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Earlier this week I asked my friends, readers and Twitter followers “How many desktop or laptop computers do you use in a normal day?” A simple question that you might expect would have an answer of 1 or 2 for most people. Surprisingly the average answer was 3, and there were many in the 4-5 range, with mine and several others ballooning up to 8! In this case, we weren’t counting servers, just desktops, laptops, netbooks and net bookish devices like the iPad.

While I had thought I was one of the lone geeks with a ridiculous amount of PCs I touched daily, it turns out it’s not as uncommon as you might think.

Of course my results are skewed over “Normal People” because I asked via mediums that lend themselves to tech savvy users, but we can only assume it’s some sort of leading indicator of what the future might bring.

So what does this have to do with anything you might ask? In this world of multiple computers, multiple operating systems is beginning to be as common as multiple computers. We’ll conveniently skip over Linux for this article, as it’s not really making much of a blip on usage scale and concentrate on Mac and PC.

Living In Two Worlds

It used to be very difficult. I can remember a time when Photoshop 3.0 for Mac wouldn’t read Photoshop 3.0 for PC files. I can remember a time when you had to have some arcane utility just to get a Mac to read a PC formatted disc and vice versa. Back in the day living between multiple platforms was a headache to put it very mildly.

These days my computer ecosystem looks like the diagram below. 3 PCs, 4 Macs and an iPad. That’s a lot of devices, but something occurred to me the other day, and inspired this blog. With the exception of a few specialized applications (Logic Studio or Final Cut for example) it really makes no difference which machine I use. Any time I sit down at a desk or pick up a laptop, when I start working, all my files are exactly where I left them, all of my IM accounts are ready to go, my email is not only set up but perfectly in sync and all of the applications I need to use regularly are available in some form or another on the device I am using at the time.

That’s a hell of a lot of progress in 10 years. These days whether you use a Mac or a PC boils down to a preference.

How Did I Get There?

I don’t want to disillusion you and let you think that it worked this way out of the box. It took some trial and error and patience to figure out what to use and when. Hopefully, if you find yourself living between more than one computer regularly, this article will give you the tools to do it seamlessly.

Where Do My Files Belong

Mac and PC both use the concept of something like a “home folder.” On the Mac it’s your user/profile folder, on the PC, it’s your My Documents folder. I have mentioned it many times before, but step one of keeping everything perfectly in place, in sync, and organized to any Monk’ish degree you prefer, is Dropbox. Dropbox is a free service (up to 2GB, 50GB for $9.99/mo.) that does two things important things. First, it keeps your files available online, so anything you save into your Dropbox folder, is automatically saved to a server on the internet for you to access from anywhere. The second, and most important thing for our scenario, is that it copies that file to the same location on any PC you have added to your Dropbox network. In my case there are 7 computers that run the Dropbox Client, and they collectively sync about 6GB of files. I use it to store anything I am currently working on or might need access to remotely. This includes serial numbers for all the software I own, receipts, documents, some images, etc.

In the case of my work files, I don’t want to share them with my personal files, so my two work machines also have Windows Live Sync installed, and they synchronize my work files in much the same way. No matter which machine I use, the latest stuff is always there, awesome!

Sign up for Dropbox with the following link to get 250MB of extra space free.

Managing the Email Mess

I think we have all done this at some point. You got access to email, you set up your email client with the default settings, and started getting mail. You, deleted a mail you didn’t want, only to move to the second machine and have it downloaded again.

Perhaps you sent your friend a message and needed to check something later, but it was only in the Sent Items folder of the machine you sent it from.

Maybe you actually took the time to create folders and organize all of your mail only to have to do it all over again when you got home.

Perhaps you got really slick with Outlook and did it all with a PST file and then deleted all of your mail and re-imported it when you got to the other machine.

However you did it, you have dealt with managing email in multiple places and it sucks. Luckily there is a much better way. Many services now support a mail protocol called IMAP. In Gmail for example, by simply changing a setting to enable IMAP, and setting up your email clients to access your email this way, all of the problems I mentioned above magically disappear. Your mail is all centrally managed on the server. Sure your local machine can cache it so you don’t have to wait for it to download every time, but any change you make anywhere is automatically reflected anywhere else.

That means that you can delete, send, organize and forward to your heart’s content and you’ll never be stuck trying to figure out what you did. It’s beautiful.

Marking Your Books

I am sure you have been here too. You are at work, someone sends you a link, you want to check it out more when you get home. I bet right now you open up your email client and email yourself the link, right? I used to. Now I use X-Marks. X-Marks supports Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome. Once you create an account and set it up on all of your machines, your bookmarks are always synced.

When I come into this problem, I bookmark the site, and when I get home it’s sitting in my bookmarks right where I left it. I don’t think I could live without it. When you are as OCD as I am, your bookmark structure is as important to you as the bookmarks themselves.

What else?

There are many other tools that can accomplish these types of tasks, these are ones I use and trust. There are also more advanced syncing techniques for specific applications and working with the same files between different applications that I will cover in a future article. For now, take these tips and streamline your life between computers.

This week I traded an iMac I wasn’t using for a 13.3″ Macbook. I already have a 17″ Macbook Pro, but to be honest given the price and size, I just never take it with me anywhere. I have a pretty strict “don’t use my work laptop for personal stuff” mentality. Previously I had purchased a 13″ HP laptop I used when I wanted to be super mobile, but that laptop took a header off my nightstand one night and ceased to be.

I hadn’t bother to replace it until two events conspired in the last two weeks. I had failed at finding a useful place for the iMac in either my office or my studio, and I found a guy on Craigslist looking to trade a Macbook for an iMac. I didn’t take his deal, but it sparked my interested and I pursued and found a deal that worked for me.

The result is a 13.3″ White Unibody Macbook. It has a 2.26Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor, 4GB of RAM, 250GB HD, webcam, all the usual Mac trimmings. It also has a nice tidy form factor that can fit in my laptop bag with my work computer when I need to.

So far I am loving the computer. I am not as constrained by the 1280×800 resolution as I thought I might be, but I can thank Spaces for that. The multiple desktop feature built into OS X is my lifeline when I am not on a multiple monitor desktop.

The machine itself seems to run a little hot, but I’ve been using Apple laptops for awhile and that’s not exactly unusual. The performance is fantastic. I have installed Office 2011, Photoshop CS4, Final Cut Express, Pro Tools Essentials and tons of other smaller apps on it. They all run speedy and other than being a little small on the screen real estate forefront, it’s nice.

This computer is definitely more comfortable for casual use than the 17″, but I do really miss the backlit keys.

Next on the list is setting up Boot Camp on it and installing Windows 7. I’ll use this machine for blogging and there just is no blogging without Windows Live Writer in my opinion.

The battery has been awesome so far. I have been using it for hours and with about 1/3 of the battery remaining it’s still several hours.

I am hard pressed in casual use to notice a performance difference between the two laptops honestly. I am sure during some video compressing or heavy photoshop use I’d notice the 8GB of ram and the faster processor, but for day to day, this machine should be plenty for most people.

This time of year I get lots of friends and family members asking questions. They are usually buying someone they love a computer for Christmas and want to know what to pick. Let’s go through some of the decisions you need to make, and hopefully you’ll be able to walk into Best Buy or go to your favorite site and buy a computer with confidence!

Mac or PC

We might as well get it over with. The first question is always going to be Mac or PC. I use both and I can tell you from experience that both are fantastic computing platforms. Each have unique advantages and strengths that play out to specific types of people. My general advice for someone buying a computer, asking this question, is:

If you don’t have a compelling reason to buy a Mac, buy a PC.

What does that mean exactly? Unless you’re buying a computer for an audio buff that wants to run Logic or a video nut that wants to run Final Cut, or you are buying for someone who specifically says “I want a Mac!” You’re best bet is to buy a PC.

The ugly truth is that you will get a lot more value for your money with a PC. Windows 7 is a fantastic, stable and secure operating system. The old Mac vs. PC debates are antiquated. Devices rarely dictate which one you should use. These days it’s mostly about preference and cost.

I won’t go too much into choosing a Mac for the rest of this article. Apple just doesn’t offer a whole lot of choice, so you are pretty much in the situation of choose your form factor (Laptop, all in one or Workstation) and choose how much you are willing to spend, that’s the end of the decision process.

Picking a PC

Get the Laptop or desktop question out of the way first. These days prices and features are very similar for both. Make that choice first, and then we can get into what all these components are and what you should pick.

Processor

It’s fortunate that today’s processors have more than enough beef for what you want to do. Unless you are going to be doing some serious computing the processor is almost a non-issue. That being said, you are going to run into two flavors, Intel and AMD.

Both brands have several tiers of performance. I’ll kind of summarize with Intel’s offerings:

• i3 – Lower end, great for someone who is just doing web surfing, basic productivity and communications
• i5 – All-Purpose, this CPU is great for what 90% of people do with their computers.
• i7 – High Performance, if you’re getting this machine for audio, video or gaming, you want an i7, preferably a quad-core.

Gone are the days of one CPU, these days a single chip has multiple cores, or chips inside it. Dual-core is the most common and Quad-core is coming up fast. Unfortunately software has to be written to take complete advantage of all those cores, so a Quad-Core computer doesn’t blindly mean “twice as fast” so choose carefully unless the cost is negligible. Today’s dual core processors are blazing fast and will most likely do everything you want to do. Like I said, if it’s a small premium, go for the quad for future proofing. If that moves you into another model, and the price is significant, don’t feel cheated going home with two.

Don’t get too caught up in clock speed. If it’s a normal machine anything over 2Ghz will be fine, if it’s high end, shoot for over 3Ghz.

RAM (Memory)

These days computers come stuffed with RAM. I usually give very simple advice with memory. Get as much as you can afford, but pay more attention to how much it will hold. Memory is very inexpensive these days, I just bout 8GB for my laptop for $99. I’d rather give someone a machine with 4GB of Ram that holds 8GB than one that comes with 6GB but only holds 6GB. More is better, but it’s a cheap and easy upgrade, so don’t let it be the driving force behind your decision.

Hard Drive Size/Speed

If you are going laptop, you are likely going to get something in the 250-500GB size range with a speed of 5400rpm. That’s a pretty standard laptop drive. If you need more performance because it’s going to be for video or gaming, look for a 7200rpm drive as they usually read/write data nearly twice as fast.

If you are getting a desktop, you’ll likely see 500GB-2TB sizes out there. This is another one of those cheap upgrades and externals are usually not only a cheap upgrade, but a smart one too. Keeping your data in a way you can move it around is great. Skimping on hard drive space is bad, but these days it’s very hard to. Unless your loved one is going to store a ridiculous amount of music or work with editing high definition video, you’ll be fine with a 500GB drive. If the latter is the case, look for 1TB+ and make sure the computer has room for more inside or a fast connection like FireWire or eSATA to connect external drives to add more space.

Video Card

This is much like the processor. If the computer is going to be used for surfing the web, email, chatting and productivity, you’ll probably never notice the difference a better video card will make.

If the computer will be used for games or video, look for the fastest card from either nVidia or ATI to be in the machine and with 1GB of video memory or more. Also pay attention because sometimes they will put cheaper laptop video cards in PCs that share memory with the computer. If the card uses shared ram, it’s likely no better than not having a dedicated card at all.

Monitor

Simple, go big. The biggest you can afford is gong to have the best bang for the buck. I personally prefer Samsung monitors, but Dell, HP, Viewsonic and LG all make great monitors that you are likely to find in the big box stores. Things to keep an eye out for are the extra features.

You want a variety of inputs, HDMI, DVI and VGA are the standards, I’d suggest getting one with all 3 so you never worry about not being able to connect it up. Some come with speakers, but they are usually terrible so don’t let that drive your decision.

The Bottom Line

You can find a great PC Desktop or Laptop for $600 these days. That’s going to provide a lot of fun and entertainment as well as help with the productivity side of life too. I recommend sticking with the major brands just from a support perspective so check out the Dells, HPs, Gateways, Acers, Lenovos and Apple of course. Find what fits what your looking for the computer to actually do, and your budget, and buy with confidence.

Last night the unexpected happened. My laptop hard drive died. 500GB of hard disk space is a lot, and I was using a few hundred GB of it, but outside of applications, the data was not a whole lot, about 6GB. All of my music is backed up to several local machines, and my photos are on my photo machine, home server and Amazon. The amazing thing about the total hard drive failure was that the only single thing I was thinking about was “what size/kind of hard drive will I replace it with?” I never once thought about loss of data.

That’s quite an amazing change from where we were not to long ago. I have lost so many photos, videos and MP3 files that I would gladly pay to get back over the years because of an admittedly lazy backup strategy (or in some cases no strategy.)

I can remember a hard drive failure resulting in a tangible sense of loss. Now it’s no different to me than a failed video card or a busted printer. Finally, and I hate to use the word, the Cloud and more specifically Dropbox, has solved my data problems and my computer is just a very fancy tool.

So let’s go through the process of rebuilding my computer and I’ll throw in all the places Dropbox made a huge difference in my restoration strategy.

The Data

Of course I want all of my documents, photos, Lightroom presets, fonts, PDFs, etc. Those are super important, just by installing Dropbox all of that was right back where it belonged, perfectly in sync with my PC Desktop, Mac Pros, iMac, Work Laptop, even my iPad and iPhone. If I end up on someone else’s PC I can access all of it from the browser. I always have access to all of my data.

I even store tons of sensitive personal data on Dropbox. I am sure you’ll cringe at believing it, but Dropbox’s service is actually very secure.

The Software

After I had reinstalled OS X, the first thing I did was reinstall the Dropbox client. It had about 6GB of downloading to do before it was finished, but at that point I was ready to start installing real software. Why do I say that? Because I store all of my software serial numbers in Dropbox. I have a folder where I keep the serial numbers for Adobe’s Creative Suite, Lightroom, Final Cut, Office..you name it. During this install I had to reach for X DVDs in total: OS X, iLife, Adobe Creative Suite, Final Cut Express. That’s literally it.

Lightroom, Office… pretty much all of my other apps were download from the net and punch in my serial number.

The Habits

It doesn’t take that long to get used to it. I don’t even think twice about it anymore. Unless it’s a massive video file or a disc image of some sort, I always save it to Dropbox. I have a very Monkish hierarchy where I know exactly where things should go. I have shares with several of my friends and my wife and son. We never email files or IM File transfer them anymore. When Dawn needs something I’ll just say “I stuck it in the family Dropbox.” Not only does she know where that is, she usually gets a tidy system tray notification that it has been added and she can click it and go right to it. If I need to share it with someone else I’ll just throw it in the public folder and get a link right to it.

While we are on that topic of convenience, several times my OCD file maintenance habits have led me to delete a file prematurely. That’s not much of a problem either, within 30 days I can just go back to the Dropbox website and undelete it. If you want to pay a little extra you can get unlimited history for undeleting and file versioning.

The Cost

While we are on the topic, how much does Dropbox cost? For most people it’s free. If you need less than 3+GB, it’s free. I say 3+ because Dropbox is pretty generous at giving you extra space, we are talking 1.5GB of space, for doing your part to help spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, friends, etc.

If you need more, like me, $9.99/month gets you 50GB of space, $19.99/mo gets you 100GB of space. That’s pretty reasonable considering the amount of space and the features you get for the money.

The Dropbox Commercial

So why am I sitting here telling you how awesome Dropbox is? I have been saying it for ages, but mostly because it just made a dead hard drive a minor inconvenience. It gives me the utmost confidence in data redundancy, and lastly, it’s just cool. The service is rock solid, I can’t remember an outage at all. It works on every device you have pretty much. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it makes keeping up with your data everywhere you need it totally painless.

There are other services that provide similar functionality, and I have tried them all. I’ll stick with Dropbox, I love it.

If you are going to try it, sign up with this Dropbox link and I get 500mb of free space, you’ll get a nice 250mb bump for yourself too!

I remember back in the day, you used to get a huge manual with any software you bought. When I got C++ 7.0 (which shipped on 27 floppies by the way) it came with about 30lbs of manuals. Windows, Photoshop, Autocad…they all came with tomes to tell you how to use them.

These days nothing comes with a manual. When I purchased Logic Studio a few years ago I was shocked it came with a 10” stack of manuals. Heck, these days you are lucky to get a disc, now it’s just download and use a key much of the time.

Where’s My Damned Book?

I say that in gest. The point of this article is not to blast cheap software manufacturers who don’t give us paper anymore (they do usually put something resembling a manual online) but to applaud the rise of software development principles that are entering the golden age of software that doesn’t need manuals.

Keep in mind that in the early days computers were alien. Part of the manual was to take a person who was uncomfortable and unknowledgeable about these systems, and teach them how to do something useful with it.

Once Windows 95 had cemented the Window Managed operating system with it’s explosive growth, users had total command of clicking, double clicking, dragging, dropping, etc. No longer did technical writers have to assume that users had no idea what context menus were or how to use settings or preferences panes. Software engineers stopped being code monkeys and branched into teams that specialized in different parts of the process, and from this came the all mighty User Experience designer. There are about 30 different things they call themselves these days, but the main goal of the UX guy is to take the tasks that the user needs to accomplish with the software, and make them simply make sense.

Now that users had a solid grasp of the fundamentals, the whole way software was designed changed. Instead of designing the software in a way that made sense to computer nerds, we started asking questions like “What would the user expect?” and trying to make parallels to real world experiences so the software feels more natural.

Touch Me Baby

The iPhone took this to a whole new level. In many ways the iPhone has kind of reset how we look at software in general. I know in my professional career we are looking at everything through new eyes. All across the world, and much for the first time, software companies are thinking “what would we do if we just started over?”

Keeping up with legacy software and customers can be a real tax on innovation, and touch technology has given many software companies the first solid excuse to just wipe the slate clean and start over.

With touch input, software has taken yet another step forward in feeling natural. Software designers are having to think past common paradigms like double-click and drag and drop, to come up with new ways to accomplish tasks in ways that just make sense.

A Glimpse into the Future

Part of this scares me a little bit. As a self-proclaimed “Power User” I am somewhat unnerved by devices like the iPad, and I do have one. Right at this moment I am using Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Messenger, Zune, Internet Explorer, Tweet Deck, Windows Live Mail (Can you tell I work at Microsoft yet?) and Photoshop. I can see all of them right now. I don’t have to hide one of them to switch to another. If the iPhone and iPad can manage to murder double-click, drag & drop and context menus, can they kill Window Management? Will people get used to not having it and it just go away? I can’t imagine how that could ever do for people who really do work with computers, but for consumers, who knows? If so, is that a bad thing?

Right now I feel totally claustrophobic on an iPad, why can I only see one thing? Why can’t I USE more than one application at once. It’s not that unheard of. One big company takes a bet on removing a technology, and before long it’s just dead. Usually there is a forcing function behind the scenes like USB-Keys effectively killing CD/DVDRW, but sometimes technology gets made more accessible and the mass market is more appealing than the niche market so features just start to go away, reverse feature creep.

Where Am I Going With This?

Nowhere maybe, I am not sure. I love how our industry has evolved from an awkward relationship between user and machine to machines becoming a natural extension of users. I look around these days and marvel at the technology that is at my fingertips every waking moment of the day, and I am beyond excited about the future. In my experience the industry is cyclical. We have started down an app centric road, which lends itself incredibly well to the current task-based design principles. The idea of getting a user in and out of an experience quickly and painlessly is fundamentally sound. The problem is that not every problem can be distilled down to a 30 second start-to-finish experience. I write Business Intelligence software. Problems are complex and the software must always manage a certain amount of complexity. I don’t think that a business Analyst wants to be popping in and out of a dozen apps to do his or her job.

I guess that’s the part I am trying to solve in my head. In an app centric platform like iPad, the home button experience is jolting. You feel like you have just abandoned your work. I am sure after awhile that feeling will change, but there is an engineering problem there to solve I think. Let’s start the discussion there shall we. If you were building a new User Interface, to manage multiple running applications, and you couldn’t use Window Management, but you didn’t want to do the full screen only experience either, what would you expect? What natural experience could you relate to it?

Imagine if you are cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Each dish that you are working on is an app. The app is what helps you make the dish, but you are making a half dozen dishes at once. You have to manage some shared resources like your oven, stovetop or microwave. How do you manage these multiple tasks in real life? Unless you are Monk, you aren’t wiping the counters down, putting everything away and starting over with each dish. How would you extend the analogy to software? You need your apps running, you need to be able to see changes to apps in the background and react to events.

The alert system doesn’t manage this effectively. Apps need to be able to communicate with you and each other. Join the discussion in the comments, I am very curious for feedback.