She has a point. My Mac used to be a nice little computer that let me do some graphics and a few reports and a spreadsheet or two. And play a few second rate games.

These days, my Mac is easily the center of my digital life, but is it also creating a Mac life for me? I use my Mac for so many things these days that it’s inevitable that loving family members might recognize a few symptoms of an addiction.

My Mac holds my music which syncs to my iPod and iPhone. It holds my email for personal and business use. I live on Microsoft Office. All my photos have been digitized and reside in iPhoto or Aperture.

I schedule my travel plans, do reports, edit home movies, and I’ve even taken up designing and building a web site. I have text editors, graphic editors and tools, and compose my own music in Garageband, though I’m learning to use Apple’s Logic Studio (whew, what a learning curve).

My Mac stores my login IDs and my passwords and credit card numbers and balances my check book. I have Mac software which helps me with invoicing and billing, too. The end result may be closer to I, Robot than I may have imagined. I don’t think I’m addicted to my Mac, but I hate having to use the Windows PC in the office, and I always seem to find something else my Mac can do for me.

I use Skype and iChat and I’m thinking about Twitter but I still can’t figure out if people need to know what I’m doing all the time. Except my mom, and I don’t think she’s a candidate for Twitter. She just wants me to visit her more and fatten up because nobody wants to marry a skinny little Puerto Rican girl with a Scottish last name (not true, mom!).

If I could get more of my friends interested in iChat or Skype video, I’d be using my Mac even more, just to drop in and say hello without going anywhere. See the problem? My Mac plays movies and TV shows and music videos for me.

My surrogate Mac, in the form of my iPod and iPhone help me avoid the world and communicate with it at the same time.

The latest Mac surrogate is Apple TV, and once it adds a digital video recorder function, I have no doubt that I’ll be watching more television.

Is my mom’s suspicion for addiction justified? Since the amount of time I spend on my Mac has increased in recent years, at least somewhat in line with how much I ask my Mac to do, am I becoming addicted to my Mac? Or, is my Mac addicted to doing things for me and are we seeing the effects of I, Robot from a 10,0000 BC perspective?

Increasingly, I ask my Mac to control, manage, store and become more involved in my daily life, which has become heavily digital. How much worse will it be with iPhone 2.0 or 3.0 when my Mac’s soul truly resides in my iPhone?

How is your Mac life? Too much? Too little? Total addiction or mild infatuation?

I am putting together a CD (of various Web pages,downloadable programmes and, hopefully useful information), which will be distributed free of charge to about 1000 members of a fairly prestigious institute.

Most of these will be Windows (XP and, increasing Vista) users and the CD, which is primarily concerned with computer security, will be divided, so to speak, into issues which affect these users.

In the past, issues which have concerned Apple Mac users have simply been ‘tagged onto the end’ of Web pages which have Windows users (I am one myself) as their main focus.

However, I want to give Mac users their own space on the CD so that a Mac user browsing through the CD can see clearly which issues affect him. At the beginning of the CD, for instance, there will be three logos (Vista, XP and Mac) and the Mac user who clicks on that latter logo knows that everything in that section will be, or might be, of interest.

I do have a couple of problems, though. As a windows user I am not particularly aware of security issues which affect Macs (the focus will be on OS X machines). For instance, in my Windows sections, I will have links to download programmes such as Sophos, checking firewalls, how to disable file sharing, removing Norton and so on), but apart from a couple of programmes for Macs such as ‘MainMenu’ and ‘VigiMac’ (for stolen Macs), the information I have is quite scarce.

Any suggestions, therefore, from contributors here, would be welcome.

Thanks.

Steve

My first answer, after having used various beta versions of Firefox 3 the past few months, yeah, OK, so what? It’s fast, though not as fast as some recent beta versions of Safari. Firefox is certainly better looking and has more features than previous versions.

Better looking? If there’s a big complaint that many Mac users have with Firefox is that it’s not a Mac-like, chic, attractive web browser, and it’s user of font rendering is put to shame by Apple’s own Safari.

Firefox has always suffered from ‘that Windows look.’ I’m happy to report that Firefox 3 for Mac seems to have shed the legacy ‘Windows look’ and now feels more like, well, a blend of Safari and Camino (Firefox in Mac clothing). Toolbar buttons are rounded versions of Safari’s soft rounded rectangles.

Is there more? Not much. Everywhere else Firefox acts like, well, Firefox. Bookmarks are handled the same way, a clumsy and complex implementation of Safari’s bookmark elegance.

Buttons and features options are scattered everywhere in the bookmark area, though I admit that I like the backup and restore feature.

Extensions make Firefox a valuable web surfing tool, Mac or Windows, and so far, Firefox 3’s handling of my dozen or so extensions has been spotty. Three don’t work at all, another seems to cause a conflict somewhere when I use, but not when I don’t.

I can crash Firefox 3 any time I choose, just by loading a web page and then moving through the menu structure quickly. The beach ball of death begins to spin, and Firefox cascades into a pile of digital rubbish before crashing.

Firefox 3 still has the busiest interface this side of Windows Internet Explorer 6.x. There’s the Tool Bar, which actually looks good. Then the Menu Bar, which is fully self explanatory, and like Safari, extends itself if you have plenty of bookmarks in the bar (is there really anywhere else to put bookmarks?)

Below that are the Firefox extensions area, then tabs. The former of which can fill up quickly and create a very visually busy and complex Firefox UI. Tabs can be rearranged, ala Safari, though not as smooth with the drag and drop and rearrange.

My implementation of 1Password seems to work well, allowing Firefox to share the same login ID and password information as Safari and Camino, though password management in Firefox is also improved.

The feature list for the new version is extensive, though mostly evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. There’s more built-in malware protection, with an attempt to warn users when they land on a site on a restricted black list. SSL error pages are easier to understand.

The Star Button in the location bar makes it easier to add bookmarks with a single motion click. You can also add key words to your bookmarks and set up topics to sort bookmarks. Remember the term bloatware?

That said, I do like the new View Menu > Zoom feature, if anything because it kinda sorta replicates what Mac users already have with Control-scroll using a mouse. It’s nice, but the cursor doesn’t move the screen as Apple’s implementation does.

Firefox 3 also features add-on and plugin version checks, and will, thankfully, disable older versions. Add-ons have to provide updates in a secure manner. OS X’s spellchecker is now implemented-- it red underlines misspelled words and makes suggestions in the right-click context menu.

I’m hard pressed to see much about Firefox 3.0 that makes it a full point version above the current Firefox version, which has been very stable in my daily use. So, I have to ask myself, ’Do I really need another browser with more features than I can remember?‘

Still, a little competition for Safari and Internet Explorer is not a bad thing.

Finally, share with me and our readers why you use Firefox, why we need so many browsers, and which Mac browser is your favorite.

After all, according to our darling diva and Mac360 founderette, Tera Patricks, nothing improves without change. And that’s the problem. All to often change in and of itself is considered an improvement. It’s not always the case.

The iMovie scenario is merely one example. iMovie was a great little application that was so capable that Apple found iMovie up to version 6.x to be too daunting for most Mac users, certainly so for Windows switchers (I’m inserting my own guestimate here).

What Apple did was reverse the flow of software feature and function creep and go backwards, so to speak, and provide a capable new iMovie with fewer features but one that is, arguably, easier to use. If you want features, get FinalCut Express. If you want to make a decent movie right now, use iMovie in iLife ‘08 instead.

My premise is that most Mac software is on the road to becoming bloatware; software with so many features and functions that the product becomes difficult to use. Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop CS3 are two fine examples.

My unofficial survey indicates that about 90% of what most people use Office and Photoshop for can be done with Apple’s iWork and Photoshop Elements, each of which contains fewer features and functions, but both of which are highly usable and cost much less.

Mac software, while creative, functional, even elegant, by nature of the need to improve and add features, is becoming bloatware-- full of features but less usable.

This morning I received an email from a co-worker who asked me if I still had a copy of GraphicConverter 5.x. GC 6.x has been out awhile, and he had upgraded GraphicConverter to the newer version Sunday night, deleted the old GraphicConverter, and then needed to save a graphic file as a favicon.ico file (a Windows graphic file format which creates those little icons in your browsers URL window) and couldn’t figure out how to do it.

I sent him my old copy of GC, then downloaded the new version and tried to create a favicon.ico file. Sorry, I couldn’t do it. GC’s GUI has changed. Again. And not necessarily for the better. More features, changed user interface, less usability.

In other words, the combination of the new features and user interface changes made the application more complex, not easier to use. For me. How is it for those just downloading GraphicConverter and trying it out for the first time?

I installed GC 6.x on another co-worker’s Mac and said, ”OK, create a 16 by 16 pixel image and save it as a favicon.ico file.” Sorry, it couldn’t be done. There might be a way, but we haven’t figured it out yet. More features. More functions. Less usability. The new Save As… menu is easier because the selections are much fewer, whereas the old GC Save As… menu was long and listed every known file format.

Guess which one, the old or the new, is actually easier to use? In an attempt to squish more features into an easier to use interface, GC has become actually more difficult to use.

With a notable exception, that’s the way of the software world. Mac software is becoming, in general, bloatware. I can’t blame software developers because they’re part of the problem, not necessarily the cause of the problem. Software developers need to make money by increasing the value of their software.

Software users clamor for more features and are willing to pay more money for new upgrades provided the new feature set appears to be sufficiently valuable. The new features in a software upgrade may or may not make the software better, but it makes it more complex, and complexity is worth more money, right?

See the problem?

A notable exception in this trend is Apple itself, dancing precariously between adding features and making them actually easier to use. It’s a tough dance to keep up for very long. Mac software is becoming so complex that elegant, purpose-driven software sticks out like a sore thumb on a construction site.

Relative to Mac Office, iWork ‘08 is elegant and highly productive. Relative to Photoshop CS3, Photoshop Elements is easier, less expensive, has consumer-oriented features, yet is still a complex piece of software.

My favorite Mac applications of 2008 are those that do not try to do everything, but do what they do very well. Unfortunately, such software may be part of a dying breed.

A month ago, following January to March declines in the stock market, Apple’s ragged stock was officially named the crap stock of 2008. Now what?

What goes up, must come down, right? After all, Apple has helped make many people a little richer, healthier, and, recently, maybe a little more cautious as investor.

Am I the only one who thinks that it was just a few weeks ago that AAPL was languishing around in the mid-$20s? Today, I checked my Dashboard Stock Widget and got a healthy surprise.

AAPL was up another $2.80 and broke $175 a share, up from just $120 or so seemingly only weeks ago. In the past three months the Dow Jones Industrials have mostly flatlined, while AAPL shareholders took a bath, the bottom dropped out of the stock.

As of this week, Apple’s stock has once again risen from the ashes on the strength of, well, something. Rumors? The latest says Apple has ordered about 25-million 3G iPhones.

Yet another says Mac sales are continuing to grow 40-percent, year-over-year. Still another rumor says AT&T plans to subsidize 3G iPhone sales, dropping the price to $199 for buyers

Apple recorded another record quarter of financial performance with the year’s best quarters yet ahead. Do all those rumors have an effect on the company’s stock price?

Apparently so. Ever so quietly, with little fanfare, Apple’s stock price has climbed out of the doldrums of the $120s a share, up nearly 50 points, and within a month or so of the all time high, about $203 a share.

Why?

What is Apple doing today that it wasn’t doing three months ago when AAPL was in the dumper? The stock market is a fickle place, not for the faint of heart.

With the 3G iPhone introduction perhaps two months away, and the iPhone being launched in ever more countries with improved software and features, does $175 a share look like a bargain? If so, what does the disaster of $120 a share look like only a month ago?

Financially, Apple is hot, rolling in money, gaining market share, improving cash flow, and now, after a momentary catch-your-breath dip, the stock is hot again, too.

The question of the day is, ’Should you buy Apple stock now?’ If so, why? If not, why not?

My answer would be, ‘a little of everywhere’ or, ‘it depends.’ I shop at the Apple Store in Manhattan as it isn’t far from work.

I also shop at the Apple Store online, though not as much since there’s a store nearby. Not everyone in the U.S. has quick access to an Apple Store, and the same is more so for Europe, Asia, South America.

There are not many Apple Stores in the rest of the world, which is one reason why Apple’s online store is so popular. There’s a custom store for nearly every major country.

Has Apple’s online store and a nearby retail store changed your buying habits?

For example, I used to buy quite often from the Amazon Store. These days I buy fewer items than ever from Amazon, and when I do, it’s usually through the Mac360 Store, which is powered by Amazon.

Yesterday I revamped the Mac360 Store, added more categories, freshened the graphics a bit, cleaned up the links-- so it loads a little faster, is a bit easier to navigate.

As Apple has rolled out more and more Apple Stores throughout the U.S., we’ve noticed a steady decline in customer visits and sales to the Mac360 Store. I suspect the same is true of retailers who sell Apple products.

Why bother online when you can get the real stuff at the mall, visit a Genius Bar, and select from the latest Mac and Apple products?

We put up the Amazon powered Mac360 Store a couple of years ago to provide Mac users with an easy and attractive way to buy products through Amazon, and to make a few dollars to help offset our monthly server costs and bandwidth expenses.

We don’t get rich with the Mac360 Store. It probably averages $40 a month in total revenue for us, which is less than $1,000 in total sales through Amazon.

That’s not much, but not much effort is required to maintain the Store, either. Still, every little bit helps.

I would like to know what Mac360 readers would like to see in the Mac360 online store, and what we could do to make it more attractive, more accessible, and more beneficial. Have you shopped in the Store?

Do you shop online using the Amazon? If so, what do you usually purchase, and when? We’ve noticed more purchases in the months leading up to New Year’s than in spring or summer. What can we do to make the experience better for you?