Here’s Apple’s Knowledge Base article on the matter:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3351

And a summary from TUAW:

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/07/11/apple-recalling-flawed-2008-time-capsules/

For those of you not aware of what this is, here it is in a nutshell. When users work with Daylite on a LAN, there is a server, and client copies of Daylite connect to that server to access the database. But because that data is so rich, detailed, and plain old LARGE, there had to be a way to access that while away from the office without trying to link to that database over intermittent and sometimes slow internet connections. As opposed to trying to build some web-based implementation, Marketcircle crafted an “offline” mode. When a user would get ready to leave their office LAN for the day, or for travel, and wanted to have their Daylite info go with them, they would choose a menu items to take their login of Daylite into “offline” mode. A local copy of pretty much the entire database would be created onto their Mac, and then they could have access to that data regardless of whether or not they had an internet connection. This was great for working on a plane, a bus, or anywhere that WiFi access was poor or spotty. Once there was an internet connection, the user could sync their offline with the live online database, and all changes, the ones they’d made on their offline, and the ones other users had been making to the main database, would sync.

This was a good solution that worked for most users, but could be problematic. If the database was large, with many thousands of contacts, and many users were making a lot of changes, those offline syncs could potentially take a long time. And if one of those long syncs was interrupted, with a bad or slow wifi connection in an airport, for example, there was a risk that data could get corrupted. Or, that the user’s offline database would be sort of half synced, and then not function. Users might then wait for another oportunity to sync again, at which point the changes needed to sync would be larger, and require a longer sync.

Marketcircle has been very aware of the weakness of their sync in regards to this scenario, and have been working diligently to solve it. With the release of Daylite 3.10, they have. I have been participating in the Daylite 3.10 beta testing program for several weeks now, and couldn’t be more thrilled at the change. The big difference is that Daylite will perform constant, regular tiny background “whisper” syncs every 5 minutes. In addition to making their sync consistency checks more robust, the automatic syncs work so well, that users can now just go offline, and forget about it. Their data gets updated within a few minutes, and the other users users their changes as well.

It seems like a simple and obvious thing when described this way, but with all software development, the devil is in the details. Getting this to work so well and so smoothly was a lot of work, and finally the online/offline system is working in the way Marketcircle had always hoped it would. I really appreciate them targeting issues like this that are important from end user’s point of view, and making Daylite even more pleasant to use.

For more details you can read the full release notes here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

No Apple?!?!

For the last year, there’s been a lot of hand wringing and speculation about the health and future of Macworld. The 2010 event would be its 26th year, but for the first time, Apple would not be attending. Macworld has been the cornerstone event for the Macintosh, and now Apple, -centric business ecosystem. Up until this year, it’s the only event where Apple, vendors, and consumers could meet, congregate, exchange ideas, share news, announce new products, all face-to-face. For anyone doing business involving the Mac and Apple products, be it software, hardware, or accessories, this was the show to attend.

With Apple’s announcement last year that it would no longer be attending, the community was shaken, and many felt that this spelled the end of future Macworld. The arguments were with the rise of internet, trade shows were no longer needed, and with a rough economy this past year, the expense of a trade show outweighed the benefits for most businesses. Apple certainly didn’t need to save the money, but for its own reasons, wanted to insulate itself from the cycle of having to do a big product announcement at the Keynote of each Macworld. (That didn’t seem to stop Apple from announcing the iPad separately just a few weeks before, something I see as having been a nod towards supporting Macworld.)

But despite all that, IDG, the company that puts on Macworld, decided to go ahead full steam. The biggest question was whether the vendors would come. Most vendors sat on the fence, waiting to see if anyone else was going to come or not. In the end, there were a lot fewer vendors than in years past, missing some of the large names such as Adobe, Quark, Epson, and Canon. But the vendors that did commit, including some large names such as Microsoft and HP, were there, along with the scores of medium and small players in the Apple econosphere. IDG worked tirelessly to secure vendors, publicize the event, reduce the costs to both vendors and attendees, changed the date from the previously awkward early January time slot to a much more welcome mid-February slot.

…No Problem!

All of IDG’s changes to Macworld 2010 made a huge difference, saving Macworld from death, but leaving it in what state of health? That’s what we all wanted to see. My fear was that the show floor would be a ghost town, with wide open spaces, dotted with anxious vendors peering out from their “we shouldn’t have spent the money on this” booths.

I arrived at the show on Thursday morning, to attend the keynote address, delivered this year by New York Times Technology columnist David Pogue. In Macworlds past, this was the slot where Steve Jobs himself would come down from the mountain and reveal Apple’s latested creation. Its where the iPod was revealed, the iPhone, the iMac, etc. Obviously, lacking that kind of content, Pogue had a tall bill to fill, but as opposed to trying to out-Steve Steve, he did it in his own folksy way, putting on a keynote filled with his own light Mac humor, some music, a skit, and some guests, including Apple enthusiast and acclaimed actor Levar Burton. Despite a potentially hokey event, it went down well, set the tone, and Macworld 2010 was off to a good start.

The show floor was packed. Right from the start, absolutely packed, in a good way. The floor area was about 40% the size of last year’s, and small enough to fit in only one of the two massive halves of the Mosocne Center. Paul Kent, IDG World Expo vice president and general manager, who produced the show, told me that attendance was about 30,000, down from 90,000 in the previous year. And although size is what everyone was worried about, it didn’t seem to put a dent on excitement on the floor. Vendors who were there were mobbed, the Mobile Applications Showcase area was jammed, and the scheduled events were solidly attended. Some photos on clixtr.com.

Stuff I Saw and New Things

Aly and AJ of Marketcircle w/Douglas (middle) at Macworld

Marketcircle, the company that makes both Daylite and Billings, hadn’t committed to attending until just two weeks before, and they’re glad they did. By attending, they were able to submit Billings Touch, their new iPhone app version of their invoicing application Billings, for consideration for a Macworld Best of Show award. And they won it. Congratulations!

at the CrashPlan booth

CrashPlan, the makers of the excellent cross platform backup solution for home and business, CrashPlan and CrashPlan Pro, were there with a large booth. I got a chance to talk to their people about their latest products, and get some demos of some of the finer points of their software. I am really impressed with their stuff, and will be recommending this, where appropriate, to clients in the coming year.

Microsoft let leak a few more details about their upcoming Office 2011 suite of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and for the first time Outlook — NOT Entourage, for Mac. I’m not a big fan of Entourage, due to its myriad of technical issues, nor Outlook on Windows. But the good news is that Outlook 2011 will allow the import of Windows Outlook generated .pst files. This is going to make switching users out of Outlook Windows into Mail.app on the Mac that much easier.

talking to the Neat people

The receipt and business card scanner industry was seeing a lot of activity, with long time player Fujitsu showing their latest ScanSnap scanners, and scanner and software makers Neat were showing off the new NeatWorks for Mac 3.0 . This is great software that, combined with either their mini portable scanner, or their slightly larger desktop model, will scan, and then OCR receipts, cataloging them in an exportable database come tax time. It also does the same for business cards, scanning them and allowing for import into Address Book and other common formats. I wish the sync was a few steps shorter, but that’s what I love about Macworld — I was able to talk to the developers directly, explain my concerns and give them direct feedback. Finally, new players to the Mac receipt & biz card scanner market were BulletScan, who also were showing higher capacity document scanners in the $1000 – $2000 range — perfect for smaller law offices who need to digitize lots of case files.

demo at the Pulse Smartpen booth

Finally, I bought a gadget. I usually let myself try out one gadget per Macworld. This year, I’d been intrigued by the LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen for a while. It’s one of those things that might be a useless toy, and might be a game changer. I’ve always been bad at taking notes, mostly because I’m good at remembering things. But I can’t remember it all, and occasionally wish I’d taken better notes, mostly at client meetings. I’m hesitant to take physical notes, because of the chore of re-typing them into my Mac, and I’m not fast enough (and accurate) of a typist to type while in a meeting. Not being a touch typist, but a hunt-and-pecker, it is distracting to be typing on a computer while talking to a client.

Enter the Pulse Smartpen. It is a combo audio recorder and pen-stroke recorder. When taking notes on their supplied special paper (just like any notebook or notepad, but coevered in nearly invisible micro dots), the pen records your pen strokes, as well as the audio. When you dock the pen in its USB cradle, your note taking sessions are copied into the Mac. The page(s) of your notes are perfectly reproduced on the software’s screen, and you can then select any word or image to playback the audio that was happening at the the time you wrote those words. The words are also searchable, as they OCR your handwriting. And my handwriting is awful, yet the software was able to find almost every word I wrote. That in itself is amazing. It’s much harder to describe than it is to watch the videos on their site. Suffice to say, it works fantastically well — no lag, no slowdowns — its pretty amazing to see in action. With the 10% off show floor special, and Marni Melrose’s demo of how to use it to get notes and diagrams into Daylite, I was sold.

Conclusions

John Gruber presents at Macworld 2010

I enjoyed Macworld 2010, and despite its smaller size, I felt it demonstrated a fundamental truth about Macworld — It’s not about Apple. It’s about the businesses that work with Apple products. All those people need a place to congregate and exchange ideas, and look each other in the eye. I can’t stress that enough, that having face-to-face contact with consultants and developers and engineers is irreplaceable, no matter how much info might be on a product website, or how quickly an engineer replies to your email. It’s also a time for the tech press and pundits to assess the state of the Apple universe, and define their thoughts and musings on the direction of things. Evidence of this was in the many excellent presentations, not the least of which was the talk by John Gruber of daringfireball.net .

I think it will keep going, and I think it will grow… slightly. Nothing can replace Apple’s presence on the show, but I think it will give the rest of the community plenty of space to expand into the new format. Without having to work to Apple’s schedule and needs, the show organizers have more flexibility, and hopefully will use that to improve the show.

You can view my short slideshow of photos from the show here.

With the iPad, Apple seems to have figured out the right combo. More like a grown up iPhone than a scaled down MacBook, its interface is very similar to the iPhone’s, but with changes that take advantage of the size and more powerful capabilities. I’m not going to do a full review here, but I will return to link to reviews and comments by people who’ve had a chance to test and look at the device first hand. In the meantime, learn about it on Apple’s site.

I’ll be downloading and testing the beta with Snow Leopard on release day, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

The much anticipated Daylite 3.9 was released last week by Marketcircle. DL 3.9 is a major upgrade, with an under-the-hood database engine change (out with OpenBase, in with PostgreSQL), a new Daylite Server component, and support for the new iPhone companion application Daylite Touch. One week in, the transition has gone smoothly for most, with just a few hiccups (mostly from early adopters not reading the instructions!). I have been busy upgrading clients all week. With so many changes, it would take a lot of space to summarize them all here. However, here’s a GREAT write up — very readable —  with nice screenshots, that explain the whole thing in good detail. It will answer most of your “what’s new” and “why should I care” questions. Give it a read.

The bottom line, however, is that Daylite 3.9 is faster, more robust, and modern under the hood than were previous versions of Daylite. For you, this means faster searches, faster online/offline syncing, and more reliable communication with iSync/Address Book/iCal/MobileMe. It means a better Daylite experience for users with larger numbers of contacts and items. And it means that Daylite has a very, very powerful architechture that will allow it to grow, adapt, and add new features going forward. Marketcircle is so focused on getting Daylite users to this new version, that they are announcing they are ending support for DL 3.8 and earlier as of June 2009! Did I mention that for all current Daylite users, upgrading to Daylite 3.9 is free? And that Daylite Server is free?

Daylite Touch

The part of the release that is getting the most attention, of course, is Daylite Touch. DLT is a companion application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that connects directly to your Daylite Server. It will display your Daylite contacts, calendars, projects, opportunities, appointments, notes, tasks, etc etc, and allow to add/edit/delete these items in a powerful, flexible way, right on your iPhone. No more will you need to rely on chain of interconnected parts of 1) Daylite syncing to Mac OS, 2) then to Address Book/iCal, 3) then to MobileMe, 4) then to your iPhone. DLT talks directly to your Daylite Server, all in one step. You can download Daylite Touch right now from the iTunes App store for free, and try it out with the sample database. However, to run it with your database, the cost is $49/device/year. This is the first time Marketcircle has offered a “subscription” type of license, thus the “per year”.

With the arrival of DLT, Daylite and iPhone users can finally feel secure about leaving that laptop at the office, and still being in control and informed about their business while on the go.

Also, if you’re thinking of purchasing licenses from Marketcircle for Dayliet, Daylite Touch, or Billings, please don’ forget to do so through my Marketcircle affiliate link. Doing so will help me get a small “recommenders fee” — thanks!

I’ve been on a personal battle against piles of paper, as have most of my clients. Using the Mac to run your business has made that easier, but most people, aren’t aware of the free, already built in tools in Mac OS X that help you do that easily. Also, there are a few great 3rd party hardware and software tools that I use and recommend to help take things further. Here are a few of the things I do and recommend to help keep paper to a minimum…

1) Save As PDF… Whenever I buy something online and am asked to “Print a copy for your records”, or come across a web page that I know I’ll refer to later, but am afraid it will change or disappear from the web, I DO choose “Print”. But at the print dialog, I DON’T press the final “Print” button in the lower right — I go to the PDF menu in the lower left, and choose “Save As PDF…”

This “prints” to a PDF file. I can then use Spotlight to search for any text in the PDF later, so it is easy to find. I just saved a tree!

2) Use Spotlight. Really, that little magnifying glass in the upper right corner of your screen is your quick access to Spotlight’s search engine. Its a powerful tool you should take the time to learn.

(You can also activate it by pressing command-space on your keyboard. This is the same “engine” as command-F for “Find”, but in a more convenient place.) So why use it? Under Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Spotlight was slow and didn’t work very well — it didn’t live up to the hype. Under Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, they fixed it, and it is now speedy and efficient. Spotlight searches _everything_ in your user folder. Not just file names, but the contents of the files. If I just saved a PDF of a web page about an  automatic pet feeder I could use Spotlight to find it by entering automatic cat feed… and before I was done typing, it would show me that PDF as a result. That is a LOT faster than sifting through piles of paper print-outs. Spotlight will find the contents of any file that has text, so PDFs, Word documents, text files, emails (yes, it will find stuff in your email messages), Address Book, etc. That’s strike two against paper!

3) Scan stuff in. Although I produce less paper, I still get it coming to me all the time. My technique to deal with most of it is to scan it in as images/PDFs, and then perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert it to searchable text. In the past, doing this with conventional flatbed scanners and graphics-oriented software would be tedious and time consuming. These days, there is a great selection of hardware and software that are focused on doing these things for documents and text. My favorite piece of hardware for this, bar none, is the Fujitsu ScanSanap S510M. For about $450, this this blazes through client checks, stacks of invoices, and business cards, turning them all into PDFs, or sending them wherever you’d like, or to whatever application you designate. You can save presets, so, for example, you want to do low resolution and send it to a folder for purchase orders, but do high resolution and send to ReceiptWallet for receipts.

Oh yeah, ReceiptWallet, for people who want to avoid the “box-o-receipts” at the end of the year, is great software for receiving those PDFs, either “printed” from a web page, or scanned in with your ScanSnap, and storing the image, and allowing you to input the receipt category, type, amount, etc. It will even try to read/OCR your receipt, and fill in the amounts for you. A great product that has made tax time a breeze.

Another product to tame those mountains of business cards, and get them into Daylite or Address Book, is NeatReceipts for Mac. Like ReceiptWallet, it will scan and organize receipts for you, but will also read business cards in, and send them over to Address Book. A huge time saver after a trade show or large meeting, when you haul a stack of cards back with you to the office. NeatReceipts is also bundled with a small, very portable scanner. The scanner isn’t as fast as the ScanSnap, but is tiny, portable, fits in a bag easily, or sits on a desk without hogging too much room. Now you can shred all that stuff and use it for packing material.

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So that’s a quick roundup of my techniques for fighting the war on paper that have been working for me and my clients. These tools are just the beginning, and please feel free to ask me if you’d like to learn more!

As many of you know, I recently returned from the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco. I’ve attended pretty much every year. This year’s event was preceded by the announcement that it would be Apple’s last year at the show, after 25 years, and that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would not be delivering the keynote (which was due to his ill health). While much was made in the press about this, it didn’t hamper the enthusiasm at the show. It was still the ultimate gathering place for hardware and software developers, and professionals in the Macintosh community to meet, network, and learn. For UGUtech, it is all those things, as well as a place for the Apple Consultants Network to hold their annual business meeting, training events and networking. It’s an extremely productive trip for my business, as it gives me the chance to meet developers and engineers face to face, see their new and updated offering, and learn about new developments for my clients. This year was no exception, and I learned a lot for both myself and my clients. I even volunteered to staffMarketCircle’s booth for an afternoon, where they were showing Daylite, Daylite Touch, and Billings. It was a great experience where I had the chance to test my knowledge and skills of MarketCircle’s applications, what they do, and how they work, all to a steady stream of interested attendees.

While the future of Macworld 2010 is up in the air, due to both industry trends away from trade shows and Apple’s pull-out, I feel strongly that there is a chance of a good Macworld 2010 without Apple, or that some other meeting ground for the Apple and Mac community will take its place. If there’s another one, I’ll likely be there.

Daylite Touch and Daylite 3.9

On Monday Jan 4th I attended a Daylite Partners meeting hosted by MarketCircle, makers of Daylite. They gave us a sneek peek and tech demo on their new project, Daylite Touch. DT is a companion application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows mobile integration with Daylite. Tasks, appointments, projects, and contacts are all synced over wifi or mobile networks. It will be a paid add-on, and will require the soon be released free upgrade to Daylite 3.9, which in itself is full of massive improvements in syncing accuracy and speed. These improvements are due mainly to the fact that DL 3.9 no longer uses the OpenBasedatabase engine as its back end; it has been replaced withPostgreSQL, and much more powerful and modern database. What that means to you is speed, stability, better sync, and no more having to put license codes in each copy of Daylite… it all goes into just Daylite server!

Watch an interview with Marketcircle CEO Alykhan Jetha, founder of MarketCircle, as he explains Daylite Touch from the Macworld show floor

LightSpeed 3

I also attended a training and product announcement for LightSpeed partners and resellers. If you’re not familiar with it, LightSpeed is the most fantastic Point of Sale (POS) applications for small business out there, Mac or Windows (LS is Mac only). It has been called “the point-of-sale (POS) software that has more in common with iTunes than with any business software you’ve ever seen” ( — MacVoices).

I am a LightSpeed partner, and was there to learn about their new 3.0 release. In short, there were a lot of welcome improvements, like a new POS screen, designed for faster transactions, multisotre integration, supports for debit cards and USB PIN pad hardware, and a completely rebuilt WebStore 2.0.Listen to an interview with Xsilva CEO and founder Dax Dasilva as he talks about Lightspeed on MacVoices, and DO take a quick look at the LightSpeed quick tour video.