Over the past several years, I’ve grown accustomed to using a split-style keyboard. It is easier on the hands, and allows me to type faster with fewer mistakes. In the past, I’ve owned a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite, both at home and at work. When I bought my Mac Mini last year, I also picked up the small Apple keyboard to go with my Mac. I ended up giving my MS Natural Elite Keyboard away.

After a year has passed, I’ve finally grown sick and tired of typing on that small, uncomfortable keyboard. I wanted a new one, preferably one that was ergonomically split. I went to Staples to buy my keyboard, as they had the best prices that I could find in a brief online search. When I got to the store, they didn’t end up carrying the old Elite keyboard, but they did have a newer, more spiffy one called the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, which conveniently was on sale.

This is the nicest, most comfortable keyboard I have ever used. It is virtually silent, and the keys fit my hands like a glove. The soft, fuzzy palm rest is a great addition, too. It came with software for Windows and Mac. I’m using it on my Mac now, and all the extra buttons work just as they should. The volume, browse forward/back, calculator, all work great. I will mention that the space bar is a little stiff when I push from the far end of either side. Hopefully that is simply because it is brand new. I’ll recommend this keyboard to anyone who prefers to compute in first class.

I have never been that into RSS feeds in the past, but today I find them extremely useful. I’ve used Google Reader on and off, and it is certainly a great place to get your RSS feeds. The problem for me was that I didn’t log in often enough, and ended up marking all the news as being read, just to avoid a tsunami of new messages. The Mail app included in Mac OS X 10.5 got me into using it as a RSS reader. I used it for a while to get feeds from my favorite places. It did the job fine.

Lately, since I started using Entourage for my email, I decided to get myself a standalone RSS reader. I downloaded the free NewsFire app for Mac. It’s terrific. It’s lightning fast, and I’ve found that all of its default preferences are spot on. I particularly like it that every time I copy a RSS feed URL in my web browser, then switch over to NewsFire, the program is ready to subscribe to the new feed without naming it or hitting Paste! If you own a Mac and like to keep track of the latest site feeds, I highly recommend it.

I have taken quite a liking to Entourage 2008, part of the Office 2008 suite for Mac. I didn’t have much experience with its 2004 predecessor. It is quite a robust application. I don’t use most of the advanced features included with it, but it does everything that I normally would do using Mail, iCal, and Address Book. The difference is that Entourage has many more options, and I like how it all is handled by a single application instead of using three. Having the calendar built-in has me actually using it, unlike my forgetfulness to launch up iCal to add information.

I’ll admit that a cold launch of Entourage is noticeably slower than the other programs. I did a memory test of Mail, iCal, and Address Book, and they totaled a use of 78 MB real memory combined. Mail.app alone was using 47 MB all by itself. In comparison, Entourage, after extensive use, used 78.5 MB of real memory — Roughly the same as the combined others.

At first run, my Mail data was imported with ease into Entourage. The address book was not so easy, and ended up doing most of it by cut/paste. I wasn’t able to find an exporter that would arrange my data so that Entourage would be happy with it. There is a sync option in Entourage for the Mac Address Book, but I didn’t try it.

In Entourage, I like the flexibility in assigning categories and rules to my mail. There is so much you can customize. Data searches are powered by Spotlight, which are lightning fast. I like how I get a message preview popup when mail arrives. That said, it would be nice if Office would use Growl as an option for popups, but it works just fine as-is. Personally, I like how Entourage stores all of my data in a single file on the hard drive, but this does create a burden with Time Machine. A single change of any kind to your information in Entourage will cause Time Machine to back up the whole Entourage data file again the next time it comes around. (This is one reason I chose to set Time Machine to backup manually.)

One possible annoyance to me is that there is no simple way to “auto Bcc” myself, or another address. I like to shoot a copy of my outbound mail to Gmail, so I can store it there, too. The only way to do this, that I’ve seen, is to create a Rule to redirect outgoing mail to another account. It does work, but it creates a duplicate message in your Sent mailbox for every piece of mail you send out. I can’t figure out how to automatically delete that extra copy, either.

My liking of Entourage mostly boils down to the fact that when I was a Windows user, I preferred Outlook 2003 to any other client. Entourage is the closest match to that on the Mac. It may not always behave in the same way that you have come to expect from Outlook, but it is a very powerful application in its own right. I plan to use Entourage 2008 exclusively for the near future on my Mac.

The final release date for Firefox 3.0 is June 17th! Don’t forget to visit SpreadFirefox and join in for the world record attempt. According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.0 has been in active development for 34 months. Firefox is a fantastic product, and I am very grateful to Mozilla and the open-source community for creating it. But 34 months strikes me as a bit ridiculous. I’d expect an entire operating system could be written in less time.

Apple needs to seriously negotiate a way to get most, if not all, of the iTunes Store tracks available as “Plus” (DRM-free) tracks. I don’t understand why Amazon has a deal with all of the record labels to provide high bit-rate, DRM-free music tracks across the board, and Apple does not. I just recently read that Napster has now followed in their footsteps. What is the deal with iTunes? Today, there are still a relatively sparse selection of iTunes Plus tracks. I’m certain that this has to do with some contracting with the record labels, but they need to wiggle their way out of that — if that’s the case.

I love iTunes, and I frequently buy the iTunes cards at places like Target, so I load up on downloads. Despite having credits from those gift cards, I’ve bought my last two albums from Amazon. You browse the music just like any other Amazon product, and use a batch downloader that they provide to get your music (For Mac and Windows). After that, the 256k MP3 files are yours to do as you please. Sweet indeed.

Until Apple offers the same, I’m afraid I’m going to have to continue buying music from Amazon. It’s a shame on Apple’s part, considering iTunes is such a big player. If others feel the same way that I do, they are going to be in trouble some day if they don’t turn this around.

I am watching the Apple keynote address at the WWDC 2008. The new iPhone features look sweet. Nice! Apple also announced that Mac OSX 10.6 is to come out in mid-2009. Wow. Leopard (10.5) just came out in October 2007, and I am using that right now. They seem determined to release yet another OS version before Microsoft can get Windows 7 to the market. Word has it that Apple is dropping PowerPC chip support in 10.6, and will continue developing with only a 100% Intel multi-core processing structure. Today, they are coding both platforms at once, to keep the old chipset alive for users who bought before Apple went all-Intel a couple of years ago. They probably want to cut that cord.

The following is my advice to Apple: Apple is riding so high today, with both the iPod and iPhone’s superstar product status. Considering that Apple and Intel are now all hugs and kisses, I would like Apple to turn the Mac OS loose for anyone to use on any Intel platform. Once 10.6 is ironed out, they could throw down the gauntlet to Microsoft and take Windows head on with the PC desktop market. The top exes at Dell have even said that they would sell the Mac OS to buyers, if Apple agreed with fair terms.

Considering my own Mac Mini is “Intel Inside”, I feel like anyone should be able to run it. Why does Apple want to fight it? Apple’s computers will still sell on their own awesome design merits. Still, I don’t think they’ll do it. Perhaps they suspect that Microsoft would yank their long-term commitment to future Mac versions of Office if they did this drastic maneuver. Who knows.

The folks over at spreadfirefox.com have started accepting pledges from users to download Firefox 3.0 the day it is officially released. So far, no concrete date for the final release has been set. They are hoping to set a Guinness World Record for the number of software downloads in 24 hours. For all the details, and global pledge totals, head to the Download Day page at Spread Firefox. I’ve pledged!

I’ve already written in the past about the beauty that is Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. After using it for several months now, I have to say that the new features such as Quicklook, Time Machine, and Cover Flow are all fantastic.

Despite all that, the best new feature, as far as I’m concerned, is Spaces. It is the one feature of the OS that I can’t function without. At first, I didn’t make much use of it, but over time, I have come to utilize a four-desktop system that makes me much more productive. I put my email and chat program on one desktop, web browsing on another, and iTunes on yet another. It is so much better than using a single desktop with all of my open applications in my way. Now, when I want to start something completely different than what I’m running, I switch to a new blank Space. And the ease of hitting F8 to see all of my Spaces at once is just great.

Spaces is so terrific that if you’re still using Tiger, I can’t help but feel sorry for you. I once tried disabling it, and Leopard suddenly felt like a caged animal. I know Linux has had an option for multiple desktops for a long time, and not everyone will agree that Spaces on the Mac is as great as I make it out to be. It depends on your computing habits. But for me, it’s absolutely wonderful!

If want to try the new Firefox 3.0, and plan to copy bookmarks between different computers, there is something you should know. Firefox no longer stores its bookmarks in the traditional bookmarks.html file. It is now using some type of database system to make up Places, a new way of managing your bookmarks and browsing history. While this new system is a big step forward from the days of old, it gave me a lot of grief when trying to move my bookmarks from one computer to another.

The problem was, I had no idea about this new system. I kept trying to copy my bookmarks.html file between computers, only to find that when I loaded Firefox, the same old ones kept appearing in the browser. It took me a long time to nail down what was causing it, but after some research online, I found out that you have to go about this in a slightly different way.

First, within Firefox, choose Organize Bookmarks from the Bookmarks menu. Then, export your bookmarks from your source computer. You’ll find importing and exporting options within the pull-down icon displaying a star within the Organize Bookmarks Library window. You may notice that the file size of the exported HTML file is half the size that it used to be in the past with Firefox 2. (I don’t know the technicalities of why this is, but it’s all the better.) When you get to your source computer, choose to import bookmarks and use the HTML file as the source. Done. I only wish there was an option not to duplicate existing bookmarks. I found it necessary to delete all of my old ones before importing the new ones to avoid having a duplicated mess.

I was not aware of any of this until I failed repeatedly at trying to copy my bookmarks after upgrading to Firefox 3. This may explain why the Foxmarks extension has not yet been updated to support Firefox 3.

One of the gifts that Laura bought for my birthday was a really cool device that I never knew existed. It is an iTrip add-on for my iPod, made by a company called Griffin. It is a small device I plug into the bottom of my iPod Nano that broadcasts the music from the iPod to any FM frequency of your choice. So pick a blank spot on the dial, and set it to that, and bam! It totally works. We used it in the car this past weekend on a road trip, and were able to hear hundreds of songs through the car stereo. Wow! No wires, no fuss, no muss. All the power needed is drawn from the iPod itself. Granted, the audio quality is not that quite that of a CD, it is a little brought down by the FM radio transmission, but it is still very enjoyable. Great stuff!