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It has only been a few days since I’ve started using OS X Leopard as the primary operating system. The OS itself took only a few hours to get used to and be comfortable with. Most of the things looks more streamlined with Mac. But not everything is so rosy though - definitely there is a lack of quality Free applications out there. Yet a few of the good ones I managed to find are enlisted further.

Information Applications

1Password - Password vault
Keeps my software licence information, web logins and other wallet data securely. I bought this application because it has an excellent way to sync the desktop data with the iPhone using Smart Bookmarks.

NeoOffice  - Office Suite
NeoOffice did not run well  on my Mac. I would definitely go for iWorks ‘08 or Microsoft Office 2008. The KeyNote application of iWorks is just too good. iWorks is priced at Rs.3800 and is available at the Reliance iStore in Bangalore. Office 2008 for Mac is yet to arrive in India.

SideNote
I found it better than the default ’stickies’ app. Really useful to take study notes.

TaskPaper
This is a GTD application for Mac. I have been using Lifebalance earlier with my PC and Palm before moving on to MyLifeOrganized and Windows Mobile. Unfortunately MyLifeOrganized won’t be available for Mac. Now the task was to setup a simpler GTD system working with my office laptop, home Mac and iPhone. I evaluated quite a few available GTD apps like iGTD and OmniFocus. Though they are all well executed programs, I could not find a way to easily integrate them with my iPhone. I use the default Notes.app on the iPhone for a lot of note taking and ToDo lists. But having the iPhone Notes data to sync with a Mac application was the issue. Fortunately a good friend from scotland found a way to do that - Sync TaskPaper GTD App with iPhone Notes. I am yet to purchase TaskPaper as the cost is way too high for me. Fortunately the TaskPaper data can be opened in any text editor. I found another application - Things - which is nicely designed and I hope to see iCal Sync / native iPhone client for Things in the future.
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Well.. I knew it was time to make a move. I replaced my home XP and Ubuntu system with an iMac couple of days ago. Here it is!

Mac’s a different beast and sure its going to take me a while to get adjusted to. A few quirks like the ‘control’ button on the keypad, the Expose circus, QuickSilver commands etc.. are going to take a bit more time. More over, with this iMac, I think I will be doing more of Productive stuff, than trying to tweak and treat the computer endlessly :). The Wide screen display is very impressive and the noiseless performance within such a slim casing is truly great engineering. Hope to share more in the coming days..

Looks like things are going good on porting the Java VM on to iPhone. The fact is that iPhone is very well poised to run Java applications better than any other phone. Jay Freeman has been successful in porting the JamVM on to iPhone. JamVM is JSE 1.5 compatible. The core java classes has been ported already and Graphics and Media frameworks are being actively investigated. The current port is not optimised for the iPhone CPU. So expect it to run tad bit slow.

The iPhone offers a built in relational database in the form of SQLite. This is used to store information by the iPhone’s Notes application. Efforts are under way to offer a JDBC driver for this database too. The JamVM itself is pretty small - around 150k and uses the GNU Classpath libraries(9 MB). Compiling java source on iPhone is also possible now with Jikes ( upto jdk 1.4) or by using the Eclipse java compiler.

Please checkout the Java on iPhone development page for more details.

Storing information from your PC to the iPhone is a daunting task. You have to either send an email to yourself or send an SMS. But information received thorough these means are not editable on iPhone further. I always wanted to quickly send information from my PC to the iPhone and vice-versa. So I have come up with a setup which I hope will interest you too. It works for me well.

This is not yet automated. You still need to manually move a message from SMS to iPhone Notes using WeTool.  No automatic Notes synchronization yet!. But we are near. Let me know your thoughts.

I have an IP filter enabled!

Read on.