For these users, as long as you’re using Leopard (at least version 10.5.3) you can use a Google account for free on your Mac and your iOS Device. To configure this, you can just open Address Book, go to Preferences, then check the box labeled “Synchronize with Google.” After signing in with your gmail (or Google Apps) account, your address book should start to sync with Google. This method is significantly slower than iCloud, in my experience.

For iCal, you can do basically the exact same thing. MacWorld posted a good roundup of the best ways to get Google to sync reliably with iCal. Read their article here.

Dropbox integrates well with your iPhone, iPad, Mac and PC. After signing up for a free account here, download the app to your computer. Dropbox makes  folder in your home folder called, “Dropbox.” Everything you put in that folder syncs up to a server, which is accessible via the Dropbox app on your other devices.

Inside your Dropbox folder are two folders that have extra features. One is Public, and another is Photos. When you put a folder of images in the Photos folder, you are able to copy a “Gallery” link, which you can share with friends and family. Step by step instructions on using Dropbox as a Gallery are available here.

The Public folder also lets you copy links to specific files. Recently, I wrote a blog entry about using the public folder to email large files. Read that here. Read about the Public folder on dropbox’s site here.

Between the instantly synced storage space, the galleries and the ability to share download links, Dropbox has emerged as a wonderful way to get back the functionality that iDisk is taking with it when it goes away on June 30th.

Jeff Battersby, on the MacWorld site, wrote up a wonderful step by step set of instructions on transitioning your iWeb page over to Dropbox.

To follow his steps, you’ll need a free Dropbox account, available here.

1. Do I already have the Flashback Trojan? and if so, How do I remove it?

Probably not.

You can run a set of terminal commands to check (and you can find a good step by step on how to do that here), OR you can run Software Update. If Apple’s Software Update says your software is up to date, then you don’t have the flashback trojan. Apple has pushed two Java updates in the last two updates specifically removing the trojan and patching the security hole that Flashback took advantage of. Run your software updates.

2. How can I protect myself from future threats?

Run antivirus software. There are plenty of choices, and having these installed on your Mac would have prevented Flashback in the first place (the trojan actually looked for some of these on your hard drive, and if it found them, aborted its install!).

•Little Snitch – This program is awesome. It tells you what programs on your computer are accessing the internet.

•Avast Free Edition for Mac – Avast has a good, free Windows antivirus as well. The Mac version is in beta, but it does the trick.

Those are two of my favorite in the anti-virus market. I can’t say how useful Little Snitch can be. I’ve used it many times when customers had really slow internet connections, to show them how many different programs they were using that accessed the internet.

In addition to Anti-virus software, there are a couple of “best practices” for not getting viruses on your computer.

•Don’t use your computer as an administrator.

•Set a separate user account password and keychain password

There are some great “best practices” at MacWorld’s Protect Your Mac page. Follow them.

Since the advent of contact syncing across computers and devices, the bane of users existence has been duplications and inconsistencies with contact data. Some address book services, such as Gmail’s contacts, have “Find Duplicates” and Merge card entries.

In Lion, Apple’s current Mac operating system, Apple has added two new commands to Address Book. In the Card menu, there is a “Look for Duplicates” command, which searches through your address book and tries to find duplication, and a “Merge Selected Cards” command, which combines the contact data from multiple cards into one card.

To do this, you need to install dropbox on your computer. Dropbox adds a folder to your Mac’s home folder that automatically uploads anything you store in it. So when I add any file to my dropbox folder on my Mac, that file is available to me via dropbox.com, or the dropbox app on my iPhone or iPad, as well as the Dropbox folder on a second Mac.

When dropbox is first installed, it contains two folders, Public and Photos. The Public folder is where a file needs to be added in order to send someone a download link. If you want to send a set of pictures or a group of files, make sure they’re all in the same folder, then control-click or right-click on the folder and select Archive. Once you have a “.zip” file, put it in that Public folder within your dropbox.

Now, just control-click or right-click on the archive file, and using the Dropbox drop-down menu select “Copy Public Link”

Now, just paste that link into an email to the person you want to send the file to, and you’re all done!

The easiest method is the built -in setup assistant on your new Mac. You’ll start up the new Mac, enter your name, AppleID, and address, then your new Mac will ask if you want to transfer everything from an existing Mac. Just say yes. It feels so good.

Your new Mac and your old Mac will need to be on the same network, either via Wi-Fi or (preferably) wired ethernet connection. On the old Mac, you’ll need to open Migration Assistant and enter your password. The new Mac will handle all the “heavy lifting.” Depending on the amount of data and the method of transfer, your migration will take anywhere from 1-2 hours up through 12 hours and possibly even longer.

When the migration is done, the new Mac will prompt you to click continue. Then, you should be able to log in using the username and password from your old Mac. One thing to keep in mind is that for security purposes, the new Mac will need you to enter your stored passwords. The computer will prompt you for these each time it needs one.

After entering your passwords, your new Mac should work and feel just like your old one!

The one thing these internet services have never been great at is storing large amounts of data. A user’s pictures or music folder typically takes up the majority of the space on their hard drive, and until iTunes Match, there was not really a decent way to move it to the internet. Until iTunes Match.

Signing up for iTunes Match is easy, you just buy it with your iTunes store Apple ID. Once you sign up and turn it on in your library, iTunes Match compares your music, stored on your hard drive, to what’s available in the iTunes Store. Everything that you have that’s for sale in the iTunes Store becomes available to you across all your devices immediately. Then, for the songs that you have on your hard drive that aren’t already in the iTunes Store, iTunes Match uploads those songs to Apple’s server so the songs are available to you on your devices.

This is what it looks like while iTunes Match is matching your songs to the Store

The uploading and matching takes a while. For my library, with 85 GBs of music and a theoretical 10MBps upload speed, it took about 6 hours to finish. iTunes had a vast majority of my 85 GBs of music in the iTunes Store, so the actual upload was significantly less than the full 85 gigs.

Once the music is all uploaded or matched, using iTunes Match is a breeze. I use an iMac (where the full library is), a MacBook Pro, an iPad and an iPhone. After the upload finished, i turned on iTunes Match on my MacBook Pro, and I quickly was able to see all my music from my iMac. There was a handful of music on my MacBook Pro, but for all the rest of the music, I now see an iCloud icon next to the song name, telling me that when I play that song, it will stream from the iCloud server.

The cloud icon means those songs are stored in iCloud, and will stream when they are played. Clicking the cloud saves that song to the device, so they will be available offline. The songs without a cloud are already on this device.

Clicking the cloud icon downloads those songs to the device, so they will be available to listen to when no internet connection is available.

On an iPhone, iTunes Match works the same way. The cloud icon shows I can play any of those songs, or if I press it, download them.

In this picture, the album "The Whole Love" is already on my iPhone, the rest are available via iCloud.

So, what is iTunes Match? Well, after using iTunes Match for a week, I can say iTunes Match is the easiest, most intuitive system for me to listen to ANY of my music on any of my Apple devices. With no configuration, network, port numbers, or anything like that, I’m able to stream all 85 gigabytes of my music anywhere I go.

Now, all Apple needs to do is make it easier for me to decide what to listen to!

With Safari 5.1, Adobe Reader stopped working without warning. Users were acclimated to clicking a PDF link and seeing it within Adobe Reader in their browser, instead were faced with errors, and finally after a second update from Apple, the original Preview engine.

Last week, a client needed to be able to fill out online forms, and wanted my help getting Adobe Reader working again. In order to do this, we had to downgrade the Safari installation from 5.1 to 5.0. Enter Pacifist, a wonderful piece of software from CharlesSoft. With Pacifist, the Safari 5.0 installer, and the Adobe Reader installer, you can restore Adobe Reader functionality to Safari.

In order to perform the installation, launch Pacifist, then click “Open Package…” then find the Safari installer file (you may need to double click the safari DMG file if it’s not showing as one of your connected disks). In the Pacifist window, select Safari, then click the top left button, “Install.”

The most important note for downgrading your version of Safari is that you need to click “replace” at every opportunity for Pacifist to correctly get all of Safari to work. When it’s done, just install Adobe Reader again, and all should be well. Unfortunately for us 10.7 users, this fix only works in Snow Leopard.

If you’re looking for a movie to see this weekend with family, look no further than The Muppets. Since I was young, I loved The (original) Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan. The new film The Muppets absolutely fits in with those three as a fun, cheeky Muppets classic.

Here’s the trailer, which I’ve watched two or three times since seeing the film, just to enjoy some of the jokes again.

Watch this video on YouTube.