I like how most of the other clients minimize to the menu bar instead of the Dock; Beak does not. Also, while Beak supports multiple accounts, it doesn’t appear to do so simultaneously. You have to log out of one account to log into the other.

But, Beak’s beta is all of a few hours old. Things can and will be changed, so let’s hope that some of these early issues are addressed.  In the meantime, check out the public beta at http://beakapp.com.

Also, don’t forget to follow me at twitter.com/bigdaddyk!

Interestingly, this has presented a fairly ironic solution:  open source.  Ironic because my switch to Mac – a traditionally closed world – has “opened” my eyes to all of the great free software available today.  I have found a great wealth of apps to solve nearly every problem I’ve run across with my Mac.

Who needs to spend hundreds to write a few letters?  Instead of shelling out a bunch of bucks on Microsoft Office for the Mac, I found NeoOffice.  It’s basically a front-end for OpenOffice, the free office suite champ.  It worked okay, but was a bit rough around the edges.

Well, OpenOffice itself has been upgraded to version 3.0 and now is native to OS X.  I tried it out for about eight minutes this afternoon and immediately threw out NeoOffice.  OpenOffice is faster, has more features (and programs), and just plain-out looks nicer.

If you’re a NeoOffice user, I strongly encourage you to download OpenOffice today.  It’s well worth the price!  =)

I would have liked to have seen a bump in processor speed and maybe 4GB standard.  The quad-core Penryn would have been extra sweet.  The memory thing is just a rip-off:  I bought 4GB of memory for my MBP last month for $80.  Yes, $80!  Apple wanted to charge me $180 to go from 2GB to 4GB.  And they charge $400 for that same 4GB kit!

I guess I think that the “Pro” line should push things a bit more.  Get a super-fast CPU and tons of memory to pair up with the admittedly ingenius video subsystem.  Charge a butt-load because you’re Apple.  But make it COOL!

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining!  The value of my month-old laptop is still very high and it makes the sweet price I got all that much better.

After downloading the free app and playing with a few settings, I decided that I should also download the desktop version. I figures that I would at least give me an easier way to input the data.

Both versions seem to offer a wealth of input options and before long, I had learned to use the Import from Firefix feature. Simply amazing. It took my entire Keychain and parsed it into useable data in 1Password.

I synced wirelessly with my iPhone in no time at all and was thrilled. Cool stuff, indeed. So cool, in fact, I decided that it was worth an hour or so of my time to input everything from my wallet.

It was after doing so that I found the iPhone app apparently does not have a Wallet section. Odd, I thought, but I guessed that was just to keepthe app free for now.

I noticed, too, that I had a couple of dulicates. No big deal, I’ll just delete them. Problem: the duplicates didn’t show on the desktop app and I couldn’t figure out how to remove unwanted entries from the iPhone app directly.

It was at this point that I realized that there was extra button on the bottom – Wallet. Cool! Weird that it just showed up, but cool that all of my info was there!

Still trying to remove those duplicates, I deleted all the info for one of the entries to see if it would be removed. It wasn’t; instead, there was a blank entry listed. Well, while I was in the app, I decided to remove the Master Password protection (an extra, stronger password for extra sensative items like debit card numbers) from a few website logins.

The iPhone app crashed. Hard. After relaunching, I put in my four digit code only to see all if the pretty icons on my (Customized, finally) Springboard.

It crashes every time I put in the code now. No passwords, no logins, no wallet, no 1Password.

A trip to the support forum showed that the developed, Agile Web Solutions, knows about the problem and has even FIXED it… but that fix is stuck in the whole Apple approval red tape.

I, and countless others, have to wait until Apple approves the update for an app that it already has approved! Until then, 1Password’s rating slides because people review it as worthless when it crashes.

The App Store needs a few tweaks and one if them is definitely the update process. As ridiculous as the whole approval thing is, I can at least understand the motivation behind it. Apple doesn’t want junk in there crashing iPhones and dirtying their image. But why does an UPDATE to a previously approved product have to take a week or two to be approved???

The only exception that I know of so far was the game Aurora Feint. It was pulled from the store altogether after it was discovered to be sending all of your contacts unencrypted over the web! A fix was released immediated and it was reinstated. Why was it fast-tracked? How was it approved in the first place?

And why can’t ALL updates be that quick?!?

I’m bummed. 1Password is exactly what I was looking for but it appears as though the update feature in the App Store is going to cause me to do without for a while. Back to saving everything in Notes, I guess!

The service took the better part of a day to get setup correctly.  After getting my contacts perfect on my iPhone, I synced them to Address Book on the Mac only to find out that the format was slightly different on the two devices.  I spent a fair amount of time editing contants for companies, for example, to “file” correctly.

Then, thinking that everything was going to align perfectly again, I synced with MobileMe…only to find that the format was just a bit different again.  Arrggg!  My APPLE Mac, my APPLE iPhone, and my APPLE MobileMe service all have different formats for contact information?!?  Come on, now!  Seriously.

The fun didn’t stop there.  I got all of the APPLE products looking nice and then (bravely) decided to bring Microsoft’s tools into the mix.  You guessed it!

This is why it took so long to get my contacts groomed.  All 504 of them (down from 628 after removing duplicates, etc.).  I played that game a few times until everything was perfect.  I won’t even tell you how much of a hassle syncing the calendars was!

But, for all of that pain in the butt configuration, MobileMe has turned out to be exactly what I was looking for.  My email, contacts, and calendars (all four of them) are all perfectly synced and available where ever I’m at – on my Windows Vista laptop, my Mac Mini, my iPhone, and even on the web.  Nirvana does exist!

Don’t get me wrong, I still have some problems, but I’ve learned to live with them.  For example, if I read several messages on my iPhone and delete them, they may pop back up a minute or two later.  A simple tap of the Refresh button trashes them again – and for good this time.  I shouldn’t have to do that, but it seems a small price to pay to be able to use all of the great Mac apps like Mail.app and iCal and still have the ability to use my laptop to read filed emails.

Let’s hope Apple continues to work on MobileMe to make it more consistent and reliable.  Otherwise, “Exchange for the rest of us” is going to look more like Microsoft Bob….