iPhone app review – Ocarina
From the company that gave us an iPhone lighter application that can be used at concerts comes another music related application. This one turns your phone into an ocarina, a small wind instrument most people probably know from the Zelda series of games. The application is on sale for $0.99 for a limited time, and it is unknown what the regular price will be.
Drobo Support
I've been using a Drobo and Drobo Share since July. For those that don't know, Drobo is an enclosure that accepts up to four SATA drives, and uses a proprietary RAID-like technology to make the drives appear as one drive to the operating system. Unlike RAID you don't have to use identical drives, and the Drobo indicates when it's almost full. When that happens, the smallest capacity drive can be replaced with a larger one and overall capacity is increased. Drobo Share is a network attachment that turns the Drobo into a NAS device. It's been working fine until this past weekend when I noticed I couldn't connect from my Mac. The lights on the Drobo appeared normal, and I could ping the IP for the Drobo Share. I tried all the troubleshooting options on the Drobo support site, including restoring the Drobo Share to defaults using a paperclip, but nothing worked. The Drobo itself is fine and still works over USB, so it was a relief that no data was lost. The Drobo Share appears to be dead though.
new iGoogle changes.
Google has a post on the new iGoogle layout. A lot of their "gadgets" have been updated and the tabs have been moved from the top of the portal to the left of it.
I'm not happy with the changes. The new Gmail gadget now opens within the same window instead of opening a new window (or tab). You can work with e-mails by replying or forwarding, but if you need to click on any web links you have to copy the link and paste it into your address bar. Moving the tabs from the top to the left also has some problems. Google's blog post describes the move so you can "access to any gadget with one click." It may be so, but it would have been nice to have some notice of the change.
(left, old design. right, new design. Click for larger versions.)
Don't get me wrong, I like some of the new apps. The Weather app is particularly nice. However, this design has the feel of being rushed. Maybe it was hurried because of Yahoo's upcoming redesign?
Replicating Exchange on my Mac
I have recently moved, and in leaving my job I had to give up Exchange. My setup involves a Mac and an iPhone, so I decided to use this as a chance to give up using Windows as well. I had been using Outlook 2007 instead of Entourage 2008, but after giving Entourage a decent shot I just wasn't able to be as productive with it. My desired outcome of this project was to use the native applications on OSX and my iPhone, while also syncing the calendar to the "cloud" for web access. I chose Google for the "cloud" part of the project. My e-mail was going to be Gmail, and I had been syncing my calendar from Outlook to Google Calendar for a while now using Google Calendar Sync.
TripIt
TripIt is travel site I have been using for the past few months. I'm not sure exactly how I found it, but I'm glad I did. Tripit describes itself as a "travel assistant." It works by e-mailing the confirmation e-mails from flights, car rentals, and hotels to plans@tripit.com. You are then presented with the information imported in a clean looking itinerary with all the information imported, weather updates, and maps. You can add other items such as meetings, activities, restaurant reservations, and directions to the itinerary if needed, and you the itinerary can be exported to any calendar that supports the iCal format. The itinerary can also be printed out, and includes Google Maps for both the area you're visiting as well as all the driving directions for the trip in a nice, clean layout.