Today’s edition is being written at Panera Bread in Chicago. This place has more working professionals and students than a Starbucks. Given the free Wi-Fi it’s easy to see why.

I’m sweating to get this done before the WWDC keynote at 1:00 (12:00 CT). Since I’ve got the day off I’ll be tracking it. From oldest to newest:

Marc Andreesen is back on the Mac
I’d never heard he was a Mac user who left, but it’s a great endorsement. Read

iPhone developer kit at WWDC
Of all the rumors floating around, this one makes the most sense to me. Job’s already acknowledged it, and what better time to do it? Read

New MacBooks
They’re faster and I like the new display on the 15-inch. The hard disks are bigger. Tom Yager has a typically thoughtful piece on them.

Yet the case design never changes. The 17-inch is actually slightly larger than my three-year old 17-inch PowerBook. The 15-inch lost two-tenths of a pound, but the 17-inch is the same weight. The machines are still beautiful, but I want to see something new.

I was equally bummed (but not surprised) there’s no Robson caching, though at least one recent report questions the technology’s effectiveness. I’d expect if Apple’s going to implement it the technology will require Leopard.

If Leopard were already available I’d be seriously tempted to jump. My hope is redesigned MacBook Pro models will be released on conjunction with Leopard.

Parallels 3.0
There’s been of writing about the new version of Parallels; I liked Pogue’s article. I’m seriously psyched about this software. I can’t wait to retire my Dell Latitude and run Windows on a fast MacBook Pro. This made the MacBook Pro disappointments that much harder to swallow.

.Mac via Google
The rumor seems to have started with this posting, then a bunch of others followed (the Business Week blogger, ComputerWorld, etc.). This morning some site called MacScoop claims they’ve heard it from a (presumably reliable) source. A hot tip or a site hoping to gain credibility by claiming to have confirmation of a rumor they heard from someone else? We’ll see.

Somewhat off-topic but too brilliant not to mention
Floorplanner provides simple and effective tools for designing, uh, floor plans. It’s effective for my modest New York apartment planning needs, anyway.

Necessity is the mother of invention
A rule proven once again by a saint at MIT, who is working to develop the ability to wirelessly recharge batteries. I wish this existed now, because my battery is dead.

More later…

This was a busy week in tech. I’ve been trying to write this post for days and the list of stuff to include just keeps growing.

From oldest to newest:

BackRow Developers’ Kit
Apple doesn’t provide one, so this guy does. Nice. Doesn’t sound like a kit “for the rest of us,” but it’s a start. Really this guy’s just trying to get a job. Nice.

Google Street View Maps (here) and Microsoft Live Search Maps (here)
The Google maps are pretty cool. I saw the front of my apartment building. Navigating them is kinda slow, and privacy concerns are already surfacing.

The Microsoft maps look interesting, but they don’t work on my Mac, and I haven’t taken the time to try them on a Windows machine. I’ll never stop being annoyed by Web services that aren’t fully cross-platform. I’m over the fact that not everything works (or works well) on Safari, but I expect everything to work on Firefox, regardless of the underlying platform. Shame.

Palm Foleo
A Linux-powered laptop-like device at 2.4 pounds is a neat idea. The fact it’s an add-on to a Treo (or other smartphone) is an interesting, if at times impractical twist.

I think the fact it’s Linux-powered is very cool, but I generally agree with Engadget’s impression of it. The TreoCentral guy is, not surprisingly, more open-minded about it. The general consensus seems to be in line with Engadget.

The fact it runs Linux and has built-in Wi-Fi (which apparently operates independently of a tethered smart phone) means it will probably be a popular hacker toy. A light, subnotebook-sized machine that will provide Web browsing for $400? It may create an unintended market.

Microsoft Surface
Cool stuff, but the initial applications are less than exciting to me.

Interesting Development Technologies
LINA, Google Gears, Google Mashup Editor. More on Google Gears and Mashup Editor later.

Real Networks. Yawn.
Real built some product that allows you to download Flash videos. Apparently the installer is less annoying.

Didn’t they build something a while back that was a “threat” to Apple? What was it called, again? Does it still exist?

AppleTV Developments
YouTube. Cool. I’m more excited by the 160 GB hard drive, though. I’ll stick with my Mac Mini for the moment.

If it gets IPTV, though, I will be really, really interested.

Jobs and Gates at D5
I’ve read the transcript and I’m halfway through the videos.

iPhone Lands June 29
It’s official, and the ads are already posted. I’m gone back and forth, but I’m now 90% sure I will be picking up an iPhone the minute I can get my hands on one. Will they be available at the Fifth Ave Apple Store at midnight June 29?

This will be daily notes on tech stuff I read or find.

Google Desktop for Mac

Google Desktop for Mac was announced yesterday.

I wasn’t really expecting it, though the announcement was probably no surprise to anyone who cared. For some reason I figured Google would somehow show “respect” for Spotlight by not releasing search on the Mac. I think I know better.

In my whopping 20 minutes of use I’m finding each has unique advantages. Google Desktop is a faster way to search Google, my Web history, and Gmail. Spotlight is still for app launching and finding local documents as well as assets managed via the iApps.

I knew better, but I hoped anyway Apple would license Google technology to do desktop search, or would at least integrate Google searching into Spotlight. Instead, as with Windows XP, I’m stuck with two incomplete desktop search tools. Vista’s desktop search sorta works, once you set the default search engine to Google, anyway. (I’ve only got Vista on my unloved personal Dell, so I haven’t spent a huge amount of time using it.)

Yes, I know there are Google Spotlight plugins. I haven’t tried one in a while; maybe I should try again.

Mossberg: New PCs “Ruined”

Walt Mossberg does a nice job summarizing the frustration that’s part of setting up a new Windows machine. I spent seven hours a couple Saturdays back setting up a Windows machine for my Mom. It was infuriating, and I know what I’m doing. The Mossberg article and this one by Ken Rockwell made me decide I should get my Mom a Mac. She uses her computer to browse the Web, write email, and manage her digital photos. Why should I keep putting either of us through phone calls to me about annoying Norton questions and vague errors?

I have to agree with Arrington on this one. I will take extra steps to use del.icio.us anyway, but this level of integration with Firefox is great.

Okay, I just installed it and have barely used it, but I’ve used it enough to be excited about it. It goes onto my XP machines tomorrow.

Old News: Apple TV

The Apple TV has been around for a few weeks now. I’m a lot less excited about it than I thought I would be. I haven’t even gone to the Apple Store to play with one. Having read up on it I’m feeling better about my Mac Mini media center arrangement.

Engadget’s review seems about right. Useful as a simple iTunes extender, but it’s got some growing to do. Still, I may check one out when I’m in Chicago this weekend.

It’s a rainy day in New York and I’m taking some time to look for new investments.

I’ve been digging into NAVTEQ and one of my first stops was Yahoo! Finance. I’m not what I would call an experienced investor, but I know a bit and I’ve browsed both Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance.

The first thing on my mind was the significant gap between NAVTEQ’s 52-week high ($55.86) and its 52-week low ($23.73). The current price ($26.29) is pretty close to the 52-week low, which might indicate a great buy. However, the vast difference between the high and low is not due to external market factors. I need to understand what’s at play before I invest my hard-earned money.

With the above in mind, I decided my first task was to track NVT’s price fluctuations throughout the year. The first place I looked was the default Yahoo! Finance chart.

The Yahoo! chart was small and defaulted to a one-day display. Though clicking on the chart enlarges it and allows for an expanded timeframe, I wasn’t sure how to map either view of the chart to the company events throughout the year. I was mildly annoyed by this, so I absentmindedly clicked around a bit and eventually made my way to Google Finance.

After searching for NVT on Google Finance the first thing I saw was a huge, legible chart. This chart has interactive controls that allows quick scrolling across days. There are various zoom levels (one year, six months, etc.) and there are small letters on the chart that correspond to events that are summarized in a list directly to the right of the chart. The list updates dynamically based on the currently-selected date in the chart and the overall timeframe shown. Clicking on a day on the chart displays the closing price for that day as well as trading volume. All this happens via AJAX; there are no page refreshes.

Google’s chart is exactly what I need. I’ve seen the Google Finance charts before, but I never realized how valuable they were because previously I didn’t have a specific task in mind. Now that I have a mission I find Google Finance gives me the tools I need to efficiently complete it.

Google gets criticized for releasing half-baked products. On one hand I respect that perspective. Many Google products are in perpetual beta status. Yahoo! products (and others) have been around a lot longer and are more feature-rich.

However, in several cases Google products like Gmail, Personalized Homepage (a rough competitor to My Yahoo!), and now Google Finance do the things that matter to me a lot better than others out there. Often Google seems to have realized what I really want before I do.

Gmail doesn’t use folders, which I quickly decided was a benefit, at least for personal email. (Professional email is another discussion.) Gmail provides a simple, one-click (or keyboard shortcut) “Archive” feature and great message search. I didn’t know I wanted either of these things, but I’m addicted to them now. I’ve been on Gmail for over a year, which is the longest I’ve used a single email client (Web-based or otherwise).

The Personalized Homepage is simple, ad-free, allows third parties to develop functionality (though My Yahoo! may do this now, too), and displays Gmail messages and Google Reader items. I’ve had a My Yahoo! page for years and could never figure out why I rarely used it. Now I realize having banner ads and other hard-coded content on my “personal” page really bothers me. I use my Google Personalized Homepage every day.

Google Finance is helping me do the investing tasks that matter most to me. Google Finance’s lack of banner ads and advertising for add-on services doesn’t hurt, either.

I expect the services to change and I expect to see more advertising on some if not all of them. However, if my experience with Gmail is any indicator Google will probably integrate advertising in a way that’s non-offensive and doesn’t distract.

So I sound like a Google shill. I can’t help it, their stuff just hits me the right way.

Writely’s a pretty cool Web-based word processor, but at this point it’s largely useless for blogging.

The editing features and general user experience are much better than the WordPress editor’s, though that’s a pretty low bar. Where Writely fails as a blogging tool is its inability to assign categories and the fact it can’t open and modify previous posts.

I’m writing this post in Writely and I’ll assign categories after-the-fact using Ecto. After this post I’ll begrudgingly continue using Ecto on the Mac and Windows Live Writer on Windows. Sigh.

The rest of the experience is solid. Writely is feature-rich enough that I don’t feel compelled to install Word on my PowerBook, though I would if I needed to write even moderately complex documents. Writely reminds me a lot of Google Spreadsheets, which probably shouldn’t surprise me.

One irony: Writely’s spell checker doesn’t recognize the name “Writely” and flags it as a misspelling.

Writely’s still in beta, so it will be interesting to see how it evolves over time.

For the first time ever I was drawn in to an advertisement on a Web page. This is definitely worth noting.

It happened on The Onion. Something animated caught my eye at the right of the page. It was an ad for the movie My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

Here’s what was great about the ad:

• The video caught my eye without startling me.
• The name of the movie and leading cast member names were constantly displayed at the top.
• By default the audio was disabled, but there was a prominently (but not distractingly) displayed link to enable audio.
• The video does not loop; once it completes there’s a link to replay it.

I actually watched the video a second time.

The movie story seems kinda funny. The story idea would seem to be a reasonably effective way of getting guys to go to a chick flick. (Using Uma Thurman as a lure doesn’t hurt, either.)

More on the inevitable migration of PC software to the Web from mainstream sources:

WSJ article on the Gates Transition, Q&A with Gates, Ozzie, Mundie

And from a mix of sources:

Tons of items on the Gates transition (old stuff from Friday)

After last night’s rant on computer problems I got into the “limited test” of Google Spreadsheets. I’m already impressed.

I just learned I’m a pretty lightweight spreadsheet user. Google’s functionality is pretty basic, but it does most of what I need from a spreadsheet. It’s fast and easy to use.

I shared a spreadsheet with Alan and we were able to edit it together and communicate via Gmail Talk. Very slick. This is encouraging.

I promise I didn’t see this article on Google Spreadsheet before I wrote the rant this evening.

This is the second post in an as-yet-untitled series. I’m thinking of titling the series either “Tales of Petty Angst” or “Letting the Little Things Win”. (The first post in this series was “Who steals an Umbrella?“)

Today’s woeful tale is of my semi-beloved PowerBook, which fully let me down tonight when its hard disk went south. It now sounds like a coffee grinder. I’m in the process of wasting the next few hours of my life installing Mac OS X Tiger on my portable FireWire drive so I can boot the PowerBook and then (hopefully) grab my data off the soon-to-permanently-expire disk.

After all this I’ll have the privilege of blowing a couple hundred dollars on a new startup disk. Some additional dough will be required to have it installed, of course, because I checked into the installation process and I’m not going near it.

All of which reminds me how hot the thing has been running lately. Has it always run this hot? I don’t remember. Apparently, though, we’re all supposed to accept that laptop computers run hot. (Actually, we’re supposed to call them notebook computers now–we don’t call them laptops precisely because we don’t want to encourage people to scorch their laps). We might even consider being happy about this; it’s a small price to pay for faster and faster processors, right?

When I got my first Mac in 1993 I was firmly in love with computers. (Or Macs, at least.) This unconditional love evolved into a love-hate relationship following my foray into Windows use in the latter part of the ’90’s. (I gave up on the Mac for several years when it seemed like the old Mac OS would never be replaced. OS X brought me back a few years ago.)

As I experienced continual frustration with my computers I found myself more and more wanting to offload the processing complexity and software to the network. For a while this seemed imminent, but then the tech crash happened. Nirvana didn’t seem so near any more and I got tired of stressing about computers. The relative stability of Windows 2000 and XP also lulled me.

I got plain sick of Windows after a while and then started having feelings for Macs again when OS X matured a bit. I like Macs more than Windows again, but ultimately both of them disappoint me in the same ways.

I just don’t have the patience for all the overhead any more. Years ago I would have known my Mac inside out; tonight I had to reference a book to figure out how to boot my PowerBook from the install DVD. It used to be I would have spent an afternoon searching out software updates; now I get annoyed when the computer automatically prompts me to install them. At this point I have better things to do with my life than spend a bunch of time on the care and feeding of my computer. It should just work when I need it.

A lot of the time I don’t need even half the power of my computer. I expect most folks don’t. I love the promise of my computer, but I hate the reality of living with it.  

Will hosted applications that “outsource” the complexity to Web companies like Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft fix all this? They’ve been doing this for a while on things like email and calendaring, of course. The next generation services are getting nearer and nearer. Will these services make our software and hardware-heavy Macs and PCs unnecessary? I don’t know, but I do know I’m ready for something simpler.