Here is a nice piece on Adam Lisagor at FastCompany. Adam is this weekend’s Mac Power Users workflow guest and absolutely endearing. I’m thrilled for him.

Who would have thought this 10 years ago? Nutty.

Kirk McElhearn explains how-to. This is one of the most frequent problems I hear about from readers and friends. It goes something like this:

1. Big iTunes library goes on external drive (Not Time Machine);
2. External drive goes up in smoke;
3. Tears.

Once you put your iTunes library on an external drive, outside your normal backup regime, there be dragons. You need to have a second drive (at the minimum) and routinely make a copy of your iTunes library. I do this once a month. I figure I can deal with losing a month of play counts and new content. I know there are some online backup solutions but still can’t get over the idea of how long it would take to upload a 1TB library.

I’m starting to notice benchmarks concerning the impact of Lion FileVault on portable Macs. I don’t think benchmarks are the right context for this discussion. You either need encryption or you don’t. If the thought of someone, who just stole your laptop, rifling through your files, browser passwords, and other data, doesn’t bother you, move on. Otherwise, use FileVault. I use it and can’t see or feel any appreciable system slowdown on my Fall 2010 MacBook Air. Neither can Ben Brooks or Federrico Viticci. To me this is a complete non-issue. Laptop + Lion = Encryption.

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When I first started running the Lion betas, there was no 1Password extension for Safari and it felt like someone hacked off one of my arms. I knew the 1Password team was hard at work but not this hard. The new 1Password Safari/Lion extension is fantastic. They’ve folded several features into the extension that used to require launching the app. Read more about it here. I dig it.

Macdrifter explains his backup regime. Gabe is my kind of nerd.

I almost named this post “Hell Freezes Over” but that wouldn’t be fair. In truth, the Microsoft Mac Office team is as big a bunch of Apple nerds as there are. It is impressive that they can get Office, which is legendary for its refusal to follow Apple programming protocols to take advantage of all the Lion goodness in just a few months. Nice work Office for Mac team.

Merlin talked about using Byword in the most recent Back to Work episode. I couldn’t agree more. The Byword developer was active as Apple finished up Lion and had a Lion compatible version out even before Lion released.

The app works with Markdown flawlessly and does no more. I’ve been playing with BBEdit and TextMate but can’t seem to find a reason to use them when I am just writing Markdown text and Byword does it so well. I’m planning a future MPU episode on power text editing and looking forward to talking to some friends about why I should be using big boy tools for text editing. For the meantime though, I’m really satisfied with Byword.

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