When babies are born, in case you are not aware,  they need to be swaddled, rocked and given something to slobber upon… As I see it, the result is that technology tends to focus on rocking and/or white noise. That’s about it. Sigh… I write this as I sit up waiting to do our late night / early morning feed and wish that there were magic bullets I could use from my bat belt. No dice.

Instead of telling you about our Fisher Price Cradle Swing (god send that it is), I’ll focus on the tech that I’ve found useful, rather than helpful, for life with a baby.

Camera(s) – iPhone and DSLR

She’s cute and everyone wants to see her, thus we’ve snapped away with both our iPhones and the big DSLR. Although in the beginning we went a bit overboard, expect to take tons of pictures. Having the DSLR, with its incredible resolution, reassures the compulsive in me who worries that we’ll miss the perfect shot. The iPhones have pretty decent cameras too, for all those times when you don’t want to lug around a baby, six pieces of matching baby luggage AND and camera bag…

Ways to share pictures – Picasa and Dropbox

Picasa lets us share our photos with the family, but Dropbox is where we consolidate. With two Macs, two iPhones and a SLR, there are lots of places where pictures end up. We combine our photos into a shared folder in Dropbox and then I upload them to Picasa. Easy peasy.

The white noise app on my phone

Hm… This one was almost a magic bullet… We were told that white noise would soothe her on our way out of the hospital room and by the time the elevator arrived in the lobby, I had a white noise app for the car ride home. The great part? It actually works (provided that she isn’t hungry, sleepy, wet, dry, too hot, too cold…)

If you want extra geeky points, go grab yourself a pillow speaker (very cheaply online) and use an old iPod to make your white noise machine. It’ll free up your iPhone for dropping calls.

Amusements – all hail the iPad

You will spend a lot of time doing nearly nothing (other than rocking your child) and your brain doesn’t have capacity for the russian novels you were planning to read. My iPad holds my books, my RSS feeds, Netflix, Hulu and my email. With a bit of balancing, I can use it one-handed. Late in the evening, ’round about 1-2am, this will become very important.

That’s it. Like I mentioned above, no true magic bullets, but there are plenty of ways to add techie flair to staying up late with your newborn. Best of luck – duty calls…

~ab

In truth, I get it. The idea is so simple: click a button, pay $100 for a year and receive your push mail, contacts, calendar, storage for your photos and files, plus a “find my iphone” application all in one handy interface to your computer. However, it forever irks me when I’m told about these services as if they are the only game in town. I mentioned my doubt to the Mac Store genius a few days ago and was told “yes but MobileMe is seemless and far less complicated”…

That sounded like a challenge to me, so I wrote out my alternative to MobileMe system.  I thought it would take longer, but it’s actually quite simple.  Here are my choices:

Push Gmail, Calendar, Contacts

Comes straight from Google for free (Mail was included back in September 2009) and here are the steps to set it up.  When you make a change to your email, calendar of contacts, the change appears almost instantly on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Photos

If you’re using Gmail, you have a Google Account. This means you have a Picasa account, even if you haven’t activated it. Just head over to picasaweb.google.com. Your storage is shared with your email (most people have about 7GB). If you need more space, it’s available for a reasonable rate (see my picasa post for more details).

Storage (iDisk)

Dropbox is a service I’ve talked about before.  It’s easy to use and it integrates with both Windows and Mac.

See the little icon with the box and the check?  i got that to replace the default MobileMe icon on my Mac with several hours of coding…  HA! Just kidding.  It was as simple as dragging the old icon off the tool bar and installing Dropbox (10 seconds).  I would love a free Mac product to store my stuff, but using Dropbox is a breeze and it’s free.

Find My iPhone

Finally a service that doesn’t have a free alternative.  You setup your MobileMe on your iPhone and the service will help you find it if you misplace it or someone steals it.  I won’t downplay how great this service is, but if it’s the only part of the MobileMe family that you can’t get for free… is it worth paying $100?  There is a similar product on the app store right now (who knows for how long) that’s called “Find my phone” which does exactly the same thing (as far as I can tell) for only $0.99.

The moral of the story

I’m not trying to be a jerk.  My new Mac has made me very, very happy.  Moreover, I’m perpetually enthused about Apple products.  My only complaint is that MobileMe is $100.  It should be free or at the very least, uber-cheap.  If that were the case, I’d convert over from my google alternatives in a heartbeat.

In short, don’t believe all the hype quite yet.  If someone is asking you to pay $100, it should probably be for something entirely unique.

Enjoy!

~ab

Why?  Well I’m learning!  Apple is not my strong suit and everything is new.  That said, every feature pleasantly surprises me.  Each time I think “there must be a way to…”, I stumble upon what I’m looking for, amazed that it’s there, without code or effort.  What had worried me about the transition was this: I’m a pretty geeky dude.  Won’t it be hard to transition the hard stuff from Windows to Mac?  The answer?  Not even a little bit.

Google Calendar and Gmail were both quick to setup (a Google search put me on the right path).  Microsoft Office was a simple install.  My programming environment in Windows (Komodo Edit) is available for Mac, so no transition there.   Skype and Dropbox were the same story.  To be honest, if we discount the time for my downloads, I’ve probably set the entire machine up, super-user environment and all in less than 3 hours.  That even includes the time I’ve spent playing with it… Pretty amazing.

Given the fun I’m having, I’ve decided that just an asterisk is going to follow me on my new adventure into Mac land, writing about the land of the apple from the big apple.  That said, my day job still requires a PC and I’m sitting on a ton of windows hardware, so JAA will have to be about more than just the domain of Steve Jobs.  We’ll see where the balance lies after a few months…

I guess this is really a post about posts that I’ll write in the future.  Keep an eye out for a Mac post soon and feel free to send questions to ab@justanasterisk.com.  I’d love to have ideas of what to try next.  We’ll explore this lovely transition together.

Best,

~ab

• A folder on your harddrive is backed up to the web 
• You get 2GB of storage 
• Every computer that gets the dropbox software, will also get a copy of this folder 
• Every change to the folder is mirrored on the other machines 
• A web version of the folder is available for when you are on a friend’s computer and want to share a file. 
• You can send people links to files in your public folder, eliminating the need for an attachment.
• Versioning (the ability to keep track of each save to a document) is available for all files. 

So now a scenario – I start a word document at home. I save it to my dropbox folder and when I boot up my laptop, the laptop grabs the newest version of the file from the web. Now as I edit and save my word doc on my laptop, new versions of the document are kept online (just in case I want to revert to an older version). Finally, I’m done and I send a link to a friend to download the document from my public folder (where I’ve just saved the final copy). 
That is pretty cool. Get it now at getdropbox.com