As many of you may know I have been a “pro-apple” guy ever since I saw my first iMac. It was clean and white, stood alone and had no tower feeding it wires, no mess of cables under the desk and it all seemed very well made. In fact that iMac still works today almost roughly 5 years after its purchase date and hasn’t had a single hiccup. 

Then in 2007 Apple tried their hand at Phones and with the annual iteration of the iPhone they keep getting better and forced other phone manufacturers to change their direction and focus. They almost crushed Blackberry outright but spawned a litany of other phones inspired by the iPhone but different in many ways. Some better and some worse. 

When I jumped on the iPhone bandwagon roughly a year ago I felt like I was making the best decision. After all I already had a Mac and already used iTunes so obvious phone of choice was an iPhone. I even did some research on other phone available at the time and did some color representation, battery life, screen density and weight comparisons to the other phones out there and when weighing in the app store and the fact that tonnes of developers flocked to the iPhone platform I felt that I would get more useful life out of my phone if it where an iPhone. 

Fast forward to today. After a year of using, living with and experimenting with the iPhone and going from iOS 4 to 5, playing with jail-breaking and other things, going through antennae-gate and dealing with software limitations like no accelerometer in background, a awkward settings application and outright STEALING the notifications center from android and continuous reports of fragility of the iPhone I was starting to have second thoughts. 

So before I made any decision I sat down and thought about what I really use my phone for. Here is my list:

• communications. ie. facebook chat, texting, skype and phone calls
• Social Media. ie. Facebook, google plus, youtube and tumblr
• scheduling. ie. calendaring and reminders
• weather reports
• News updates via. Stichter and No Agenda
• Streaming audio
• Podcast listening
• Listening to music
• Controlling my mac with (Rowmote)
• Reading Reddit.com

All of these tasks I value in my mobile device and have come to love certain developers work on the iPhone but certain nagging issues that stared out as just little buggaboos where now becoming very frustrating and infuriating the more I heard about them. Here is a list of the stuff that was making me dislike the iPhone and Apple:

• The small screen, however pixel dense with the “retina” screen was still too small for things like calendaring and text messaging
• iOS apps can only do limited things
• interface options are non-existant
• iTunes and app store are draconian and take a whopping 30% from developers of apps i love. I’m much more willing to pay money for an app when i know more is going to the people that made it. 
• The home button is too limited in functionality
• having all software buttons on applications limits available screen space. 
• Home screen is almost 100% useless for gathering information

After examining the android approach to the homescreen and their App model I was sold. Android devices have a very malleable home screen, you can place little widgets on the homescreen, like a weather widget to show you the weather, a facebook widget to let you quickly see your friends updates without having to launch the whole thing. A better contacts application that auto fills information and being able to call from your contact list straight to Skype! Best of all there is a “swipe keyboard” for entering text and you just keep your finger on the keyboard and draw out the path your finger would take to type a word, and it is incredibly accurate. Far more accurate than apple’s autocorrect. 

This was just a short list of why I’m moving. I plan on doing a entire University Power Users show on this topic. 

In the future I may even move from the Mac to another system, but we will have to see about that one as I still like Mac OSX better than either Windows or any Linux distro. 

Hello to the three people who actually read this thing. 

This blog is now going to get a bit more posts and will no-longer focus on tech help stuff. all that is going to my new site universitypowerusers.com where i will post every podcast i produce along with full shownotes and links to everything i talk about on the University Power Users show. 

this blog will now be more for personal things and longer form thoughts and ideas that I dont feel belong on facebook. 

I might even put up some videos when i produce some. :)

-pwnus

A new semester is upon many a student this week and most still take notes in one location, don’t back-up their stuff. If their computer crashes or gets stolen. Potentially ALL their work is lost. So to protect you from having to re-write your essays and cobble your notes back together, here is a quick, easy and FREE solution that will save your bacon. Heres how:

1. GET DROPBOX! 

I honestly can’t stress this enough. Get dropbox. stop reading, go to dropbox.com and get it! its free, its cross platform and it will save your data.

Now that you have dropbox, Lets back up and examine what it is so you may better use it. Dropbox is a synchronization and back-up service for your data. (2GB FREE or you can pay for more) once installed it will place a special folder in your home directory called “dropbox” and this folder and everything it contains will be copied to dropbox’s servers within seconds of hitting that save button on your word document. Better still, if you have several machines (laptop, desktop, iPad etc) it will send the saved file to each device! so you can pick-up on your desktop right where you left off on your laptop when you get home. 

Dropbox also has a web interface you can use on any school or friends computer. You just log into dropbox.com with your favorite browser (at school they usually force you to use Internet Explorer… yuck I know) once logged in you can download your essays and print them or email them to your Prof just in time for the due date! 

One final note on dropbox. It supports versioning of your documents. This means that every time you hit save, dropbox not only saves the new version, but it archives the previous version as well. So say you really like your previous revision much better or drastically changed your essay then hit “save” you can get right back to the old version. All you have to do is go to the dropbox.com site, login, click on the file, and select the “previous version” button and your off to the races!

2. GET DROPBOX!

Ok one last thing. Dropbox also supports sharing of folders with as many friends as you like. This is SUPER fantastic for group projects and research projects. Simply make a folder inside your dropbox folder, name it something like “stupid group project” then right click and select “share this folder”. Follow the steps and enter the emails of all the group members and BAM! that folder is synced between every group member’s computer. So you toss in a few notes, your friends can work on the essay together, and all without having to meet. (because we all know how ‘easy’ it is for groups to get together)

oh by the way,

You’re welcome

Next Post: Getting a grip on Personal and Web security (simple edition)

I often don’t believe in super heroes. Unless they are things like dropbox and OpenDNS. Today I feel like talking about OpenDNS. (I’ll get to dropbox when I have more patience to explain in minute detail why its better than breathing) 

To start, if you’re a super nerd (I’m looking at you Simmons and Shumlich) this will be just a refresher and for everyone else you may praise me for being “so smaaaaart” later. To being I’ll break it down. DNS stands for Domain Name System. It’s essentially a computerized phonebook for computers. This is because computers don’t like using simple things like names to identify each other, they are more receptive if they use numbers.

74.125.127.99 is a fine name for a computer. However us lowly humans can’t remember these numbers all that well so we like to assign names to these machines. This machine’s name is google.com for example. Now the system that links the name we like with the name computers like is called DNS. This service is managed usually by ones ISP (Internet Service Provider) but due to lots of technical mumbo-jumbo I don’t particularly care about they are not the fastest at proving us with the information of what computer is what name fast enough. This basically means that internet searches and direct URL lookups can take up to a second or five to get an answer. And to combat this pokey response system as well as to offer up plenty of anti-phishing and anti-scam filtering is a company called OpenDNS.

This company does sell services to businesses but were focused on the free awesomeness for home users. OpenDNS provides approximately 327,053 DNS requests every second and has their data centers placed in the densest areas of the inter-webs and can provide DNS responses in microseconds!  This small increase in response time can seriously cut time you spend on the web down because it cuts a few seconds from EVERY website you visit, and they add-up.

The addresses here you need to concern yourself with are:

-

208.67.222.222

208.67.220.220

-

Now what to do with these you ask? I’m so glad you did. But because I’m lazy I will only provide instructions for Airport users (apple routers).

Instructions:

1. Be at home.
2. Open Airport Utility
3. Select your primary router
4. Go to “internet”
5. Then the “TCP/IP” tab
6. And down where it says DNS, fill in the two fields with the numbers provided by OpenDNS 
7. Restart the airport
8. Enjoy a faster internet!

And there you have it! A faster internet for free! 

More to come.