Thank you, Steve.  Your work has changed my life.

“Hello Mr. Mac  I wish I would have learned more about this before it became cool. You were light years ahead of the rest of us =)can I ask you a Mac question? I didn’t save a document in Pages and the baby managed to shut down my Mac when I stepped away. Is it auto saved anywhere like with Word?? Sorry to bug you… I am missing notes from my AP2 Lab class and am going crazy b/c I forgot to save them.”

To which I replied that yes, I was cool before the rest of the world caught up.  Ha!  And then I asked if she had upgraded to Lion, yet.  Her response: “Lion what?”

Sometimes it’s not immediately obvious to we Mac geeks that the rest of the world is caught up the hype of some new Apple release.  If that’s you, I am referring to the new 10.7 version of Mac OS X, continuing the legacy of big cat nicknames, this one is “Lion.”

So unfortunately for Christa, she was still on Snow Leopard 10.6 and thus Pages did not auto-save.  I advised her on where to go to get Lion:  Apple Menu -> App Store -> Click “Lion” -> Click “Install”.  $29 and a 3.5GB download later, she’d be all set.

So we come back to the age old question: to upgrade or not to upgrade.  See as easily as I advised Christa to go for it, I told one of my largest clients this week that there was no way that any of their users should upgrade to Lion.

There’s only two reasons you should ever consider spending money (even $29) on a major software upgrade like this:

1.) Because you want the new features and are willing to put up with cost to get them.

2.) Because you must do so for compatibility reasons.

In Christa’s case, the fact that one of her kids closing down her Mac before she saved her work is big motivation to get Lion’s new auto-save and document versioning features.  (Frankly, I’m still wrapping my brain around how awesome these are.)

Now before I go on, let me tell you that if you want to know everything new in Lion, you have plenty of reading material.  The Cliff’s Notes version of what’s new is on Apple.com.  Macworld’s review is probably a good place to start.  If you want a deep dive, nobody beats John Siracusa’s Ars Technica reviews. Lord knows I have plenty of reading to do myself.

I learn by doing so I am running Lion on my Air and experiencing all the subtleties that it brings to the table.  There’s a lot I like (digital delivery, Mission Control, autosave).  There’s a lot I’ve already turned off. (“natural scrolling”, window animations).

So, desire for new features notwithstanding, the only other reason to upgrade to Lion is compatibility.  As far as I know, the only forced compatibility at this point is if you ran out and bought one of the new MacBook Airs and Mac Minis released last week.  They will only run Lion.  This is typical: the lowest MacOS a new Mac can run is the shipping version.  The Airs and Minis are awesome hardware for the price point, so I recommend them highly.

In absence of positive motivation for upgrade, Lion also carries one big negative to dissuade someone from upgrading.  Apple finally cut ties with the PowerPC platform.  This has been coming for sometime now, with each previous version of Mac OS X pushing it further away:

2005 10.4 “Tiger” – 10.4.5 in 2006 was the first to run on Intel hardware.  PowerPC apps ran with a compatibility layer called “Rosetta” – this is an important detail, hang on.

2007 10.5 “Leopard” – the first to discontinue “Classic” Mac OS 9 apps from running.

2009 10.6 “Snow Leopard” – the first to require Intel hardware.

2011 10.7 “Lion” – the first to discontinue Rosetta compatibility with PowerPC OS X apps.

This makes sense because there’s a significant development cost in backwards compatibility.  And I find that we have better success with technology when all the components are the same age.  When you try to pair an old printer with a new computer for example, it could be a problem.  When you run an old version of Quicken on a new Mac, it could be a problem.

I use these as examples because these are two scenarios where problems will develop with the Lion upgrade, and thus the loss of Rosetta compatibility.  Only the newest Quicken (that isn’t really Quicken) will run.  Quicken 2009 and earlier all require Rosetta.  So do apps like Adobe CS2. Office 2004.  Sometimes it’s not a whole app – but certain functions that needed Rosetta and will no longer work.

For my client, none of their high-end printer/copiers would print under Lion.  The print driver software needs Rosetta.  Or more accurately, the print driver needs an upgrade.

That’s kind of the point.  Apple is saying to vendors that they need to get on board with Mac OS X technologies that have been in place since 2006.  It’s a lot easier for Apple to say that now than it was back then.

But that means you need to watch out.  There’s a great database at RoaringApps.com that you can search.  Or call us and we can check for you.

And as always, it might be better to let trailblazers take the arrows.  Rumor has it that version 10.7.2 is already in testing to fix some issues that didn’t show up before Lion’s release.

Bottom line, much like its namesake, Lion is not something to take lightly.  

Jamie asked Diane about her experiences in working with BestMacs.  You can listen to the conversation here:

Or here’s some of the highlights:

On BNO monitoring: “…the sense of trust and that the guys will bring things to my attention before I know that they’ve gone wrong or before they’ve even gone wrong.”

On BestMacs response times and leveraging BOM: “…the ability to just enter a ticket online and know that somebody is responding to it. The people who have done our IT stuff prior to BestMacs had an online program where you entered the ticket, but you didn’t get any follow up until they kinda felt like it. So, you never really knew if anybody was working on something.  I think that was part of the attraction being able to go in, look at a ticket and see whose been assigned to work it, what’s going on with it, most of the time I don’t really have to utilize that because it’s get to taken care of pretty quickly. But if there’s something that I wanna check on. It’s also good as a point of reference because I can search the tickets by the date or the type of problem, you know, I can go back and look at past problems and say, oh that’s right.”

On BestMacs capability to learn a business environment: “I found [the BestMacs team] to be very knowledgeable about Mac and all the different software. We have a lot of software issues related to what we do … I really feel like everybody has educated themselves on [unique] stuff that we use … And I feel confident that they would do that again.”

How BNO has benefitted Diane the most: “…the consistency of service and the fact that I no longer have to spend … 60% of a day, most days a week trying to track down why we’re not getting e-mails, why we cannot connect to our server, why clients can’t upload stuff to our website. Prior to that, that’s literally where I was at. I was spending so much time on IT related issues, everytime an employee had an issue, they would come to me with it. Now, they can just go and enter a ticket themselves and interact with whoever they need to interact with. So, the reporting and the ability to utilize that has been great and the service, the follow up, you know, the response has been outstanding.”

Why Diane would recommend BestMacs for your Mac-powered business: “…generally for all the reasons that I have stated as far as the service level. It’s competitively priced. Even though I was a custom to paying virtually nothing for the service I was getting – you get what you pay for. So it’s a good value. I have not had any problems or issues.  I’d definitely recommend to anybody on Mac.”

But what’s a Pismo?! Apple’s product code names are now pretty famous but before the “big cats” became well known for versions of Mac OS X, they were less commonly known for models of Mac hardware.
In 2000, the PowerBook G3 (Firewire) was code-named “Pismo” presumably after Pismo Beach, CA. The PowerBook’s lid had a “clam” like shape and Pismo Beach is famous for its clams. A Pismo was the first brand-new laptop that I bought for BestMacs. I liked it so much that I named my black cat Pismo in tribute.
And really, for our “newspaper” Pismo sounded cooler than the “BestMacs Post-Gazette”.

Pismo Beach, CA

PowerBook G3 (Firewire) "Pismo"

My Cat Pismo

From the hilarious "Toothpaste for Dinner"

Change is hard.

The last time you got an update from us was back in August when we debuted BestMacs Network Overseer. Our “silence” since then hasn’t been an act of commission. Rather, over the past six months we’ve been learning a lot about how being an outsourced IT provider is different (and better) than being a repairman. Change may be hard, but change is also good. It’s been an intense time, and frankly required complete focus & effort. One other thing we’ve learned: Change is constant. So…

For one, our communication needs to change, and improve. When a BestMacs tech comes to your office, it’s easy to stay in contact since we are right there with you. When we work remotely, as is often the case on a NO plan, it’s more difficult. My team and I are stepping up our responsiveness and our transparency. You are always welcome to call us, but I want us to do the work of staying on top of your computer needs and keeping you informed.

At the same time, too much communication can have a “noise” effect. I have been hard at work revising our BNO software to make sure it doesn’t inundate you with the alerts that we see. Likewise, we want to make sure all manual communication with you is effective and with purpose. We’re making changes to find the right, optimal communication balance; we ask that you help us affect this change by letting us know if we’re anything less than right. How?

The centerpiece of what we do for you is in BOM. If our email volume is getting unruly, try logging into BOM directly at https://bom.bestmacs.com. (you can create your password there if you’ve never been). It has a great interface for seeing your open tickets and all of our notations.

And for those of you who miss all the content that we used to post on BestMacs.com, I haven’t forgotten you. I’m frequently on Twitter and use that to get a lot of my Mac news while on the run. Now I found a great way to share that with you on a daily basis. (Visit The Pismo!) I’ll add my own $0.02 to the mix when i have a contribution.

Change really registered with me last month; I had to fly back to CNY to be with my father in the hospital. I just wanted to take a moment here to thank Jacob, Josh, and Jamie for their great work while I was away. Bet you didn’t even notice I was gone.

One point I don’t communicate nearly enough: thank you for your business. If there’s anything that my team and I should be doing better, please don’t hesitate to let me know. We’re open to change, especially when it benefits you, and your business.

Mark your iCalendars and join us at 7pm on Wednesday, October 6th at the Lawrence Apple User Group meeting.  Our own Brian Best will be bringing along a Snow Leopard Server to show off “all the cool stuff” – iCal and Address Book services, the awesome and easy to use built-in Wiki group collaboration server, secure mobile access for iPhone and iPad, and becoming your own studio with Podcast Producer.  And that’s not to mention everything that Server could do *before* the Snow Leopard upgrade!

If this will be your first visit to a LAUG meeting, you’ll find it to be a friendly laid-back atmosphere.  Meetings are free and questions are encouraged, even if it isn’t about the topic being discussed. (In other words, come get some free tech support from the most Mac knowledgable minds in Lawrence!)  A door prize will also be given out to an attendee.  Learn more about the LAUG at http://laugks.org

Here’s a map to the meeting location at Douglas County Senior Services:

View Larger Map

This is a fast, easy, and no obligation way for your Mac-based business to learn what Mac OS X Server, BNO, and BestMacs can do for you!  Please grab some dinner in downtown Lawrence then drop in and see us!

BNO (which by the way, we pronounce interchangeably “Bee-Know” or “Bee-Ehn-Oh”) isn’t just a new service offering, it is a complete redesign of BestMacs’ business model that started to take shape in 2008.  You’ve seen important glimpses of it in 2009 and 2010 as I tweaked BestMacs operations to get us ready for this.  And when I said 2010 – our tenth year of business – was going to take it to a new level, I meant it.

That’s right, BNO is a culmination of over two years of planning and development.  But more important than that is that it comes from lessons I learned while working with you, BestMacs clients.  Let me share a few of those lessons:

Log files are useless unless you look at them.

Sometime a couple years ago, one of my favorite BestMacs clients suffered a pretty severe server crash.  We did what we always did; we rescheduled things to get out there and fix it.  But it ruined their whole week because they had to make up for a whole day of lost productivity, it inconvenienced other clients who had to be rescheduled to accommodate the change, and the worst part?  It could have been avoided.  The log files had been showing disk failures for two weeks before it finally gave up.  Had we seen it even a day earlier, we would have put a fix in play and they would have had zero downtime.

Vendors can’t play the blame game with us.

Just recently we had a client who got a new printer and everything was fine, except they couldn’t print from their page layout program.  Well, the copier vendor said, “Hey, everything else prints except that program, it must be your Mac.”  So we got the call.  After some serious troubleshooting by everyone on your BestMacs team, we determined without a doubt that the printer was missing a key hardware component and that was causing the issue.  The “blame game” started and our client was in the middle.  Finally, the client and I convinced the vendor to bring out the hardware as a test, even though they were sure it wouldn’t matter.  And it fixed the problem.  Now imagine how much faster that could have been solved if we had been in on it from the get go, directly interfacing with the vendor on our clients’ behalf.

The very service model BestMacs offered prevented people from using our services.

This was a huge realization that took me almost 3 years to come to grips with and fully understand it.  Something breaks on your Mac.  You have to quickly decide what you’re going to do about it.  Fix it yourself?  Costs you your time that you could spend doing more enjoyable or more productive things (you know, like your job.)  Call BestMacs?  Costs you money.  (As much as I enjoy this, I gotta pay the bills.)  Obviously, you know which one I prefer – I want you to call us because I know we can take care of your Mac problems faster, better, and address the bigger problems that cause the little issues.  But many times, our clients won’t call because they don’t feel like the problem is worth $129 or $90 or $75 – even when you have prepaid for BestMacs service.  Maybe it’s just not in the budget.  Imagine then if every problem, every day, cost you nothing beyond what you had budgeted and already paid.

And finally, the most important lesson:

Proactive service is faster, better, and less expensive than reactive repair.

This is the heart of the change we make today.  For the first ten years of BestMacs, we were completely reactive.  You only called us when something broke.  We only saw you when something broke.  Or when you were getting something new to install.  But reactive repair is expensive both in dollar cost and in time and productivity loss.  And thanks to some regular, consistent proactive work with a handful of BestMacs clients over the past few years, I saw that we could be doing so much better for all of our clients – it was just a matter of how to scale it.  I’ve been working that scaling problem since December 2007, and with a couple of big bumps in the road, I started shedding the parts that didn’t fit in 2009, and this year began rearranging our customer service, internal operations, and tracking to match this paradigm shift.

And here we are.

I’m so excited to finally be able to share with you what I’ve been working on all this time.  If you’re a BestMacs client, you’ve been telling me how much better our service has been this year.  Thank you for sticking with us all this time.  But, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet; I can’t wait to share BNO with you in person.  We are scheduling visits just as fast as my schedule will allow.

And if you’re new to working with BestMacs, I promise you that you have never seen anything like this from a Mac-based IT services company.

Please call us to set up a free 12-point business and technology evaluation to get your customized BNO plan.   It’s going to make your Mac computing experience so much better.

Watch this space on August 16th. We’ll have plenty to talk about then.

In the meantime, here’s some random Apple thoughts from the past few weeks:

• iOS 4 is an excellent upgrade.  Apple just nailed multi-tasking: they did it in such a way that you get all the functionality but also prevents background apps from killing your battery and crashing the OS.
• The iPhone 4 antenna is way better than its predecessor, provided you don’t hold that spot.
• Even then, “antennagate” is way overblown.
• At least I got a free case out of the deal.
• Apple’s phone testing lab makes me think they know where all the mutants are.
• The new Mac Mini is a great update of the design. Installing a RAM upgrade went from royal pain to stupid simple.
• It was brilliant to release the new Mini on the same day they started taking pre-orders for the iPhone 4.  Talk about candy at the checkout lane.
• The HDMI port on the new Mini is great on my HDTV, but watching all of our shows on the computer isn’t quite as good as a standard DVR yet.  Buffering stinks.
• The Facetime ads make me a little weepy.
• Facetime video calling is really easy and slick.  If this tech takes hold on the computer and/or over the air without Wi-Fi, look out.
• Yes, I called 866-FACETIME.
• We finally have Address Book Server working on the iPhone, thanks to iOS4.  Very nice to have a secure, shared contact list among my team and I on the phone.
• I sold my iPad.  It just wasn’t right for me – I’d rather have my MacBook Air, and when I can’t use it, I usually can’t use my iPad either.
• I promptly got a lot of grief from wife and son.  Wife, who approved the sale but didn’t know what she had until it was gone.  Son, who asks for “iPad” – yes, he actually says it – and has to be handed my old first-model iPhone instead.
• There are a ton of people who really love the iPad, and I still think it is a great device.  I’m not its target audience.  Given the above, I sense there will be another one in my home before year end.
• Snow Leopard Server’s mail service is soooooo much better than Leopard or previous.  This isn’t really news but we did an upgrade and a couple of failover tests recently, and if you’re running Mail service on Leopard Server, I’ll be talking to you about an upgrade.
• The Mac Mini Server got 4.5 out of 5 stars and an Editor’s Choice designation from PC Magazine.  Yes, you read that right.
• Forget iDevices; Apple sold 3.47 million Macs last quarter – the most ever in a single quarter.
• I love it that Apple’s market capitalization is now greater than Microsoft.  For someone who was in this business, rooting for the underdog when it wasn’t even close, that is pretty cool to see.

Thanks for hanging in there with us.  We’ll still be a little quiet between now and August 16, but watch this space.

I’ll be talking to you very soon.

Things that annoy me:

• Location services must be on to use the app. Why? You can geotag clips, but I don’t want to be FORCED to do so.
• Only video clips shot with an iPhone can be used.
• Added text lasts the entire length of the clip and takes up a big portion of the frame.
• Audio can’t be moved at all, and when it ends, it ends.
• You can trim video from both ends by using handles, but it’s difficult to see what you’re trimming (easier to trim and then import).

Things that I like:

• It’s relatively easy to cute-ify video clips.
• You don’t have to have a desktop computer to join clips on the fly.
• You can pick what size to export, and it includes HD, which looks good (way to make use of the new iPhone 4 video-recording capabilities!).
• You can add video and photos, and you can do the Ken Burns thing with photos. Result: quick-and-dirty video that looks pretty polished.

I spent a half hour messing with this software and slapped together a project of my trip to Italy (see on YouTube). Keep in mind this video was shot with a 3GS—not in HD).

Screenshots:

 

Ken Burns effect

Choosing image transitions

For $5 this is a fairly sophisticated app. For people who shoot a lot of video clips and like to share them, it’s probably a should-have (eg, people with kids or active blogs). For people who shoot longer videos or videos with multiple devices, it’s probably best to stick with a desktop video-editing software. Beyond a few minutes of editing, iMovie on the iPhone’s limitations just get too frustrating.

 

The "accessory" is your car. It causes a lot of "interference." Just tap YES.

(If you’re expecting some info on the new iPhone 4 and the stuff going on at WWDC, don’t worry, it’s on the way.)

Have you ever been aggravated at being stuck behind someone who was clearly more interested in talking on their phone than driving their car? Yeah, that may have been me. I took it to a whole new level. Phone calls, sure. Texting, yeah. Emails, you know it. I’ve even repaired clients’ computers from my iPhone while in the car.

Since about 2007, I’ve done all of the above with the iPhone cradled in a heads-up dash-mounted holder from ProClip along with a device that plugs it directly into the car audio for music and charging. You can see from the picture below that the holder puts the iPhone within reach of the fingers on my right hand while I’m holding the wheel. That, in tandem with my Bluetooth speaker phone mounted on the visor, always made me feel like I was safer than the average driver who talks and texts. The fact that I never had an “incident” just bolstered my confidence.

My iPhone dash mount

For better part of the past year, my loving wife has been trying to convince me that my perceived safety was in fact a false sense of invincibility that was going to vanish the first time something really bad happened. I saw the videos on TV and the Internet: like the bus driver who rammed the back of a car on the interstate because he was texting – “but he was looking down at his phone; I have heads-up!” – and the countless studies and PSAs that showed that drivers talking on the phone in the car are as dangerous as drunk drivers – “but they’re holding the phone with one hand; I have a speakerphone” and Dr. Phil talking about how in just one second a car going 30mph moves from one side of his stage to the other – “but even when I’m looking at an email I can see the road!“

Right about the time that Kansas passed its “no texting while driving” law, our DVR snagged an episode of the Oprah show about the perils of texting and driving. And the Queen B said “you are sitting down and watching this whole thing.” I made it through about 15 minutes. Hearing a mother who lost her 9-year old daughter because a distracted driver ran her down with an SUV… and then hearing the grief of a father who lost his 18-year-old son because said son dropped his phone and slammed into a tree while bending over to pick it back up… Well, that lead to firing up the iPad and doing some more research to completely defeat my illusions.

My biggest fallacy in this whole thing was that “talking on a speakerphone is no more dangerous than talking to a passenger in the car.” Research isn’t quite as strong here, but a study at the University of Utah showed that actual passengers are safer because they assist the driver by acting as another set of eyes. In other words, the driving becomes part of the conversation, like “blah blah – oh, there’s your exit.” or “yada yada – stop, stop!“

The next day, I talked with the BestMacs team about it and we all agreed that this was the right decision. I went up and signed the Pledge on O’s website. As of now, no BestMacs employee will send texts, emails, or make phone calls while driving. If we must, we will pull the car over on to a safe shoulder or parking lot.

For many of you who know my phone habits, you know that this will be especially difficult for me. Almost every time I have talked to someone on the phone in the past 3 years, it has been during a long drive between Lawrence and KC and/or between client visits. So, yes, this will be a hindrance to our productivity. We MUST put safety (our own and of others) above our business. If we don’t do that, we’re no better than a certain Big Polluting oil company.

So, I’m going to ask you for two things:

1) Please forgive me and the team if we are a little slower to respond to phone calls or texts than we have been before now. Our average drive time is around 30 minutes so it should only be a short while. Jamie is rarely working from the road, so please call her first at 866-BESTMAC. If it’s urgent, she can get a tech to pull over and call.

2) Please evaluate your own situation. Are you subject to the same false invincibility that I was? It’s real and it’s a very insidious problem. You don’t have to take my word for it; do some research and make your own decision. And if you come to same conclusion that I did, make yourself stop.