My Powerbook G4 blew up (again)

My Powerbook G4 blew up when I attempted to install the latest update to 10.6.  The good news is that the HD is OK,  Better, I use Time Machine so my files are backed up.  The bad news is that I misplaced my Leopard disk and it looks like I will have to buy a new one later today just to restore.  Also, until I actually see my files restored I feel sort of sick to my stomach.

This problem is forcing me to think though something I have been considering for a while - do I really need my laptop?

I have G5 desktop at home (my kid's machine).  I have an iPhone.  I have MobileMe/iDisk.  So, the question becomes: "What do I miss about not having my laptop?"  Put another way, I want to determine how efficiently I can work with just an iPhone, iDisk and access to OPCs (other people's computers).  At some point I may even have to re-evaluate iDisk but I just re-upped for another year so it stays for now.

Having thought about this ever since I got my 2G iPhone (I have a 3G now), I can already say that not having a keyboard means that I am going to need access to a PC in order to produce any longer documents that requiring a lot of keyboarding.  That the iPhone does not support cut/paste will also cause problems as will the inability to multi-task.  Still, with these limitations can I make this work well for me?

• MS Office: The most obvious issue is office productivity applications: word processor, spreadsheet and powerpoint.  This is not such a big deal since there is Zoho and Google (and others).

• Mail is another big one.  I have already moved my mail accounts to IMAP so they can be readily accessed on different computers and, of course, I can login to mail via a web browser.  The problem is that I do not like accessing email via a web browser but I will have to get used to it under this new regime.  Plus, it works well this way with my iPhone which is my preferred way to READ most email.  For longer emails on my iPhone I can use EasyWriter which allows me to use the landscape keyboard.  There is also Tap4Me (iTunes store) , a snippet expander which allows me to import from Tap4Me or Text Expander.  I am also going to look at Wide Email (iTunes store) which has the snippets in an app that allows typing emails and twitters in landscape mode.

• Instant Messaging is not as important to me as it once way due to Twitter and SMS texting but I still use it. Fortunately, there is BeeJive on my iPhone which should work although the service they offer where IMs sent when I am not on BeeJive (almost all the time) get pushed to the iPhone as alerts has not been reliable for me.

• Twitter is a problem and not a problem.  It is a problem because I love TweetDeck and that means Adobe Air and I cannot rely on always getting Adobe Air on OPCs and certainly not TweetDeck.  On my iPhone I have Twitterlator (iTunes Store) which is very good because I have multiple Twitter accounts and can monitor discussions via hashtag searches and create groups.  Still, I like having the TweetDeck columns in front of me.  A major way around this is that I have set up a combination of FriendFeed, Delicious, Newsgator, Yahoo Pipes and TwitterFeed to deliver Tweets automatically across multiple accounts when I take certain actions I take anyway (like bookmarking with delicious or dropping an RSS item into a clip folder on newsgator.  I can enter tweets directly into Twitterlator but even better I can speak them into Jott.  As noted above Wide Email also supports Twitter.

• Evernote is a huge help here.  I can easily send or clip web sites, images, scans and many other things into Evernote.  This is great for business cards.  I also use Evernote to collect "How To" pages from various web sites for protocols I may need to use to fix problems.

• Blogging on MarsEdit is great but it is stand alone client and  I will only be able to use this on my kid's PC when I am home.  A revelation to me was being able to post to my blog via Google Docs which I am doing here.  Between Google Docs and iBlogger (iTunes Store) on my iPhone I may be OK here.  I am also interested in a way to have links from Delicious automatically post to my Drupal sites as can be done with WordPress.  This would give me a post a day without having to actually open a blog editor.  There is a FeedAPI that might work.
• Music and podcasts.  I like to listen to music while I work and I also have some regular podcasts that I like.  Long ago I ripped my large collection of CDs so I have about 10,000 songs (or phonograms, a word I learned monitoring the Pirate Bay trial).  This is about 40 GB so it needs to be stored somewhere and paying for server space in the cloud seems like an expensive proposition, plus I want to sync my songs to my iPhone plus my family members have their own iphones/ipods and want to sync from this library as well.  The good news is that on the iPhone there are a ton of ways to listen to music including Simplify which allows me to stream my music from my iTunes library to my iPhone.  Pandora is also great.  The new RSSPlayer app is still a work in progress but I prefer this app over getting podcasts via the iTunes Store app on my iPhone because I can store a favorites list and update them all with with one push of a button.
• 1Password.  I really like this app and have it on my iPhone.  I see no alternative to having this app on my kid's mac and then syncing bookmarks via MobileMe.
  

Let me stop here.  At this point the Apple store in White Plains is open so I need to run over and buy another copy of Leopard.  Darn it!