Shirt Pocket Watch

Well, one year ago today we released SuperDuper! 2.0, and the past 12 months have gone quickly indeed.

In that time we’ve released a number of great updates, and I’ve communicated personally with thousands of you through support mail, IM, the forums and this blog. It’s been fun, rewarding and—on occasion—exhausting. But, mostly, fun and rewarding.

Looking over my blog post from this day last year, I spent my entire birthday, save for about 40 minutes, responding to hundreds and hundreds of support messages as people asked questions about the new release, and Bruce and I tried to fix a rollout glitch or two. Quite a day.

This year, though, it’s much calmer, and I’m going to take most of the rest of the day off—pretty much my first in a few years—to celebrate Thanksgiving (& my encroaching decrepitude) with my family, aunts, uncles, cousins, Zabeth and Taiko.

While I’m doing that, I also want to raise a glass of Thanksgiving wine in a toast to thank all of you, out in the tubes that make up teh Internets, for your support, encouragement, criticism, and compliments. Bruce and I couldn’t do this without you!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ve got a huge backlog of topics that I’ve wanted to post about, and hopefully I’ll be able to get down some more extended thoughts soon. But here are some “Hot Dots” style quick thoughts…

Working Toward Phone Nirvana
Overstated a bit, but the new T-Mobile Dash (a/k/a the HTC Excalibur) is a great new “balanced compromise” phone—small, light, with excellent email and browsing, a good keyboard and screen, and—with Missing Sync for Windows Mobile—complete Mac support, too. Incredibly full featured in a small package: WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, EDGE, Quad-Band… good stuff.

A few relatively minor downsides: the battery is small (larger battery = larger phone), the XT9 implementation that helps with typing (if you need it to) doesn’t work properly with multi-line text in Calendar, Contacts and the Web (but can be turned off), the screen’s a bit small at 320x240 (again - larger screen = larger phone), and the phone doesn’t support the DUN bluetooth profile (but does support PAN).

Giving mail a push
On top of that, I’ve been using Kerio Mailserver here at Shirt Pocket HQ for many years, and their latest release—6.3—fully supports “Push” email (and “live sync") for Windows Mobile clients. It works great.

Both products highly recommended.

Slinging
Now that they’ve released their Mac client, I’ve acquired and installed a Slingbox Pro, and it—too—works great. The Mac software is a bit klunky and windowsish, but it nevertheless works. And—even on relatively slow connections—the picture quality is surprisingly good.

There’s even a Windows Mobile client and—installed on the Dash—it works!

Now, I don’t plan to watch TV on my Dash, but it’s nice to be able to access the material on my TiVo elsewhere in the house—or even at other locations. If that’s something that appeals to you, by all means, get a Slingbox, and support their efforts on the Mac.

Edgy
I try to switch my keyboard relatively often to keep the wrist bugaboos at bay, and I’ve recently brought the new Logitech diNovo Edge in-house. Even though the keyboard isn’t listed as Mac Compatible on the box, it’s a standard bluetooth HID device and—save some buttons and features—works quite well. You just need to use the Keyboard Preference Pane to swap the Cmd and Option keys to stay sane.

The keyboard has a nice feel (it’s not “clicky” but is nonetheless responsive and solid), some useful features (like a touchpad cursor—though I can’t get the scrolling feature to work), and some elegant design and lighting effects.

Expensive, but nice.

Taiko
The pup’s continuing to grow quickly (though not too quickly) and has been a delight to have around, though he’s a ton of work. A recent photo (last week):

I look at that and can’t believe he was 12 pounds just a few short months ago. He’ll grow into his tail yet!