This is awesome news, because the landscape keyboard allows for much faster typing on the iPhone or iPod touch, and in my opinion, finally makes long-form writing practical on a pocket device. Many bloggers have probably already used Safari’s wider keyboard and the online Wordpress admin interface, or the interface for whatever platform they use. But the beauty of this application is that it allows writing offline and local storage, and you can publish whenever you have a connection available. This is revolutionary for iPod Touch users like me, who don’t have the availability of a data connection all the time. I also feel better that my writing is being saved on my device locally, so that the security of my data isn’t dependent on the integrity of my internet connection.

Even writers who aren’t bloggers, or who don’t use Wordpress as their blog, could feasibly sign up for a free Wordpress account, and use that account as an online repository for their writing, where they can later publish their articles to any platform they want. Maybe not the ideal solution for non-Wordpress users, but until a dedicated writing application is created for the iPhone, with a landscape keyboard, that simply saves locally and syncs to your desktop, this is undoubtedly the best solution available.

The current alternative, as mentioned earlier and in another article, is Zenbe Lists, which has a landscape mode, saves locally, and syncs to an online system. However, their recent update completely cuts off the line you’re typing on with the top of the keyboard, making it completely unusable in this mode, so it’s really not an alternative anymore (though it does work well in portrait mode, with the smaller keyboard).

The thing about wish lists that I love so much is that it deals with a deep seated psychological issue that I’ve had for as long as I can remember; a problem that I’m sure I share with at least 99% of the world - impulsiveness. You see, when I’m browsing the web, and I run across something that I want, I get impulsive. I want to do something about this thing I want right away. Most people feel this same way to some extent, I think. The most obvious thing I can do about it is to buy it. But what if I can’t afford it at the moment? What do I do then? If I don’t buy it, I’ll forget about it, and I don’t want to forget about it. Granted, I could bookmark it, even put it in a special folder for just this type of thing; but it’s more likely that I will end up with two, three, or more methods to address this problem, and I’ll lose track of what I’ve done with what.

This is the beauty of wish lists. They allow you to do something consistent about the things you want without breaking your bank. I shop on Amazon all the time, usually looking for something specific that I intend to buy. But in the process, I often run into other things that I’m interested in. It’s very reassuring that I can just add them to my wish list, and revisit them any time in the future. I have things in my wish list that I added two or three years ago.

So, yeah. Wish lists. Really, really, useful. So I have to ask, why doesn’t the iTunes Music Store, possibly the largest music downloads store in the world, built and maintained by Apple, possibly the most talented company when it comes to designing user friendly interfaces and experiences, why doesn’t this store have a wish list feature? I browse the iTunes Music Store all the time, way more often than I have money to spend. I run across music I’d like to have every time I make a visit. So what do I do when that happens? Usually, I just move on, and often I forget about the music I was interested in at the time.

One might think that this is one advantage that the Amazon mp3 downloads section has over the iTunes Music Store. I might think the same, except that when I visited the mp3 downloads section, I was dumbfounded to find that this is possibly the only section of Amazon that does not use the wish list feature. How can this be? The irony. The tragedy! Okay, maybe not. But still, pretty strange.

Aperture has a backup tool called Vaults. Essentially, a vault is a backup of your entire Aperture library, all of your photos, including their ratings, their keywords, the manner in which they’re organized, everything. It isn’t an exact replica of your library, but when an Aperture vault is restored, the intent is to end up with an exact replica of the vault that was backed up.

I used this feature for several months. I have a 250GB external hard drive (thanks, Mom) that I kept a vault on, and updated regularly. It seemed like a neat idea to me, and made for an easy, almost effortless fall-back in case of primary hard-drive failure, or other such cause.

Such a cause came knocking recently. My Airport card began failing on me, and I had contacted Apple’s technical support. In order to eliminate any monotonous and time-consuming tests that they might have wanted to run, I offered to completely format my machine, and reset the OS to factory default. I knew I had everything backed up, so it wasn’t a big deal.

A couple of days later, after getting my Airport card replaced, I began the process of restoring everything. Amongst the many items that needed restoring was my Aperture library, and I was particularly curious to see the restore feature in action. So I opened Aperture, and began the restore process.

Somewhere between two and three hours later, Aperture completed restoring approximately 23 gigabytes of photography and metadata. For those of you unfamiliar with computer maintenance, 23 gigabytes is a sizable chunk of data, but it shouldn’t take nearly that long to transfer it from one hard drive to another. Thirty minutes would have been reasonable; this was ridiculous. The reason for this extensive timeline had to do with a series of checks that Aperture did to the vault before and after it transferred everything. Aperture verified every file, every project, every album, everything, before it began any actual restoration. And after the restoration was done, it verified every file, project, album, everything, that had been restored. I also got the sense, as indicated earlier in this article, that the vault is not a replica of your library. When I compared the size of my library to the vault, the vault was significantly bigger (not horribly bigger, but it was larger by several hundred megabytes, maybe even a gigabyte or two; I can’t recall exactly). My guess is that there is a lot of extra stuff wrapped around everything that facilitates all these thorough verification processes.

While I appreciate being thorough and careful when it comes to manipulating important data, my final thought was that there was a lot of extra complication to this backup and restore process without any real gain, and in fact quite a bit of suffering on the timeline and hardware workload.

Additionally, I noticed what I would consider to be defects in the final results of the restore process. Prior to all this, as my Aperture library got larger over time, I did a number of things to reduce its footprint on my hard drive. The first thing I did was to move a lot of the older master photos to some archival discs, which freed up an enormous chunk of hard drive space. I also noticed that I could delete the preview files and continue to use the thumbnails as adequate previews; the thumbnails that Aperture generates are pretty enormous, enough to fill the small monitor on my Macbook at least. I think the preview files are dimensionally equivalent to the masters, they are just highly compressed. So deleting the preview files helped free up space as well, without losing much advantage in viewing the photos. But problems with the missing previews arose when I restored my vault. Not only were my previews gone, but my thumbnails were gone, as well. I’m not sure why this happened, but I was left with a library of more than 20,000 images, with probably more than half of the images completely unidentifiable. Since all of these images were on archival discs, I had to put every single disc back into my computer, one by one, and generate new previews, which in turn generated new thumbnails. This added onto the restore timeline exponentially, as in days of additional work.

When all was said and done, I had to ask, why all this fuss? Before I reset my computer, my Aperture library was working fine; everything was in tact, all my images were pretty well organized, birds were singing, flowers were blooming, and all was well with my world. Using the vault was a huge mistake that messed all that up. By contrast, I could’ve just made an exact copy of my library on my external hard drive by dragging and dropping it. Even better, I could’ve used my great backup program, Chronosync, which simplifies and automates all of my backup processes; I could’ve set Chronosync to backup my Aperture library to my external hard drive every day. Chronosync handles backups incrementally, meaning that it only copies the changes, so the process is pretty quick, as in mere minutes, after the first time through.

If I had thrown the whole vault idea out the door and done my backups this way, I would have never lost my thumbnails (or whatever ghost preview was left after I deleted the actual previews); everything that I had before I reset my machine, would’ve been there after I reset my machine. Moreover, restoring my library would’ve taken all of 30 minutes, maybe less.

Oh well, you live and you learn. At least it makes for a nice cautionary tail for the rest of you. If anyone can point out any advantages that I’m missing out on by not using vaults to backup my library, I’m all ears. Until then, I recommend staying as far away from the Aperture vaults as possible.

Although getting, opening, and firing up this small machine was a very exciting experience, I’m going to spare you the details. There are a plethora of blog postings out there about getting MacBooks, with detailed write-ups and stacks of photos. If you want more, just google “my new macbook”; you’ll get a ton. I came in late in the game, and probably couldn’t add much to what’s already been said. It’s almost disturbing how nutzoid people go over these things.

Not that I don’t understand, to some extent, why. Against my better judgement, I’ll confess to you that I’ve had to keep myself in check, so as not to get caught up in this current of bubbly, feverish, clammy enthusiasm. But in spite of my great success in doing so, the fact remains, I love my MacBook. From the shallow points of how slick it looks on the surface and on the screen; to the deeper aspects of the operating system, so stable, customizable, and production-oriented; this machine started out as a need to have a lighter, more portable laptop, but ended up being a wonderful surprise through and through.

Anyway, enough blabbering. I’m planning on writing a few posts, not just about my MacBook, but also about some of the great things I’ve discovered while operating it, software and such. It wouldn’t have made sense, in my mind, to start into Apple stuff, unless I told you that I now had one.

So there it is.