iTeleport

[Editor - Sorry for the delay in getting this one out folks. Unfortunately, there is little that you can do when your guts kick you in themselves. Hope you enjoy.]

Ever go off somewhere, to a meeting, or to visit a friend, and realize that you wanted to show something on your computer to someone? Maybe you had your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad along with you, and you checked Dropbox and Evernote and cursed yourself because the file wasn't in either one, but was safely on your computer at home, just out of reach. Well, if you have iTeleport installed, that file won't be out of reach anymore. You'll be able to connect to your home computer, find the file and drop it into Dropbox, e-mail it, or anything else you want!

Scrambled Bits - Part Three: TrueCrypt

In parts one and two of this series I talked to you about the encryption software native to the newer versions of Windows. Contrary to what some would like to believe there are a lot of older versions of Windows still running around out there. There are also a number of operating systems other than those put out by Microsoft that people are fond of. And that's not counting people that aren't fond of Vista or Windows 7. So what if you find yourself in this group?

Scrivener 2.0

[This week's review for The Nifty Tech Blog is a Guest Review by author Philippa Ballantine. Pip is the author of Geist and the co-author of the forthcoming Phoenix Rising: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel. We are happy to have Pip's review as part of her Blog Tour promoting the release of Geist.


Some notes not included in Pip's review: Scrivener is published by Literature & Latte Ltd. and costs $45 . Up until this year, it has been Mac OS only, and developed by Keith Blount. But now Keith is assisted by a number of contributors, and a new Windows version is now in public beta. But enough of me, here's Pip! Enjoy! - Editor]

AirPort Extreme

As mobile devices become more popular, the need for wireless networks increases in order to provide the most demanding apps with the bandwidth they require. And eventually, one begins to look at setting up your own home network. These days, many internet providers are filling this demand by providing uplink devices with built in wireless modems. For some it is an option, for others it is a premium service with an accompanying monthly fee. For some people, letting Comcast or Verizon or whomever set up their wireless network is good enough. But others want more control over the network, and who is allowed on it. In this review, I'd like to show this last group of people one of the easiest, fastest, and most robust ways to set up your own wireless network: The AirPort Extreme.

The AirPort Extreme is Apple's latest solution for wireless networking. It provides the speed of 802.11n (Draft) wireless networking and is still backwards compatible with 802.11g, b, and a devices. Even better, the latest incarnation of the AirPort Extreme has dual-band support. This means that instead of one antenna for the wireless network, the base station has two antennas, so it can use one antenna for the speedy 802.11n devices and a second antenna for the slower 802.11g, b, or a devices. Most other wireless networks will slow down when a g or b device connects to the network. And there is actually a third antenna, so you can set up a Guest Network and allow visitors to use your connection to the internet without letting them see your computers on your local network. With the AirPort Extreme you can connect up to 50 devices on the network and all share the same internet connection. And they don't all have to be Apple devices. 802.11 is an industry standard and should communicate well with any device that follows the standard, be they Mac, PC, Linux, or something else. In this review, I'll be going over the set up of a new AirPort Extreme, to show how easy it is to get going right out of the box. I'll highlight a few of the other features as well, but if you really want to dig into everything the AirPort Extreme can do, go look at http://www.apple.com/airportextreme/ and take a look. Apple sells the AirPort Extreme for $179 in their US stores, but we were able to find it online for $164.39 at B&H. Prices will vary with time and from country to country. Right now we're just looking at the standard base station, not the $99 AirPort Express portable base station, or the Time Capsule, which provides a base station and 1 or 2 TB of network attached storage for $299 or $499, respectively. All of these are Apple AirPort devices and should give about the same feel when setting up and using your network, but may have slightly different features.

A few more features of the AirPort Extreme I'd like to mention before diving into setting up a new network. The AirPort Extreme has a USB port on the back, which you can use to connect a USB hard drive or a USB printer, or both if you also add in a USB hub. Why would you plug your hard drive or printer into the Extreme? Because the AE will share these devices on your network, allowing all connected devices to share the printer and hard drive. Naturally, you can put additional security on your drives to limit access. And unfortunately every computer will need their own drivers in order to print to the printer, but other than that little wrinkle, it is an easy way to share these resources with multiple users.

The AE supports the latest security protocols, so instead of leaving your network wide open (a bad thing to do), you can secure it with a password using WPA, WPA2, or WEP encryptions. Wait, what is all this alphabet soup? These are different standards for wireless encryption. Depending on how old your other devices are, your security needs, and if you're using some features with limited compatibility, you'll probably want to use one of these standards to protect your wireless network. The oldest of these is WEP, which stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy. Unfortunately, there were some flaws in WEP that allowed unauthorized persons to determine the password and decrypt the network traffic. WPA stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access. WPA was developed to eliminate the problems found in WEP, but was introduced quickly and was discovered to still contain some flawed code. WPA2 patched the remaining holes and is the current accepted security standard for networks. I recommend using WPA2 with a strong password: a password that contains letters, numbers, and special characters and does not appear to be a word or a simple pattern drawn on a standard keyboard. However, if you've got some older devices in your network, you may not be able to use WPA2 or WPA. Do the best you can, or try to set up your older devices to be connected to the network with Ethernet cables.

In addition to turning on encryption and setting up a strong password, you can also limit access to the base station to specific MAC addresses. No, that's not a Macintosh address, it stands for Media Access Control address. The MAC address is a unique identifier that each device has when using a particular network protocol. It uniquely identifies that specific device. When looking up a MAC address for your device, make sure you have the wi-fi address. Some devices also have different MAC addresses for using Ethernet or Bluetooth. And lastly, you can set up a Closed network. That means that instead of the base station shouting out "I have a network, and this is its name! Wanna join?", the base station will simply listen for devices that already know the network's name and access password to request a connection. These different security measures are all industry standards, so your devices should be able to work with them, but some devices may have issues when using more than one of these methods. I recommend using WPA2 encryption, and limiting to MAC addresses. Those two methods usually work well together. Your mileage may vary. If you're concerned about the security of your network from intruders on the internet side of things, the AirPort Extreme has a built-in Firewall to keep intruders out of your network.

Now, if at least one of the computers on your network is a Mac or a Windows box, you should have a very easy time with the AirPort Extreme. Apple provides AirPort Utility with the AE and usually installs it with Mac OS X. AirPort Utility provides powerful, easy to use tools to set up and manage your AirPort network.

After taking your AirPort Extreme out of the box, you'll plug in the power supply, and connect that cord to the back of the unit. And you'll need an Ethernet cable to connect to your internet access point. For most people this is a cable or DSL modem. This Ethernet cable plugs into the WAN (Wide Area Network) port. This is on the back of the AirPort Extreme. There are four Ethernet ports back there, the one you want is next to the USB port, on the side where the power supply plugs in. Once you've plugged up the hardware, and installed AirPort Utility on your computer, we're ready to get started.

When you first bring up AirPort Utility, it should scan for Airport base stations that need to be configured. The default name for the base station should be something like "Base Station abcd3f". The last six characters are the end characters from the MAC address for the primary antenna of the base station. This is the one used for the fast 802.11n speeds. It should look something like this.

And we're already into the setup wizard. To begin setting up your base station, click the Continue button. The next screen asks you to name the base station, and to pick a password for it. The name here is just the name of the base station. You don't have to change it unless you have more than one base station. It just helps you figure out which base station you're working with when you're in Airport Utility.

This isn't your network password, but a password that will allow you to change settings in the future. You'll want to pick a password that is memorable and strong. Some people create strong passwords by taking the first letter from each word of a short phrase. By including punctuation and inserting a few numbers, you can usually get a pretty strong password, and it is easier to remember the phrase. If you click on the key icon, a Password Assistant window will open. It will suggest a good password, and will tell you how strong your password is. It can suggest several different types of passwords. So enter your password and click Continue.

This screen asks how you want to set up your network. You can create a new network, replace an existing base station in a wireless network, or add a new base station on to extend an existing network. We're creating a new network, so we'll just click Continue.

Now we're on the screen where we are naming the actual network. You might also want to change from the default name for your network as Apple's default tells everyone whose network it is. This may help hackers find information about you to break your password. Don't make it easy on them.

The password on this screen is the one that your devices will use when joining the network. Again, you want a good strong password that you can remember. Don't rely on Keychain and other things to remember your password for you. They may help with day to day computing, but some day you'll want to add a new device to your network and unless you remember that password, you'll have to reset passwords on the entire network. Make it memorable, and at least 8 characters long. Of course, if you have a huge plot of land and no neighbors, or if you are a strong believer in free Wi-Fi, you can click the No Security radio button and create a totally open network. If you're like most folks, you'll want to enter a new name, and a good password, and click Continue.

This next screen lets you set up a guest network if you like. You can set a password for the guest network, or leave it open with no password at all under the security popup. Or you can uncheck the box and leave a guest network for later. We'll do that and click continue.

This screen talks about how you connect with the internet. Most people will be using DHCP, getting a IP address assigned automatically from your ISP and changing on some set period of inactivity that your ISP controls. If you have a domain associated with your network, or your ISP requires a DHCP client ID, you can enter them here. But for most people, it is just time to click Continue.

And at last we have a Summary screen. This is your last chance to check your settings before updating the base station. Now we click update, and then Continue, and wait for the base station to restart. It should take about 30 seconds.

And that is it! Your network is up and you're connected. Your network is protected by your password. If you want to enable other security measures, share drives or printers, just choose Manual Setup from the Base Station menu. This opens up this screen, giving you access to all the available capabilities of your Base Station.

If you want your network to be a little more secure you can go into Access Control, choose Timed Access from the pop up menu.

From here you can enter a MAC address for a particular device, and set up rules for when that device can access your network. The first entry there is the default, it is the access that machines that aren't on the list get to your network. Be default they can access it all day every day. If you're going to limit MAC addresses, you'll probably want to change that to no access.

If you forget a password, or manage to block MAC addresses without giving access to your own MAC address, you can connect to your base station with an Ethernet cable and fix it.

One of the nice things about the design of AirPort Utility is that most of these screens are pretty self-explanatory. You don't really need someone like me to tell you how to use each one. The hardest part is really the initial setup, and you're past that now. Once you've connected your devices successfully, they should connect right to your network whenever you're in range. The actual range depends on what kind of device you're using. 802.11n signals are pretty robust and have a good range. 802.11g signals are unfortunately prone to interference from cordless phones and other devices. And of course your environment will have an effect on how far and how cleanly the signal carries. In most cases you should have usable signal within 150 feet of the base station.

We have to give Apple credit for building a product based around ease of use. It may not be the right answer for everyone, but for people who just want to set up their network and move on with using it, it really does the job.

Evernote

Are you one of those people who goes out to a restaurant and has great ideas over dinner? You scribble them down on a napkin, or the back of your receipt and then stuff it into your wallet or a coat pocket and never seem to get back to it? Or if you do get back to it, some important part of it always seems to be missing? If you can relate to this, Evernote was created for you.

Evernote for Android

Evernote is a free service provided by the Evernote Corporation. It allows you to capture, organize, and reference your notes, pictures, web clippings, and more.  And you can do it from their web interface at http://www.evernote.com, or by downloading a client.  Currently clients are available for Mac OS X, Windows, the iPhone, the iPad, Android, Blackberry, the Palm Pre or Palm Pixi, and for Windows Mobile. Once you've created your free account, your notes will sync to each client as it connects to Evernote's servers.  The number of notes you can have is unlimited, but with a free account, you're limited to uploading 40MB of notes per month.  Evernote also offers a Premium account for $5 a month or $45 a year that increases your upload limit to 500MB a month and provides additional extra functions.

Getting started with Evernote is just a matter of creating a username and password and providing Evernote with a valid e-mail address. Evernote will send you a confirmation e-mail. Verify that you did create the account, then sign in with your new account, or download and install one or more clients.  You're ready to start capturing your notes.  Simple.

Evernote for Blackberry

There are a lot of ways to get something into Evernote.  The most obvious is to use one of the clients to create new text notes, or take a snapshot directly into Evernote from the client.  In my experience with my iPhone, taking photos directly to Evernote was always an iffy proposition.  I've lost pictures because the upload never completed, or a phone call came in during the upload, or because the client app just popped.  Much safer to take the picture to your phone's cameral roll, and then upload it from there to Evernote.  And on some devices you can also take voice notes as well.

The Windows and Mac clients also install an Evernote web clipping tool.  You can also download and install versions of the tool for various browsers on those machines where you don't want to have a full browser, but use often enough to want to be able to capture web clippings.  Once the tool is installed, just click on it to send an entire page to Evernote.  If you only want a portion of a web page, just select the area you want first.

Web clipping tool on a Mac browser

Evernote has a few other ways of allowing you to import information.  With each account you get an e-mail address that allows you to send or forward e-mail right into Evernote.  So when you get that hotel conformation letter you can forward it and have it in Evernote where you can find it quickly.  More on finding things later. If you start getting spam at that address filling up your Evernote, just go into settings on the web client and generate a new e-mail address for your Evernote account.  In addition to e-mail, you can drop Twitter messages into your evernote account.  Just follow @myen (My Evernote), and you will receive a direct message with a confirmation link.  Click on that link and sign into Evernote to associate your Twitter account with your Evernote account.  Then, if you tweet or retweet anything with @myen in it, that tweet will go right into your account.

Evernote will also import your Google Notebook items as notes.  To do this one you'll need to sign in to the web client and go into settings.  Click on the Import tab item, then click on Google Notebook. There is an instructional video, and detailed instructions to help you choose the import settings you want.  Presumably, Evernote will be expanding the number of services that you can import from in the near future.

Some products are even building in Evernote compatibility.  For example, the Cannon ImageFormula P-150 will scan documents and upload them directly to your Evernote account.  The Eye-Fi wireless SD card can send pictures directly from your digital camera to your Evernote account.  Mobile applications like Seesmic and Egretlist will also sync content to your Evernote account. You can find a list of similar products on Evernote's website.

Part of the Evernote package is syncing across all platforms, and access to all the various versions of the Evernote client.  Included with that is Evernote's Text Recognition feature.  Whenever you add an image, or a note containing images to Evernote, software scans the image looking for text.  It then indexes your note with the text that it found and the position of the text in the image. This allows you to find these images by searching for the text within them.  For example, I went on a picnic last year and tried some new wine. I took a picture of the wine bottle, so that I could remember to get more of it later.  Let's say I don't remember the wine, but do remember that a box of Club crackers was also in the picture.  I search on "club" and see what I find:

Evernote search on iPad

My search word is even highlighted in the picture.  Evernote doesn't keep an OCR copy of your image to search, and you can't get an OCR version of a photo out of Evernote.  Instead it keeps a list of possible text interpretations with different scores.  This lets you search for text in images without having to look at each image.  It isn't perfect, but it does give you a best guess.

Tags view on iPad

Evernote lets you organize your notes in two basic ways.  The first is that you can assign tags to your notes.  Tags can be anything you want, providing it is meaningful to you.  They let you pull similar data from across your list of notes.  The second method is to group related data items into notebooks. Notebooks pretty much work like folders, except you cannot nest them.  So, if you were a frequent traveller, you could create a notebook for each trip and add all the planning information for your trip into that notebook.  You could then tag your hotel confirmation as "Hotel", your rental car reservations as "Rental Car", your plane tickets as "Flights", and your schedule as "Itinerary".  Then when you need to find something, you can either look it up by the trip, or by the type of information it is.  Or you could create notebooks for "Hotel", "Rental Car", et al and tag the items by the date and destination of the trip.  Whatever makes sense to you.

One thing to be careful of when creating notebooks, is the kind of notebook.  Notebooks can be either synced or local, and once created the type cannot be changed.  You don't want to put data you need to take with you into a local notebook.

Mac client with synced and local notebooks

One of the nifty things that you can do with Evernote is to share your synced notebooks with others.  Either you can share the notebook with the world, or you can share it with specific individuals.  Evernote actually implements their website FAQ as a series of shared Evernote notes.  You can search it, or browse through the notes.  And you can link individual notes, or groups of notes from searches to your account so that you can pull up that help at need.  When you share a notebook with the world, it becomes available at a public url that begins with www.evernote.com/pub/ and your username. At the next level down, you get to set the name the world will see and add a description.  You can also determine the sort order of the items in the folder.

When sharing with individuals, you will need to provide the e-mail addresses of the individuals and determine if you wish to require them to log into Evernote in order to access the notebook.  You can also include an explanatory message to go along with the invite.  With a free account or when sharing to the world, you can only share files as read-only items, but with a Premium account you can choose to give your invitees privileges to edit the notebook and add or delete notes.

With the free account the kind of files you can place in a note are limited to text, images, audio, and PDF files.  And that is really enough for most people's needs.  But if you need more, you can try a Premium account, which will allow you to upload any file type.  It also allows you to search within PDF files, access note history, and maintain local notebooks on an iPhone or iPad.  I haven't tried the Premium account yet, so I can't vouch for these features.

Client for Windows

With the Premium account, the maximum size of an individual note is bumped up to 50 MB from 25, and the user gains the ability to turn off the advertisements that are displayed on the Evernote web site and in the client.  The ads aren't particularly offensive, but they do take up screen space.  Regular Evernote accounts are secured by the logon information, which is transmitted to the server using SSL, while the actual notes are transmitted in the clear.  With a Premium account, your entire session is encrypted with SSL instead of just the logon info.  If you're wanting to store just a few notes with sensitive information, you can encrypt just those notes using the windows client for Evernote.  Unfortunately these encryption tools haven't been built into the other clients yet.  And remember that encryption key, because you will have to type it in whenever you want to access any encrypted notes.

Evernote on Palm Pre

The big power of Evernote is the sync.  The fact that you can collect your notes anywhere you happen to be, right when the thought hits you, then organize them when you have time, and carry the finished product on your mobile device, or access it through the web.  Even if you're in an area with no network connection, you can add and edit notes and then sync the changes when you can connect again. The best part, however, is the fact that the guys at Evernote aren't sitting back on their laurels.  They're still working to improve and expand Evernote to provide new tools to capture, organize, and retrieve your notes.  It will be interesting to see what they add next.

iTunes

Yes, you read that right. This week I'm reviewing Apple's iTunes software, the music management, iPod/iPhone/iPad/Apple TV syncing software that has been around since 2001. After 9 years, iTunes certainly isn't new, cutting edge tech. But then again, it isn't the iTunes that was released all those years ago.

The basics: iTunes is free, is available from Apple at http://www.apple.com/itunes/, and the current version is 9.1.1(12) as of this writing. It is available for Mac OS X and for Windows, but not for Linux. Every Mac currently shipping comes with iTunes installed, and everyone who has an iPod or iPhone has already had to install it on their computer.

For some people, this has been a great source of consternation and trauma.

So, for this review, I'm going to assume that you, gentle reader, already know how to use iTunes to rip your music from legally purchased CDs into iTunes, how to purchase individual songs off of the iTunes Store, how to purchase Apps for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, how to purchase movies, and how to sync all this stuff to your Apple-branded mobile appliances, or to the handful of other devices that Apple supports syncing content. And I suspect that you also know how to create a playlist, burn it to an audio or data CD, and how to listen to music, watch videos, or listen to podcasts or podiobooks on your computer using iTunes. (That loud cheering noise you're hearing is my podcasting friends going wild because I mentioned podcasts. Hi Guys!)

Where was I? Oh, yeah. This article expects you to already be familiar with all the pedestrian functions that everyone uses on iTunes. We're going to look at some of the things that are overlooked functions. The power under the surface that most people miss because they didn't realize they should look for it.

This is another review that came about because of a friend of mine. This friend is a part-time DJ who was looking for ways that would make it easier for him to take requests at functions without being glued to the DJ station, and for ways he could control the music from his iPhone and have a little bit more freedom. While I am NOT a professional DJ and I don't really know much about the way that pro DJ software works, I do know my way around iTunes. He came over to the house with his computer rig, and by the time we finished I realized that I'd shown him a bunch of things that I took for granted that most users might have just missed. So I'm going to try to show you a few things.

First, for the Audiophiles, iTunes can rip your music from CD into one of five formats: AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, MP3, and WAV. Except for Apple Lossless, these are all open formats, so your music is still portable. You're not "locked in". And except for Apple Lossless, these are a lossy formats, meaning that you lose some level of musical definition in order to compress the files into a smaller format. Of course, if your audio source is a CD, it is already in AIFF format. And each of these lossy formats has a custom setting in the preferences to allow you to dial up your own perfect balance between accuracy and file space. And you can convert from any of these formats to any of the others, although you really wouldn't want to go from something else to Apple Lossless. So, you can have portability, or you can preserve every nuance. If portability is important to you, don't buy from the iTunes store. They only sell AAC files which are authenticated to an authorized user account. And if having every last nuance is important, then rip everything from CD into either Apple Lossless or AIFF at the maximum quality settings. We got that settled? Good.

The first feature I'd like to talk about is Genius. By default Genius is turned off. You have to turn it on under the Store Menu. When you turn on Genius, iTunes sends Apple information about each track you have in your iTunes library, which Apple then uses in cooperation with the data from all other Genius subscribers to find connections. iTunes uses this data to do two things: suggest music in the iTunes store that is similar to a selected song, and create playlists from your library of music that goes together.

The suggestions on the Genius Sidebar are a great way to discover new music and new performers. Even if you don't buy from the iTunes store, you can get the names of new acts, and listen to 30 second segments of their work and buy where you want to. Genius playlists can be saved, and can contain 25, 50, 75, or 100 songs. And you can refresh them periodically to see if new music in your library fits with what you had when you saved the Genius Playlist. You can re-order and even remove songs if you feel iTunes made a mistake And at any time you can drag your Genius Playlist down and put its contents into a regular playlist.

Genius mixes are entirely controlled by Apple. Based on what is in your library, Apple puts together complementary music styles, usually from a handful of artists, and names that particular mix based on the common element. All you can do with the Genius Mixes is play them or not. Genius Mix can be good if you just want music in the house and don't want to worry about it, but most people seem to want a little more control of their music. Apple recently updated iTunes and added the ability to remove Genius Mixes you don't like so you don't have to look at them. Personally, I'd like to remove specific bands or songs from within the mix. Maybe next revision?

Next up is iTunes DJ. If you enable this in iTunes General Preferences, it will show up as the first item under Playlists in iTunes sidebar. iTunes DJ is an intelligent playlist that tries to keep the flow of music coming. You can set the source of your music to your entire music library, a Genius Playlist, or any other playlist in iTunes. iTunes DJ will only pull songs from that source. It builds a reasonably random playlist up to 100 songs, and will also display the last few songs played, again, up to 100.

iTunes DJ was built as a tool to make life easier for budding DJs. By seeing the songs that have recently played, you can keep from playing a song too often. The list of upcoming songs is completely editable. Allowing you to change the order of songs, or remove songs you don't want to play. As one song rolls off the list, either by being played or being deleted, new songs appear at the bottom of the list to keep the party going. The settings let you choose how many played songs to display, and how many upcoming songs to choose from. And there is an option to allow higher rated songs in the source to be played more often.

And right below that, is the feature my DJ friend wanted: A check-box to allow guests with Apple's Remote App on their iPhone or iPod touch to make requests. Your guests will have to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the computer running iTunes. You can leave it open for anyone to make requests, or you can add a password to limit the number of people who can make requests.

When your guests go into Remote, they'll see your iTunes DJ above the list of any other music libraries they may have connected to in the past, plus any welcome message you may have set up. They'll also see the currently playing song, and the same list of upcoming songs that you have displayed in iTunes DJ. And at the bottom of their screen, a button to Request a Song. In iTunes DJ, you can restrict all requests to come from a particular source, just like you did when you chose the source for iTunes DJ, or you can let them browse everything in your library. When a song is requested, it will appear on the playlist as the next song to be played if there are no other requests, or below the last requested song. If you need other songs to play before requests, you can still drag the requests down in the list, or insert other songs between them.

Another option with requests is to enable voting. Voting adds a new column to the iTunes DJ display, and adds a heart symbol next to the song names in Remote. Each requested songs automatically starts with one vote, and new songs still appear after the last requested song. Unfortunately, voting also turns off your ability to re-order the songs to your liking. Song order is now based on votes. Each connected user gets one vote for each song. The fun begins when a second person votes for a song. That song now gets promoted up above all of the one vote songs. This continues with song order being determined from most votes to least. You still have control from iTunes, but now you'll need to Control-Click (Or right click if you have a multi-button mouse) to bring up the contextual menu. Among the usual options for songs in iTunes, you will find a few new entries. Play in iTunes DJ which makes the selected song start playing immediately. Play Next in iTunes DJ puts the selected song at the top of the list no matter how few votes it has. And two other items, Add to iTunes DJ and Like, which do the same thing, increment the vote count for the song by one. While you're running iTunes DJ, these menu items are all available when you're in other playlists, except for Like. So if needed, you can go to playlists outside your iTunes DJ source and put more songs on the playlist.

For those of you with multiple computers, Apple has added a feature called Home Sharing. Home Sharing is turned on from the Advanced menu. Home sharing lets you share files back and forth over the network for computers that are linked to the same iTunes account. Regular sharing only lets you remotely play files that are streamed live over the network by a remote computer. Home Sharing raises that to a new level by letting you copy music over the network from one computer to another. That way you can have a master music library on your desktop computer, and pull a selection of music from it for your laptop when you're traveling. And you can even set Home Sharing preferences to automatically copy new files from one library to another. That way when you come back from your trip, your desktop can automatically copy over any new songs you bought or ripped onto your laptop during your trip.

Home Sharing does have a few drawbacks. First is the restriction to have all the computers connected to the same iTunes account. This can make it a little difficult for families with multiple accounts to share all their music files. I don't actually have this situation, so I don't know what kind of hoops need to be jumped through to make it work. Second is the fact that Home Sharing will only allow you to pull from a remote server to your local machine. You can't push files over the network. You have to get up and go to the other machine and do a pull. The pull is as easy as a drag and drop, but you have be on the right machine. Third, Home Sharing's automatic transfer doesn't work for all media. You can only choose to automatically copy Music, Movies, TV Shows, Books, or Applications. If you want to move Podcasts or Ringtones across with Home Share, you have to do it manually. And lastly, for some strange reason you can't copy over Regular Playlists, or Smart Playlists, but you can copy over Genius Playlists. It will copy each of the songs from your remote machine to your local library and add them all into a new Regular Playlist. Even if this creates duplicates on your computer. So, still needs some work.

The last feature I want to talk about is the most powerful one: Smart playlists. You can do almost anything with these. With a properly built Smart Playlist, you can do amazing things, and if they are built carefully, you can almost automate your listening experience.

One last digression before I attack Smart Playlists. A while back, Apple introduced Playlist folders. Use them. As you start multiplying your number of playlists, group them into folders. Nest folders. Don't make yourself hunt for one playlist in a list of over 300. Just don't. Trust me on this. Playlist folders can hold regular and Smart Playlists, and other playlist folders, so there is no reason not to categorize your playlists and reduce what you have to look at in the sidebar to manageable levels.

Ok, Smart Playlists. Apple introduced these a while ago, allowing you to create playlists that automatically update themselves when anything changes in your music database. Simply put, it lets you create a search to find the items from your database that you want and it puts the results of that search in a playlist. And re-runs the search when the database is updated. All you have to do is define the conditions for your search.

This makes Smart Playlists incredibly powerful, but sometimes a little difficult to set up. It helps if you have a good grasp of boolean logic so you can figure out when to match all of your conditions (a boolean AND) and when to match any of your conditions (a boolean OR). To give an idea of how powerful Smart Playlists can be, and to help illustrate how to create them I'd like to talk through how to set up a couple Smart Playlists.

The first one is a simple one that is one of my favorites. I just call it "Not Recently Played". Start by creating a new Smart Playlist, either with the menu command under the File Menu, or by holding down the Option Key and clicking the little gear wheel that appears at the bottom of the sources list on the left of the window. This gets you a simple Smart Playlist window like the one below.

Click on the drop down menu that says "Artist" and change it to "Last Played". This is the date that iTunes saves in the database when you play to the end of the song. When you do this, the middle drop down menu changes to "is". We want to change that to "is not in the last". This changes the last field to a text entry field with the default of "1" plus a units popup defaulted to "days". Change "days" to "months", and the number to a 3. Three months out works good for me. Depending on the size of your library and how often you listen to your music you may have to adjust the time period a little. By now your playlist should look like this.

Click the "+" button on the right hand side of the row and you'll get a new row, and the "Match the following rule:" at the top of the window will change to "Match all of the following rules:". Now, if you're like most people, some of what you have in your iTunes library is seasonal music. Typically these are Christmas Carols for most people. It is fun to listen to in the right season, but you don't want it popping up in your mix for nine months out of the year. So we fix that with this new condition. Set this line to be "Genre" "is not" "Holiday". Your smart Playlist should now look like this.

And that's it. Click OK to save what you have and you'll see a new Smart Playlist appear in the sources list on the left of your screen. iTunes tries to name this automatically from the conditions that you've entered, but it doesn't always choose a name that makes sense. In this case, it names the new Smart Playlist "Holiday", since that was the Genre you entered. We need to change that, but fortunately iTunes leaves it highlighted so you can change it easily. Just type "Not Recently Played" or whatever name you want to call it.

Hit return, and your new playlist is ready to go. By default, iTunes will sort this playlist by whatever your default sort is for your music library. You can re-sort it anyway you like by clicking the column headers. And the Smart Playlist really does update on the fly. Start playing your new playlist. When the first song finishes, the second song will start, and about two seconds later the first song will disappear off the list. This is the playlist that I usually listen to, as it means I'm always hearing music I haven't heard in a while. I just put it on shuffle and let it go.

This next playlist is to show you some of the versatility available in smart playlists. Let's say that you share your library with another family member and both of you frequently add music to the library. For the most part, you enjoy each other's taste, except there is one genre your family member likes that you just can't stand. We'll use Country as the genre in this example. So you want to create a playlist of the new music the two of you have bought, except without the Country Music. You also want to limit it to just Music or Music videos, that way any new movies or podcasts won't mix in with the rest. He's how to build this playlist.

Start with creating a new playlist, just like the last time. This time around, we'll be changing the first field to "Play Count". At this point the operator will default to "is" and the last field will default to the number 0. We'll leave this just as they are.

Click the plus to get a new line. Now we change this to "Genre" "is not", and type "Country". At this point, we'll have everything new, of any kind, that doesn't have a genre of Country.

Now at the end of that last line is a button with ellipses in it. That is those three little dots. We're going to click that button now, which gets us two new lines. The first says "all of the following rules:" and the second is an indented line of the type we're used to seeing when we create new lines. This is sort of a sub-query. A separate search that will happen first, and whose results will be joined with the items above. Change the "all" to "any" in the first new line, and then change the first field in the second line to "Media Kind". The other fields will default to "is" and "Music". It should look like this.

Hit the plus again for the last line in this Smart Playlist. Once again, change the first field to "Media Kind". Now go over to the last field and change that to "Music Video".

If you want to, you can check that first checkbox underneath your search criteria and limit what the Smart Playlist returns. It can be limited by the number of items, the time in minutes or hours, or by the size in either MB or GB. These items can be selected randomly, or by Artist, Album, Genre, or Name. You can also start with the highest or lowest rated, the most or least recently played, the most or least often played, or the most or least recently added. So there is a bit of flexibility here, too.

Click OK, and name your search something like "New Songs". The default name of "Country" that iTunes assigns it isn't all that accurate.

Smart Playlists put some really powerful tools into your hands for being able to pull just the items that you want out of your iTunes library. They are by far the best feature in iTunes, but a little under-used. It takes a little forethought to get the most out of them, and setting up your queries does require a little geekery. But if you've got a good idea of what you want to find, trial and error will work for you as well.

iTunes has really grown into a powerful tool for managing your media. While it may be limited in terms of the formats of different media it will recognize, once you've got your files into the iTunes library, you can very easily get high-end results out of it, in terms of organization, playback, and discovery of new music. iTunes is by no means perfect, but Apple has been steadily evolving its capabilities, trying to make the computer do the work for you. And for me, that really proves that it deserves a place here amongst the other Nifty Tech. It does still have quirks, and you may have to look past the most obvious solution to find the power in iTunes, but the power is there at your disposal. You just need to use it.

OmniFocus

Whether your projects are small or large, eventually your going to need to get organized.  And the Omni Group has a nifty tool that they are sure will do the trick.  It’s called OmniFocus and it is available for the Mac and the iPhone.  Sorry, PC and Linux folks, that’s just how the Omni Group rolls.  An OmniFocus individual license runs $79.95, and a family license for up to five persons runs $119.95, although educational and group pricing is available as well.  The Mac version is available from http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/, and the iPhone version, which runs $19.95, is available through the iTunes store.  You can download and use the Mac version without a license for a 14 day trial.  An upgrade for the iPad is planned for summer of 2010, but isn't currently available.

OmniFocus is built around the Get Things Done model of project management, but is flexible enough to accommodate many different styles of structuring projects.  But the basics are simple.  Start by capturing all the individual tasks that need to be done, in as much, or as little detail as you like.  You can just put down a simple description, or you can add start and end dates, duration, and additional notes.  The important thing is to capture the pieces.

Next, start grouping these individual steps into projects and putting them in order.  OmniFocus lets you group things in folders for convenient access, and allows you to break steps in your projects down into sub-steps just by nesting them with a simple drag and drop.  Your projects can be set up to execute the steps in order, or allow them to be done in any order.  Or you can just create a container to drop individual independent tasks into.

The last bit of setting up is to assign a context to the projects and steps.  Contexts can be people, places, software, or if you use sub-contexts, combinations of the above.  A Write E-mail task could have a context of Work, or Computer, or Work:Computer.  Or even Work: Doug: Computer: Online.  Again, you can make it as detailed as you need it to be.

So after you get your projects set up, the fun begins.  OmniFocus lets you sync your projects to other computers using OmniFocus, via Bonjour, a disk, or Mobile Me (or another WebDAV server in the cloud).  So if you’ve got multiple computers, you can access your projects on all of them.  Or you can sync it to your iPhone, so you can carry your projects with you.  OmniFocus also integrates with Mac OS X, letting you sync tasks to iCal, add and update tasks via Mail, and even search for them using Spotlight.  Once you’ve set up syncing, OmniFocus syncs automatically when you open the program, just before quitting, and one minute after any change has been made.

OmniFocus lets you look at your tasks by project, either an overall look at all projects, or every project in a given folder, or you can focus in on a single project.  Projects can be set to automatically complete when the last step is completed, or you can leave them as ongoing projects and add other steps later.  OmniFocus highlights tasks in orange that are due soon, the default for “soon” being in the next 24 hours, but you can edit that setting to suit your needs.  OmniFocus also highlights overdue items in red so you can see how behind you are and focus on what you need to do to catch up.  Items that have a future start date, or cannot be done until another task is complete are greyed out.  You can even create repeating tasks and projects, or pre-create projects that won’t be started until sometime in the future.  Or you can put an entire project on hold.

In addition, you can view your tasks by context.  So when you’re at work, you can look at just the work tasks, at home, just the home tasks, etc.  A really nifty variation of this is available with the iPhone version of OmniFocus.  In Contexts on the iPhone, you can set a location for a given context, and then sort your tasks by your geographic distance from the locations.  This is very useful for running errands, but it can be a little tough setting all the locations to begin with.

The iPhone version of OmniFocus can act on its own, or you can sync it to the desktop version, or just sync several iPhones together through the cloud.  The iPhone version is fully functional, and lets you mark items as complete, set any of the fields, or even create new tasks on the fly.  And the iPhone version syncs on startup, and automatically after a minute when you make changes, although if you exit the program within that minute, you can prevent the sync.  You can also set it to only sync manually, which is useful if you’re in an area with poor connectivity.

There are a few nagging issues with OmniFocus.  When the application was first launched there was a tendency for cumulative transactions to cause the database to swell.  This led to very long sync times, and could make the mobile version effectively unusable.  The Omni Group has since fixed this issue by better management of a self-compression script in the database.  But some of us old timers still feel better using a manual compression script once a month.  A current problem is a tendency for OmniFocus to fail to close out recurring groups of tasks when the last task is completed.  This can lead to duplicate sets of tasks.  It is easy to remove the duplicates, but it can be somewhat irritating to have to deal with them.

For my family, OmniFocus has been will worth it.  My wife and I can work off the same plan, and even if we’re each running errands in different parts of town, we know almost immediately when the other has completed a step.  It has been very handy for organizing our household chores, shopping lists, Christmas lists, and our private projects.  In the end, the syncing and the ubiquity of OmniFocus really pushes it up to the level of Nifty Tech.