Yes, my son is now officially kicking his dad’s butt on the iPhone side of the business.  Ben had NetSketch ready at the launch of the app store, and even as an impartial observer (as much as I can be, anyway), it’s an impressive piece of software.

NetSketch brings collaborative drawing to the iPhone and iPod Touch.  You can draw on the iPhone’s screen in full color and share your work with others over WiFi - pretty cool!  If you collaborate with your friends, everyone’s changes are shown in the drawing in real-time.  And NetSketch is vector-based and offers infinite pan and zoom - so it’s easy to add detail to your work and you never run out of room.

Here are some drawings made with NetSketch:

I have to say it’s darn nice for $5.99, and the networking capabilities really set it apart. I can see this taking over in classrooms and meeting rooms this fall

Take a look at http://www.netsketchapp.com/

I had MacJury duty Tuesday on Chuck Joiner’s MacJury show, contributing to a discussion on stolen Macs and the hilarious Back to My Mac recovery of a stolen laptop. We also talked about Starbucks’ new WiFi rollout and speculated on their possible plans as a “media hub cafe”. Check out our random ramblings

Ted Landau at MacFixit has posted a column celebrating Default Folder’s 20th anniversary.  Ted’s a long-time Default Folder fan and one of the most knowledgeable guys around when it comes to troubleshooting Macs.  It was a real honor to get to sit down with him for a virtual interview :-)  And embarrassingly, I hadn’t actually realized that this year marks Default Folder’s 20th anniversary until Ted actually asked me when the first version shipped.  We’ve gotta plan a party and a big sale or something!

Well, my number came up today. The hard drive in my MacBook Pro started making this funny crackling, clicking noise. The Finder beachballed. Xcode locked up. I tried to shut down the machine gracefully. Tried to force quit everything that wouldn’t quit. No luck. Power cycled it. It booted to the blue screen, then hung there.

Funny - just two days ago I was visiting my uncle in Colorado, talking with him about statistics and probability, the Gambler’s Fallacy, and the reliability of hard drives. Now TechTool Deluxe tells me my drive has a bunch of bad blocks in the middle of what used to be my data. I guess I asked for this - bad karma.

So I’m going to lose some development time. That really, really sucks. But it doesn’t suck half as much as the prospect of losing all my source code, email, customer databases, test files, scripts, music, and geez - all my photos too. Thankfully, I’m still fairly paranoid about backing up (not as paranoid as I used to be, but still enough that I’ve got a backup in my office from last night, and an off-site backup from last week).

So look at all those files on YOUR Mac. How would you feel if they went away tomorrow? Like really. Y’know - gone, * poof *, never to return. The old adage is that it’s not a question of whether your hard drive will fail, but when. I’m happily calm about my bad day. At least it’s not a Bad Day with a capital ‘B’. Sure, it’s a maddening setback, and I’ve lost a little work - but I haven’t lost everything.

Do yourself a favor. Back up your data. And yes, I mean now. Get SuperDuper!, Time Machine or some other (lesser) backup application and use it. Sometimes it’s a nuisance, but right about now, I know it was a good idea.