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If your Launchpad was a mangled mess with 8 pages of everything that could possibly be ran as a program on your Mac like mine when you upgraded to OS X Lion, you’re annoyed you didn’t find this before you spent a ridiculous amount of time organizing it to accomodate your OCD tendencies. Wait, maybe that was just me. Either way, it would have been nice to know this before, still glad I know it now though.

Run this command in Terminal.app to wipe Launchpad clean

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db "DELETE from apps; DELETE from groups WHERE title<>''; DELETE from items WHERE rowid>2;"; Killall Dock

Run this command in Terminal.app to rebuild the default database

rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db; killall Dock

Thanks Macworld!

Today I officially announced this at work, and I am very excited to share it with all of you. As of next week I will no longer be working in the SharePoint and Office Business Intelligence space. I’ll be joining the team at Microsoft that makes wonderful products for Apple platforms.

Those of you that know me well will probably find this to be of little surprise, but it’s a very welcome change and something I am very excited about.

I can’t quite say what I’ll be working on yet, but for the Mac faithful readers of my blog, stay tuned and I’ll divulge more as it’s appropriate to do so.

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.

Being a hybrid PC-Mac user, one thing that always drives me bonkers on the Mac, is the lack of a decent blogging app. I have tried Ecto, Mars Edit, Qumana and countless others, but nothing has been less painful that booting up a VMWare copy of Windows and running a full, albeit slow, copy of Windows Live Writer.

Let me be clear in saying that no, Blogo is NOT better than Windows Live Writer. It’s not even equivalent. What it is, however, is decent. Decent will do when I don’t need to do something heavily formatted.

All of the other blogging clients forget about images and treat them like a 3rd class citizen. Blogo at least gives images proper priority and provides tools for using images in your posts.

It would be nice if it allowed you to preview your posts on your theme in realtime like Live Writer does, but at least it does give you the ability to open a preview window and see how it will look when it’s posted.

It’s nice that you can insert photos, crop them, add filters to them, but I am not a huge fan that you can’t edit and resize them in the blog post with handles like you can in Windows Live Writer.

Other seemingly missing features are the ability to specifically size the thumbnail and manually set the padding. It’s a little unintuitive to have to select the image, and then edit it via the thumbnail outside of the post.

I will also miss the tons of plugins for code formatting, videos, etc. That being said, it’s the best blogging client for Mac I have used so far and definitely worth the $25 price of admission. I guess that’s 25 more reasons I like Windows Live Writer better

One drawback of not getting an HP Home Server is that it doesn’t do Apple Time Machine compatible backups, so my Macs don’t automatically back up. Most of what I do on my Mac is web based or using applications that are working with files already stored on my network.

The big exception to that is my Lightroom collection of photos. That’s all on the 24” iMac’s external Hard Disk.

I did have a completely manual workflow where I would copy the entire library to the external drive on my HP desktop to have a backup copy. When I added a second 1TB drive to the Windows Home Server I decided to start backing that external up also.

With that drive’s image of my Lightroom Gallery being backed up daily, I got to thinking “how can I keep that secondary copy of the photos up to date so the backup is truly automatic?”

It turns it out’s alot more simple than I thought and requires no 3rd party software to install at all. The magic is done through two applications that come on every Apple Mac..Automator and iCal.

Automator

If you have never used this little gem, it’s totally fantastic. It allows you to create complex workflows, save them as applications, scripts, and even attach them to folders to run automatically. In my case I wanted to create an application so I can schedule it. The process looks something like this.

If you look at the library of actions you see instantly that this tool can automate pretty much anything. In this case we only care about connecting to a server, and copying some files. We use four modules to accomplish this:

Get Specified Servers

This action tells the script what server you want to use. In this case I am using SMB to connect to a Windows Network Resource and if you notice the url, I am specifying the username and password so I don’t get prompted to enter it when the workflow runs.

Connect to Servers

The connect to server action simply establishes the connection we detailed in the Get Specified Servers action.

Get Specified Finder Items

This action is identifying which files and folders we want to act upon. If you notice in the image I am defining my Lightroom Collections folder on my external hard drive. This will capture both the image files and the lightroom catalogs.

Copy Finder Items

The last action just takes the files and folders I specified, and copies them to the destination location which is the network share I connected to in the first action.

After we save this as an application, it’s ready to go. Save it somewhere that you want it to run from, and now we can schedule it.

iCal

You might think we need something super complex to schedule this thing to run. The truth is iCal can do it all. It’s really easy too.

If you look at the recurring appointment I created, I have added a setting to make this Automator application run whenever the event is triggered.

It’s really that easy.

I have uploaded the script in case you want to try to do this yourself, you can download it here.