I’ll be the first one to admit it – I am a big Apple fan.  I think—and millions of satisfied Mac users would agree—their products are by far the best on the market, and Mac computers beat any PC running windows in both quality and ease of use.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to show you why having an Apple / Mac setup is the easiest and most painless solution for business owners and entrepreneurs on a go.  Below is my personal Apple / Mac setup of devices that work seamlessly with one another.

iMac 24” – The ultimate All-in-one desktop.

I spend most of my time in front of my iMac.  It is the base of my operations.  I do most of my design work, administration, accounting and everything else associated with running a business on my iMac.

Being a graphic designer I need a lot of screen real-estate – the 24” screen on the iMac along with another external  24” monitor provide all the space I need.   By plugging an external USB hard drive to the computer, it feels like I have unlimited storage space, even for editing large movie files.

I can access my iMac and all it’s files via wireless network or—thanks to MobileMe service—even over the internet from anywhere in the world.

To keep my data safe, I use online backup by BackBlaze which automatically backs up content of all my drives to a secure online server.

MacBook Pro – Incredible mobile powerhouse

If you are a business owner, you probably know what it is to be always on-the-go.  I meet with lot of my clients at their premises a notebook has become a necessity.  I use my MacBook Pro for showcasing our design proposals, making final tweaks to client’s websites at sign-offs, browsing internet and responding to emails, when I’m on the road.

I can access the internet anywhere and I don’t even need to have any special USB modem. Just by using my iPhone’s internet tethering option, I can connect my MacBook via to the internet via iPhone.  It all runs over bluetooth so there isn’t even a need for a cable.

Data synchronization

Now the beautiful part about all this – all my key data is synchronized with all the devices I use.  This means I have all my emails (IMAP), contacts, notes, calendars and passwords synchronized (via MobileMe).

I also synchronize all my documents, projects and working files between my iMac and MacBook Pro.  This way I can go to see a client, make any changes to his project on my notebook right on the spot and when I get back to the office, all the changes are automatically mirrored on my big computer.  This works both ways so any changes I may have made on the iMac will get transferred onto the MacBook and any changes I made on the MacBook will get transferred onto the iMac.  (via ChronoSync)

This also means I have all the key data stored on two separate computers. In the event of an unexpected power cut or a hardware failure I can still access all my data and keep my business running.

iPhone

Say what you want but to me iPhone is the best smartphone out there.  If nothing else, the 150,000 apps available for it should be big enough reason to get one.

I use iPhone to quickly check my emails and calendars, make notes on the go, keep in touch on social media or browse the internet when I quickly need to check something and I’m not close to my computer. Because all your contacts, notes, calendars are synchronized with your computer, it really becomes such a handy tool you start wondering how did you ever lived without one.

It can also provide internet access over mobile network for your notebook, without having to sign up for an extra data transfer plan. Connecting notebook to the internet via iPhone takes only a few clicks and is so far the most elegant solution of getting onto the net from anywhere.

Apple Airport Extreme base station

The Airport Extreme base station is an amazing wireless router.  Not only it provides 802.11n dual-band fast wireless network for up to 50 users, it also has an USB port for plugging in your printer or an external hard drive.  This will let you print documents from any room in the house to one central printer or turn a USB hard drive into a shared drive that’s accessible wirelessly on your network and over the Internet.

MobileMe subscription

MobileMe is a service that pushes email, contacts, and calendar events over the air to all your devices. So your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and PC stay in always synchronized.   It is a must-have for any business professional with Mac and iPhone.  Not only it allows you to keep your key data in sync, it also comes with other brilliant features. The one I find most invaluable is the “Find my iPhone” service, which let’s you find your lost iPhone or iPad using GPS. It even let’s you display a message on the lost phone, make it ring, or erase all your data in case it has been stolen.

iPad

With all the hype, I have to mention iPad as well.  Although it is not available in New Zealand at the time of writing this article, I can easily see it as a perfect fit into the computer setup described above.  iPad is perfect for that casual web browsing, reading your favourite blogs over the coffee in the morning, checking email, or replacing your old paper diary and organizer.

It’s small enough to carry around in your briefcase, yet it’s large touch screen offers the developers plenty of real-estate to work with.  We are already seeing some tremendous applications designed specifically for the iPad and—just like it has been with the iPhone—it’s just a matter of time before we’ll be able to find apps for almost any occasion on the iPad.

Google Wave

There is one more tool I’d like to mention. Although it’s not an Apple product, it has similar properties that are behind the success of Apple’s products.   Google Wave is simple, innovative and milestones ahead of anything else we have known so far.  It’s an online tool for real-time collaboration and communication.

I have adopted Google Wave for my business because it makes working on a project and overall communication much simpler than email or phone calls.  It’s perfect when you have more people working on same project, even more if some of the people involved are either on a road or work from remote location.

With Wave, it’s easy to log in from any location, check on the project status, post your own updates or just chat with your colleagues.  One of the many uses I found is to use Wave for taking notes when in the meeting with a client.  My colleague can instantly see all the notes and instructions I’ve written, as well as any file attachments, and she can start working on the project straight away. She can also post her own questions which I can instantly see while in the meeting and address any issues I might have missed, right on the spot. For some businesses, Google Wave can be a perfect free time-saving tool.

Quick summary

Here is a quick summary of my vision of “Perfect Mac Setup”

Use iMac as your desktop computer and as a heart of your operations.

Use MacBook Pro whenever on the go or for working at home.  You could also use your MacBook Pro as your main computer when in the office, simply by plugging it into the Apple 24″ LED Cinema display (any other monitor would work too, but these ones are the best).

Use iPhone for phone calls, quick checking of emails and calendar on the road and to connect your notebook to the internet when no wireless network is available.

Use iPad for reading on the internet, checking and writing emails when not at the computer and as an organizer. I’m sure you would quickly find many other uses for it as well.

Use Apple Airport Extreme as your wireless network router.

Setup your mail server as IMAP to keep all your emails synchronized. IMAP stores all your emails on the server so any changes you make on one computer (marking messages read, moving emails into folders, deleting messages etc…) are automatically reflected on all the devices connecting to the server.

Use MobileMe service to keep your contacts, calendar events, passwords and other settings synchronized between your iMac, MacBook, iPhone and iPad.

Use ChronoSync to keep your data files, documents and working files mirrored between your desktop and notebook. This way you’ll always have all your latest data with you and you don’t have to worry about losing data in case of an unlikely hardware failure.

Use BackBlaze for online backup – it’s cheap and it automatically backs up all your files onto a remote server.

Use Google Wave when communicating with your team on a project or in cases that usually required a lot of emailing back and forth. It could very well save you a lot of time.

The above setup and solution is what I found to be working best for myself and my team. I think it shows how seamlessly Apple products work with one another – it plays a big part in why I recommend Apple products to anyone I think would benefit from owning one.

I hope this post will help you make things easier for yourself. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments on the topic.

What did you find as a best computer solution working for you?

We all know them. The email your friend sent to you and all his other contacts in address book. They usually warn you about a “dangerous computer virus that will melt your hard drive” , “win a free laptop“,  “there is a little girl either lost or in need of a new kidney” or “don’t get out of your car at petrol stations or your car will be stolen“.

95% of these emails are just hoaxes playing on human compassion.  The fact is the emails warning about computer viruses become the virus itself – using unsuspecting people who mean well to spread the rumors to everyone in their address book, clogging up mailboxes and eating up your bandwidth.

How do you know if the email is a hoax?  Ask Google.

Here is what I’d like you to do. Next time you get a suspicious email warning you about this or that, copy the entire first line of the email text into Google search and see what comes up.  It’s that simple.  I can almost guarantee the first three results will lead to sites like hoax-slayer.com, urbanlegends.com or museumofhoaxes.com. This way you can find how much truth there is to the email you just received, and perhaps let the poor fellow who just sent you the hoax know he has nothing to worry about.

So the moral is this – please think before passing on the hoax email you just received. Google the first line of email text first to see if it is a false alarm.
How do you deal with mass hoax emails?

What is the best way to find what you’re looking for when searching the Internet?

Do you use the best tools for your search?

Finding information on the Internet is easy if you know what to use and where to look. There are a few tricks I’d like to share with you to increase your effectiveness and reduce time spent on searching the Internet.

With over 100 million searches done every day on Google alone, most people automatically use this biggest search engine to find what are they looking for. But did you know Google is not always the easiest way to find the page you’re after? Depending on what do you seek, there are other ways to get the best results. There are also some search options within Google itself many people don’t know about. here are a few tips how you can increase your web search effectiveness.

In this post I’ll explain a bit about these tools:

1. Google search options
2. Delicious.com
3. YouTube.com
4. Twitter Search
5. SocialMention.com

1. Google Search Options

Google does pretty good job in finding pages that it thinks are most relevant to your search terms. There are a few commands you can use to narrow the search criteria and get even better results. Here is a list of the commands you can use in your search terms:

• OR – Search for either one, such as “price high OR low” searches for “price” with “high” or “low”.
• “-” – Search while excluding a word, such as “apple -tree” searches for “apple” where the word “tree” is not used.
• “+” – Force inclusion of a word, such as “Name +of +the Game” to require the words “of” & “the” to appear on a matching page.
• “*” – Wildcard operator to match any words between other specific words.

Some of the query options are as follows:

• define: – The query prefix “define:” will provide a definition of the words listed after it.
• stocks: – After “stocks:” the query terms are treated as stock ticker symbols for lookup.
• site: – Restrict the results to those websites in the given domain, such as, site:www.michalwurm.com. For example the option “site:.nz” will search only web sites from New Zealand.
• allintitle: – Only the page titles are searched (not the remaining text on each webpage).
• intitle: – Prefix to search in a webpage title, such as “intitle:google search” will list pages with word “google” in title, and word “search” anywhere (no space after “intitle:”).
• allinurl: – Only the page URL address lines are searched (not the text inside each webpage).
• inurl: – Prefix for each word to be found in the URL; others words are matched anywhere, such as “inurl:acme search” matches “acme” in a URL, but matches “search” anywhere (no space after “inurl:”).

The page-display options (or query types) are:

• cache: – Highlights the search-words within the cached document, such as “cache:www.google.com xxx” shows cached content with word “xxx” highlighted.
• link: – The prefix “link:” will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage, such as “link:www.google.com” lists webpages linking to the Google homepage.
• related: – The prefix “related:” will list webpages that are “similar” to a specified web page.
• info: – The prefix “info:” will display some background information about one specified webpage, such as, info:www.google.com. Typically, the info is the first text (160 bytes, about 23 words) contained in the page, displayed in the style of a results entry.

You can find more detailed information on Google search options here.

2. Delicious.com

Delicious.com is a social bookmarking website for storing, sharing, and discovering website bookmarks. It allows you store your favourite bookmarks online, organize them by assigning tags and share with others. Use of Delicious is free and the site is very easy to use.

People use Delicious to save links to pages they consider of good value. Because the bookmarks are organized by tags and the saved links are “human filtered” it makes Delicious the perfect resource when searching for interesting content. You can use it to discover fascinating articles from your industry you didn’t know about, find great pages full of useful resources or search for case studies and key facts about your industry.

Chris Brogan summed use of Delicious.com best:

So, the point is this: I use OTHER PEOPLE to find interesting information on the web, and not search engines. I use search engines to find targeted information.

I found Delicious to be an invaluable tool for organizing bookmarks and finding pages I wouldn’t find otherwise. For example when I searched to case studies and statistics about social media in business, Google brings up tons of pags, but finding the actual data is like looking for needle in a haystack. Search for socialmedia and casestudy tags on Delicious brought up the pages I was looking for straight away.

You can also see other people’s bookmarks and see what others deem interesting (for example to see all my bookmarks about social media go to http://delicious.com/michalwurm/socialmedia).

3. YouTube.com

Did you know YouTube is the worlds second largest search engine? There are over five billion videos on YouTube, making it almost one for every person on Earth. These days you can find almost anything on YouTube from video clips through funny videos to tutorials and lectures. Obviously if you just want to see a music clip of your favourite singer, YouTube should be the first place to look. But it is also a great learning resource. There are hundreds of thousands videos on how things work, software tutorials and product reviews. These days you can learn how to use a new software just by watching YouTube tutorials. If you are looking for a more academic resources I’d recommend installing iTunes and searching iTunes University which allows you easily search, download, and play education content from colleges and universities.

4. Twitter search

Many people still struggle to see the benefit of Twitter. It is a micro-blogging site where you can post short updates about what you are doing and connect with other users. It’s one of those services that is very hard to explain but once you start using it you’ll start seeing the power hidden behind it.

Let’s leave the ins and outs of Twitter for now and have a look at how you can use the Twitter search function. Twitter is very “live” site. There are 6,390,000,000 updates in the site to date (see the current count here) This makes Twitter a great tool when searching for trends, things that are happening “right now” and live feedback and opinions on products, brands, services or locations.

Do you want to know what people say about certain brand? Do a Twitter search. Traveling and want to know where’s a good place to stay? Ask on Twitter. You can also use sites like TwitterFall.com to see live tweets as they come in. Do that on a trending topic and you’ll be amazed by the volume of updates coming in.

5. Social Mention.com

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis tool that aggregates user generated content from across the internet into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

The ability to subscribe to RSS search feed or setup social alerts for your search terms make it an incredible tool to keep tabs on what people say about your brand or your competition.

Summary and examples

Here are a few examples of what tools deliver the best results for particular type of searches.

• Use Google for your generic day to day search queries.
• Use Delicious.com to discover new content other people deem interesting.
• If searching for case studies, reports or fact sheets, try Delicious first.  If searching for a specific report and you know the report title, use Google.
• When searching for videos, try YouTube first.
• Want to learn how to use new software you just purchased? Look up video tutorials on YouTube.
• Looking for product opinions?  Try searching on Social Mention, Twitter or Google “product name review”.

These are just some of ways to search for information, I hope you find the tips mentioned here useful.

How do you find good stuff on the internet?