I’ve been waiting for Numbers ever since it was rumored to be released in last years iWork (that never shipped). The reason: I’ve been tied to two options, the first is Google Spreadsheets for personal use and occasionally work when we 
need to collaborate on data and the other is excel. Numbers will never replace Google Spreadsheets for the collaboration side and it’s just too easy to use GS since I’m using Google Apps for my personal use. For work I primarily manage very large CSV files and I’ve been forced to use excel for these documents.
The problems with excel are long and would just waste space so I wont list them here but the top failings; it’s extremely slow running through rosetta on large sheets and it’s extremely buggy with large spreadsheets (e.g. scrolling). A couple days ago Apple announced numbers in their press conference and I downloaded the trial for iWork ‘08. As soon as I started it up I was impressed.
Similar to Keynote and Pages it’s very simple and robust but while you’re impressed with the ease and
functionality in the first few minutes the learning curve starts soon after. The learning curve for the MS Office users is rather annoying. Not annoying that Apple designed it this way but annoying that you’re habits of clunky office aren’t going to work with the iWork apps, especially Numbers. Even MS has noticed the UI of Office pre-’07 is obnoxious and that’s why they created the ribbon, something that completely resolves the UI issues of the old Office but is very hard to get used to if you’re a veteran at Office.
On to Numbers. The application is wonderful, I could see it helping out every excel lite user out there. Apple calls it
a “flexible canvas” and it’s wonderful, similar to Pages it allows for you to move anything anywhere without being tied to a grid or a table. Charts, Images and Graphs are going to make Numbers standout. Like Keynote you know whether you’re looking at a keynote presentation or a powerpoint well now you’ll know whether the spreadsheet was create in Numbers or Excel. And with it supporting Open XML it wont matter whether you send it for another user to open it in excel or create a PDF with it’s new “Interactive Print View”.
Apple has really given the common excel hater what they want in Numbers because it’s completely “revolutionized” remixed how spreadsheets are done. The shift away from what we expect form a spreadsheet program is refreshing and is going to help out a lot of people that don’t power use excel now.
For the power users of excel, don’t get too excited. It’s worth checking out since the purposes you use excel could be responsive in Numbers but some of my major functionalities are missing (for now). That one major option is “Auto Filter”. 
A missing Auto Filter option is extremely surprising to me since the ease of use is what Apple is going for and is extremely noticeable because the filtering is the same filtering in mail or any other core OS X app, very basic or too basic for me in a spreadsheet app.
For now I’m going to keep both and see what I can do with Numbers that I can’t in excel and hopefully it wont be the vice-versa.
Parallels users would have noticed 3.0 is around the corner and may have been surprised with the cost of the upgrade, I sure was. The features are excellent, especially the 3d graphics support and the snapshot capability. I’m using fusion for one of my environments and I’d have to say VMware has a lot to do to catch up to Parallels. Ever since fusion was released it offered a lot power user settings, including snapshots and 64 bit support. Now all they have is the 64 bit support which isn’t much since 64bit OSes haven’t caught on except for OS X non-complete 64bit support in Tiger.
I might as well complete my planned post about Google apps since a conversation is about to start.
I’ve been in the transition of using Google Apps for the last few weeks for a trial review. Next week I’ll need to decide whether to keep my apps account or stick with the free apps that 
I’m so dependent on. Since the my reasoning for using Google apps is solely based on my use of e-mail and the guaranteed uptime and support I can’t say anything more about the additional features that I plan to never use (start page, talk, etc.).
Although I do use Google Calendar and having that provided uptime is a major plus.
The problems I have with moving to Google apps is the limitation of taking my already existing gmail account. It wasn’t a problem importing my years of email into the new account through gmails provided pop support nor is it a problem emailing in the new account as @gmail, the problem is being dependent on e-mail forwarding with my @gmail.com. I’m not positive but I’m imagining if gmail is not allowing me to login it’s not forwarding my email, then the uptime means nothing.
The only solution is to transition an email change which fully makes sense because I wont be dependent on a service long term. Of course I like having @gmail rather than dan@[anyone of my domains I decide] and not having to tell everyone to update my e-mail more than I distrust Google’s future. I’ll go on record that I still do not feel locked-in but things would be different if I wasn’t so dependent on @gmail.
So for $50 a year isn’t unreasonable to me it’s having to change my e-mail or changing my Talk account. I use Talk daily especially at work where I talk to developers continuesly and I refer to my chat history a lot. It being an excellent BlackBerry app also helps. And chat history is something I can’t forward to my new account so I would have to login to my gmail to retrieve it.
For my Calendar and docs I just exported and imported them without a problem. however I did have to setup the sharing again with Sara since we both manage each others cal.
Only if Google allowed a gmail upgrade service or the integration between a Google app and Google account because that’s really what’s making me hesitant. Its a shame for them since the money isn’t an issue. I can’t guarantee any uptime like that for $4 a month and e-mail is too critical to grovel at. My issues are e-mail forwarding dependency (or having to chang my e-mail address) and not having the gmail history integration for Talk.
OpenDNS added shortcuts today. I’ve been an OpenDNS user for sometime and it’s an excellent service. I haven’t noticed any speed advantages from their caching but I’m glad that we’re safer with it blocking phishing sites, it also helps with some quick URI typos.
Setting up the shortcuts feature took 2 minutes. I just needed to setup an account and add my IP (which was already populated for me) then add a few shortcuts. Now instead of http://www.google.com/reader/view/ I can type gr or rss and the page loads. I’m actually impressed that I have this functionality without needing to install anything and without it being slow what-so-ever.
If you’re not using OpenDNS on your network or your computers your going to have to spend a few more minutes configuring your router or computer but I’d fully recommend OpenDNS even if you don’t care for shortcuts. Even the network admin has a bunch of great tools like network stats.
Thanks for the great service guys.
Tailing this post I wanted to point out again that the top links feed for Digg is excellent so far. Now instead of scanning through the 200+ items spewed out of the normal feed I can know read the feed. … Read More »
January 04
The upgrade path offered by the Mac Pro is particularly interesting, not because Macs weren’t upgradable in the past (since they were) but because upgrades have never been so readily available. And based on our initial testing, it’s looking like you’ll be able to drop in a pair of Clovertowns and make the move from four to eight cores in … Read More »
September 17
Configuring those new computers were a snap.
I setup an account on each with “limited” access a default in Windows XP. Not the best solution but more then adequate for the Library folk. I then used TweakUI to autologin to those accounts, so on a reset or a poweron the accounts would automatically start. Nothing worse then a person going … Read More »
March 10
30 Boxes was released yesterday and I was one of the lucky ones to get signed up before the “traffic overload”.
I’ve only played with it a couple times since this morning and I really like it. It’s everything I would want from a Google/Gmail calendar app. Even the open api is what I would expect from the big G but as you know they’re been lacking and slow with the release of their highly rumored app. I’d imagine the 30boxes team is very excited that Google hasn’t as of yet released the fabled competitor.
The features of 30 boxes are…there, it’s a calendar app so ease of use is the main priority and they seemed to have nailed it. Adding events is extremely easy with the “one box entry”, the click able dates, the js non pop-up windows all with simplicity of use. But there are a lot of features that are worth mentioning like the syndication options, tagging of events, searching, RSS, and buddies.
The things I didn’t notice, that I would like to see in the future. 1. A decent looking theme. It’s almost as if Google designed it. 2. You can’t edit the calendar from anywhere but the site, i.e. ical and ics uploading. You can share the cal and subscribe but you can’t edit it, as far as I know. Other then those two minuscule things I’d have to say 30 boxes is excellent and will be my main cal app for now on.
Okay, Okay enough already about this thing. Who really is going to buy this with a better device already available, the PSP. The PSP does so much more including emulated snes and genesis games, plays music, video and browses the web. So who will want to buy this thing? Especially since the cost is going to be a lot more then the PSP which is currently $250. The Video iPod, if released next week would probably be around $400. This is just too much for those who already bought the best iPod ever, the nano, a couple weeks earlier.
So who will buy this thing? I might. I never thought I would want one because of the excellent capabilities of the PSP and that more importantly I already own a nano. I try to talk myself out of the Video iPod continuously.
Especially since I never watch video on my PSP but the main reason I don’t is solely because of the memory card and how long it takes to convert the video to a good compression to look good and be a small enough size. The video iPod would solve this with a hard drive and h.264. With a hard drive the video could be stored on there at a much lower compression then the PSP requires. i would love to just drag over a bunch of quicktime files, I already have, and just press play.
So will I buy it? Not likely. The reasons: I rather wait until Sony comes out with a HDD PSP, it’s too much because I already have some loot saved for the 360, i won’t use it for music because I have the nano and it’s too big, and most importantly it might not even come out.
I am spring cleaning a little.
I took the links out of the right side for two reasons: 1) Because it was an eyesore for me 2) I love Del.icio.us too much, especially since they started to show flickr style weighted tags. I know it’s sort of a nuisance because my links were one click away and now they are two but this way you are now drawn to all my links. Which are categorized so well (I plan to clean up the tags a little).
I created a Link Log. A blog for all my links, it will update every time I add a new link to my del.icio.us account. I did this with an awesome service from RSS Digest. They closed down shop right now but I found a little work around. I will write a full review on RSS Digest when the new version comes out but I do have to say it is excellent, easy and innovative. Innovative because in the near future users will be able to splice there feeds together, filter and more. I can’t wait. I originally created a plugin to take care of the rss feed with magpie from the WordPress install but I soon scratched it because I couldn’t figure out why it was getting screwed up with another RSS plugin; probably because I was sharing the basic code. Maybe later I will fix it and release it, although there already are a ton.
No flickr Zeitgeist. I took it out because it continually loaded while the page was open, something I didn’t like and I had to get rid of in order to get Jared’s tagboard plugin to work properly. Something that still isn’t because in firefox, the iframe is off vertically.
Soon I will create a new theme, I don’t know if I am going to what until K2 but I will get something together soon. It will be dark.
