Switchers' Blog

MacHeist 3 - One week left

The guys at MacHeist unveiled their 3rd bundle in as many years last week and there is still time to take advantage of the deal. Some of you may know that 1Password was part of the free loot in MacHeist 1 and was included in the bundle for MacHeist 2. This years bundle has some great software in it and some of these apps normally the same or more as the price of the entire bundle. I use Little Snapper on a daily basis and Acorn is my graphics editor of choice for its ease of use for those of us that are graphically challenged. I've been wanting to pick up WireTap Studio for quite some time and its a steal at this price. Plus, 25% of the proceeds go to one of ten charities that you get to pick when you purchase the bundle. If you have not heard about the bundle, go check it out here.

Backup Strategies

We've all heard about the importance of having backups and we all believe that they are not empty words of advice. However, a lot of people add that to their lists of things that need to do one day and procrastinate for far too long on this. Sadly, those who are most diligent about backups are those that have previously suffered loss as a result of a catastrophic hard drive failure and had no backups. 1Password has a built in backup method but by default it uses the same hard drive as the main data file. This protects you against file loss but not against a drive failure. You can change this in the 1Password preferences.

However, today I want to talk about a more complete and whole disk backup stategy.

Mac Users Are the Best!

I am continually amazed at how great the Mac user community is. Look at this wonderful 'Belated Birthday' ecard I received today:

Great stuff!

Best of all, emails like this make me want to work even harder creating the best darn products we can! Expect some new updates soon :)

Thank you for the encouragement everyone!

Macworld.com: The new rules for buying a Mac

If you are in the market for a Mac, you need to read the new rules for buying a Mac.

Jonathan Seff and Jason Snell from Macworld posted revised rules for Mac buyers and busted many of the common myths:

• I’m a power user; therefore, I need a Mac Pro.
• I need a Mac Pro because it’s the only expandable Mac, and I need an upgrade path.
• I need a really fast Mac so I can run Windows.
• I’m a power user, so I need a desktop system, not a laptop.
• I need a desktop Mac for serious work, and a laptop for travel.
• Macs are just as expensive as they’ve always been if you want good performance.

Leopard Code Signing and Keychain Problems

OS X 10.5 Leopard brings a new Code Signing security feature that helps verify the integrity of an application. Applications are signed by their creators before being distributed using their private key, and then can be verified on the customer's machine using the companies public key.

The OS X Keychain Services leverage this new Code Signing feature to verify the signature of each application before it will allow access to the contents of the keychain. By verifying the signature, the OS X Keychain Services can detect when a potentially malicious change has been made to an application and thereby protect your sensitive data by denying the changed application access.

Since the upgrade to Leopard, many 1Password users have written in to mention that they cannot access their data, usually from within Safari. At first we were confused why the keychain data could not be accessed from within Safari, yet it was accessible from other browsers and the 1Password application.

Leopard and the Applications Folder on the Dock

Trying new things when you have a lot of users is always a hard thing. People tend to get used to how things are and get comfortable with the way it is. Apple has a huge user base so you can imagine the completely revamped Dock in Leopard is causing some confusion and aggravation, especially the new way Folders are shown.

Overall the Dock looks very nice I think:

On Demand Keychain Locking

1Passwd gives you several options for automatically locking the keychain. For example, you can have it automatically lock after so a number of minutes of inactivity or when your Mac goes to sleep. However, sometimes you want to lock your 1Passwd keychain right now. (like when your crazy Uncle Alex is visiting and asks to use your Mac to check his web mail)

You could load the 1Passwd application and click on the lock icon. However, for those who want to do this frequently there is a better solution.

Five Google Calendar Tips for iCal Users

I have been a heavy iCal user ever since I first purchased the PowerBook G4 and I still open it every day. However, after Merlin Mann mentioned how much he liked the Google Calendar in one of the recent MacBreak Weekly podcasts, I decided to give the online service a try.

Here is a few tips I found in the first few weeks:

1. Use Keyboard shortcuts

You will be surprised to find that navigating and editing Google Calendar entries in the web browser can be faster than using a native desktop application. For example, press "d/w/m" to switch between Day/Week/Month view, "n/p" to navigate to next or previous Day/Week/Month, "t" to jump to Today and "c" to create a new event.

Running Leopard and Tiger Together

The new version of Mac OS X operating system, 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard is getting ready to be released in October this year. From developer's perspective it comes with large number of improvements and Apple provides members of ADC (Apple Developer Connection) with early access to the system.

I tried to run a few preview releases of Leopard on my MacBook Pro. As much as it is exciting, it is also a pain to reinstall the system. Also, I found that it is not possible to support our current users who still use Tiger. After a few Leopard—Tiger roundtrips I decided to look for a better configuration and run both Tiger and Leopard on my laptop using multiple partitions.

AppFresh: Helping Your Mac Applications to Stay Fresh

Today we updated 1passwd.com web site to make it compatible with AppFresh — great little utility that helps to keep your Mac updated with the latest versions of the programs you use.

One of the interesting features of AppFresh is the integration with iUseThis a popular web site for Mac OS X users.