40% off the “Evernote Essentials“ ebook

Evernote_essentials_book

One application I've come to utterly depend on is Evernote. I use it on my Macs, iPad and iPod touch. For curator of information like me, it's something I wouldn't want to be without. It ties in well with the free Skitch app. http://www.skitch.com Evernote bought Skitch last year.

From the man who literally wrote the ebook on it, Brett Kelly, is the ebook, "Evernote Essentials." Full disclosure: I'm an Evernote Essentials Affiliate, so if you buy via this link:

 Click here to check out this ebook.

I get a portion of the purchase price (but you pay no more).

For information on Evernote (a free application with a free or Premium service, which I have), see:

 

http://www.evernote.com

 

See mention of SugarSync as superior to Dropbox (which I'd agree with)

Why is Dropbox Successful? It's the Simplicity (Stupid)

Share33 inShare16 0diggsdigg
Dropbox for iPad

Why is Dropbox so important? We're willing to bet that its 50 million users would have a variety of answers as to why they enjoy the cloud storage service. Benchmark Capital's Bill Gurley has a few words of his own: More than 400, in fact, as to why he and his firm find a value (and an investment) in what Dropbox offers.

But Gurley's argument – posted on the eve of a San Francisco celebration commemorating Dropbox's 50 millionth user – can really be boiled down to just two words: The Cloud.

Seems simple, right? But Dropbox's ability to seamlessly execute cloud storage with minimal user fuss is its billion-dollar proposition. And as users experience and enjoy the exchange to greater degrees, the importance they place on their physical devices begins to shift, Gurley argues. That's the key.

"Once you begin using Dropbox, you become more and more indifferent to the hardware you are using, as well as the operating system on that device. Dropbox commoditizes your devices and their OS, by being your 'state' system in the sky," Gurley writes.

"Storing credentials and configurations of devices, and even applications are natural next steps for this company. And the further they take it, the less dependent any user becomes of the physical machine (HW and SW) that is accessing that data (and state). Imagine the number of companies, as well as the previous paradigms, this threatens."

While you're likely to find many who will agree on the strength of the Cloud, not all pundits think that Dropbox offers the most ideal balloon to get there. Gurley's argument, after all, could be made for a number of Cloud storage services on the market. What makes Dropbox so special, writes Chi Corporation Chief Technology Evangelist Greg Knieriemen, when other storage solutions offer either a stronger group of features or a more competitive price?

"I would argue that SugarSync handles file syncing and file management much better than Dropbox with many more features," Knieriemen writes. "For the next month Box.net, with similar features to Dropbox, is giving away 50GB of data. It's a crowded space and the window for Dropbox being unique or disruptive is closing quickly."

It's clear that Dropbox needs to continue to find new ways to maintain its edge, and that fact becomes even more apparent as the heavyweights begin to jockey in the storage race: Apple (iCloud), Microsoft (SkyDrive), Google (the up-and-coming GDrive), and all the other third-party storage services looking for a slice of the market.

To that, some pundits argue that Dropbox's best edge is just how potentially purchasable it is; that the company has set itself up as a perfect acquisition target for any company looking to carve a bigger foothold in the cloud storage arena.

But if selling out isn't to be Dropbox's future, perhaps the service just needs to continue doing what it does best in order to succeed: The basics, as detailed in an early Powerpoint by founder and CEO Drew Houston.

"Fortunately," he wrote, "we spent almost all of our effort on making an elegant, simple product that 'just works' and making users happy."

For more from David, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).

For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.


How the U.S. Could Pressure North Korea Tomorrow: Quit the $100 Bill; North Korea is minting superdollars | Business

Photo-Illustration by TIME
Photo-Illustration by TIME

U.S. negotiators are heading into a second day of what have been dubbed “serious and substantial” talks with North Korean officials. Yet amidst all the discussion of how the U.S. will attempt to work with Kim Jong Un, there has been little (open) speculation as to whether Dear Leader Junior might crank up production of $100 and $50 bills. No, not North Korean 100- or 50-won banknotes, worth about as much as old tissues. I’m talking about fake greenbacks — or, as the U.S. Secret Service has dubbed them, “superdollars.”

These ultra-counterfeits are light years beyond the weak facsimiles produced by most forgers, who use desktop printers. As an anti-counterfeiting investigator with Europol once put it: “Superdollars are just U.S. dollars not made by the U.S. government.” With few exceptions, only Federal Reserve banks equipped with the fanciest detection gear can identify these fakes.

Yet as unpatriotic as this may sound, perhaps America would be better off if Kim Jong Un were to try and enrich himself with D-I-Y Benjamins. Let me explain, by way of a little background about superdollars.

(MORE: Can a Second Bailout Save Greece?)

The “super” moniker does not stem from any particular talent on the part of the North Koreans. It’s a matter of equipment. The regime apparently possesses the same kind of intaglio printing press (or presses) used by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. A leading theory is that in 1989, just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the machines made their way to North Korea from a clandestine facility in East Germany, where they were used to make fake passports and other secret documents. The high-tech paper is just about the same as what’s used to make authentic dollars, and the North Koreans buy their ink from the same Swiss firm that supplies the US government with ink for greenbacks.

Forging $100 bills obviously gels with the regime’s febrile anti-Americanism and its aim to undercut U.S. global power, in this case by sowing doubts about our currency. State level counterfeiting is a kind of slow-motion violence committed against an enemy, and it has been tried many times before. During the Revolutionary War, the British printed fake “Continentals” to undermine the fragile colonial currency. Napoleon counterfeited Russian notes during the Napoleonic Wars, and during World War II the Germans forced a handful of artists and printing experts in Block 19 of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to produce fake U.S. dollars and British pounds sterling. (Their story is the basis for the 2007 film “The Counterfeiters,” winner of the 2007 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.)

Superdollars can be viewed as an act of economic warfare, but Pyongyang’s motive is probably more mundane: The regime is broke. The 2009 attempt to raise funds by devaluing its already pathetic currency revealed not only the country’s fiscal desperation, but also the abuse Dear Leader was willing to inflict on his people. The won was devalued 100-fold, which meant 1,000 won suddenly had the purchasing power of 10 won. (Imagine waking up to a learn that a slice of pizza costs $250.) Officials set a tight limit on how much old money could be exchanged for new, so whatever value existed within people’s paltry savings evaporated overnight. Compared to devaluation, generating quick cash by counterfeiting some other country’s more stable currency looks downright humanitarian.

(MORE: TIME’s Interview With Warren Buffett)

The superdollar affair has a certain comic-book quality: copying the currency of the evil capitalists so you can buy cognac and missiles. But Washington isn’t laughing. At the end of December, Ireland’s high court rejected a U.S. request to extradite former Workers Party president and IRA veteran, Sean Garland, for his alleged involvement with the superdollar plot. There is also the question of what exactly the North Koreans hope to procure with all of this “money.” According to the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, superdollars may be part of the regime’s effort to acquire materials for nuclear weapons.

Since the superdollars were first detected about a decade ago, the regime has been pocketing an estimated $15 to $25 million a year from them. (Other estimates are much higher—up to several hundred million dollars’ worth.) That sounds like a lot of money, but compared to the $1 trillion in cash circulating in the great ocean of commerce, a few hundred million is chump change. Although certainly costly for small business owners who unknowingly accept a bunch of forgeries, counterfeits probably won’t bring about a crisis of faith in our paper money anytime soon.

Yet taking the long view, maybe a rash of new superdollars from the hermetic regime of Kim Jong Un would be beneficial. How so? Because counterfeits have a way of reminding people of what material money is and how it functions, and that could lead to a discussion of its pros and cons. Cash is, and always has been, such an uncontested part of everyday life that we rarely stop to consider its toll on society as the currency of crime, to say nothing of the heaping expense of printing, transporting, securing, inspecting, shredding, redesigning, reprinting, re-inspecting, and redistributing it ad nauseum, plus the broader costs of prosecuting and incarcerating the thousands, if not millions, of people who commit cash-related crimes. That’s not to suggest we could get rid of paper money tomorrow; we still don’t have a substitute that’s equally convenient, universally accepted, and adequately secure. But that day may be closer than you think. (Coins, however, we could—and should—do away with. As in, right now.)

(MORE: Google Takes Another Experimental Step Toward Delivering TV)

Superdollars, and the untold billions of (electronic) dollars spent combating them could be the wake-up call that finally forces us to think more clearly about the costs of physical money. If killing all cash strikes you as a little too radical, consider for a moment what it would mean to get rid of high-denomination banknotes. Who would be most inconvenienced if Washington were to outlaw $100 and $50 bills tomorrow? Cartel bosses in Juarez, Mexico jump to mind. So do human traffickers in China and Africa, aspiring terrorists in Afghanistan, wildlife poachers, arms dealers, tax evaders, and everyday crooks who hold up mom and pop groceries. And, or course, North Korean government officials.

So then. At the risk of infuriating cash-hoarding militia members, anonymity-obsessed ACLU’ers, the U.S. Treasury, Russian mob, Laundromat owners, and just about every person who has ever hid a purchase from a spouse or income from the government, I would say this to Kim Jong Un and his posse of counterfeiters: Bring it.

David Wolman is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society, out this month from Da Capo Press. Follow him on Twitter: @davidwolman

[Correction: This piece originally noted that "The won was devalued by 100 percent, which meant 1,000 won suddenly had the purchasing power of 10 won." It has been corrected to read "The won was devalued 100-fold..."]

A fascinating story.

What’s coming with the next Apple OS, Mountain Lion

Apple’s iPhones and iPads get most of the attention, but Apple is now directing the spotlight on the Mac.

FDDP


The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.
Sign up | See Sample

There had been rumors swirling that Apple was back-burnering the Mac, but that’s hard to believe after Thursday’s announcement: from now on, Apple will update Mac OS X once a year.

It will start this summer with Mac OS X 10.8, code-named Mountain Lion, only a year after the Lion version was released.

Now you’ll have to decide once a year whether or not to succumb to paying annually the $30 (or whatever Apple winds up charging) for the privilege of remaining current.

The real shocker, though, is that for the first time, Apple decided to give tech reviewers an early, early version of Mountain Lion — not just months before its release to the public, but even before its release to its developer (programmer) community.

When Lion came along last summer, the big changes were all about making the Mac more like an iPad. Trackpad gestures simulated the multitouch gestures on an iPad screen. Lion features like Full Screen mode, Auto Save and Launchpad are total iPad rip-offs, too; if Apple hadn’t stolen these features from itself, it would surely be suing for copyright infringement.

Well, don’t look now, but Mountain Lion brings even more of the iPhone/iPad features to the Mac. The juiciest payoff here is the suite of Mac apps that now mimic what’s on the iPhone/iPad, like Reminders, Notes, Messages and Game Center. Through your free iCloud account, all of these apps are synced instantly and smoothly across all your Apple gadgets. On the Mac, you type a reminder to yourself; it appears simultaneously on your iPhone.

Notes is cool: you can add photos to your notes, or change the font styles and sizes. (The font and size changes sync over to your iPhone/iPad, but not photos.) You can also pin a note to your desktop to make sure it grabs your attention.

Messages is particularly awesome. Now you can type little messages — or shoot photos or videos — to anyone else with an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Mountain Lion Mac, right from your computer. These may feel like text messages, but they’re free and don’t involve the cellphone company. And because everything is synced up, you see the same conversation thread on all your gadgets. If you started a chat with your boss on the phone, you can get home from work, sit down at your Mac and see the whole transcript so far.

This new Messages app replaces the venerable iChat. Or, actually, adds onto it; all the old iChat features are still there. And you can download an early version of this app from Apple’s Web site.

Twitter is now built into many Mac programs, like Safari, iPhoto, Photo Booth, and Quick Look, so you can tweet almost anything. A Share button is built into many Mac apps now, too. For example, in the Safari Web browser, you can click it to share a Web page via Mail, Messages or Twitter. In Notes, the Share button offers to send a note by Mail or Messages. In Preview, the button offers Mail, Messages, Twitter, Flickr or AirDrop (the effortless Mac-to-Mac file sharing feature).

My favorite new feature, though, is the Notifications Center. It’s that handsome dark-gray list of everything that has been trying to get your attention: incoming e-mail, Messages, alerts and reminders. On the iPhone, you summon this list by dragging your finger down from the top of the screen. On the Mac, you’ll swipe two fingers from the right edge of the trackpad into the center. Wild. (You can also click a special button on the menu bar.)

When you do that, the Notifications Center slides onto the screen from the right, shifting the rest of the desktop to the left. It’s gorgeous and Apple-like.

As on the phone, programs that want your attention can display either a banner (it appears for a few seconds at the upper-right corner of your screen, then disappears) or an alert box (which requires a click on a Close button, or a Show button to jump to the program that is waving its hand). You can specify which type you want (or none at all) on a per-program basis. Already, Calendar, Safari, Reminders, Messages, Mail, App Store, Software Update, Facetime and Game Center can display these notifications, and developers can tap into the Notification Center in their own apps.

And how do you avoid being bombarded by alerts for every single incoming e-mail all day? A new feature lets you flag certain people as V.I.P.’s — you click a little star icon in the new Mail app next to their names. Only messages from V.I.P.’s try to catch your eye in the Notification Center.

There are lots of other little changes (over 100, Apple says). A few highlights:

• The Game Center, a central hub for pairing up anonymous players of games across the Internet, now comes to the Mac, too. Apple says that 100 million people have signed up for Game Center on the iPhone/iPad, and 20,000 games are compatible — and now that the Game Center is on the Mac, you can play against all those people on their phones and pads.

• If you have an Apple TV, you’ll love this: Now you can project whatever is on your Mac to your TV, wirelessly. Yes, the iOS feature called AirPlay has now come to the Mac. Think slide shows, classroom demos, YouTube videos, Netflix movies — with one click, it’s all on your TV, at 720p hi-def resolution, instead of only on your little Mac screen.

• When you open one of the iWork apps, like Pages or Keynote, you see two buttons for opening or saving your documents: “iCloud” and “on my Mac.” That is, you can now keep and edit your documents online, for easy access (and syncing) from any Apple gadget. Within this filing screen, you can create folders the iPhone way: by dragging documents onto each other.

• Gatekeeper is a new security system. It controls which downloaded apps you can install on your own Mac. You have three choices: Mac App Store Only (that is, apps approved and prechecked by Apple); App Store and Identified Developers (software companies Apple knows about); and Anywhere. Viruses and other malware have not been a real problem on the Mac, but this new blockade will be ready if they become one.

• The app names have been changed to match the iPhone/iPad. So Address Book is now called Contacts; iCal is now Calendar; iChat is now Messages.

• Lots more features for Chinese users, including a character-recognition system that updates the Mac’s Chinese dictionary as new words enter the popular lexicon. The Chinese equivalents of Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are now integrated with Share buttons and other spots, just as they are on the American version.

• There’s a Search button on the Launchpad (Lion’s app launcher screen, like the Home screen on the iPhone/iPad).

• When you’re screen-sharing with another Mac (great for tech support), you can swap files by drag and drop.

• Safari has a unified search/address bar.

• You can fill out PDF forms right in Preview, the built-in PDF reading program.

• In Calendar, the list of categories (Family, Work, Kids, etc.) is once again a sidebar panel that you can leave open. (Apple acknowledges that making it a pop-up bubble in Lion was sort of a mistake.)

• There’s a Groups column in Contacts.

• There’s a new widgets browser in Dashboard.

Over all, Mountain Lion shows that Apple is continuing to unify its ecosystem — to bring the same apps, interfaces and data to all Apple gadgets. It’s a calculated, evilly smart way to make staying within the Apple family even more desirable, comfortable and useful. All your data is waiting for you in identical format and placement on every Apple gadget. All of its operating systems are starting to look more alike, and all of your data is becoming more synced and more accessible.

You have to wonder how Apple intends to keep up this pace of change to Mac OS X every summer without gunking it up.

You also have to wonder how Apple will keep numbering Mac OS X, since it’s already at version 10.8. (Actually, Apple’s people told me: They have no problem with double-digit decimal points, like Mac OS X 10.10, Mac OS X 10.11, and Mac OS X 10.12.)

The bigger question is how long it can keep coming up with big cat names. Mac OS X Bobcat? Mac OS X Cougar? Mac OS X Really Fat Tabby?

Editors’ Note: David Pogue writes books about technology, including how-to guides, among them titles covering the Mac operating system. These projects are neither commissioned by nor written in cooperation with the product manufacturers.