StreamJockey

Applications, Services, and Hardware We Use (May 2011 Update)

These are applications, services, and devices we use every day and/or for specific projects. For example, while we currently are not using CacheFly, we have made use of the service for particular projects. We expect this post to be updated routinely.

Offsite and Cloud Providers

Amazon Web Services

Apple MobileMe

Google Apps

Rackspace cloudservers^TM and cloudfiles^TM

Backpack and Basecamp from 37signals. And by the way they use Amazon Web Services for storage.

Domain names, hosting, virtual and dedicated servers we use our WebServicesRock.US! affiliate.

Salesforce Cloud.com

Operating Systems

Apple OS X Snow Leopard

Most of our regular use and development is on Windows 7.

Windows 2008 Server, Web and Standard Editions

Ubuntu Desktop and Server often as a virtual machine on the Mac.

Application Software

Multiple OSes

TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. We use it on the Mac.

Cloud Storage
We recommend you create accounts with a couple of vendors in the event you are at a location that is blocking a particular vendor/URL. And yes this has happened to us on multiple occasions and going to plan B saved the day!

Box.net provides 5GB for free. They have excellent support for the applications such as LinkedIn and Salesforce and there iPad app is very good.

Dropbox works with Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.

SpiderOak SpiderOak provides an easy, secure and consolidated free online backup, sync, sharing, access & storage solution for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. We use it on Windows, Mac, and iPhones.

OS X

Apple iLife '11 has web, music, and photo tools that work great together. We have never had to load a driver to communicate with any cameras we own - they just work.

Apple iWork '09 and iWork.com word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software. We also use the iPhone app that both controls the slide show and displays presenter notes.

We use Screenflow for desktop recording on our Mac and also to record Windows when running on under a VM on the Mac. The new version added some nice features including easy publishing to YouTube.

Microsoft Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 continues to be one of the best Mac applications.

Growl Growl lets Mac OS X applications unintrusively tell you when things happen. Small popups occur such as when GMail or Skype users login or leave or Xcode compiles are complete.

VMware Fusion 3

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac

Intuit QuickBooks for Mac. QuickBooks for Mac allows encrypted backups to your MobileMe iDisk. 

OmniFocus is GTD® style task management for Mac OS X and iPhone. The software has good syncing functionality.

OmniGraffle Professional a drawing program - similar to Visio but for the Mac.

OmniPlan a project planning tool we occasionally use.

iStat pro is a free widget that lets you monitor your Mac, including CPU, memory, disks, network, battery, temperatures, fans, load & uptime and processes.

SuperDuper! is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. And it complements Time Machine.

Development

Apple xCode development environment for Mac OS X.

TextMate TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors.

Aptana Studio

Panic Software Transmit ftp client that works with ftp, MobileMe iDisk, Amazon S3, WebDav and more.

Panic Software Coda one-window web development

Kaleidoscope is a Mac program used to spot the differences in text and image files. Review changes in seconds with the world's most advanced file comparison application.

Version Control Systems
While our consulting work requires us to use various version control products, including the trash Visual SourceSafe, for our development we most often use Mercurial and Git. We had used Subversion for years but once we switched to a DVCS product there was no going back.

Git and github (git hosting) and Mercurial integrated with Kiln.

Versions Mac Subversion Client (version control system client)

Development Portals
We include here systems that combine some or all of the following features: bug, issue, and project tracking for software development; version control along with code review.

Fog Creek Software's FogBugz and Kiln hosted on a VM at WebServicesRock.US!

Atlassian's Jira which also provides hosted as well as downloaded solutions.

iPhone Applications:

Analytics from AnalyticsApp.com

iStat Shows iPhone stats, monitors remote Mac, Linux & Solaris, CPU, memory, disks, temps, fans, and more. And it has some basic network tools.

OmniFocus Winner of the 2008 Apple Design Award for Best iPhone Productivity Application. We really like this program. It has multiple ways to sync but we use our MobileMe account here too.

Remotely lock your iPhone with Find My iPhone which requires a MobileMe account.

Windows

IIS Internet Information Server - web services. Much of our development targets IIS with ASP.NET.

FileZilla Client free open-source ftp client that runs on many operating systems. We only run it on Windows. There is a server now too that only runs on WIndows. 

Development

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 The Microsoft Store is offering 12 free hours of training with your purchase now. There are numerous free and low-cost add-ins to Visual Studio. We'll show some that we use.

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is a great valued, full-featured UML diagramming program. We use it instead of the much more expensive Rational tools. 

Processes

We expect to write about some processes that we routinely use in the future.

Devices We Use

Apple MacBook Air 2nd Generation

Apple 20" iMac 

Apple Magic Mouse 

Blue Pen, Mechanical Pencil, pape, and iPhone Application Sketch Pad

The mStand Laptop Stand By Rain Design is a nicely designed stand for desktop we use regularly when working in bed or on the couch. It keeps the laptop at a good angle and most importantly keeps the ventilation at the back hinge clear from blankets etc.

iPhone & iPod Touch OS 3.1.2 Update

The OS 3.1.2 update is for bug fixes not new features and it includes the following fixes:

• Resolves sporadic issue that may cause iPhone to not wake from sleep
• Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart
• Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming

According to Apple, iPhone OS 3.1.2 is compatible with the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 3GS. Users can update via iTunes - just connect your iPhone or iPod Touch and click the update button. The update is approximately 270-310MB depending upon device. Apple released iPhone OS 3.1 about one month ago.

Once finished your iPhone will restart. You will be alerted about a Carrier Settings update. This will upgrade the US iPhone OS 3.1.2 to AT&T carrier settings version 5.6. There is no reboot required after updating the carrier settings.

We have experienced the issue where the iPhone would not wake from sleep and it then had to be reset. And we have not run into any issues on the iPod Touch (2nd Generation).

Once we have a few days usage with the updated devices we will report our results. 

OS X Commands to Copy & Burn CDs/DVDs

The built-in Disc Utility application can burn an ISO (CD/DVD) image but it can not create one. I assume this is to discourage illegal copying, but it makes it more difficult for those making archives of their data. But you can use the following commands in terminal to create an ISO image: hdiutil makehybrid -o image-name image-source example: hdiutil makehybrid -o ImageName /Volume/MyCD

Tip: Once you have typed as far as .../Volume/, pause after typing the first couple of characters of the CD/DVD name, such as My in MyCD, and press the tab key to have terminal auto complete the name. This is helpful for CD/DVDs that have long names. The Mac OS X Reference Library manual page provides greater (if not overwhelming) detail.

Have trouble sleeping? Or "I need to go to grad school to understand this title"

20. The Defenestration of Superfluous Architectural Accoutrements
"Simple architectures have conceptual integrity and are better than more complex ones. Continuous architectural refactoring helps to converge a system to its practical and optimal simplicity." -Grady Booch

Now I should note that I have followed and learned much from Grady Booch over the years. Some of his early writings and code on object-oriented state machines were very informative and personally helpful. Likewise his Booch methodology and UML work too! (OK enough links :-)