I’ve been a PC user all my life, if you don’t count the Apple IIe’s we used back in high school. I then became a PC bigot and stayed that way for many years. Things stayed the same until I met my wife, who, being a graphic designer, was taught on macs, and worked on macs exclusively for her career. Before long, we had a Mac/PC household and I was now a Mac support guy. Slowly but surely I started learning the Mac way. To cut to the chase, my house now has the following hardware running on the network:

1. Dell 5100C desktop
2. Sony PictureBook
3. Apple 15″ Powerbook
4. Apple Mac Mini w/ Superdrive

I now have enough experience with the, well, experience in both camps and I want to point out a few things… When you buy a Macintosh, Apple kind of wants you to be on your feet when you start, and this is more true now then it ever was. An Apple includes most of the tools the average user is going to need to do the cool things they want to do. Things like iPhoto and iMovie HD are top of the line applications, and you’re getting them, on the drive and ready to play with. A photo package and movie editing software for the PC can be costly. iLife ‘06 also adds in the ability to create a web site, a blog, publish photos of your kids and it all WORKS, and you don’t have to shell out anything extra. So, let’s sum up, you pay more for the mac, but you get lots of the software you’d probably buy for your PC anyway, its top notch and works as soon as you press Power.
So, what happens when you buy a Dell? Well, not only do you get nothing, you’re desktop will be littered with special offers and “trial programs” that are only there because some other company paid Dell to put them there. When you finally finish setting up your PC, its like, No thanks, I don’t want to use Quicken, I don’t need an ING direct account, Oh wow Virusscan, no, wait, it expires in 30 days and threatens me to upgrade for additional costs. The list goes on and on. Apple just seems to “respect” their users a little bit more. I will never turn on a mac and have advertising and desktop spam thrown in my face. It’s just not their style. So, think about that if you’re on the fence between Mac’s and PC’s. Apple isn’t going away anytime soon, and I feel they are on the brink of their best year ever.

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Andrew over at Treonauts has tested the latest patch for Unlocked GSM Treo 650’s. If you have an unlocked 650, be sure to get the latest patch here.

If you are using any other providers, do NOT use this download, there are separate releases for Verizon, Sprint or Cingular. But do yourself a favor and make sure you’re using the latest patches, there have been many updates to this phone that will give you a more stable OS and better voice quality, among other things.

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I’m still amazed by how many people still do not use RSS. The technology has been around for years, and has grown tremendously but it is still hiding in the shadows of the internet. Forget about the technology for a second, let me try and give an example of how RSS changes how you use the internet. You don’t need to be a power user either, anybody could and should do this.

OK, so how do we use the internet today? We open our browser (hopefully firefox) and we do some of the following tasks:

• Check U.S. news
• Check the weather
• Check stock prices
• Check sports news for local team

OK, so you may have some of this bookmarked already, or you may just type in the address to cnn, or espn, or yahoo finance. But once you get to these places you still have to look further to find out what is important TO YOU. And you may have already read what’s there, the news isn’t always new, or relevant.

Well, with RSS, you can go to one place to read what’s new, relevant and important to you. The RSS logo can now be found on many of the web pages you currently visit. More customized links also appear on specific pages. Forget about how this works, if you really want to know, you can read the link on the top right of my site. For now, let’s set up a simple Bloglines account. Bloglines is one of the most popular web based feed readers (RSS sources are called feeds), the fact the its web based means you can read it anywhere, on any computer. There are other web based feed readers out there, more than i can count, but bloglines is very easy to get going. You may want to try Googles Reader which is very fast, but takes a slightly different approach to reading your feeds.

OK, go open a new page to bloglines.com. Click on Sign Up Now and give them your email address and choose a password. They will confirm your membership via email. Upon clicking the confirmation link in the email, they welcome you with a screen listing a whole bunch of popular feeds. Now, I must warn you, this can get out of hand very easily. From this list I chose to add Dilbert and Google, so I have a little humor and I can keep tabs on everyones favorite company. I click on subscribe and then I see the main feed reading page. The selections I just chose are on the left with the reading/viewing pane on the right. By default it looks like they’ve subscribed me to bloglines news as well. The number next to each feed is how many unread items I have in that feed. Since this is my first visit, Dilbert shows 12 and Google shows 7. Clicking on Dilbert shows me every daily comic since Jan 5th, in newest to oldest order. I can change this to show items in oldest to newest if preferred, and for a comic you’d probably like it that way.

OK, lets move on to adding something that matters to you, this is where things can get tricky. And Microsoft and Apple are all moving as fast as they can to integrate this stuff right into your browser, but we’re not quite there. Let’s go over to CNN, and now Business news. Lets say I want to get the latest business news from this page. If you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see an RSS link. CNN has made it somewhat easier than most places by giving you the direct URL’s right on this screen. But now I want to get only the latest money market news, not all the business news, so I use my mouse to highlight “http://rss.cnn.com/rss/money_markets.rss” and copy that to my clipboard (CTRL-C). Now, lets go back to bloglines/my feeds and click “Add”. In the box entitled “Blog or Feed URL” paste this item (CTRL-V). Click on subscribe. Before adding it, Boglines asks you to configure this feed, and how you want to view it. You can leave these settings at the default for now. We click subscribe again and that’s it, now we’ll see all the new money market business news from CNN Money.

Our second example will be to add a feed for our favorite hockey team. I click over to ESPN.com and go to NHL then Teams, the Rangers. On the team news page there is a link to “Add Rangers RSS Feed. This is a little different because clicking this link appears to show us just garbage in the browser. This is the XML code that the feed runs on. Copy the URL that’s shown in the address bar and paste it into bloglines in the same place as before.

Our last example will be to track stock news for a specific symbol. I enjoy using Yahoo Finance for my financial news, so I go to finance.yahoo.com and enter a symbol “AAPL”. On the bottom of the news list there is a link that says “Add AAPL news to my Yahoo”. You can either add it to My Yahoo (which also accepts RSS feeds) or click on the RSS link to get the RSS URL as in our previous example. Add this URL to Bloglines.

OK, now you’ve got a good start to using RSS, set bloglines to be your homepage and add more feeds as you see fit. One of the cooler things you can do now is to see who else is reading the same feeds that you are. If you’ll notice, after clicking on a feed link in Bloglines, there is a stat near the top that says “59 subscribes” or whatever the number may be. You can now browse through other peoples lists to see if they might share the same interests. You can also categorize and backup your feeds list, so don’t be afraid to invest a lot of time customizing these choices, they can come with you to another web site.

Hopefully this will change the way you surf the web by helping to consolidate many of the sites you visit regularly into one convenient portal. Any questions or comments, please contact me.

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