I registered moebis.com back in 1996, so it’s about 16 years old now. At first it was html based, then I used my first CMS system called php-nuke running on a home server with linux in my tiny apartment in Princeton. It’s gone through many changes over the years, many tests of content management systems, like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. I hope to keep this interation for a while, and I’m going to post every kinda of idea, rant, interest and media I can to my site from now on.

As with anything, there are many possible solutions to any given problem, but it really comes down to “the best” option. I like apps to run with a small memory footprint and developed using Xcode in Cocoa via Apple first class SDK. I also try to avoid redundancy and where possible suggesting apps that cover several bases at once.

Music Management:

iTunes – Keep music here and synced to your iDevice, best of music management and well-integrated obviously intro the operating system.

Tagalicious – Does the best job at finding missing tags, lyrics and album art and updating/organizing your iTunes library. If you use iTunes to find missing artwork, it just copies it into a separate directory and doesn’t actually embed it into the MP3 file itself, making a bad portability option. Tagalicious covers 90% of your organizational problems.

I LOVE STARS – Great lightweight and 64 bit native Cocoa menubar app to rate your music. Audible notification after music plays for over a minute to let you know if it’s unrated. I use this to weed out the weak in my library. Songs that get 1 star end up trashed during monthly maintenance. 4 and 5 stars songs automatically get synced to my iPhone.

GrowlTunes – Again, lightweight and 64 bit. Growl is probably already on your system, so this small footprint menubar app will let you see what song is playing when you skip forward. You can also rate songs from it, but ILOVESTARS is more accessible and configurable for staring tasks. The combo of the 2, ILOVESTARS and GrowlTunes will let you quickly go through your library and rate/see songs that are playing without leaving the app your already in. All done in the background.

3D Modeling & Rendering:

MODO 501 – Without a doubt the best. Run the 64 bit Cocoa version.

Photo and Movie Management:

Aperture 3 – That’s right, dump iPhoto. Aperture does it all, keep, manage and sync all your movies and photos here. If you have an iPhone this is easy when you connect the device. iMovie will automatically scan the library and create thumbnails. Don’t use iMovie to store your videos, just use it for editing a projects. Keep everything managed in Aperture.

iMovie 2011 – For simple video-editing, it’s hard to beat iMovie. It integrates well with the rest of your system and pulls the videos from your Aperture library. Keep just the real iMovie projects stored here for simplicity and to cut redundancy. There is no need to import of copy movies again into the iMovie library when they all already exist in Aperture.

Web Browser

Safari 5 – This one was tough. For many months I was switching back and forth between Chrome and Safari. I love the speed of Chrome, but I settled into Safari because of the MobileMe integration with my bookmarks syncing to my iphone. I deal with the little annoyances like not bringing make your open tabs by clicking on “Reopen All Windows from Last Session”. I hate that when I open a tab it appears at the end of the list and when I close it, it doesn’t bring me back to the last open tab. All of this is easily handled by default with Chrome. I’m hoping Safari gets all the upstream updates to webkit from Google. I’ll stick around a little longer and see. 10.6.7 is supposed to have an updated Safari.

PIM – Email / Calendar / Contacts

Apple Mail – It just works, especially if you’re a MobileMe user like me. No need for anything else, and it works flawlessly with my iPhone.

iCal – Same thing.

Address Book – That’s right, the native apps are the best integrated solutions.

Tasks – Tasks on the other hand is a nightmare. It gets really confusing because there are “Mail Tasks” and “Calendar Tasks” and only the Calendar Tasks sync to MobileMe for access within the browser. There is no iPhone app to sync with even that option though. So it’s truly weird and annoying that Apple screwed this up. Something so simple. I’m looking at Wunderkinder, which is a nice and simple task manager, and has an iPhone app to sync with. I just wish my native apps handled this properly. Apple somethings your strangely neglect!? They seem to ignore their own support forums which are rife with thread after thread explaining this exact situation.

I just watched the great documentary “Inside Job” and it makes you both depressed and angry at the same time. How can these large investment firms get away with so much stealing all the while creating zero value? They produce nothing, they only burden us.

I just read about the hacking group “Anonymous” taking down one of the Koch Brothers websites “Americans for Prosperity”…. what a joke. For whose prosperity? Theirs? Anyways, I’ve been following “Anonymous” for a long time, since I first read about them on 4chan. I like how they are helping the little guys, standing up for WikiLeaks and the Unions in Wisconsin. Good for them. It’s about time someone takes action. These right-wing nut jobs have been hijacking the media for too long, everyone seems brainwashed. I blame FOX news for that. Puppet-heads.

My last insight is this, and it’s simple. It comes down to balance. Everything in nature wants to find an equilibrium. When things get too one-sided there is always another force that pushes back and makes things right. I was so worried for so long that the rich and powerful in this world would manipulate us into oblivion. Well, piece of shit company’s like “Bank of America” are about to be dealt some justice for there greedy and heartless ways. WikiLeaks please publish the dirt already.

It’s the hackers, the “lefties”, the young and the dreamers that cause change to happen. If it’s old, white, republican and rich, pay attention to what they say and do. Do the opposite. Believe the opposite. When they try to label things, like “Communist”, “Terrorist”, “Job Killing”, “Un-American”, these are all underhanded ways of manipulating people. They don’t work for our interests, they work for the corporations and banks. Stay tuned. I will.

So diving into OS X was familiar concerning the command line. I found OS X extremely stable. I also have a graphic arts background, which included print advertising, video editing/animation and eventually web design. OS X fit perfectly with that background. The tools, environment and applications available for OS X was a creative persons dream.

Along with the stability and security of OS X, I was able to actually work on creative projects instead of downloading and maintaining anti-virus/spy-ware software, and defragmenting my hard drive. Not to mention all the times Windows would crash on me.

After the recent announcement from Google to release Chrome OS, my interest in Linux was sparked again, and I setup my old PC with Ubuntu 9.10. I’ve made a commitment to use Linux wherever I can to do video and photo editing, along with web development. So far my Mac plays nice with Linux. I’ve was able to partition my “/home” directory onto a separate drive and network it. Since OS X and Linux are UNIX or UNIX-like operating systems, I can use “rsync” to keeps my music, photos, docs and videos synchronized between computers.

So-far, I’m amazed at how “zippy” Ubuntu is. My Linux box only has 1GB of memory compared to the 2GB I have on my MacBook, but the Linux box is more responsive. I’ve also dumped my favorite browser Firefox (for the time being), in favor of Google Chrome on both the Mac and Linux boxes.

I would also like to note installing and playing with Windows 7. Well, it’s definitely an improvement over Vista, and runs about as quick as XP does on the same machine, I’m not overly impressed, except with the task-bar which really just reminds me of OS X. Windows in general is complete garbage. I’m not really talking about the driver support or the GUI (Graphical User Interface), but the NT kernel. It is based on a very shaky foundation and has repeatedly been subject to attack and is inherently very buggy. Why do you think almost every web server in the world is run on Linux (where the GUI doesn’t matter but stability does)? If Microsoft would just use a BSD, Mach or Linux kernel and focus on the GUI, driver support and OpenGL (dump DirectX) they could really compete.

Apple was smart. They choose BSD (pure UNIX), also known as the Darwin kernel, and then really focused all of their effort and resources on the user experience.

Right now I’m most excited about Ubuntu. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I really like it. I’m right at home in the command line and terminal from my days of administering Linux servers, I love open-source, and the Linux kernel in general is just rock solid. I never have to reboot. If my Gnome session gets whacked out, I just go to another terminal (CTRL-ALT-F1), log in as ROOT and type: /etc/init.d/gdm restart – and voila! I’m back up and running in 3 seconds.

So, we’ll see how this experiment works out, but really, with Google and Canonical (creators of Ubuntu, based on Debian) working together on Chrome OS and all of the improvements getting folded back into the Linux community, it will be hard to ever recommend Windows again to anyone. At the very least, although expensive, I would recommend Mac OS X, simply because for most users, especially the creative types (musicians, graphic artists, multimedia enthusiasts) it just fits. It looks nice, runs stable and everything on PC is available on Mac.