TIP: Faster VMWare on OSX

Since using OSX and VMWare Fusion I've been looking for ways to improve performance. Using my MBP with 4GB of RAM is not at all a bad thing ;-), but when developing in Visual Studio (especially 2008) under Windows (especially Vista) within a virtual machine, I did experience glitches in performance. Using Activity Monitor on OSX I figured out that, what was causing the glitches, was disk activity. The MBP sports a 7200rpm drive, but it still is the bottleneck.

Now for the tip: Use an external drive (the fastest one you can get, i use a LaCie 1TB 7200rpm USB2 drive) to store your VM's.

Running a VM from a different drive dramatically boosts performance of the VM, as OSX's drive intensive virtual memory management won't conflict with Windows'. 

Currently i use the afore mentioned LaCie drive, but as it consists of 2 (noisy) 3.5" drives, I think I need to invest in (quite) a fast 1.8" or 2.5" external drive.

PS. Do upgrade to the latest version of VMWare fusion! Version 2.0.1 solves the often seen memory corruption and finally works well with Vista x64!

Using Google Apps with OSX and an iPhone

I'm not someone who likes promoting products that is not Open Source or at least free, but since using SpanningSync - costing a mere $25,00 a year - I'm really enthousiastic about the product. It just works and is invisibe ...

My scenario is somewhat different than that of most other iPhone users. I own 2 SIM cards, 1 Dutch with unlimited data traffic and 1 Italian prepaid without 3G options. As i currently live in Italy, using the Dutch SIM to access the internet would be costly, so I'm restricted to using WIFI whenever and wherever i can. Not being constantly online with my iPhone makes syncing the iPhone with Google Apps hard. I've tried the free NuevaSync, but i've noticed that i forget syncing regularly.

Using SpanningSync is transparent. It installs on OSX, syncs iCal with Google Calendar and Address Book with your Google contacts so that i can sync with my iPhone via iTunes. This way, when syncing my podcasts, music etc. i automatically sync my iPhones calendar and address book to 2-way with Google Apps. Having GMail configured on the iPhone as well, makes working with Google Apps a seemless experience.

As a bonus-tip that will further improve your Google Apps experience on OSX: Install Google Notifier for Mac and Reader Notifier and you're good to go!