DropBox: FREE — sync files — with this iPhone app, you have access to your files on the go. And since the storage is cloud-based, and dropbox works on both Mac/Win you can have your files synced effortlessly. See my previous Dropbox article about the software versions and how to download and install on both platforms with FREE 2GB + 250MB of storage.

Evernote: FREE — sync notes — while the iPhone app isn’t as robust as some other Note applications, it will sync with their incredibly handy Mac and Windows application. So, if you’ve made notes or clipped screenshots at home for your big presentation at work, you can edit it on the way with the app, and then have it synced and ready on your work PC. See my previous Evernote articles for more details.

LastPass: FREE (requires $12/year subscription) — sync passwords — there you are visiting a favorite website at home or on your iPhone, but you can’t remember what password you used. Not any more with LastPass. LastPass works as a browser add-on that will store and sync your login information. Plus, anywhere you travel, you can log into the LastPass.com site to find those passwords. Find out more about LastPass with my previous article on it.

Skype: FREE — cheap talk — sure iChat is great on the Mac, but it’s limited to the Mac. Skype works on both platforms and even on your iPhone. With Skype, if you subscribe to one of their unlimited talk plans (US = $3, Japan = $6), you can not only talk all you want at home, at work, and on your phone. (NOTE: Skype currently requires you to use WiFi to make calls on your iPhone. To get around this limitation, you can use the FREE Fring application, which allows you to make Skype Out calls over the 3G network.)

Pandora: FREE — cheap music — if you love music, this is one app you need to have. Set up “stations” of your favorite music and let Pandora stream that music to you via this iPhone app. Pandora.com works great in Firefox and Safari also, so you can listen to those stations at work or home too.

Toodledo: ($3) — sync to-do’s — with this iPhone app you can edit/add/delete your To-dos. Toodledo’s website offers links to sync your account with both Mac and Windows, so those changes you made will be reflected wherever you go.

Photo apps: — see your photos — there are several good apps to show and upload your photos to a photo site, including Shutterfly (FREE), Flickr (FREE), Eye-fi (FREE), and Picasafoto ($.99, for Picasa) . If you take a lot of photos and want to see them on the road, these apps will help you stay connected to those images.

Yelp: FREE — great tips — Yelp’s iPhone app can help you find local businesses quickly. The “bookmark” feature is really great for keeping your favorite places’ phone numbers handy. So, you can order your favorite Thai dish in advance for quick pickup. User reviews can also give you tips what to order or avoid.

MAC ONLY:

AirMouse: ($2) — control your Mac with your iPhone. This app will work with your local WiFi network to become a trackpad to control your Mac wirelessly. Much more robust than Apple’s free Remote app, and cheaper than a Magic Mouse.

Prowl: ($3) — get PUSH notification on your iPhone from any Growl messages on your Mac. If you have Growl installed to display notifications on your Mac, Prowl allows you to send those notifications to your iPhone. You can be notified of things like disk errors, completed downloads, or whatever you want.

Well, I hope that’s helped you with some cool apps for you iPhone. If you have children and don’t mind them holding your $300 device, then check out my other articles on iPhone Apps for Toddlers.

1) all of Panic‘s software is 50% off including Coda, a web developer tool similar to Dreamweaver, and CandyBar, to customize your Mac.  Sale ends 11:59 PM (PDT) May 29th.  Details HERE.

2) Macupdate Promo has a terrific bundle deal on now: over 10 great Mac apps for only $49.99.  Titles include Parallels, Ripit, Circus Ponies Notebook, NetBarrier, and DVDRemaster Pro.   Learn all the details HERE.

3) Apple is running their “Back to School” special again for students and educators; buy a new Mac and get a free iPod Touch!  Details HERE.

The full list of speakers is HERE — highlights include; Peter Kay, Andy Bumatai, and Bert Lum on topics like iLife ’09, Mac 101, Adobe Lightroom, and Social Networks and Livefeeds. You may want to arrive a little early for some of the speakers to get a good seat. The JAIMS buildings will be filled with Mac enthusiasts, experts, and “switchers” (PC users just starting to use Macs). So, no matter YOUR level of expertise, you’ll find someone there to learn and chat with.

You should bring some money with you, especially if you like bargains. The Professional Photographers of Hawaii and HMAUS will have a swapmeet — expect to find goodies for cameras and computers. And, if you plan to stay the entire day, order a little bit for the tasty bento meals now: link is HERE.

If you like to blog, bring your camera and computer to capture the events. HMAUS sponsored HawaiiGeekWeek last year and brought out lots of social networking fans; posting to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and videoblogs. We’re hoping to see lots of great posts about “MacSpringFest” this year!

As with HMAUS’s Mactoberfest, there will be some fun prizes and giveaways, and this time someone will win an iPod Touch!

If you’d like to volunteer to make this years MacSpringfest the best ever, just let us know, we could sure use extra help!

That’s pretty much it, be sure to review the days events HERE so you don’t miss the topics you are most interested in. Tell a friend and see you there!

Place your lunch orders HERE -- Order yours NOW to make sure you’ll get one. Limited quantities except for pre-orders.

HMAUS presents MacSpringfest '09

You can read all the details of speakers and events HERE.  Get the a copy of the flyer HERE.

Sponsors

Hawaii Macintosh and Apple User’s Society http://www.hmaus.org

Professional Photographers of Hawaii  http://www.pphawaii.org

TAPA Communications  http://www.tapa.com

Peachpit Press  http://www.peachpit.com and

O’Reilly Books  http://oreilly.com

Hope to see you there!

In that case there are many external hard drives that would work. Here’s an example: the 1TB WD Home Studio is around $150 from Amazon comes with Firewire and USB2 connections, and includes an automated backup system designed for Macs. Both Time Capsule and the WD Studio are pretty much set-and-forget. If you need to recover your files, you mount the drive, browse to the folder, and copy it over. Easy enough.

But you may want to add a second layer to your backup plan. What happens if your external hard drive dies? Or, what happens if your house floods and you lose both your computer and backup hard drive? That’s where a secondary, “cloud-based” backup plan can really save you.

Mozy offers a free backup application with 2GB of space on their servers. You sign up for an account, download and install the program, select which files to backup (only important ones if you have more than 2GB of documents), and let it run in the background. It will automatically upload those documents and any changes to their server. Simple and free. If your house floods, you’ll still have a copy of the documents stored off-site with Mozy.

There are some draw-backs to Mozy though. Mozy only keeps the last 30 days of your documents backed up. So, if you find out 2 month later that a version of a needed file you changed isn’t on your first layer of backups (the external hard drive), you can’t get it from Mozy either. Also, Mozy’s recovery of files is a bit of a pain. You basically have to request which files you want recovered, and then wait (sometimes many hours) until you get an email with the link to download them.

There are other solutions like Mozy available, most of them for a yearly fee of under $100 that are less cumbersome on recovery, including Crashplan (recently discussed on HMAUS listserv), Carbonite, and Jungledisk. If you are serious about adding an in-the-clouds kind of backup layer, or have files you absolutely can not live without, then these paid services are a good solution.

However, for a FREE, automated, off-site, secondary backup, Mozy is so simple and easy to have running, it may be just right.

I’ve tried many different password keepers, some free and some not. For the PC, I found that Roboform was great. It remembers your passwords, logs you in, even fills out forms for you. But it doesn’t play at all with the Mac. For the Mac, I found 1Password works great. Same functionality as Roboform (plus syncing to the iPhone). However, it doesn’t play with Windows. (Sure, you can import and export between the two, then use something like Dropbox to sync them, but it’s a hassle and isn’t real-time.) So, now I’ve got two great systems and neither one easily communicates with it other, so passwords on my PC can’t be found on my Mac.

That’s where LastPass is perfect. LastPass works with Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. So, you can use it on your PC and Mac. It stores all of your passwords, ENCODED, on their server. You log into the extension in Firefox for example, (please use a STRONG password!) and it provides the same great functionality of Roboform or 1Password, but all your passwords are SYNCED!

And, if you visit a computer without LastPass installed, just go the LastPass web site, log in, and there are all your websites with passwords. (No longer do you have to bring a sticky pad with your login information around when you travel.)

If you have lots of passwords and want a great, easy-to-use FREE password keeper that syncs (via cloud), then check out: LastPass.

In other words, you can write up your ideas from work, edit them in the car, tweak it some on your friend’s browser, and have it complete to print out when you get home! You can tag your ideas, like Yojimbo, to make it easy to organize and find. Evernote will even search within your PHOTOS for text to add as tags!

So, let’s say you want to write a journal of your life and work on it wherever you go. Or, a blog article (yep, this one was an Evernote). Or, you find a cool product on the web — take a screen shot and save it for later. Or, for researchers, it’s perfect for keeping track of those “finds”!

Sounds good so far, right?! Well for FREE, it is good! But for $5/month you can also sync any type of FILE, not just photos, pdfs, and text with the free account. Wow! You could even skip Dropbox if you upgrade!

Evernote is a great way to keep your thoughts in sync: a notepad in the clouds…

Dropbox allows you to easily set up a “cloud” storage space that can sync between your computers. That’s 2GB of FREE storage that you can share, backup, or sync files with.

I’ve tried many solutions and found that Dropbox is one of the easiest. Once you’ve signed up for a free account, you download the install and run it on each machine you want to sync up. It installs on PC, Mac, even Linux. You can set up hidden or public folders, even share your photos with others through it.

I’ve used Dropbox since it was in beta, with only one problem — I was running an older version on one of my computers; upgraded and all synced again!

How does it compare to some other solutions? It’s similar to both Syncplicity and Microsoft’s livemesh, though for me, both of those solutions were more difficult to get set up (and for livemesh, a pain on updates).

If you are looking for a fast, easy, CROSS-PLATFORM and FREE solution to file storage and syncing, check out Dropbox.

Sign up now and Dropbox is offering an extra free 250Mb to their 2GBs of storage!

I recently purchased a MacBook and used the Targus cable to transfer files from an old iBook. While a folder containing dozens of fonts transferred in seconds, a 16 MB file folder took 40 seconds. The speed of the file transfers was hampered by the USB1 port on the iBook. Having USB2 ports on both computers is recommended for the highest speed, estimated at 480 Mbps. Because the transfer is from computer to computer, there is no file size limit as there would be using CDs or DVDs.

Transferring applications was mostly unsuccessful. Photoshop Express did not transfer intact and transferring Mahjong Towers Eternity actually crashed EasyMacCopy. The only application I did manage to transfer was Senuti.

The Targus File Share Cable is a viable option for large file transfers, particularly for MacBooks lacking a port for Firewire Target Disk Mode.

The operating system requirements are Mac OS X 10.x or later for Mac, and Windows Vista or XP for PC. On the Targus website,  www.targus.com/us/forMac, the File Share Cable is priced at $49.99.

Targus USB2 file share cable

Screenshot of two-panel file viewer