Now that the default stuff is out of the way and we started the series with Remote Buddy, let’s move on toward the right on SvenOnTech’s Leo’ Menu Bar. For this snip-it, I’ll touch on all the communication stuff.

The second icon in the menu bar is a blacked-out bird with a green LED on it. That, folks, is the multi-instant messenger client Adium. It allows you to connect to various IM servers such as Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, ICQ, Jabber (including Google Talk), Bonjour (for local LAN chatting), MySpace, and even junk, err, stuff from Lotus and Novell. It’s the Trillian of Mac, basically. Like Trillian, Adium lets you skin your look-n-feel in many, many, ways. I opted to go with the Aqualicious theme which gives me that iChat from Leopard feel. With a slew of other Xtras, such as Emoticons, Sound Sets, Status Icons, Service Icons, Menu Bar Icons, Plugins, and a ton of other stuff, you could lose a lot of time just customizing Adium let alone chatting with your friends. My only wish for Adium is for video conferencing (which as been in the works for over two years.) I’d like Skype chatting, too.

Speaking of Skype, you’ll notice that right next to the Adium icon. The green check mark with the little clock. Known more for its video and audio presentation than for text chatting, Skype brings Mac users into a new world of Voice over IP (VoIP). Allowing anyone with a Mac running Mac OS X or a PC running Windows XP or higher to talk for free, Skype is an incredible application that should be on anyones Menu Bar. If you’re wondering why I use Skype rather than iChat, that would be because of just the better video presentation and audio than iChat could hope to offer over AOL lines. iChat has a great interface, but AOL is its weakest link and thus, Skype is my way of going. You’ll also find Skype to be pretty much the default method for communication in the business world. While Skype does have some rough edges, over all, it is a great way to communicate to millions of people world wide for free.

Next in line on the communication bin is Dialectic. Formally John Phone Tools, Dialectic lets your Mac dial phone numbers for you. The little gear with a phone jack in the center on the Menu Bar lets you enter a phone number by hand or from the clipboard for dialing. You can search your Address Book for numbers as well. A slew of features are easily accessible from the Dialectic icon allowing you to decrease your phone call dialing times. No more “typos” on the keypad and no more tired fingers for your power users. The greatest thing about Dialectic is that it works with major VoIP carriers such as Vonage and Broadvoice. Simply select the number to dial and your phone rings with the connected call. Other dialing methods include sending to a Bluetooth device and even emitting the DMTF tones in your speakers to send to the phones mic. All very cool and very useful.

Last of the communication items is that little bird (between the white check mark and the music note). Birds tweet and so do I. Thus, using Twitterrific is a very helpful tool. Twitterrific keeps you up to date of those you’re following or lets you open the flood gates and shows every new tweet coming in. You can easily respond to tweets and click on embedded links from it’s nicely laid out pop-up (or HUD-like) window. At the bottom of that window, you can also quickly add your 140 characters of thought as well. Fully compatible with Growl, Twitterrific is one sweet tweet!

Since time is short today, I’ll get to the “gloss over” post on the Menu Bar stuff. Here I’ve darkened out the third-party menu items and left those that are from Apple easily seen. From left to right, you have .Mac Sync, AppleScripts, Spaces, System Volume, and Spotlight.

.Mac Sync keeps pretty much everything in sync between my MacBook Pro and Mac Pro. Sometimes one will wipe out the others address book or something silly but that’s why I back up nightly with SuperDuper, too. For most of my purposes, .Mac Sync works but I’d love to see more remote disk space and a little better robust services for weeding out systems and preventing them from stepping on each other.

AppleScripts menu item gives me easy access to my scripts which is nice. I guess I could disable the menu item and just use Quicksilver, but when you have a 30 inch screen, who cares.
Speaking of that 30 inch screen, I really don’t know why I have Spaces on my Menu Bar. I really don’t use it. I guess I figure if it’s there, I’ll end up using it. I never really got into virtual desktops not even back in my X-Windows days on top of SunOS. I’ve tried using it even on my MacBook Pro, but old habits die hard. Maybe someday I’ll use it.

System volume is self explained. It raises and lowers your volume. I keep it up on my Menu Bar so if my music doesn’t play and iTunes is all the way up, I can quickly look at the Menu Bar and see, “Aah, it’s muted!” Sure, I can figure that out by just pressing my volume key on my keyboard, but hey, I’m visual. I’m a guy.
Last, but not least, I use Spotlight. I never really used it until Leopard. With all its added features and neat tricks like performing mathematics (try putting this in: pi/-4), I use it all day long. It finds files fast and has even shown me some things on my hard drive I forgot about! Hopefully Apple will put advanced features in a future release, but for now, I’m happy with it.

So, there’s the gloss over stuff. I’ll be talking about my other menu items in the coming week, so stay tuned!

So, what’s in the top right corner of your Mac? I know every time I see screen shots of other desktops, I look closely at the Menu Bar and see what’s running there that I do not have purring on my Mac. So, today I thought I would start a series of posts sharing what’s on my Menu Bar. Maybe some sweet applications may be revealed that may not be running on your Mac for you to nab. (Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to gloss over the pre-installed OS X items so we don’t waste time on them. ) To get a closer look of what’s on the bar, click the above image and see it in its 100% pixel glory on our Flikr account.

So, I guess the easiest way to start is to simply go left to right. Thus we start with Remote Buddy. We previously touched on this application in a post before, so you should already be familiar with this groovy application. Basically, Remote Buddy allows you to use a slew of devices, including your iPhone, to remote control your Mac. Remote Buddy allows you to run through a presentation in either PowerPoint, Keynote, NeoOffice, Adobe Reader, or even Preview all from your remote in your hand. Since this is your buddy, it goes even further and allows you to control iTunes, DVD Player, VLC, and more than 100 other applications. Yes, that is not a typo, it is 100. As we stated in our last post on Remote Buddy, you can now watch movies, listen to music, and such all on your iPhone right from your Mac! You can even take a look to see if anyone is sitting at your chair via tapping into your iSight. Slick stuff indeed.

The Menu Item basically gives you quick access for pairing devices and configuration of Remote Buddy. It’s also a nice reminder that it is running and you are in control of your Mac…from afar.

Do you find yourself often wondering where a good place to dine or maybe where to get some great souvenirs in a city you may be visiting for work or leisure would be? Is your GPS just not cutting it for you? Too timid to ask a local for suggestions? But wait! You have an iPhone and Google Maps seems to be working for you. Well, kind of. No worries, mate, SvenOnTech just discovered Schmap! While the name makes me think of having a shot of peppermint schnapps, the new city guide made just for the iPhone goes live with its public beta Monday that’ll help you with all your city guide needs.

With Schmap, you’ll be able to find a nice place to dine, attractions, stores, and many other easy to find items from the simple laid out iPhone-like interface. Drilling down to a place that fits your desires, you’ll be able to find the address, phone number, email address, and web site of the place all with a tap of your finger. Tap on one of the items and the corresponding iPhone application opens it. From dialing the number to showing you where the place is on Google Maps, you’ll be quickly on your way to your new found Point of Interest, or POI as us geeks call it. If you’d rather stay in Safari, just turn the iPhone onto its side and Schmap presents a map of the POI right there befor you! It looks just like Google Maps on your desktop computer. Reason being is, well, it’s powered by Google Maps. Nice! You will also be able to do local city searches once the service is fully initialized.

What I really liked about Shmap is how light-weight it is. EDGE connections are not spiffy by any shot and thankfully the folks at Schmap not only gave us a familiar interface but one that loads quickly, too. Anytime you tap on a form element that needs a number only, a keypad comes up, not the regular keyboard. Yes, a basic thing for any iPhone developer, but man, I can’t even begin to tell you how many iPhone “ready” sites are missing this little thing. Schmap didn’t forget us keypad tapping folks.

Overall, the site offers some useful information for the average tourist but I did find some more mainstream names missing such as Starbucks and Peet’s from the Coffee/Tea category. Donald McMillan of Schmap explained this is because, “The current content does tend to focus on more unique/independent locations”. Don’t worry though, you coffee snobs, McMillan said the local search will kick back your well branded caffeine hits once it is up and running. I noted that also omitted from the Shopping category is malls. I was told by McMillan that malls can be found in “Stores & Arcades”. Both Sacramento and San Jose did return a good sized list for the “arcades”.

Schmap is in beta, so this means things can change, be added, removed, or just plain fixed if there are bugs found. Give it a spin on Monday (www.schmap.com) and be sure to let the Schmap team know what it can do to improve the city guide experience. Until then, take a look at the preview page on your big boy Safari (or other browser.)

Now I need to satisfy this peppermint craving….

Today my iPhone did what my Pocket PC/Windows Mobile phone would do three or four times a day: lock up. I was surfing a web site on Safari and it just locked up. (Later on my Mac, I learned that the site is a full Flash site. Mmm, Apple’s handling that lack of Flash well.) The phone would not respond to the home button nor the on/off button. Holding in the off button for a long period of time still rendered my iPhone a brick. Nothing. Fortunately, I had just read how to soft-reset the iPhone a couple of days ago, so I applied the Apple support trick. Sure enough, after a long seven second count (I used 1, 1,000, 2, 2,000 count instead of the Mississippi one), my iPhone went black and there in the middle of the screen was the Apple logo. Woo hoo! It worked.

Now, I don’t expect perfection from any company but I’ll tell you, a week before something triggered my iPhone into brick mode is very impressive when you’ve used Microsoft gear for nearly ten years. I’m sure when that rumored Flash update hits the phone, then even this won’t be an issue.

I always enjoy connecting to a wireless network (WLAN) with my MacBook Pro. It’s a piece of cake and never a difficult and nerving task unlike Windows XP or even Vista. One thing that’s always bugged me, though, about joining WLANs on my Mac is trying to figure out which one has the strongest signal when in a hotspot rich area. Heck, my own home has three wireless APs alone! In true Apple form, however, I don’t need to use iStumbler to find the strongest signal. Nope, I just need to hold my Option key when clicking the AirPort status menu item. When done, the menu displays in order of strongest to weakest all the hotspots in your Macs reach. I love this!

Thanks to TidBITS for the great tip that I just had to pass along. Be sure to hit the jump to learn more about coconutWiFi, my new tool that may just make me never use iStumbler again.

I’m always telling people, “It’s the little things that makes Apple stand far and wide beyond the competition.” From the way it packages its product to the ability to make any of its computers an external hard drive with a press of a key. Man, I wish all the time that I could put Windows-dead PCs into Target Mode instead of having to physically take apart the PC to gain access to the hard drive with my IDE-to-USB connector. Dell, are you reading?

Today I found another sweet “little thing”. Many Apple users know that if they have more than one bootable partition on their hard drive, they can select which on to boot from at power-up. By holding the OPTION (or ALT) key down after the Mac tone plays, a screen will appear with the various boot up options (including bootable CD or DVDs if present in the drives.) Well, what’s one to do when they purchase a non-Apple keyboard that doesn’t respond in time or the Bluetooth keyboard hasn’t yet bonded? Dig out the original keyboard? Nope, find their remote!

If you are unable to select your bootable partition with a keyboard, then simply press and hold the Menu key on your Apple Remote after the boot tone. Within seconds, you’ll see that familiar boot manager and then you’ll be able to use the volume up (+) key to make your selection and then the Play/Pause to accept that choice. Presto! Up starts your Mac in your selected drive.

Knowing that there had to be further goodies with the remote, I searched and found Wikipedia is there to give you all the delicious things you can do with your Apple Remote. Enjoy!

With temperatures dropping and the snow piling up, skiers and snowboarders are making their way to the mountains. When they do, Verizon Wireless, owner and operator of the nation’s most reliable wireless network, urges winter sports enthusiasts to remember they can count on their wireless service if they keep some wireless winter wisdom in mind:

• Charge your phone or PDA frequently. Cold temperatures can run down the phone’s battery charge more quickly.
• Handle your handset with care. The display cover can become brittle when exposed to cold temperatures for long periods of time.
• Keep your phone in a warm place; avoid leaving it in an outside pocket of your parka or backpack, or in the car overnight.
• Prolonged exposure to the cold may affect the phone’s display screen. When on the mountain, carry it in an inside jacket pocket, keeping it close to your body for warmth.
• Check your phone’s signal strength in a non-emergency situation to know where the signal is strong and where it’s not. Ski area and back bowl coverage may vary depending on topography and altitudes.
• If you hold a yard sale, pick up your phone first to keep snow from melting into the keypad.

“Our ongoing investment in Verizon Wireless’ coast-to-coast digital network makes it possible for winter vacationers to use their wireless phones from the Western Rockies and Cascades to the Green and White Mountains of New England,” said Jack Plating, executive vice president and COO for Verizon Wireless. “Skiers can maximize their time at their favorite mountain by using their wireless phone to check in with families, get in touch with friends in a neighboring condo, receive the latest snow report or make reservations at a nearby restaurant whether they’re in the lodge or on a lift.”