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Not a complaint, but I’m a bit curious about all of the recent Microsoft bashing from fairly high profile MS alums. A few days ago Don Dodge, a former startup evangelist at Microsoft who’s now at Google, blogged about his positive experience discovering Apple products after escaping the Microsoft vortex. This is the same guy that told Venturebeat two months ago:

“At a high level, Microsoft today is where IBM was in late ’80s, early ’90s. When I was just starting my career, IBM ruled the world. IBM was the dominant computer provider in the world — hardware, software, network, you name it, IBM was king. I think in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we saw that shift and Microsoft became king of the hill. And in 2009, 2010, going forward, Microsoft is sort of like IBM. It’s a longtime company with a great tradition and still very profitable, but it’s not the leader. Microsoft is not making the innovative leaps and coming out with the new stuff.”

But the much larger news item was yesterday’s juicy New York Times op-ed by former MS Vice President Dick Brass in which he describes Microsoft as a “clumsy, uncompetitive innovator.” Microsoft quickly posted a pretty lackluster response to the op-ed that sidesteps Dick’s points entirely and instead claims Microsoft measures its contribution by its broad impact, whatever that means.

I’m interested in this topic now because these guys are definitely not morons. And I’m wondering what’s causing this to come out now. I think it might be because of iPad. That’s a class of product that Microsoft tried to pioneer, and failed. And if iPad does turn out to be a big hit, then it could be another big blow to Microsoft’s ego/pride/morale/perception. It’s kind of like MS is the dutiful older sibling that’s repeatedly being shown up by the golden younger brother or sister, not that I would know anything about that! In either case I guess only time will tell.

The results are in! Seven days later, here’s my new home screen:

And for comparison, here’s the before:

I may rearrange the order over the coming weeks, but otherwise this is what I’m going to keep. (In fairness I did use a few other apps over the course of the week, like Cydia and TripTracker, but decided not to move them because they aren’t apps I use on a regular basis.)

I must say it’s been a somewhat surprising exercise. There were seven apps on my home screen that weren’t being used regularly: Contacts, Maps, Weather, Mint, Pandora, Shazam, and Settings!

I’m not that surprised about Contacts. Some people like it but I find it redundant. Maybe I’m too much of an iPhone old-timer but I get to my contacts via the Phone app out of habit. I am surprised about Settings though. In theory it makes perfect sense to keep it on the home screen but it turns out I hardly use it. That is most likely because my phone is jailbroken and has SBSettings, which I use obsessively.

A few months ago I picked up a Mighty Wallet. I’m still using it and will probably get another when this one wears out. So far it’s holding up really well though it is coffee stained in a few places. I do get a lot of comments on it as most people have never seen one before so it makes a nice icebreaker. And I just discovered a new “feature” the other day.. After a few too many times forgetting to get my AAA discount at Tully’s I decided to just write a reminder inside! And below that I’ve written the spending categories which my Amazon credit card awards double points so I remember to use it when I’m supposed to.

Part of the reason I like to post tips and tricks to my blog is so I can refer to them later if I’m doing a fresh install or setting up someone else’s machine. But there are at least two tips I just thought of that I’ve never posted because they are automatic for me.

1. 2D Dock. I’ve just never been a fan of the 3D Dock introduced in Leopard. Here’s how to get it.

2. Recent Things Stack. There is a recent items option in the Apple menu but that requires two clicks. With this tip you can get there with one click. I typically keep it set to recent applications. Here’s how to get it.

Minimal Mac had a nice idea two weeks ago for discovering which apps should be on his home screen. I decided to duplicate the experiment. On Tuesday I cleared all of the apps on my home screen, except for the Phone, Messages, Mail and Safari icons in the Dock. (I agree that those four should not be moved in principle, but find they are by far my most commonly used apps anyway.) Over the course of the week, any time I use an app I move it to the home screen. After seven days, I’ll see what I have!

For reference, here’s what my home screen looked like before:

And here’s where I am after two days:

There are already three apps that I didn’t have on my home screen before!

Yesterday I received an email from my credit union announcing a new feature called Online Deposits. You can now deposit checks by scanning them. What an incredible feature!

With Online Deposits, you can deposit original personal checks, corporate checks, and cashier’s checks using a scanner connected to your computer. Once you scan the front and back of the check, the electronic image is sent to BECU with the deposit information.

And like ATM deposits, most deposited checks are made available immediately up to a certain amount.

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Fake Steve at it again with the conspiracy theories! This one doesn’t sound that far-fetched to me.

As for Google suddenly growing a conscience, come on. You know why Sergey freaked?

It’s because he found out that his own employees in China were actually working for the Chinese government, and were using their access to Google’s internal systems to steal information about Google’s precious little search algorithm. How can you do business in China if everyone you hire is going to steal from you? That’s why Google is backing out.

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Nice walk-through on how to use Smart Folders in Mac OS.

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Not sure how I missed this but if you use the WordPress iPhone app make sure you have the 2.0 release. I’m perplexed at why they did it this way since both versions are free but they made version 2 a new app. In either case, just got it and it is way better than the original!

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Once again, a simple and intuitive solution to a problem that had been nagging me for a while. If you’ve ever changed the icons of folders in your user directory and wondered how to get them back to the originals, there is a drop dead easy way… Just Get Info, click the icon and hit backspace!

Post #4 claims an AppleCare “Genius” didn’t even know this. Why am I not surprised..

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