I picked up my Phone Valet from the Mac Store today. This thing is cool!

It speaks the name of my incoming calls, logs all incoming and outgoing calls (just by using the phone), sets iChat to “I’m on the phone” when I use the phone, and you can voice dial too. I have not tried this due to not having a mic that works well with Speech Recognition.

You can dial from Address book, or from Phone Valet’s application. You can also script the phone valet dialing assistant to dial as well.

Tired of slow, noisy backups to my WD 120gb drive in an old La FW400 noisy enclosure, I have ordered one of these puppies.

oooh ooh ooh, one that feels real good, in my geeky grip..

Yes the MacMice mouse is less than a week old but it proved to have several flaws:

• The mouse wheel is slick, and my finger would slip over it easily
• The mouse wheel only scrolled every other detent, making it tough to mentally map the clicking of the scrolling wheel to movement on the screen
• The mouse was light, and with the harder than normal to click buttons, the mouse would slide while clicking or double clicking, causing some clicks to fail.

So I bought this kensington optical elite mouse for $19.99. So far, it feels nice and the Kensington software is ok. The software did not come set up for prev/next for safari on the extra buttons, but I added those pretty easily by mapping the buttons to command-left and command-right for Safari only.

We’ll see if this is my mouse next week!

I went to the Tigard Mac Store today and with the help of Erick I picked up a MacMice Mouse and a MacMice SightFlex.

The mouse is nice - It is a little loud when clicking, and due to how they implemented the two buttons, when you pick it up to reposition, it drops away from your grip, but it does come with software which lets you set up the three buttons (and a handy “enable left handed” button) The scroll wheel is ok, a little tough to roll, but it is new, we’ll see how it is over time.

The SightFlex first caught my eye, as the Apple supplied iSight hold made it so I could not use my iSight in any other view than where the monitor faced. This little gem has a gooseneck so you can position it in a myriad of ways and the firewire cable runs inside the gooseneck. The top of the SightFlex is just a firewire connector that allows the iSight to snap on tightly.

As you can see from their site, you can flex the gooseneck in many positions, the weighted base holds it in place, or you can just pick it up and go!

I’ve been a Pronto user for many users now. I loved my pronto, but I didn’t love designing screens, the lack of hard buttons nor teaching people how to use it.

So when I heard about the Harmony, I waited for awhile and then finally picked one up.

Pros

Anyone with a home theater, or at least TV/stereo needs one. You program it via the web, then it downloads a file to your mac which installs it over USB. The database is user supplied and it knows things like “How do you listen to sound, through the TV or stereo?” You tell it what devices you have, and since it is ACTIVITY based, there is one off button and no on buttons nor device buttons.

You click “Watch a movie” or “Listen to music” and it turns on what needs to be on, turns off what needs to be off, and sets up the inputs.

My Toshiba TV sucks. It has 5 inputs but no discreet codes for any of them so the thing knew to press channel up to get to the first input, then source 5 times to get to HD component. However it never worked. The wrong input was always selected. I went to the website, clicked on my TV, clicked edit options and it had timing delays for tv on, between input and bewteen keypress. So I changed the TV on delay to 5500ms and the inter input to 1500ms. Now it works like a charm!

The Harmony has three emitters, I can control my iPOD from around the corner! Harmony even knew about my Navipod IR remotre for my ipod. Though not at first, so I recorded the play button into the remote then connected it and it searched thieir database and said “You have a ten technogies navipod, right?” and I said yes and boom, done!

This is one great, easy to use remote and for the $199, ($159 at MacForce) highly recommended.

Cons I had to dremel the case a little, as some buttons were sticking. There seems to be some QC issues as all of the remotes at MacForce had sticking buttons, and one person’s backlight didn’t work, but Harmony will replace it. My problem only required a #000 philips and a little time, plus was fun

The programming is all done via the Harmony website, so should the company every go bust and not release the software in a client form, it’ll take the will of the community to generate software before you can change your remote.