For the software that’s not available yet through the Mac App Store, use AppFresh. I have been using AppFresh for over a year, so I don’t worry that it’s still a Development Preview.

Continue reading for the exact steps.

1) Create an iCal entry for the 1st Sunday of the month (or weekly, if you wish). Set a convenient time for your event.

2) As part of the iCal entry choose Alarm -> Open File -> Applications -> App Store. Set Alarm for 15 minutes before your stated time.

3) Then, choose Alarm -> Open File -> Applications -> Appfresh.app. Set alarm for 5 minutes after your stated time.

4) Install AppFresh.

5) In AppFresh Preferences -> General -> Scanning, ensure Check for updates on startup is checked, but uncheck “Check for available Apple updates”

6) For each application that you want updated, set it’s Preferences to _not_ automatically check for updates. This will help cut down on the number of popups when you start apps.

7) If you have multiple machines, sign up for an iUseThis account, and repeat the previous steps on all the other machines. AppFresh has a “Used and not installed” category.

Now, once a month, the Mac App Store will start, 20 minutes before AppFresh, which gives you plenty of time to perform any App Store updates that need to be done before AppFresh updates the rest of your software!

Note that I do not allow AppFresh to update running programs, nor Preference Panes or Menu Bar plugins. You can also right-click on any app and choose Exclude.

Enjoy!

Separately, I had purchased a Clear iSpot to use for my Wifi-only iPad. This was a low-cost way to get my iPad on the internet when I wasn’t at home. $25 per month, and I got access to Clear’s “4G” network, anywhere it was available. Not a bad deal, really. My monthly usage was around 0.3 – 0.4GB (300-400MB) per month. Of course, their network wasn’t available outside of larger cities, and even though I don’t travel much, it wasn’t very useful outside of Loop 1604.

I added “Personal Hotspot” to my iPhone data plan, which technically changes it to “$45 per month iPhone 4GB DataPro with Tethering” … this allows me to cancel my iSpot, and save a few bucks. So, add $15 to my AT&T plan, subtract $25 from my Clear plan (actually, I will just cancel it).

In addition to that, while doing research on this, I noticed that I didn’t really use my 900 minutes a month on my voice plan. I mean, really, I had over 6,500 Rollover minutes. Turns out I use around 200 “Anytime” minutes a month. So, I changed my voice plan down to 450 minutes a month, thus saving me another $20 per month.

So, here’s how it breaks down for me…

Before:

After:

The benefits I get out of this are the fact that my personal hotspot can now run my computer, not just my iDevices, like the iSpot, my phone gets charged continuously when I drive my car, and I don’t have to carry yet another device (the iSpot). Oh, and all for the low, low price of saving $30 per month!

Next time you have the chance, kick someone over at AT&T for me. Thanks.

Then kick yourself for allowing AT&T to dictate how you sell product. Thanks.

Wow… purchasing an iPhone 3G was so not the experience I expected from Apple.

Ok, waiting in line for an Apple Launch, I don’t mind.

I got to the La Cantera store at 9am. They opened at 8am, so I figured the line would have moved some by the time I got there. Not so much. It didn’t even seem like anyone was coming out with new phones!

At 10am, Jill left to take Ian to his six months doctor’s checkup. She got back before I got into the store.

By noon, I wasn’t in the store yet. Let’s be clear, I was only 250 or so people back in line, when I got there at 9am. In fact, I wasn’t as far back this time as I was for the original iPhone launch. I waited in line from noon to 6pm that day, but that’s because the store was closed! I knew there was going to be a long wait… I even took a cooler and a lawn chair. And then, after the line started moving, it only took a half hour or so to get inside the store. But not today, though.

We were hearing from people coming out of the store that activation was taking about 15 minutes per person (per phone, I guess).

Once we got in the store, it didn’t get any better. We tried activating Jill’s phone first, an 8GB. Her activation failed for reasons unknown — perhaps the servers were having trouble at that point. I don’t know. Whatever, though, once that happened, then her phone number was caught in the middle of the “port” — because she was moving her phone number over from Verizon — and her phone couldn’t be activated.

So, we decided to activate my new phone, a 16GB model, and then work on hers. Mine activated just fine, no problem. Well, almost no problem. Once my phone activated, my old phone no longer worked. You wouldn’t think that would be a big deal, except that my new phone had to be plugged into iTunes before it could finish activation. So I was basically without a phone for almost an hour while we worked on Jill’s phone.

We waited in line again for a “concierge” to help us fix the problem with Jill’s ported number. He had to call AT&T directly, wait on hold forever, and then cancel her number port so we could start again.

During this entire time, you have to realize, the handheld kiosks that the Apple employees were using were working really, really slowly. So we finally got Jill’s phone activated, on the third try.

Then we went to another part of the store, and meet with another Apple employee to plug the phones into iTunes so that they can “upload the IMEI number”, according to one employee. Surprisingly enough, each phone at this step only took a minute or two. The employee told us when we walked up that it was taking “5 to 45 minutes” for this step. Boy, were we happy at this point. Just to get out of the store.

Let me say that all of the employees were nice, even though they were obviously frustrated. I mean, everyone was great, it was just a bad situation.

All of you guys (and gals) that skipped today’s launch… pat yourselves on the back.

On the other hand, a friend of mine, Chad, stopped by the La Cantera store around 10:30 or so, and said that he already picked his phone up, at an AT&T store, and everything went smoothly.

Of course, I heard from someone else in line that they went to an AT&T store, waited since 6:30am, just to find out that store had only been shipped 15 phones!! So, did Chad get lucky? I don’t know.

Stephen twittered today about the Northstar opening… reminding me that I took a few pictures of the event, and promptly forgot to post them!

Check them here.

Here’s what I did, I’ll just link to the forum post I made, over at Acurazine… look for my username “DMoyes” it’s the 5th and 6th posts in that thread.

http://tl.acurazine.com/forums/showthread.php?t=173870

So, anyway, he was worried about having to buy a new battery. It’s kind of a bummer, but what do you do, if you haven’t bought AppleCare?

Well, I suggested that he go down to our Apple Store, since he was in town for a few days, over Thanksgiving.

Oh, BTW, Happy (belated) Turkey Day!

The guys at the Apple Store, who are usually pretty good, basically told him that since he hadn’t registered the MacBook, they couldn’t even look it up! And if it wasn’t in their system, they couldn’t help him.

So he decided to come home and register it. Of course, after registering, it showed as “out of warranty” — he knew it was pretty close, and most likely over a year old. Close indeed.

He left San Antonio late Saturday night, to travel back home, and today I got an interesting email from him:

“I cannot believe it!

Apple is going to send me a free replacement battery for [my wife's] Macbook. Only 15 minuets [sic] on the phone – troubleshooting the steps, and they confirmed that even though I am exactly 62 days past my warranty they will replace it for free. I am stunned.

Much thanks to Elroy at Mac Support…”

Awesome! He then went on to tell me that he had researched it, and J&R Electronics had the lowest price on the battery, and he was just about to click “Buy” when he decided to call Apple’s Support line.

I know he’s glad he did… once again, Apple Support comes through. Tell me how often Dell, HP or Gateway would do this for you.

He purchased a MacBook for his wife some time back, and now the battery isn’t holding a charge. I forwarded him to a couple of places that could sell him a replacement battery, but I also asked him if he had purchased AppleCare.

He had not, but AppleCare for that one would have cost $249, so if all it needs is a battery in three years, he’s still ahead, since a replacement battery should be considerably less than $249.

Generally, though… I have decided to buy AppleCare for laptops that I purchase, but not desktops… although if I bought an iMac I probably would throw it on there, just because it’s basically a laptop in a nice desktop case.

I do have AppleCare on my PowerBook, and this year after T-Day it’ll be 2 years old, so I’ll still have a year left. On this one it was $349. Of course, my battery was part of the infamous Sony recall, so I got a new battery for free earlier this year.

However, I also own 2 Mac minis that I do not have AppleCare on… I think the Mac mini “replacement cost” is too low to spend the money, even though it’s only $149, not $249.

On my son’s iMac, it was a gift, so we didn’t put it on there.

So, basically, I have 4 macs and only one has it, the laptop. But if I bought another laptop I would certainly buy it.

Now, all of that said… I think that AppleCare is a MUCH better deal than most stores’ “extended warranty” (or “performance plan” as some of them call it)… basically, with it you take your product to the Apple Store, and they fix it. Seriously.

As an example, I bought an iPod 5G, a 30 Gig, used from a friend, and it failed (hard drive) within a year (of my friend’s original purchase date) — the Apple employees still let me buy AC for $59. Even though it was in warranty, I would have had to leave it at the store, and wait for a new (or refurbished) one to come in. When I bought the AC, they just gave me a new one. Furthermore, that same iPod failed again after 6 months (bad batch of HDDs, I guess) and the second time it cost me nothing except my time for a trip to the Apple Store, and I again walked out with a new one. If I hadn’t purchased AC within the first year, I wouldn’t have been eligible for it the second time around, and I would’ve had to pay to fix or replace my iPod.

Another thing I just thought of — I bought an Apple Mighty Mouse, sometime after I bought my laptop, but it broke while I was trying to clean it (the little scroll ball on top). When I called it in, since I used it on my laptop (which had AC) they replaced it for free… I called them around 3pm, and a new mouse was on my doorstep at 10am the next morning… with a return box and an 800 number to call for pickup. $0 out of my pocket for overnight shipping on a replacement MOUSE!! Who the hell else does that?

UPDATE: More Thoughts On AppleCare, Or At Least, Apple Support (2007 Nov 26th)

So, I modded my new “shelf” — you can’t really call it a dock anymore — with the old triangles, and wasn’t really happy with the look.

So I did something else.

Here’s the result:

As you can see, I’ve overlaid the glowie on top of the old-style triangle.

I’m still not completely happy with it, but I don’t have a better idea right now.

Here is a zip package with my graphics. Feel free.

I mean, who can blame them, it took Microsoft 20 years (1985-2005) to finally make a stable version of Windows, and now they’ve gone and replaced it with “ME Version 2″ otherwise known as “Vista”.

Anyways, if you’re running Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5 you can see your “Shared” computers on the sidebar of your Finder. Mac computers show up with a Light Blue Apple Looking ™ icon, and Windows computers show up with a Dark Blue icon.

However, if you examine the icons closely, you’ll notice that the Windows icon actually shows an old-style CRT monitor with a Windows 98 style “Blue Screen” or crash screen!!

Awesome!

Here’s a few pictures, so that you can see what I’m babbling about:

You can see the difference between the top system “melchior” a Linux-based SMB (Windows) file server, and the two bottom ones, that are Macintosh computers.

If you do a “Get Info” (the equivalent of Properties, in Windows) on the Mac computers, you see a nice shiny Apple LCD screen, with the “Tiger” background on it. It just so happens that these two Macs are actually running Tiger… I can’t wait to see if the background changes when they run Leopard, in a week or so.

On the other hand, a Get Info on the “PC” server clearly shows a Windows 98 style “blue screen of death”. Zoom in if you have to. Very nice!

I can’t imagine that this will stay around too long, as Microsoft is one of Apple’s largest partners. Either way, I’m sure it’s “all in fun”.

The install went perfectly. I did a complete backup before and then did a complete format and install of the new OS. I was running 10.4.10 before.

Actually, the backup gave me more trouble than the install did. I was using Carbon Copy Cloner, a great product, but I was using the new version, 3, that I was a bit unfamiliar with.

Normally, you do a complete backup to an external drive, preferably firewire, and this creates a fully bootable backup for your Mac.

Well, the new version allows you to create a “disk image” format file… I figured this would be great, since I’m going to be backing up several Macs (to install Leopard) before this is all over, and this would allow me to back them all up to the same external HDD.
After many, many backup hours, but no success, I discovered that there’s somewhat of a limitation on disk image files. There seems to be about a 60GB limit before they become unusable.

If I had only known this, I would have saved myself over 20 hours of waiting on backups! My PowerBook HDD was about 85GB full.

Apparently, the disk image backup is designed to clone Macs for computer labs, etc. In this situation, you would probably want to have a small image, so that it would fit on lots of different Macs.

Anyway, using CCC, and a regular backup this time (which took about 4 hours — using a USB external drive) it worked perfectly!

After getting Leopard installed, I proceeded to re-install all of my apps. Most of them I just copied from my backup — that’s one of the nicest things about the Mac, is how applications are installed by simply dragging and dropping — but of course, I had to dig through ~/Library/Application Support and ~/Library/Preferences for all of the other files that I needed. Not too difficult, if you know where to look.

Copying my data over was very easy, of course, since Mac OS delineates so well between “System Files” “Applications” and “User Data”. It’s really very nicely set up. Reminds me of an incident a while back, where I needed to re-install Mac OS on a system… but leave the data and applications alone. This is actually quite easy. Apple’s installer has an option called “Archive and Install” which just moves the previous “System” parts of Mac OS out of the way, and then installs a new copy.
I’m liking Leopard, so far, after using it for only a few hours tonight. I’m going to give it a few days on my laptop before I go installing it to the rest of the Macs in the house.