Mind-Blowing App of the Day: Ubiquity for Firefox

I’ve been playing around with Aza Raskin’s Ubiquity plug-in for Firefox. It is amazing. Seriously, it is like a series of magic tricks for Firefox, extending the capabilities in exciting new ways. It’s one step closer to just being able to tell your computer what you want it to do. If you’re a Firefox user, be sure to check this out.

Apple’s MobileMe and Me: It Works!

MobileMe has, with little question, been Apple’s most botched and embarassing product release ever. It just didn’t work, something that spat in the face of Apple’s “It just works” motto. Mail was getting lost. Calendars weren’t syncing. Photo albums were crashing. In the mad vision to launch iPhone 3G AND iPhone software v2 AND MobileMe all on the same day, something choked. It was just too much to shove down the tubes, I guess.

That was about six weeks ago. Since then, Apple has been doing massive clean up work, trying to polish this thing into something useable. Along the way, we saw Apple standing up and, with uncharacteristic humility, say, “Yeah. We screwed this up.” When else has Steve Jobs himself EVER admitted to making a mistake?

So, in a time when Apple is backtracking and giving weary MobileMe users free months of service as an apology, when the whole Apple world is griping and the whole Windows world is snearing, what did I do? Yeah. I totally bought MobileMe.

I’m giving it a test run. So far, so good. If you’ve seen the photo and video pages of this site, you’ve seen a very minor touch of MobileMe and iWeb, which is a pretty sweet combination for creating and hosting media-rich websites. I now have an iDisk on all three of my Macs that gives me 20gb of storage in the cloud, and some sweet syncing software to keep all of my info in sync across all my machines and iPhone. So far, so good.

But the best thing? The really coolest thing so far? “Back to My Mac” has sprung to life. MobileMe, combined with my Airport Extreme N router at home, lets me remotely control my home iMac and PowerBook from my work machine, my work and home machine from my laptop, and more. That means that, wherever I am in the world, it’s just like I was sitting in front of my home computer. That’s pretty useful. “Back to My Mac” was a promise that fell flat a year ago. Now, I use it every day. Sweet geeky goodness.

Long post just to talk about a new product I’m trying out. I wanted to throw it out there, though, because of all the bad press it’s been getting. I’ll keep the none to one of you who are interested in this posted as I play around with it. For now, I can’t speak for everyone else; but I know for me, MobileMe just works. Kinda.

For the Win: Sarah Palin RNC Speech

I just wanted to post a quick note with my reaction to Palin’s speech to the Republican National Convention last night. That reaction: Holy crap. A week ago, I had never heard her name; today, I think she’s awesome.

If you missed it, you need to find it online somewhere. The articles about it are nice, but actually watching her deliver it puts it over the top.

Let me know what you thought about it in comments.

**UPDATE** You can download the full audio of her speech at Audible.com’s Election 2008 page.