planned to show in class to make sure it worked and it did. I never had to boot off my external. I'm glad I brought it though because there were a few things that I had forgotten to copy off of it. Everything worked fine in Lion. No problems with Photoshop CS5, InDesign CS 5.5, Illustrator CS5, Lightroom 3.5 RC & of course Adobe Carousel.

What annoyed me most

There were three things in Lion that I had to change. Although I really don't have a problem with the "natural scrolling", I end up turning it off because I spend more time on Snow Leopard than I do on Lion. Going back and forth between the two operating systems is a lot easier when they both scroll the same way.

The second thing that annoyed me was that every time I'd launch an App it would also re-open the last document I was working on. While that may be a feature for most, it was a problem for me. If I want the document I was working on to be opened, I know how to find it and open it.

Lastly I really don't like the Lion feature that shows all your recent files (All My Files) in the Finder sidebar. Luckily you can Command-Drag to drag it off the bar (or right click on it to remove it). 

The forth thing that annoyed me that i don't seem to know how to restore or if it's even possible is that in Lion it doesn't show you the number of files or how much available space you have at the bottom of the Finder window! Why would they take this away?

UPDATE: This problem is also solved by choosing View-Show Status Bar (Thanks Brad!)

One thing I forgot to bring. I'm so used to being on WiFi or having Ethernet built-in that it wasn't until Friday when I had a presentation in the Adobe booth and I needed to connect to the ethernet network at the demo station. That's when I realized that I didn't bring my USB-to-Ethernet adapter. We worked around it by setting up another MacBook Pro and using Internet Sharing over WiFi. Lesson learned! I'll make sure I always have this little adapter. 

The Bottom Line

Once I tweaked a few preferences in Lion I had no problem using it the entire week. Also battery life seemed noticeably better on the plane rides. I landed in Vegas with a 54% charge! While everything worked fine, I still didn't see any real advantages either. It felt like I was losing more than I was gaining. For that reason I'll take my time going to Lion. What I did learn from this past week is that my MacBook Air is going to be going on more trips with me even if I need to demo as long as I'm not going to be demoing a ton of Creative Suite apps simultaneously (since it only has 4GB of RAM). I'm also now drooling more than ever over the 2011 model with the Core i7 processor. If it had more than 4GB of RAM I'd upgrade in a heartbeat. 

It is not uncommon these days for people to have two or more Macs. The most common scenario is a desktop Mac and a portable Mac. Perhaps it's a Mac at work and a Mac at home. Up until recently my situation was a little different. I've had several Macs over the years and have usually had two or more Macs in my home, but in my case the Macs were used for specific purposes. My "main" Mac is a MacBook Pro and has been since the MacBook Pro was introduced. I have a Mac Mini that is my OS X Server. I have a dedicated iMac as an iTunes/media server. I have a Mac Pro that is my video editing Mac. In the past I used my "main" Mac as "my computer" and the others were used for doing certain projects or jobs. So I never really had email setup on my Mac Pro. Nor did I use the iMac for word processing or spreadsheet work, etc. I also really didn't use it to surf the web. It (the Mac Pro) was for Video editing of large projects. 

The tale of Two MacBooks

While I love the power and speed of my MacBook Pro, I've always been envious of the MacBook Air. It offered the promise of a really lightweight computer that I could use for just about everything except the heavy lifting of my day job, which is demoing high in Adobe Creative Suite products. The MacBook Air traditionally just didn't have enough memory, storage, CPU power, graphics power, etc. to be my "main" computer. Yet there are certainly times I could use this computer for day to day web, email, iTunes, blogging, and just about anything else short of a full blown Creative Suite 5 demo. Sure, the MacBook Air can run the Creative Suite 5 Apps, but it's the lack of RAM (4GB Max) that makes it challenging to have multiple large applications open at once. Also the Core 2 Duo processor is a litle under powered for this task on a regular basis. While I would love to use my iPad 2 for this "second computer", it's just not there yet in terms of the Apps I would need and if I add a physical keyboard for typing long docs/blog posts (like this one), then I might as well have an Air. Yep, I just sat there admiring the MacBook Air from a distance. Well that was up until recently. 

I started justifying a MacBook Air purchase for my "personal" use. I figured that it would be great for travel when I'm just going to a meeting. It would be great around the house when I don't need the most power, but need more than what an iPad can do. It would just be great to have one. See, I just justified it to myself. That wasn't hard at all. I want one! The other problem and probably the thing that has kept me from doing this sooner was not wanting to have to manage files between TWO "main" computers. I didn't want to be frustrated by not having the file I needed because it was on the computer I didn't have with me. This is when I started looking at today's solutions to this problem and I realized that this is very doable now with what's out there today! Here's how I solved this problem and it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be:

Email, Calendars, Web Bookmarks, Contacts, Widgets, System Prefs, Dock icons

Of course I want access to all of my most commonly used data on either computer at any time. Luckily all of my email accounts are IMAP based (as opposed to POP3 based) and therefore email isn't an issue between my computers or mobile devices because it's in the cloud (on a server). If I read, delete or file mail on one computer it is marked read, filed or deleted off all computers/devices. For calendars, Dashboard Widgets, System Prefs, Transmit FTP favorites, System Prefs and contacts I use MobileMe to sync them between devices. It also handles Safari bookmarks, but I use Google's Chrome as my default browser. As luck would have it, Chrome supports syncing of bookmarks wirelessly and automatically between computers too. I also manage my RSS feeds with Google and therefore I can view them on any device and as I read them they are marked read on all devices.

iTunes

Music was sort of an issue since iTunes doesn't offer true "syncing" between computers. Luckily I was able to solve this with SuperSync and sync the playlists I wanted from my iMac iTunes server to both MacBooks. The only thing that I don't have in both places is iOS Apps. You have to sync them to one computer at a time and I use my MacBook Pro for this. Since iOS devices can update their Apps on the devices themselves as needed, this hasn't been a problem.

Applications

I knew that Applications wouldn't be a real issue as I would just install the ones I needed on the MacBook Air. Since most software companies allow you two installs per licence, this hasn't been a problem. It's also cool that Apps downloaded/purchased from the Mac App Store can easily be installed on both Macs directly from the Mac App Store app. Also since I don't really do a lot of App installing it was really a one time thing and I haven't looked back.

Documents & Photos

Now it's time to take a look at the biggest problem of having two or more Macs and that is "Dude, where are my documents?" Each Mac and each user account on each Mac has it's own Documents folder. Mac OS X doesn't offer a great way of syncing these folders natively. If you have a MobileMe account you can accomplish this by putting your documents on your iDisk and syncing your iDisk to your desktop. However, I've found the iDisk to be too slow for this kind of daily use. Especially if you work on large documents. My solution here is Dropbox.com. Dropbox.com gives you a FREE 2GBs of space in their cloud. When you install Dropbox on your Macs, PCs or mobile devices, you will have access to the same Dropbox folder on all of your devices. While I appreciate the 2GBs of FREE space, I went with their paid option of 100GBs. I added up close to 50GBs of documents that I would want on both MacBooks and while there is a 50GB option, I didn't want to constantly be hitting the ceiling. With 100GBs of space I have room to play. Also Dropbox does syncing over your LAN, which makes it MUCH FASTER to keep multiple "Document (Dropbox)" folders in sync. I was easily able to move documents, Lightroom catalogs and websites that I author into my Dropbox folder for access on either computer. While I don't really use iPhoto, I put my iPhoto library in my Dropbox Pictures folder and it works GREAT between the two MacBooks.

Speaking of devices, it seems that more 3rd party iOS Apps work with Dropbox these days than iDisk too. The Free Dropbox.com App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch is here on the 

Lastly, what about Passwords?

While you can sync your Mac OX Keychain between Macs with MobileMe, that doesn't help you with iOS devices. My favorite solution is 1Password for not only maintaining my site passwords, but also account/financial information, software serial numbers and more. The best part is that it syncs your encrypted data file with Dropbox so that you have access to it on all your Macs as well as 1Password for iOS.

How's it working?

I've had the MacBook Air 13" for a couple of months now and it's GREAT to have my choice of either Mac to take depending on what I'm doing. I've taken it on the road a couple of times now for trips that were just meetings and it's been a dream to travel with and work on those small airline tray tables. What really makes this setup a total success is the combination of MobileMe and Dropbox.com. I would NEVER want to give up either one. 

Maybe iPad 4 will be the answer to my "2nd main computer", but for now I'm a happy 2 MaBook, iPad 2 and iPhone 4 user with all my data in sync and accessible between all my devices.

Carrying around purses, computer sleeves, briefcases or backpacks can sometimes be a bother to the activity you are engaging in, and sometimes, its just a bother altogether.

Your desire? Hands free. Pockets a-plenty.
A solution? Scottevest Travel clothing.
And for those of you who need a heavy duty solution for your small-electronics-fetish, there’s the Scottevest iPad and MacBook Air Compatible Clothing.
 

Scottevest has a line of travel jackets and vests designed to hold as many items as a travel carry-on bag. Which is great for air travel because it doesn’t count as an extra bag.

These iPad compatible jackets and vests are designed with a special pocket to hold, secure, protect and hide the iPad. Along with additional zippered pockets for your other items like a Smartphone, water bottle, ID, small camera, keys, earbuds, sunglasses, etc.

With the ability to hold all of these items comes the concern of how the jacket or vest may look, fashionably. The minds image of having a lot of gear stashed away on your person doesn’t readily lend to sleek and stylish. But, the jackets and vests have a “NoBulge” pocket design so that you don’t get that bulky or stuffed pockets, unflattering, look.

With having all this gear inside a jacket or vest, I’d also be concerned about weight balance; having more weight on one side of the jacket than the other, which can wreck havoc on your skeletal system. Well, they thought of that too. The clothing has a built-in “Weight Management System” to aid in evenly distributing the weight of your items, so that your jackets and vests are worn comfortably.

I really like the hidden passage within the fabric that allows you to run and conceal your earbud cables. It’s annoying when those cables snag on something.

If you take your iPad everywhere you go, the Scottevest may be a must have item.

:::

Those of you who read my ramblings regularly might remember the issues I had with the Navigon GPS software for the iPhone. I mentioned that the TomTom app, the other major alternative, was not working too well. Since then, TomTom has released a new version, 1.5, so I decided to give it a try, after reading reports that the main problem – incorrect routing when using contacts – was fixed. 

Like with any competing apps, there are things I like better about the TomTom than I do the Navigon and visa versa. When you get to where you're going, both apps tell you you're there – but Navigon tells you which side of the street your destination is on. Personally, I find this to be huge. For some reason, TomTom doesn't think you need to know that (if I've never been there before and can't read the address numbers, knowing which side of the street to look at is a big help to me).

Also, when you arrive, Navigon clears the route – TomTom doesn't until you clear it yourself or pick a new destination. Why does this matter? Because both apps multitask – but if the route is clear, you see the "GPS" indicator turn off, and the app doesn't consume inordinate amounts of power. I've occasionally left the Navigon app up with the route still on (it doesn't always think you've arrived if the destination has a large parking lot) and noticed my iPhone getting hot and the battery draining.

Still, there might be cases where you don't want the route auto-cleared – such as when you need to drive past it (maybe because you didn't see which side of the street it was on!) or need to make a side trip quickly, so I can see where this might be a feature. 

The maps on the Navigon are a little nicer looking, but the TomTom ones are functional. Also, traffic on the Navigon is a one-time charge – with the TomTom it's a yearly subscription. Navigon also lets you pick from three routes where TomTom shows you one, and if you don't like it, you can ask for alternatives or bypass portions of the route.

So why did I buy this app? Is there anything I like better with TomTom? Well, yes. I haven't taken it on a long trip yet, but I have used it locally for several days, and guess what? It hasn't missed a turn yet. If I followed Navigon's voice instructions, I'd make a wrong turn onto the expressway each morning on my way to work (interestingly, the map is right, but what it tells you to do is wrong).

There are other features I like too. TomTom lets you plan ahead – you can see a route (and adjust it) ahead of time – and it doesn't have to start where I am right now. I can start it anywhere. Also, any of my geo-tagged photos can be used as an address. I tried this out with some vacation photos, and it got the destination correct (down to the address). 

I prefer the traffic display on the TomTom – you get a small bar to the right that shows you where (in miles) on your route the slowdowns are and for how long (the bar can be turned on and off). There's a little colored indicator at the top to tell you if there are any expected slowdowns – green is clear and red means some delay. Navigon has a traffic indicator too, but tapping it takes you to a whole new screen that lists every traffic issue for a several-mile radius of your route.

Does that mean I'm done with Navigon? Nope. I will try it out again when the next update comes out.  Hopefully, they'll fix up their map/speech directions issues, and throw in some other cool feature I didn't even know I needed. Then it will be TomTom's turn to one-up them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy2tEP3I3DM

(OK, show of hands – how many thought this was going to be a Led Zeppelin video?)

AT&T has an extensive network of WiFi hot spots in places like McDonald's all over the country. If you have an AT&T account for your iPhone or iPad, you can use these hot spots for free (and in McDonald's they're free for everyone).  This wasn't always the case – but as AT&T saw how overwhelmed their cell data network was, they decided it might be a good idea to open up their WiFi network to take the load off their cell cloud.

Don't be fooled by the siren song of WiFi, however, especially when buying an iPad, If you think you'll travel a lot (at least in the US) with one, consider very carefully whether or not to buy a 3G model. I'm glad I have the 3G and not WiFi only.

On a recent trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I stopped several times at places with free WiFi, some of them AT&T's WiFi at McDonald's, some at other places, like Panera Bread, that had non-AT&T free WiFi. However, for some reason they blocked IMAP port 993 – the port you're supposed to use for encrypted iMAP email. You can also use port 143, but I shouldn't need to reconfigure my device from a simple standard like the IMAP encrypted port. Why on earth that was blocked I'll never know, but I think it did me a favor. I decided to use the WiFi for web browsing, and it was excruciatingly slow – so slow that I switched back to 3G data (figuring if it was going to be slow I might as well get mail too) and got a huge speed increase!

What was also annoying was my standard trick for getting around silly firewall rules like that one is to open a VPN connection to my server. But the VPN ports were blocked too!

The hotel was a joke as well – I heard a rumor that they were set up for 250 people on their wireless network. I don't know if it was true or not,  but there were over 1500 people at this convention, and many of them had laptops and smart phones. I do know that when I got a signal, I frequently couldn't get an IP address for 10-20 minutes at a time (and sometimes I just gave up after 20 minutes). This wasn't a problem for my iPhone and iPad – I left them on 3G data. But my MacBook Pro only has WiFi. I only really needed the MBP for a few emails (with PDFs that the iPad/iPhone won't display correctly) and to connect into work (it's easier to remote control the programs I need to run with a real mouse). At least the VPN worked at the hotel (when I could get a signal and an IP address, which was usually very late or very early in the morning), because they too blocked port 993.

So before you think you can travel with your iPad and won't need 3G data, you might want to think again. WiFi done poorly is much worse than 3G data!

Anybody else finding that their actually better of on the overloaded 3G network rather than public WiFi?

As I packed for my second trip to Lancaster (for yet another game convention) I came *this close* (see how far apart my hands are?) to leaving behind my laptop. Thanks to the iPad, I can very nearly do everything I need to do while away from home. There's just a few things that trip me up.

One is PDF reading. Sure, the iPad reads most PDFs just fine. But I regularly get PDFs with annotations in them. Even though Preview on the Mac handles these files pretty well, for some reason the iPad and iPhone don't – the annotations just don't show up. It doesn't matter what program you use to read them, either, because they all use the built-in iOS frameworks.

Next is connecting up with work (I know, I'm on vacation, but it appears I am invaluable at times – just not raise time<g>). I can connect up OK, but trying to manipulate a lot of text, especially with cut, copy and paste, without an actual mouse, is pretty difficult. I've tried a few different programs for remote control, and none of them are quite as easy to use as I need. It seems to take a lot of time to get things done without an actual mouse (and yes, the machines at work are Windows-based – just try running Windows natively without a mouse to see how tough that can be).

Printing is pretty-well solved, although it can require jumping through some hoops. Still, the overall functionality of the iPad is *so close* I can almost taste it. Maybe I can practice a bit more with the mouse movements…

Anybody out there been able to replace their laptop, even for a short time, with an iPad? If not, what roadblocks do you have?

Up until very recently, I was using a Garmin Nuvi 765T as my GPS, and it performed pretty well. It was sometimes slow on showing maps, and occasionally rebooted spontaneously, but for the most part was pretty reliable. I didn't like that the traffic data came via radio and was largely unavailable outside of large cities.  When I upgraded to an iPhone 4 from my iPhone 3, i picked up the Navigon GPS app. I started trying it out at the same time as my Garmin, and it seemed to work just as well. So I put the Garmin in my wife's car – she prefers it to an app.

I drove to a friend's house in Pennsylvania for a game convention over the weekend.  In spite of the fact that I had it set to "Forbid" toll roads, it put me on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, although not as soon as it could have, so I suppose the app was avoiding it – but I thought that's what the "Avoid" setting would be for. I was surprised, because Navigon routed me completely around the Ohio Turnpike, and I knew there were plenty of other roads to my friend's house from glancing at the map earlier. But at 65 MPH I was pretty much stuck – it was go on the Turnpike or go off on some other road (the road I was on ended there).

So even though I'm a cheapskate (I have a problem paying to drive on roads I've already paid for via my tax dollars, and any Interstate fits that bill) I decided better to take the Navigon's preferred route (it was just me in the car, so no one to help navigate).

The next direction was to turn onto some road in 10-some miles. Imagine my surprise when, in around 9.5 miles, an exit appeared, but I wasn't told to take it. I figured there must be another exit shortly thereafter for me to take. Surprise! Exits in the stretch I was on are around 20 miles apart, and that *was* my exit. So I got to drive another 20 miles and still was never prompted to exit!

Navigon – the whole *point* of a GPS is to tell me where to turn, especially when I'm in unfamiliar territory, not to make me guess! Yes, the proper line was shown on the screen, but I didn't have a chance to look at the screen until I missed the exit (it wasn't really clear I was supposed to take the exit on the map until I had passed it). All those units warn you too against staring at the screen, because you need to keep your eye on the road.

And before anyone comments on it – you're right, I am not blameless here – not at all. Until I started using GPS units, I used to pour over maps and plan out every turn. The last few trips I took I was just sort of glancing at them, and this trip I hardly looked at all. So shame on me for putting blind trust in the app. I need to back to Pennsylvania soon, and you can bet I intend to go back to planning it myself, with the Navigon as a reminder and live help for re-routing. 

That doesn't let Navigon off the hook. Exits on a freeway – especially a toll road – are something that should work! In addition, why was I even *on* a toll road?  I know the Navigon can get around them, because it took me home without getting me on the Turnpike. Why couldn't it get me there the same way?

I have reported this to Navigon on their site, but it didn't fall neatly into one of their categories, so I hope it gets to the right folks and gets fixed.

I was thinking of trying the TomTom app while it's on sale, but the version as of this writing (1.4.1) seems to have a terrible bug when using contacts that is sending people miles off-course instead of getting them to their destinations. So that's not an option.

Last week I took a business trip to Asia and of course I took my iPad WiFi+3G 64GB with me. Since this was a business trip and my job involves doing software demonstrations, I also took my MacBook Pro. I planed to use the iPad primarily for travel and in-flight entertainment. 

Entertainment on the long flights

The week before I left on my trip I decided not to watch any of my favorite TV shows that week. Instead I wanted to save them to watch on the long haul flights. So I TiVo'd them as usual on my TiVo HD and then using Toast 10 Titanium Pro I transferred them to my iMac and then converted them from the .tivo files into .MP4 files to be loaded onto the iPad. This worked great and I had several hours of entertainment to last me all the way to Singapore. Although I had games on the iPad, I wasn't in the mood to play any. Instead I just watched TV show after TV show or slept (ok, tried to sleep). I can't really comment on battery life because I had power at my seat on each flight. So there was never a need to run on battery. Since I'm not into books I didn't download any and even if I wanted to, the iBookstore is very lacking in titles at the moment. Every book that I have searched for that I would consider buying isn't available yet. So even if I wanted an eBook I would have to do it via the Kindle App.

Which Case Did I Go With?

Although I bought the Apple iPad Case first, I wasn't thrilled with it. So I was still searching for the ultimate iPad case. The one that I bought for this trip was the Convertible Book Jacket by InCase. I don't know that I would call it the ultimate case yet.  It's a little thicker than I like, but I like it over the Apple case because it has more viewing angles and it's much easier to get the iPad in and out of.

Internet Connectivity in Asia

My trip took me to Singapore and Mumbai India. Although Singpore has a very good 3G network, I was not willing to sign up for an AT&T international roaming plan. At least not at the rates AT&T charges.

So I kept the iPad in "Airplane Mode" the whole time. Even though Airplane Mode disables both the 3G, Bluetooth and WiFi transmitters you can go back into the Preferences and turn WiFi and Bluetooth back on. So while I was in my hotel rooms I used WiFi any time that I wanted to get on the internet via my iPad, MacBook Pro or iPhone. Although many hotels offer in room WiFi, I actually prefer to use the in room Ethernet connection if there is one, so that I can use my Airport Express base station. This way I only pay for ONE connection and can surf from any one of the 3 devices. Even if I had paid for the International Roaming Plan, I would have been screwed in Mumbai. I quickly found out that Mumbai doesn't have a 3G network yet. They just have EDGE. So I would have paid to roam and not had the benefit of 3G speeds. However, no problem again using the Ethernet connection in my room with the AirPort Express.

Power and Charging

I brought the iPad 10W Wall Charger along and since I already owned the Apple World Travel Adapter Kit I had the necessary adapters for both Singapore and Mumbai to plug right into the wall. This way I wouldn't have to depend on the USB ports on my MacBook Pro for charging and could leave the iPad charging in my room while I was out with the laptop.

Entertainment for the Trip Home

Since I had pretty much watched all of the previous week's TV shows on the way over, I wanted a few shows to watch on the way back. The easiest thing to do was to buy the episodes that I missed last week via iTunes right on the iPad itself. Although iTunes sells both HD and Standard Def versions of my favorite shows, I see NO ADVANTAGE in buying the HD versions for the iPad. They are bigger and therefore take up more space and longer to download and visually I can't see much if any difference when viewing them on the iPad itself. So I bought the cheaper Standard Def versions instead and all was well.

The Bottom Line

The iPad more than exceeded my expectations as a great travel companion. The big beautiful display was a joy to use on the plane. Having tons of content also makes those 14-21 hour flights go by just a little easier.