About 2 month ago I just ignored Twitter, everybody talked about it, but I couldn't see how that would help my Blog, my Business or myself.

But some time ago somebody mentioned that he would like to get the App Store Updates in Twitter, rather than reading the website or using an RSS feed. So I  checked the Twitter API and added a few lines of code to my software. So now immediately when a new App or a price reduced App is found the software will create a Tweet with a link.

I didn't expect much from this and I didn't even mention this in my Blog. But to my surprise quite a few people became my "Followers" with-in the first day. And I also got some referals from a Twitter search. I still didn'ty pay much attention to Twitter but the number of my Followers kept growing constantly.

Well I told my wife about this new Twitter feature and it seems she became more excited about Twitter than me. She told me about this great new web-sites she found using Twitter. Finally we watched this interview between Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki which changed my view of Twitter. Finally! Guy says "Twitter is a weapon" and some other interesting things. If you have about 20 Minutes time, it's really worth watching.

Firefox Plugin for Twitter

So now I like Twitter but I don't like following the Twitter updates on the Twitter website. So I looked for a plugin for Firefox that shows the updates in the Firefox Sidebar.

I found these 2 Plugins which I quite liked:

• Twitbin
• Yoono

Both were quite good but not exactly what I wanted.

Website in the Firefox Sidebar

During my search I came along a solution that shows how to view any website in the Firefox Sidebar. Of course most websites are too big to fit in there, but websites which are optimized for the iPhone or other Mobile webbrowsers work usually quite well.

Somehow I liked the TwitterGadget website best for my Twitter needs. It automatically updates the Tweets every 3 Minutes and it looks very clean and tidy. So how can you get this Web-site into your Firefox sidebar?

1. Go to the website of TwitterGadget http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget.asp
2. Add this website to your Firefox bookmarks.
3. From the Firefox Menu choose Bookmarks/Organize Bookmarks.
4. Click on the Bookmark you just added.
5. Click on "More" and tick the option "Load this website in the Firefox sidebar"
6. You can now close the Bookmark Window.
7. When you now choose this Bookmark it will be opened in the sidebar.

You can follow me on Twitter here:

http://twitter.com/thomashk

Recently the US iTunes Music stores is offering Special offers for Movies, Music Albums and TV Shows. They are offerred for a reduced price for a limited time. I think they change the downloads they offer every week.

To make tracking these changes easier I put together a little RSS feed where you can see what is currently on offer.

I also included the items that are available for Free in the iTunes Music store.

Here is the link for the RSS feed, I hope you find it useful:

http://feedproxy.google.com/Infoxenter-itunesSpecialOffers

SugarSync is not really an iPhone/iPod Touch App. Recently there is now a free App available in the iTunes store, but to use it you also need to subscribe to their service. They have a 45 day trial offer, afterwards you'll need to spend at least US$ 2.49 per month, depends on how much storage you need.

So what is SugarSync?

SugarSync is an online backup, i.e. your files will be backed up to SugarSyncs servers. You can access your backed up files with any web browser and they also offer some Apps for iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. I have no Blackberry or Windows mobile phone, so I can't take a look at those.

Apart from SugarSync there are many other service providers that offer online backup (e.g. Mozy, idrive, iBackup etc.),  below points apply to all of them:

Good things about online backup

• Disaster proof location, if a thief, fire, flooding, hurricane, typhoon destroys your computer you still have a backup in a location far far away.

Bad things about online backup

• Subscription service, so monthly or annual fees
• Backing up files is slow, many broadband connections offer very fast downloads but uploads can be very slow. Modern hard disks have now a few hundred Gigabytes which might take days or weeks to backup (depending on your connection)
  So for online backups: Always use a free trial first!

What's special about SugarSync?

There are a few things that make SugarSync special:

• Available for Windows and Mac OSX
• Pretty Web-interface
• Pretty and intuitive client for Windows and Mac.
• Support for several PDAs/Smartphones, e.g. iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, Windows Mobile

Installation

• First you need to go to the SugarSync website to create a free trial account.
• Afterwards download and install the client for Windows or Mac OSX, which is pretty straight forward.
  
• When you start the Windows or Mac client you need to enter your SugarSync account and you have to choose which folders you want to backup to SugarSync. When you try out their service you should use a rather small folder, it might take long to upload your files.

Automatic Syncing

• SugarSync automatically detect all the changes you made to the folder you are synching with them and uploads or downloads all changes.
• Versioning is also supported, so if you change a file you can recover an older version. Either right click on the file in the client software or click on the file name in the Web interface and choose versions.
  
• If you delete a file you can recover it, if you either choose "Show deleted items" in the client software, or go to Deleted Files on the Web Interface.
• On their web-site they also have a nice demo video that shows how to sync Windows and Mac automatically.

Web-Interface

Where SugarSync really shines is the web-interface, it has a sleek look, is fast and functional. In many parts it remembers me to Apple MobileMe, which now seems to work as it should btw.

In the web-interface you can

• access all your files, download them, email them to somebody etc.
  
• upload files, which will be synced to your computers afterwards.
• email a file to somebody, he will get only a download link, where to get this file, so you send very large attachments. When the receiver accesses this file, you also get a notification email.
• play unprotected MP3 and M4A files with the online Music-player.
  

From an iPhone/iPod Touch:

On the iPhone/iPod Touch you can either use Safari to access the web-interface, which has is optimized for the iPhone/iPod Touch or you can use the free App (iTunes Link).

The free App is the better choice because it has a much faster and responsive interface and there is no reason not use it as it's free anyway.

From the iPhone/iPod Touch you can:

• Browse your files
• View PDF, Word, Excel files etc. on your iPhone/iPod Touch
  
• Email all kind of files to somebody
• Play unprotected MP3 and M4A files, but this does not work too well. SugarSync downloads the whole file first, and plays it afterwards.

Summary

SugarSync seems a good Offline Backup service, which has nice intuitive software for Windows, Mac OSX and several PDAs/Smartphones, but compared to other Offline Backup

Pricing

Price: for 10GB storage US$ 2.49 per month. Here is the complete price-list.
Free 45 day trial available,

Alternatives

• Store files locally on your iPhone/iPod Touch: See my Air Sharing vs. Datacase review
• Turn your Mac into a file server: See my iGet Mobile 2.0 review
  

While I did some research for another article I came across iGet Mobile from Nakahara Informatics, Inc. I neither heard of this software nor the company before, but I liked the features and so I tried it out (free trial available at the website).

iGet Mobile is basically a web-server that makes all your Mac's hard disks and network shares available, so you can access them on any other Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, iPod Touch and probably also on other mobile phones with a web browser.

Setting up the server is very simple, you just need to enter a user name and password. After that just click on Start Server. That's it.

Well so far nothing too special, you can do something similar with the Apache Server on OSX. I'll show how it looks on an iPhone/iPod Touch. It's looks very similar from a Mac or Windows PC.

From an iPhone/iPod Touch:

iGet Mobile shows the web address you need to enter into any webbrowser. If you have a variable IP address you can configure it, so that it sends an email on each start with the current IP address, or you can use DynDNS.

When you now access your Mac you'll notice, all folders and documents have the same icons as on the Mac.
When you access a file you have usually 3 options:

• View
  Works for all documents the iPhone/iPod Touch can view, but the iPhone/iPod Touch can be quite slow with large documents.
  It does not seem to support Audio/Video Streaming, I tried some MP3s and MP4s.
• Convert to PDF
  For all documents (also MP3s...), but still very useful for documents, also those the iPhone/iPod Touch can't view, i.e. OpenOffice etc.
• Send via Email (optionally compressed as .zip file)
  You can sent files with less than 10 MB to any email account, but you need to configure your email server on the Mac first.

Summary

This is a great and easy to use application for the Mac. If you're often on the road and need access to your documents at home, this is just right for you.

I noticed some problems with media files: I couldn't open MP3s, MP4s on the iPhone/iPod Touch. I also couldn't open my iPhoto library, so to access your photos you need to store them outside your iPhoto library.

You also need to remember to leave your Mac switched on! If it's off you can't access it...

Pricing

Regular price: US$ 39 (at the moment a special offer for US$29)
Free trial available, server stops automatically after a few hours.
Requires Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) or higher

ShareTool from Yazsoft (same company who mad the excellent Speed Download) is a program for Mac OSX 10.3.9 (or higher) that allows you to share all your Bonjour services though the Internet.

What is Bonjour?

For a detailed description you can check either Apple or WIkipedia, but here a short summary:
It allows sharing of your harddisks, printers, iTunes/iPhoto library, screen sharing in your LAN. No need to know any IP address, ports etc. Bonjour announces which services are available on one Mac and all other Mac's on the same network discover these services automatically.There is also a WIndows driver available which allows to use some of the Bonjour services, but I haven't tested this out.

The ShareTool difference

With ShareTool you can use this now also over the internet. Actually a quote from the Yazsoft website: "SHARETOOL : BONJOUR OVER VPN FOR THE REST OF US !". Well,I think I heard something similar not too long ago, as Steve Jobs announced Mobile Me... Well that's another story.

You first need to install ShareTool on two or more computers:

• One server which provides the services
• One or more clients which use the services that the server provides
• This also means you need at least 2 licenses, one licence for each computer you install ShareTool. Pricing see below.
  

Connecting Server and Client

• Now you need to start Sharetool on the server and click on "Share". Sharetool will now show you which IP address and which TCP port to use to connect to this Mac from the internet.
  
• Now start Sharetool on a client and click on "Connect". You'll need to enter now the IP adress or domain, the port of the server and a valid account for the server.

After you have entered all these you can connect to the server, and this works without any problems.I tried these

• iTunes Music sharing, OK no problem
• iTunes Video sharing did not work for me, the Video shows just the first picture but the Video did not play.
• Harddisk sharing, OK no problem
  
• iPhoto sharing, OK no problem
• Screen sharing, OK no problem

Summary

ShareTool works as advertised though I think there might be some problems, when you use the default settings. To connect to the server you need to know it's IP address. Many people won't have a fixed IP address so you need to know how to use a service like DynDNS (which is actually directly supported by ShareTool).

But the main problem I think is that you need to know the port number, which is Random by default. So each time you restart your server or ShareTool you get a new port number, which is save but very inconvenient when you want to connect to your server, but you don't know the correct port.
You can change this to a fixed port, or you can choose that ShareTool sends automatically an email when it starts with IP address and port number. I think there should be some hint about this when you start ShareTool for the first time.

Overall ShareTool is quite interesting. I think it is very useful for those users who don't have MobileMe. If you already use MobileMe there are only a few features that are still interesting.

Pricing

As already mentioned you need at least 2 licenses for this, one for each computer where you use this.

US$ 20 for 1 license
US$ 30 for 2 licenses
US$ 75 for 5 licenses

There is a free trial available, which disconnects client and server automatically after 15 minutes.