So, time to change the theme to something that is more interesting for me. From now on I’ll be focusing more on things that I am really passionate about: music, science, technology and the digital future. Stay tuned.

The thing is, Google solution basically fulfills the need of smaller or medium sized business. No, the offering does not have all the functionality of Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org. However, how many features does one really ever use? With Docs, working with basic documents is pretty straightforward. As a bonus, they are stored externally to the cloud, so there are no backups to make, and 25GB mail storage per account should pretty much be enough even for serious business use. There are also nice features for sharing and collaborating with integrated Google Talk that eases distributed and out-of-office work with Apps.

So far, the only problem for me has been offline usage. While I’m rarely totally offline (3G/EDGE works pretty much anywhere), I’d sometimes like to take the documents with me. Google Gears should fix this problem, but for some reason Gears does not function that well on Mac OS X. I think I’ll need to look deeper into that, but one can always export the documents for offline work and re-import them back. The ease of use compensates for that, as I already have two machines at home (a laptop and a desktop) and since the productivity tools are online, there is no need to sync any files to server storage – you always have up to date documents available in the cloud even when working on any temporary computer. No USB drives, no syncing, no copying – it just works.

I must admit that for a long time, I thought that online office suite would not work well enough for any serious use. Now, I think the online approach is only sensible way. Too bad this has not yet gained too much ground in the enterprise space as online tools could easily replace the basic Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations without the patch nightmares and biannual major version upgrades.

Next up is moving my web hosting to Amazon’s EC2 cloud. I’ll report back on the experiences as soon as I have the time to do it.

After doing a few ports of GPL libraries and playing around with the UI framework, I can only say that the SDK is the best mobile SDK I’ve ever used so far. My previous experiences are from MIDP (sucks), Windows Mobile (sucks even more) and Symbian (ultimate horror) so my expectations were not that high. However, Apple’s take on mobile programming is simply elegant and pretty straightforward to learn.

My only complain is my personal dislike for Interface Builder. Somehow, I’ve always been more inclined to make user interfaces programmatically, simply because that way one has total control on what is happening. With Cocoa Touch, making UI via code is pretty simple, as long as you read the documentation first and get your hands into the MVC model under the hood. Still, I think I’ll give IB a chance if I get my brain around it :-)

Given the ease of development (well, relative ease compared to other mobile terminals), it is not hard to see AppStore gaining more momentum. 12 months from now, one should have a target audience of 50 million customers or so. So it is not that impossible to sell a few thousend copies of an application if it fits some customer need. I for one will be trying out how the distribution model works for some niche applications and hopefully make a few bucks in the process.

As the launch of Apple’s new revision of the iPhone is approaching, there has been growing amount of criticism towards Apple not introducing anything really revolutionary with the new product. This critique is normally heard from U.S. and that is understandable, given that U.S. is still lagging behind Europe when it comes to mobile infrastructure. As an iPhone 2G user, however, I must contradict some of these arguments. There are some unique selling points from European perspective:

• 3G. European 3G coverage is getting near 100% and for example in the Nordics, subsidized contracts are only allowed for 3G devices.
• iTunes & AppStore. Try to find as usable for any other mobile handset. You won’t.
• Cocoa Touch. Yeah, there are loads of Windows Mobile phones with touch screen, mainly in the U.S. market. I actively use Samsung SGH-i780 for my corporate tasks and I can only say that there are touch UIs and then there is Apple’s touch UI. Try to guess which one works.
• Mobile Safari. Only desktop grade mobile browser. Don’t even try to mention Opera, it is not even close.
• ActiveSync. While RIM rules the U.S. market, Europe is still wide open for corporate solutions. This might give Apple a chance.
• Battery life. Reviews say that iPhone’s battery life is bad. Well, compare that with any Nokia N-series phone, which are common in Europe, in similar usage scenario and iPhone is not that bad at all.

This looks quite interesting: Axel Springer is changing all of their active PCs with Macs. That means 12000 clients. Hopefully this is a sign of increasing corporate adoption of Macs. Since I switched about a year ago, I’ve had the most problem free period of my IT career. In addition to that, Mac OS X seems to be the best environment to work with when developing web applications, due to having BSD roots with human comprehensible user interface – best of both worlds.

Image via Wikipedia

If you, like me, use Google Bookmarks for centrally storing bookmarks and want to use Safari or WebKit for your daily browsing, the help can be found at MacThemes Forum. The Goggles plugin for SIMBL adds a new menu to Safari that allows you to use Google Bookmarks integrated to the browser. A real lifesaver, at least for me.

PS. I’d recommend using nightly builds of WebKit as they feature a new JavaScript execution core, making AJAX applications far more responsive than on any other browser.

While I have nothing against the technology itself, I think this kind of tactics undervalue the consumers freedom to choose what to have in their machines without their consent, and thus bring up some very interesting issues involving HP’s and Microsoft’s liability, should any security issues arise because of this practise.

Other than that, I really think this will not change the bigger picture that much. 4 million shipped PCs is a fraction of Google user base or Flash installed base. So it leaves me wondering, why to make such a deal given all the history Microsoft has of such arrangements. Seems to me like playing with fire.