Pandora will live on, but it could cost a few cents to keep listening:

The revised royalties are quite high – higher in fact than any other form of radio. As a consequence, we will have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the free version of Pandora. In any given month, a listener who hits this limit can then opt for unlimited listening for the remainder of that month for just $0.99. In essence, we’re asking our heaviest users to put a dollar (well, almost a dollar) in the tip jar in any month in which they listen over 40 hours. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable–the same price as a single song download. (Alternatively, they can upgrade to “Pandora One”, our premium version which offers unlimited monthly listening in addition to its other benefits).

I’m fine with the charge. I’d gladly pay $1/month to listen to unlimited music. I might even pay $3/mmonth for the premium service, which I’ve looked at seriously for the first time.

In the end, I’m just glad Pandora will live on.

From Beautiful Typography & FireFox 3.5 – Yeraze’s Domain 3.0:

Someone just sent this to me, and I had to share.  One of the new features in FireFox3.5 is the “font-face” CSS Attribute, which lets you reference fonts not installed on a user’s system.

Safari (at least on a Mac) can do the same thing.

Note: Don’t view the screenshots in NetNewsWire. They don’t render properly.

Political consulting being my day job, I find myself from time to time needing to set up a “server system” for a campaign.

Needs are basic: Email, file storage and sharing and calendaring. Since spending money on a business-level system is not usually an option, I take advantage of Google Apps for Your Domain.

It works better than well, and I recommend it for even small businesses. In fact, my own consulting firm uses it for our email, calendaring and file sharing.

But the problem I had was getting Google, iCal and my iPhone to play nicely. Some of that functionality has since been added via Google, but not near enough.

So my answer was BusySync. For the majority of the campaign, all worked well. I loved the setup. It was so transparent that I never knew I was using a work-around.

But then that all changed. Some events started disappearing. Others started multiplying. It was weird and virtually inexplicable.

I toyed with it for a while, double-checked settings and visited the support forums. Unfortunately, I never solved the issue.

With the campaign I was managing via Google now over, I’ve switched calendaring back to MobileMe. My consulting partner and I share a calendar, then I have my personal calendars. Now, nothing disappears or multiplies.

We still use Gmail as an email server, though I use Mail.app. I’ll admit, however, that we’re not collaborating as much with Google Docs. Instead, we use DropBox to share what we need.

Before long, I may move drop Google Apps for Your Domain all together, but I just can’t bring myself to get rid of Gmail’s great archiving and spam fighting abilities.

So, goodbye BusySync. Hello MobileMe. And, well, we’ll see about Google Docs.

Hollywood execs don’t yet understand how to utilize new media when it comes to distribution. It’s much the same way newspapers are still struggling with how to use the Internet in presenting their printed product.

Consumers love the ability to watch movies online through such offerings as Netflix, iTunes and even Hulu. And while the first two require some sort of subscription or rental fee, Hollywood still treats them differently than say Blockbuster or Movie Gallery.

TV has license to kill movies at iTunes, Netflix | Digital Media – CNET News: “Spokesmen for Netflix and Apple confirmed that they pulled titles due to these licensing requirements.

The big question many Apple and Netflix fans will have is why are Web stores being treated as though they are entertainment companies instead of merchants?

The answer, of course, is because broadcasters say they are.”

It looks to me that Hollywood would find a way to take advantage of the new ways in which they can provide their product to the masses. Instead, they continue to crap on those of us who enjoy an online entertainment universe.

But as these offerings continue to grow — via Microsoft’s deal with Netflix to stream movies via the Xbox 360 or the Apple TV and iTunes media hub — Hollywood will have to face the challenge of renegotiating licensing agreements with television networks.

“One would presume that there is some sort of licensing issue at stake here,” wrote MacWorld’s Dan Moren. “But it’s a little odd that these movies just vanished into thin air. Man, it’s like a bad horror movie.”

Yes, Dan, it is. And the culprit here is a system that for decades has pumped billions of dollars into the coffers of Hollywood studios and the television industry. What has happened is Apple and Netflix have crashed into windows. “Release windows” is the term used to describe periods of time a certain type of media is allowed to show a movie. Typically, a feature film is first released in theaters, then on DVD, followed by pay-per-view channels and finally on broadcast TV.

Normally, release windows don’t affect retailers or video-rental services after they’ve begun selling or renting films. Warner Bros. doesn’t go into Best Buy and pull DVDs off the shelf when Comcast airs Casablanca. The corner Mom and Pop video store doesn’t surrender copies of Gladiator to Universal Studios when the film appears on ABC. But Internet stores are being treated differently. What this means for iTunes and Netflix customers is that movies will pop in and out of the services.

Quite frankly, I rarely watch anything at the time it comes on TV. And I can’t tell you the last time I visited a movie rental store.

But I wear out Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, iTunes and Boxee. (And after Christmas, my Xbox 360 will be my new on-demand Netflix player.)

No sooner do I post about Google Apps and mention the shortfall of not having Gears for Safari than does Google announces they are introducing Gears for Safari.

I have no real intention of testing this for a few reasons, but the main two are:

1. I don’t have a real need with my current workflow configuration.
2. Everything I’ve read thus far says this is fairly unstable beta release.

If you are interested in reading about it, here are several places to check out:

• MacUser: Safari is getting some Google Gears
• TUAW: Google Gears beta for Safari
• MacNN: Google releases Gears beta for Safari

If you give it a try, let me know what you think.

Note: This is the final part of a three-part series on Google Apps, its advantages and how it fits into my workflow.

Like I said in Part 2 of this series:

Not everyone’s workflow is the same, and thus not everyone will use Google Apps the same. As I said, it has its limitations, and I’ve accommodated those in my workflow.

To say that I’ve fully let go of Microsoft Office or iWork would be a gross over-exageration. Both office suites are still an integral part of my workflow. Ditto for iCal, mainly because of having an iPhone and wanting to have the push capabilities of my schedule. And, for the same reasons, ditto to Address Book. I can’t live with my contacts online and my iPhone 3G empty.

At first, the fear of using online apps kept me away. But I decided I liked the power of Google Apps and the advantages. So I set out to find work arounds to my concerns.

Here’s how my workflow is set up with Google Apps:

1. Email server. I’ve replaced BlueHost email servers with Google email servers. The spam filters are great, and I have user-level control over forwards, rules, etc. Never looked back.
2. Email. I use the Gmail interface. I was using Mail with IMAP-enabled Gmail. However, you get a lot of duplicated messages in smart folders and threads because of the way Mail interacts with Gmail’s archiving structure. (This is really more of Gmail’s fault because of the way they use tags instead of folders. While in Gmail one message can have multiple tags, Mail sees each tag as a separate folder. Thus, you get multiple copies of the message.)
3. Email on iPhone 3G. For the same reason as above — multiple messages — I’ve stopped using the Mail program on my iPhone. Instead, I use Google’s mobile site. And I’ve found that I like it more. There is very little you cannot do in the mobile version that you can do on the full version.
4. Calendar. I keep my calendars on iCal and use that as my interface. To make it work properly with Google Calendars, I sprung for BusySync. This app allows you to sync iCal with Google Calendars. In my setup, I actually subscribe to my Google Calendars through BusySync. I have only one native calendar in iCal, and that is for personal use. (Note: BusySync costs $25.)
5. Contacts. I had to have my contacts in Address Book so they would sync with my iPhone. Having them in Google would do me no good. Now that Address Book in Leopard will sync with Google Contacts, this is not a worry. If you are using Tiger, I would recommend AtoG. I used it, and it worked pretty well.
6. Documents. For documents that require collaboration, I use Google Docs. For documents that I want to have access to for viewing anywhere, I upload them to Google Docs. But for all other documents, I generally keep them native. I prefer to work in iWork, but I use Office quite a bit as well. (With Back To My Mac, it’s much easier for me to fetch documents from my home iMac when I’m using my MBP, so that covers me as well.)

Here are a couple of other notes about how my workflow incorporates Google Apps:

1. iPhone email. While I use the Google mobile interface, I still have my dotmac address set up on my iPhone for times when I need to simply hit a link to email something or to post photos to Flickr. I would recommend setting up your email on the phone, but I would turn off the push capability.
2. Fluid. If you’ve not tried Fluid, you should. This is the easiest way to set up site specific browsers (SSB). Plus, it’s free. I use it for two email accounts with the Gmail web interface, Google Reader and Pandora.

So that’s it. That’s how I use Google Apps in my workflow. Google Apps is a great system, especially for small enterprises who need good collaboration tools. It even works well for individuals who are on the go and don’t work in the “normal” office environment.

I’d love to hear how others use Google Apps, especially from the Google Docs point of view.

In Part 1 of this series on Google Apps, I discussed what is included in Google Apps and why I chose to use it. In Part 2, I discussed reasons I chose to use Google Apps and some hesitations that might lead others to not use Google Apps.

Note: This is the second part of a three-part series on Google Apps, its advantages and how it fits into my workflow.

I discussed in this post what Google Apps includes and why I chose to use it. Google Apps provides a lot of advantages and a few disadvantages. First, let’s take a look at the hesitations I had with Google Apps.

Reasons not to use Google Apps

1. Privacy is a major concern. This is probably the number one hesitation of 90 percent of people who consider switching to Google Apps. Certainly, there is reason for concern. You are putting your information in the hands of someone else, in this case a company who generates ad revenue by scanning email and documents of their users. If you have sensitive information of a proprietary nature, you should give serious consideration to Google’s privacy policies.
2. You have limited ability to work offline. Google Apps is primarily an online service. While Gears will allow Firefox users to work offline, Safari users are not so lucky. The easy workaround is to download Firefox and have it available if needed, which is what I do. Furthermore, I’m rarely in a situation where I do not have access to the Internet.
3. Do you feel comfortable working in an online environment? Some people do not. And for those people, this may not be for you. But what you’ll find in my setup (in Part 3) is that I do very little online work. Most of what I do is integrated into my offline life.

That said, let’s look on the bright side of things.

Reasons to use Google Apps:

1. Gmail is the most powerful email system out there. OK. So that may be a subjective statement, but in my experience it is the truth. While spam filters, rules, forwarding, etc. are not unique to Gmail, nothing I’ve come across — not Mail, not Thunderbird, not Entourage — does them quite as well.
2. Gmail mobile interface rocks. As you’ll see in Part 3, I don’t use the Mail application on my iPhone 3G. I use Gmail’s mobile interface. It’s that good.
3. Collaboration is easy and extensive. By using Google Docs, you can collaborate with other users in your domain. If you have multiple users, you can designate with whom you want to share so that not everyone has access to everything.
4. Easy access to documents from virtually anywhere. If you have an Internet connection, you should be able to get to your documents, email, calendar, etc. No having to dial in to a work server or any of the like. Just log on, and voila.
5. Google Calendar makes scheduling easy. Just like Google Calendar, you have options for multiple calendars, sharing abilities (full schedule, free/busy, etc.) and the nifty daily itinerary feature, which I absolutely love. Every morning by 6 a.m., there it is in my inbox.
6. It’s cost effective for individuals and small businesses. At $50/user/year, you can’t very well beat this option for small operations. Plus, depending on your needs, you can save all that cash you would spend on Microsoft Office.
7. Technical support is a cinch. If you are using the premium edition and want Google to serve as your domain’s email server, then you have to change a few technical specs. Don’t be concerned, though. If you can’t do it, your site host can. Past that, the most complicated part of Google Apps is adding users, and that’s as easy as signing up for a website. No need to worry about network problems (unless you can’t get online…).

Not everyone’s workflow is the same, and thus not everyone will use Google Apps the same. As I said, it has its limitations, and I’ve accommodated those in my workflow. I’ll share a bit about those in my next post of this series.

In Part 1 of this series on Google Apps, I discussed what is included in Google Apps and why I chose to use it. In Part 3, I’ll explain how Google Apps fits into my workflow, including how I utilize Microsoft Office and iWork.

Note: This is the first of a three-part series on Google Apps, its advantages and how it fits into my workflow.

I was not an early adopter to Gmail or Google Docs. My reasons were not from fear of “big brother”, though those are valid concerns.

My reasons were much simpler:

1. I had an email address and liked Mail.app just fine.
2. I was accustomed to using Microsoft Word and iWork.

It was not until necessity — or at least a minor annoyance — came along that I seriously considered joining Google’s ever-expanding empire of users.

This site is hosted by BlueHost, with whom I am extremely satisfied in most ways. The only way in which I was not satisfied was with email. First, the email was often buggy or slow. I had connection issues both through Mail and through the web portals.

So I began looking for new ways to host my email. Enter Google Apps.

What’s in Google Apps? You get:

1. Gmail. If you don’t know what Gmail is, then stop reading and move on. Nothing to see here.
2. Google Docs. Powerful online office tools to create text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. (Think stripped down versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint or Pages, Numbers and Keynote.)
3. Google Calendar. Online calendaring system that offers multiple calendars and sharing options.
4. Google Sites. You can build simple webpages with this tool, but I’ve never tried it.
5. Google Start Page. Some people love start pages, and this is a good one if you do. It’s iGoogle for your site or business. I don’t use it, though.

Google Apps provides two editions for users. The standard edition is quite powerful and is free. The Premier Edition is extremely powerful and costs $50 per user per year.

At the same time I was looking for a replacement for my email needs, I was doing the same for a client. My client’s needs included multiple user accounts and document sharing, the latter of which we were looking at an expensive server solution.

Thus, I elected to give the premium edition a try for both setups. So far, I’ve been most satisfied with both my personal set up and the one for my client.

In Part 2 of this series on Google Apps, I’ll talk about reasons to use Google Apps and some reasons why some people are hesitant to make the jump. In Part 3, I’ll explain how Google Apps fits into my workflow, including how I utilize Microsoft Office and iWork.