Mike Arrington has just posted his 2009 list of products he can't live without. After my own 2008 list, here is my update for 2009 as I think it's fun to observe how our computing environment evolves from year to year. First, the new entries:

• OmniFocus is the best to-do list application I know of. I use the desktop application daily to handle work and personal tasks. It is worth the whole of its $80. As a pure desktop application without an online counterpart it is a step back, but the benefit is flexibility and speed, both crucial to GTD.
  
• Twitter, which I couldn't figure out at all a year ago, has seen 1,778 personal updates so far, and we use it at Orbeon too. I use Twitterrific on iPhone and twhirl on the Mac, but I am not married to either of these clients. Beware: Twitter most likely will kill your personal blog (as if it needed that!).
  
• iPhone 3G: I simply can't imagine switching to anything else before a long time. I use pretty much the whole of it: phone, SMS, web, email, iPod, maps, camera, Yelp, music apps, book readers, dictionaries, you name it. Its biggest flaws are the inability to run more than one application concurrently (e.g. for music apps) and the lack of background notifications (e.g. Twitter and IM clients). I don't care how Apple does it, but these have to be addressed.
  
• Safari has become my second browser of choice after Firefox. WebKit is great (with some quirks), Safari itself not so much. To be really usable, a browser needs: 1) something like the Firefox "awsome bar", 2) an ad blocker and 3) proper tab save/restore. Safari does have some add-ons partly addressing these shortcomings, but Firefox remains the king in this area. So I use Safari for certain specific sites or applications only.
  
• Google Sites handles the new Orbeon Forms wiki. Sites can do better, and it is frustrating that it is incompatible in subtle ways with Google Docs, but it is a start.
  

The strong values:

• Firefox version 3 for Mac is a winner. It is hard to imagine we had to deal with the quirky version 2 for so long.
• GMail: I still use it mostly through OS X's Mail app through IMAP, but I had to disable the "All mail" folder to make it usable. The big change is that I use it through the iPhone mail application as well. I often process (archive) my incoming email on the go, but rarely write more than one-liners on the phone.
• Delicious: I am now at about 4100 entries (was 1900 entries a year ago). Version 2.0, delivered in July, is a success. I add entries mostly through the Firefox extension.
• Skype: VoiP, chat, video, SkypeOut, SkypeIn and soon, I hope, usable screen sharing.
• Google Calendar and Google Maps remain essential.
  
• Google Docs is strong and getting stronger. The new offline support is excellent.
  
• SlimTimer: it is still impossible to live without it at work, although report performance is an issue and development seems to have stalled.
  
• iTunes is frustrating in many ways but unavoidable if you have an iPhone. The new grid view for albums in version 8 is good, and it is still probably the best podcast client around.
  
• iTunes Store: yesterday's announcement of 100% DRM-free music was long due and I may buy again music through iTunes (other than by accident). Movie rentals rock, but the movie selection is appalling.
• Amazon mp3 Store remains appealing because of price, selection, the ubiquitous mp3 format, and the web-based interface.
  
• Picasa is my favorite photo application. I had been using it recently through CrossOver, but I now use the new native version. I wonder if iPhoto 2009 will displace Picasa for me this year? In particular, the flickr integration is very promising, and Google has less incentive than Apple to promote flickr support.
  
• Flickr is still my photo site of choice, but improvements have been slow to come this year.
• Google Reader holds about 270 feeds as of now (was 200 a year ago). The recently introduced new look is refreshing. I find myself using it less heavily as lots of news come from Twitter.

The disappointments:

• Basecamp: we still use it at Orbeon to communicate with our customers. I no longer use it as a personal to-do list as it sucks at that. Basecamp is reliable and cheap, but there are issues with messages, to-do lists, time management, and the writeboards that really don't leave me very satisfied with it at the moment. 37signals is good at rhetoric, but less so at regularly updating their applications (at least Basecamp, which is rumored to represent 60% of 37signals's about $8m revenue for 2009).
• OmniFocus for iPhone is in some ways a better GTD tool than the desktop version. For example it has a built-in notion of next action, and its relative simplicity is attractive. But stability and performance make it about unusable. It often takes 30 seconds or more to start, and much more after a synchronization. I am not the only one with this problem. A GTD app must be snappy and reliable, so this is a big letdown.
  
• Jott: I haven't used it as much as I thought, especially since the iPhone app is unable to send notification emails even with the paying plans. If they fix that I will pay $3/month without even thinking.
• Adobe Acrobat Connect seemed like the best affordable screen sharing application out there, but it can cause browser crashes and handling of screen dimensions is frustrating (try sharing when using a 30" monitor!). Unfortunately, WebEx remains the most stable and powerful solution out there, but it is outrageously priced.
  
• Google Chrome could replace Safari as my second browser of choice if there was a Mac version. I suppose it is coming soon. Or is it, given that it took Google years to release Picasa for Mac?
• Blogger hasn't seen a single visible improvement since last year. Frankly, it is not a very good blogging service anymore.
  
• Feedburner is not that useful anymore given the general decrease in personal and work blogging activity.
  
• YouTube has not really moved beyond its lowest common denominator position. I watch videos mostly through iTunes podcasts, iTunes video rentals, or other sources.
  

Social networks:

• I have been going to the Facebook site more (but not really "using it" more) because many less geeky friends use it. I mostly go to the site when I get an email notification. My guess is that photo sharing and tagging will be the first feature of Facebook I might actually appreciate this year.
  
• I have about 200 connections on LinkedIn (from about 150 a year ago). I still haven't found any actual use for it.
• Dopplr: I entered a few more trips there but it hasn't been really useful so far.

Like last year, I fail to find most social networks either really useful or exciting, Twitter remaining the notable exception.

See you next year!

A few days ago I upgraded my MacBook Pro's hard drive after realizing 320 GB drives sell for USD 110 - which made constantly worrying about disk space ridiculous. This also should extend my old MBP's life a little bit.

Here are the steps needed to replace the drive:

• Buy the new drive ;-) I got mine from Newegg. I picked a 7200 rpm 320 GB drive instead of a 5400 rpm 500 GB drive hoping that performance will be slightly better.
  
• Backup your system. I use Time Machine and Time Capsule so that part was easy. Just make sure you don't do any significant work after the last backup.
  
• Follow the ifixit instructions to open the laptop and replace the drive. Count about 1 hour to go through this, unless like me you have to run to Home Depot to get one of those funny TORX T6 screwdrivers.
  
• Reassemble the laptop.

Now for the software part:

• Boot on the Leopard install DVD.
• In the menu, chose Disk Utility. Use that to partition and format the new drive.
• Make sure the MBP has a way to connect to the network. I connected it by ethernet directly to Time Capsule to shorten the restore time.
• Restart the machine. I had to do this or the Time Machine restore wouldn't see the new drive.
• This time choose Restore System from backup. There you pick a source backup. First, you pick your Time Capsule (if that's what you use), then the backup sparse bundle file, and finally the backup version. For the destination, obviously, choose your newly-installed drive.
• The restore tool then spends a lot of time computing the size of the backup to make sure the data fits in the destination. In my case this took between 30 and 60 minutes.
• Finally, start the restoration process proper. I let this run overnight so I don't know exactly how long this required, but it took less than 12 hours to restore about 140 GB of data.

Et voilà, 174.76 GB of free space! That won't last long...

You may also want to read this excellent post by James Duncan Davidson, with much better photos than the ones I took with my iPhone.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the following caveats:

• Time Machine does not backup the spotlight index, so spotlight will run for a while after your first boot with the new drive.
• The same goes for the Mail.app caches when using IMAP: Mail.app takes quite a while resynchronizing all your email folders.
  
• I had rented a movie from iTunes before upgrading. Guess what: that wasn't backed up either, and I had to pay again for the rental as it doesn't appear you can just download the movie again.
  

Following-up on Alex's posts, to me the most glaring hole in the MacWorld announcements was the lack of any update about DRM-free music.

Apple was a precursor of DRM-free music online with last year's EMI deal, but EMI, Warner, Universal, and Sony BMG, that is all the major labels, have since announced DRM-free mp3 downloads on Amazon.com while Apple got nothing new to show. A TechCrunch post mentions that "Amazon now has 3.25 million DRM-free tracks in their library, compared to just 2 million at iTunes."

iTunes must have another 4 million DRM-protected tracks, but I can't imagine any informed person buying any of those now, and that has to mean that people will start shifting towards using Amazon. Of course Apple has the benefit of its installed base, iTunes on every Mac, and consumer inertia (after all they just sold their 4 billionth song).

Maybe Apple has been simply too busy securing the deals with the movie industry for online video rentals - clearly a potentially quite disruptive move. Still I can't imagine Apple not caring about the situation with music downloads, so this means that Apple is having real trouble with the major labels. Is this the beginning of the end for the supremacy of the iTunes music store?

Many of my tasks, at Orbeon or personal, involve PDF documents:

• Sending invoices to customers (no way we are sending Word or Excel documents!)
• Archiving, viewing and searching documents scanned with the ScanSnap scanner
• Viewing faxes received by email
• Saving online articles for reference, further reading or printing (until we get good e-paper I prefer to read long articles on good old dead trees)
  

I was already using PDF a lot on Windows, but that required installing a free viewing tool (Adobe Reader) and a paying PDF printing tool (Adobe Acrobat).

When I switched to the Mac back in 2006, I appreciated right away the built-in ability to view and print PDF documents without buying a third-party tool. But Leopard adds even more to the mix:

• The new Quick Look feature in the Finder and Mail is not perfect, but excellent nonetheless: just press the space bar (Finder) or a button (Mail) and you have a super-fast preview of almost any document or attachment, including PDF. You can even scroll down multi-page documents and keep the preview open while navigating to other documents. (To be fair, OS X should have had this for years but better late than never.)
• The new Preview allows you to insert, delete, rotate, and reorganize pages in a PDF document and save the result.
• The much improved Spotlight automatically indexes PDF documents for (almost) instant content search.

Windows XP has nothing of the sort built-in. Vista has XPS, which sounds cool but, no matter how good it may be, is today nowhere as widespread as PDF and that alone does not make it a viable option for me at the moment. Leopard definitely wins this one.

And by that, I don't mean that it beats the crap out of Microsoft Windows, I really mean that Mac OS X application windows sometimes disappear when you use Spaces. You can't cmd-tab to them anymore or otherwise see them again. They are not just minimized or hidden, they are in no man's land.

I hit this over the last few days, and I am not the only one. See this discussion: Disappearing windows in spaces.

The workaround of disabling Spaces and then re-enabling works for me, but it's quite an annoyance to have to resort to that as you need to move windows to their proper space again for applications which aren't assigned to a particular space.

Here are a few of my issues with it:

• It crashed at least once.
• It feels quite slow, certainly slower than the Windows Remote Desktop, for example. Maybe because it's based on VNC and sending around pixmaps all the time?
• The clipboard is not automatically shared. You have to send it around explicitly. This means that you can't just copy and paste a URL around without going to a menu inbetween (or click on an icon).
• I restarted my wireless router with a screen sharing session open. The session just hung and was not able to pick up the connection again. I had to restart the screen sharing session.
• The "New..." connection menu entry just opens a dialog with a single text field. There is no way to browse from a visible computer on the network. Annoying if you just had to close the connection (see aforementioned problem) and just want to reopen it. You then have to go back to the finder.
• If you show the toolbar (with three miserable icons), you have a "Fit screen in window" option, which it turns out is the same a the "Turn Scaling On/Off" menu entry. Mmmh, did anybody at Apple even looked at this app?

I wouldn't say Screen Sharing is useless, but this is a version 1.0 and it shows.

Last night, I figured (completely irrationally) that I would take the jump and upgrade to Leopard. Here is my first feedback after one day of work with it:

• I got the infamous "blue screen" upon restart during install. I followed option C and luckily thing went smoothly after that. I don't know yet which app installed ApplicationEnhancer.bundle.
• As I already knew, Java windows don't play nice with Spaces. All the Java apps remain stubbornly in the first space and won't move. Also, if you are in a space other than the first one and cmd-tab to a Java app, nothing happens: you have to explicitly go back to the space containing the Java app. It's not a showstopper, but it should be fixed.
• IntelliJ has some random problems with the tabs in the files section: they sometimes, behave erratically. This is annoying and I hope that IntelliJ >= 7.0.2 will fix this. It seem that changing look and feel may work around the issue, but IntelliJ then looks utterly ugly.
  
• Parallels seems to run fine, except that Windows drives don't show up in the Finder.
• I had no immediate obvious issues with Firefox, Thunderbird, or Tomcat.

So I can't really say "so far so good", but it seems like things should be workable.

I was stunned to realize that the Mac OS X Tiger terminal doesn't support accents (and other non-ASCII characters) by default. This includes pasting accented characters in the terminal, listing files with accents in their names, etc.

In fact, this is not really a question of the terminal: it seems that the versions of bash, ls, and other core utilities that come with Tiger are too old and don't support UTF-8. Wow: Tiger came out in 2005. Didn't Java have support for UTF-8 back in 1995 already? This is 2007 and just the kind of things that should work out of the box, right?

Anyway, I had some luck by installing MacPorts and following the suggestions in this post, although this still doesn't work well with iTerm which is unable to combine diacritics.

But maybe I am a little unfair as I am still using Tiger. Please tell me that this is now fixed in Leopard.