Bakari Chavanu's Profile

Well, if you find yourself regularly doing a task or process that could be automated, Automator is the place to look. It's limited in its abilities, but it's a place to start. Now I just wish the thing could write and edit articles for me.

Alan, I just downloaded camouflage a few days after posting this article. It works great. ediedi, are you speaking of hide others? I'm primarily referring to keeping the desktop clean of clutter.

Parky, thanks for pointing out the errors. Great to have your kind of readership.

Howard, I agree. I use a application on my iPhone to help me keep focused a few discretionary items (e.g. books and magazine) that I’ve had a habit of overspending in the past. It took me a long time to realize the importance of budgeting, and sadly it takes economic hardship to realize the importance of financial discipline.

Apologize for missing this, but my critique still holds. It's a poor design flaw on Apple's part, because putting the custom option under a list of categories gives the impression that you're creating yet another category instead of a custom title. That's why I missed it. It's confusing, because if you go back and try to put your so-called custom title into a category, it doesn't work. It just renames your "custom title" with the category. Jeff, as for your criticism about my critiquing an application, I will accept your criticism to a certain extent. I write a weekly column for AM and try to sometimes write reviews that are little timely and under a deadline. I will not always write a perfect review, nor do I intend on stressing about writing a perfect review. I feel that one purpose of the Comment section on this and other sites is for readers to extend the review and add feedback and even corrections. The initial review is sorta like a conversation starter. So I appreciate the friendly feedback and correction that johnniefr gave in the first response. I'm not writing feature articles on here. I write weekly pieces in and around the other work I do. So sometimes I'm going to miss things, though in this case, the critique is largely not misplaced, but just incomplete. I very appreciate your and other's feedback on my articles. I don't look forward to losing your readership, but if you're looking for perfect reviews, I'm not the writer you should be reading.

John, thanks for the feedback. I missed that feature that iTunes that automatically syncs stored memos on your iPhone. However, I'm still not seeing where you can customize the voice memo. You can give it a label, such as "meeting," but you can't title it say, "Noon Board Meeting." Hope I'm not missing something here. As you know, you can customize titles directly on iTalk.

I'm not a good judge of market, but as a long time Mac user who has a Mac Pro, Mac mini, and PowerBook, I'm just not feeling the need to shell out $1500 for another Mac computer. The Mac Book Air is targeted toward people with expendable income, and people who want to show off their computer rather than really use it. It's a shame that Apple can't/won't produce an affordable netbook that provides the basic needs of users. I agree with, Hadely, though, that they will produce one. But it might not be for $300. They'll try to sell it for $800 and include features not found in other netbooks.

Chris, since I've gotten my iPhone, I'd have to agree that it might be all the portable computering that I really need. But my problem is, is that I really can't type much more than a paragraph or two on the device. And I don't like lugging around my 15" PowerBook. An Apple netbook would be great for simply writing, web surfing, slide shows, and the such. I would not expect to do any type of professional image creation stuff on it, such movie editing and Photoshop work. So I'm not sure if netbooks are a fad. Some people may discover that they need more than a netbook, but are others like myself would like a netbook for mobile computing. I would especially like it for $300. Personally, I don't want to pay $1500 for another computer.