Index Offline Storage with Archive 7

Do you have a collection of external hard drives sitting around and an overwhelming sense of confusion about what is stored where? Mike Yenco’s Archive 7 indexes your hard drives and lets you search all of them, even when offline. Moreover, the latest version is in the Mac App Store. I’ve just started using it and wondering why I didn’t do this sooner.

Easy Timeline, Just $5

BeeDocs has a holiday sale on for Easy Timeline. For just five bucks you can drastically improve your timeline game. I’ve written of this app before. If you ever find yourself in the position of trying to convey time related data to anyone, you should get this app. I’ve heard from lawyers, construction managers, students, soccer coaches, and countless others about how much they love BeeDocs timeline apps and now is your chance to get in for the price of a Starbucks coffee.

As an aside, I want to thank BeeDocs for sponsoring MacSparky.com through 2011. Thanks to BeeDocs, I was able to transform MacSparky.com from the AdSense monstrosity it once was into what you see today. Please show your support and do yourself a favor: Go get this normally $20 app for 75% off.

iPhone Deck the Halls

Here is a pretty amazing video Christmas card created by some of my friends. Not only is this creative and hilarious, every viewing gets a nickel donated to charity.

Torrent Tracker

My friend George Starcher recently turned me on to youhavedownloaded.com, a privately ran site (read: not subject to government restrictions) that tracks torrent download sites and every IPN number that plugs in. If you think someone on your network has been downloading illegal torrents and want to know, check this out. If you’ve downloaded torrents in the past, now is the time to repent. Industry and law enforcement are getting more aggressive than ever about these things. Don’t kid yourself: If you torrent, they are tracking it.

iTunes: Exact Duplicates

In tomorrow’s MPU, Katie and I dive deep on iTunes Match. I spent several minutes in the show talking about the various ways to deal with duplicate songs in iTunes, including third party solutions. What I didn’t know at the time was that if you hold down the Option key while in the iTunes File menu, iTunes will display exact duplicates. Well, sort of exact. In my case I had tracks that appeared identical but had different lengths and they displayed, which was exactly what I needed.

MacSparky.com is sponsored by Bee Docs Timeline 3D. Make a timeline presentation with your Mac.

Back to Work: Nouns and Verbs

Several years ago, my young daughter asked me what exactly a lawyer does. After some thinking, I explained that I help people with really big problems. Ever since then, that has become my “go to” job description. Every time I get around any serious networking types and tell them that’s what I do, they look at me like I’m a weirdo. Then they patiently tell me how I’m not using enough terms like “results oriented”, “paradigm shifting”, and “excellence”. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, what I really do is help people solve big problems. After years of taking abuse for this rebellious elevator pitch, this week’s Back to Work gave me some much-needed validation.

Home Screens – Stephen Hackett

Stephen Hackett (Twitter) is one of my favorite bloggers with an eclectic mix of Apple news, tips, and culture at 512 Pixels. Stephen was nice enough to share his home screen.

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

Overall, I think my choices are pretty boring. The apps on my home screen are all from widely-used categories. Everyone takes notes, checks the weather and listens to music. I haven’t even changed the position of some of them, like Messages, Calendar and Photos.

That said, the least well-known one (to non-nerds) is probably OmniFocus. My entire life is inside that app.

What is your favorite app?

Camera+ wins this one for me. It is fast, includes some great editing tools and has social sharing built-in. While I use Instagram heavily, the raw speed of this app makes it a great replacement for the built-in Camera app, at least on my iPhone 4.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Currently, it is Instacast. It’s the best podcatcher I’ve tried. I like finding apps that work like Apple-built ones, and this one fits that bill. I listen to a ton of shows, both on the 5by5 and 70Decibels network, of which I am a part.

That said, I’m not sure “guilty pleasure” is a great term. I don’t play games on my iPhone, so Instacast is the closest thing I’ve got, I suppose.

What is the app you are still missing?

I would love a really good WordPress app. I’m begging you, Daniel Jalkut. Begging.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

I use my iPhone heavily throughout the work day. It’s my podcast machine, so it is usually always plugged in to my truck while driving. During the day, I use it mainly as a phone.

I use my iPad for a very specific set of actions. I love OmniFocus on the iPad, and use it daily. I also enjoy Instapaper and (as plain as it seems) Safari on the tablet as well. These apps see heavy usage in the morning and evenings at home. At work, I use the iPad to review documents and take meeting notes.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

I like that there is very little that can (or does) go wrong. If an app is crashy, usually a reboot or re-install will fix it. While I love Mac OS X, iOS is just much simpler to the user.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

I’d like to see the home screen on the iPhone rotate, like on the iPad. (Oh, and they should fix the deal where icons move around when orientation changes on the iPad.)

Anything else you’d like to share?

A lot of people who seen screenshots of my iPhone or iPad wonder why I don’t have Simplenote handy. While I do like the service — and used it for a long time — I now use PlainText on iOS, which syncs via Dropbox. On the Mac, I use nvALT, again syncing with Dropbox. I love plain text files, and Dropbox (of course) handles them very well. I simplified, and Simplenote didn’t make the cut.

Thanks Stephen.

To read about more home screens, clicky here

The Android App Store Problem

Eric Schmidt predicts that in six months, iOS developers will be flocking to Android, even if they don’t like it. Ummm, think again.

Android’s marketshare continues to climb and that is presumably a good thing for Android but mere numbers does not create a vibrant app market. There need to be two pieces for a successful platform app store: 1. a trustworthy store, and 2. customers. Android has neither of these.

The Theoretical Android App Store

While there are no shortage of issues with Apple’s own App Store, there are a few things it really nails. Apple provides a safe and easy environment to deliver apps and seperate customers from their money. This is where Android misses the boat. If Google wants to attract developers, they shouldn’t worry so much about marketshare and instead focus on getting a reliable payment system and an app purchase environment where customers aren’t constantly getting stiffed. Amazon seems to be making the best efforts to fix this but there are some truly legendary stories about what a spectacular job they are doing screwing it up. With so many different form factors, screen sizes, and system specs, it is going to be a lot harder for Google (or somebody) to deliver the iOS App Store experience on Android.

“Free is Better! Hooray!”

Android owners don’t buy apps. With very few exceptions, every Android owner I’ve talked to is only interested in free apps. To hell with the user interface. Put ads everywhere. Just don’t charge any money. (Perhaps all of the on-screen ads explains the arms race of larger screen sizes.) I don’t mean this as some sort of character attack against Android owners, many of whom are very nice people. I just think that, for whatever reason, Android users are not interested in paying for mobile apps. I’ve been talking to Android and iOS owners about this for years and the theme is consistent. iOS owners buy lots of apps: Android owners don’t.

I don’t know if it is a lack of trust in the payment system or simply a culture of “free” but ask your Android toting friends how many apps they’ve purchased and the answer will be few, if any. The short of it is that Android devices could multiply like locusts but if people don’t buy apps for them, developers will stay away.