The Aspire One is not a multimedia powerhouse, but my primary use for it is to take it to school and work with me as an alternative to lugging my Macbook Pro around.  However, it isn’t my primary machine, which brings up the issue of how do I keep my data together without having to swap files around on a flash drive or something?  Most of these apps I use the most address this issue.

Calaboration

Calaboration is a tool to synchronize your Google Calendar with iCal.  I have struggled for quite some time to find an easy and efficient way to migrate my iCal to Google Calendar without much success.  However, Google recently released this tool and it led me to move my calendar off of my computer and into the cloud.  Now, I can easily sync any of my Macs with Google Calendar as well as my phone.

Crossover Mac

This is an evolution of Crossover Office, a commercial WINE application.  This allows you to natively run Windows applications without rebooting to Windows or running a virtual machine.  This is important as the Atom processor in the Aspire One does not support the Intel VT technology, which makes virtual machines speedy enough to be close to native speed.  Aka, it would be dog slow to run a VM on an Atom processor.  So, this allows you to individually install supported applications such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Quickbooks, and other non-supported applications many times may work.  I got a free copy when they gave them away in the fall, but the package normally costs $40.

Dropbox

Oh, how I love Dropbox.  Dropbox is an application that allows you to sync files and folders between computers with ease.  Basically, it creates a dropbox folder on your system, and you can create folders within and files all as if it’s on your computer, which it is.  However, Dropbox also syncs it with their servers and even creates revisions, not only keeping your changes up to date, but old revisions should you need to go back to them.  Sync with another computer, and the files are once again stored as local data, only to be synced when updated.  Even better, you can share folders and files with other people which has become critically important for collaborating in one of my classes.  Oh, and did I mention it works on Linux and Windows too?

Evernote

Evernote is your new best friend if you are working on projects.  It is one of the best GTD (getting things done) applications because of its flexibility.  It is an application that can capture images, web pages, documents, and just plain text notes into a notebook and make it all searchable.  You can organize notes into diferent tags and categories for different projects.  Best of all, it syncs with the Evernote server so, like Dropbox, all of your notes are available and searchable if you log into the Evernote website!  And of course, you can sync it with multiple computers; not just Macs, PCs, iPhones, Windows Mobiles, and more are invited to the note syncing party.

Automator

Wait a sec, that last thing is called Mount Music?  Well, it’s basically an Automator workflow I put together to, with the click of a button, log into my windows server, mount the music share, and allow me to fire up iTunes right away.  Automator looks scary at first, but it uses a pretty basic language structure to allow you to create a workflow with no programming experience required.  If you want to demonstrate an activity you want to automate, you can even just click the record button from the workflow menu and your Mac will watch you do something and be able to replicate that task with the push of a button.  It may not seem too useful but once you begin to play around with what you can automate, it can definitely make mundane tasks much easier.