I prefer a full-size mouse, but virtually every bluetooth mouse on the market are “travel mice” size, which is another way of saying you need baby-sized hands to comfortably use them. Long ago I found a full-sized Kensington bluetooth mouse that has served me well. It worked with every PC and MAC that I tried to pair it with. Indeed, I was a very happy camper with this mouse until the time came to install Apple’s new “Snow Leopard” operating system. My trusty old mouse would not pair with my Macbook Pro. I was in a panic.

The pairing process baffled me because my Mac could actually “see” my mouse. The Bluetooth Setup Assistant would show the mac address of my mouse in the detection window but it would not go any further. The pairing process would fail. Since the mouse was working fine right up until I installed Snow Leopard, it was fairly obvious it was a software problem. I was worried that my old bluetooth mouse was no longer compatible with Apple’s latest bluetooth stack. Luckily, an idea popped into my head that fixed the problem.

When you run the Bluetooth Setup Assistant on a Mac, it displays any bluetooth device it finds in the detection window. The normal sequence is that it sees the mac address of the mouse and then it changes to the actual name of the mouse. In my case, it should change to “Kensington Mouse,” but it never would get to that point with Snow Leopard. I began to wonder if I could somehow manually type in the name of the mouse to see if that would help things along. Thankfully, the answer is yes.

I started the Bluetooth Setup assitant, and when the first window appeared, I clicked on the “Specify Device” button. I typed “Kensington Mouse” in the dialog box and clicked “OK.” Amazingly enough, it worked perfectly!

Give this method a try if you are having trouble using a bluetooth mouse with Snow Leopard. The name you type in the “Device Address” box must be the exact name that would display if detection was working properly. I was lucky enough to remember the name of mine.

–Kevin

It has been awhile since I started using Google Sync, which is Google’s free contacts and calendar syncing software. It allows you to sync your Gmail contacts and calendar to your mobile phone. It does some nice things, but in the end, I decided to stop using it and go back to Apple’s MobileMe service.

Google Sync is free, so I wanted to see if it would be worthy enough to replace my MobileMe service, which costs $99 per year. Google Sync offers push contacts and calendar from Gmail to your mobile phone and it performs those tasks very well. I tested the service on my iPhone 3G and it works as advertised. Once it is setup on your phone, any change you make to your contacts or calendar automatically gets updated in the cloud and on your phone. Unfortunately, push email is not offered as yet, but the button to turn it on is there, so they will probably offer that feature soon.

Updates to my Gmail contacts and calendar were quick and painless. Changes to something in Gmail was almost instantly changed on my phone and vice versa. I never had a problem with functionality and everything worked very well. The only downside that I noticed was that the push feature used more of my iPhone’s battery.

Okay, so if Google Sync works as advertised, why did I stop using it? Quite simply, MobileMe has spoiled me. MobileMe allows me to sync my email, contacts, and calendars to my phone and all my computers. You can use a program called Spanning Sync (for a Mac) to get all of that functionality with Google Sync, but that costs money and is something extra you need to install. I also found software that will sync Google with Microsoft Outlook, but again it costs money. In the end, it is worth it to me to pay for the extra convenience.

If all you need is contacts and calendar syncing between Gmail and your phone, then Google Sync is a no-brainer. It is free, fast, and works very well. If you need to also sync your email and have everything the same across phones and computers, you will need to look elsewhere or deal with the extra paid software. If you use PC’s, I would recommend looking at a company that offers Exchange support.

Google Sync has made a good start. I would definitely give them another try if they were to begin offering features that allow me to sync my data across all my phones and computers. Until then, MobileMe is my choice.

Best Buy has done it again. Just like a previous story, a customer bought a computer, took it home and found a brick inside the box instead of a Macbook Pro. Just like the other story, Best Buy won’t do a thing about it and pawns the problem off to Apple. It looks like Best Buy has a difficult time learning lessons.

I’ll say it again: if you buy an expensive item at Best Buy, open the box right there in the store and make sure you are getting what you pay for. It could save you a huge headache.

I came across a very useful program that allows me to quickly access the contents of my hard drive from the System Tray in Windows or Menu Bar in Mac OS X. It is called Hawkscope and it performs exactly as advertised.

This program saves multiple clicks by adding a button to the System Tray that takes you right to your files. It is a small program and uses very little resources to run.  It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

You might have heard that Apple will no longer be participating in the yearly Macworld event.  They spewed forth some token excuses as to why they are doing this, but I don’t believe what they say.  It has nothing to do with Steve Jobs’ health or any other wild notion I have read about latley.  No, I believe it has more to do with production time and having the need to no longer be held hostage by hard deadline dates imposed upon Apple by these big conventions.

The iPhone 3G was not ready for release when it went on sale.  Many promised features were not available or pushed back to a later date.  The iPhone OS was very buggy and slow.  Apple usually does not make mistakes this large, but they had to have a product ready by convention time, so they released it as-is.  I also believe that the App Store was meant to launch at the same time as the iPhone 3G but it was not in a shippable state at that time.  Also, the release of OS X 10.5 had many problems at release and needed to be corrected with several updates.  Again, it had to be released at a keynote convention.

Apple has done a fantastic job at creating good products and growing the company like never before.  They have more products in more categories than they have had in the past.  All of them require major R&D, programming, testing, and production time.  I believe that Apple no longer has the ability to release products and services in time for all of these conventions.  To appease Apple fans who seem to demand greatness from Apple at each convention, they have had to rush products to market to meet these hard deadlines.  Because of this, more bugs, errors, and problems are introduced into released products, causing bad press from the media and complaints from loyal customers.

Now that Apple has removed itself from most major conventions, they can now release products on their own timetable.  They don’t have to rush production and release things before they are ready.  They will no longer be expected to have an amazing new product available each time a convention rolls around.  This will benefit customers in the long run because the item they buy at release will be more polished and refined.  All the parts and pieces can be ready at the same time so that the whole user experience can be had right away.

Apple has grown, and maybe they have grown too fast and expectations are higher than ever.  This will make it much easier on them going forward to get things right, and in the end, will please their customers greatly.