At Tekserve over on 23rd Street in Manhattan, while waiting for my own MacBook repair, hordes of seemingly “ancient” Apple machines seem to stare at me.

There’s at least fifty of them it seems, spread out side by side on a sizeable wall-to-wall file cabinet waiting for repair.

Think a couple of ailing Macintosh Plus and Macintosh II machines. (Is that possible? They date back to the mid-eighties), plus Quadra 610s, an LC 55, and plenty of the (relatively) newer eMacs and iMacs Flat Panels.

All in, picture the robot warehouse scene from “I, Robot”. These Macs lined up in front of me look similarly alive inside, just intelligent enough to keep still and quiet, probably wise from age.

I am actually still a fairly new member to the Apple “universe”, and not sure what took me so long.

We only recently traded in our Dell machines for a slick(er) MacBook and a MacBook Pro.

Add to that an iPod Touch, a Shuffle, plus an Apple TV STB. (The design alone, I couldn’t resist).

Of course, with iTunes on top, everything integrates exceptionally well, making the user experience as good as advertised.

So, as I am staring at this mass of last-gen and older Macs, clearly their respective owners seem to have held long-lasting emotional bonds to each one of them. 

Almost like a pet hospital, each one of these Macs seems to have a name, had experienced disappointment (an occasional OS crash), and physical injury (cracks from something smashing into the monitor).

In yet another attempt further personalize the Apple experience, there is all these stickers on the side of these Macs. From what I can see, one is promoting world peace (I agree) , another a local pizza place (sure), and a rock band I never heard of in my life.

Clearly a CE marketer’s dream of permanent brand appeal.

Is that how I will soon cling on to my own Apple devices as we jointly age?

While my Tekserve customer service agent is working hard on my particular MacBook “emergency”, I am getting MBA marketing class flash backs; start thinking of J. Gutman’s “means-end-chain” model and how it says our personal purchasing decisions ultimately are driven by a particular emotional need, a visceral bond between yourself and product strong and lasting enough to have you actually expend money.

Clearly, Apple’s done it And they seem poised to carry their lead for time to come.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who keep their ice cube trays filled and those who don’t. (Remember when there were ice cube trays in most freezers?)

So maybe I should update that: are two kinds of people in the world: those who keep their email inbox empty and those who don’t – and I have to admit I’m in the latter demographic.

There, I said it. While my desktops (both physical and digital) are pretty clean (and I like to think that I’m right up there as far as productivity goes), my Yahoo account goes back well into the last century, and my mostly unkempt inbox now has over 9000 emails in it. I know, not exactly best practices – but Yahoo’s recently moved to no limitations on email data storage size, and I’m taking Mr. Yang at his word (and I’ve had clients – Exchange Breakers, I used to call them – with several times that amount of messages in their inboxes).

What made such bad behavior possible was my profound dependence on email search. Since I’m not populating subfolders, I *need* my search functionality – and for several months now, (along with a fair number of other Yahoo users) my email search is broken, only returning matches from the last three weeks or so.

I’ve Googled it – it turns out there are a lot of us out there but not enough to be news-worthy. I’ve sent forms and chats to Yahoo support – I’ve only gotten the generic “this is a known issue, we’ve escalated it” response. If I were paranoid blogger (and I hear that can be a problem out there on these here internets), I could almost convince myself Yahoo is attempting to ‘encourage’ users like me to keep less of our data laying around cluttering up their data centers – but no, I think it’s just another example of the potential downside of having one’s data up the cloud: outages. While what’s happening to me isn’t as scary (or evidently news-worthy) as what happened recently to some Apple MobileMe early adopters (in which the emails were actually lost ).

Cloud computing: collaboration, portability, workstation platform flexibility, lower server and backup costs – a free lunch. That is, until there are host-side issues up there in that cloud. Then the feeling of comfort from having someone in cloud responsible for your data can turn intoa pretty uncomfortable feeling of helplessness, especially when (unlike the Google Apps and Apple MobileMe situations) the issue is not widespread enough to garner media attention and goes unresolved for months.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten pretty acquainted with that <next> button, having hit it hundreds of times now to page through 9 years’ worth of emails.

Yahoo, thou art bumming me out. Waaah.

It’s a world of translucent shiny semi-transparent user interfaces (“What’s the difference between Web 2.0 and 1.0? – rounded corners!” …ha…)

Still, there’s one tool from the developer-world that’s so effective, so useful – and so ugly – that not enough users know about it. Total Commander is a shareware file management utility – in other words, a Windows Explorer replacement. Back in the day (and we’re talking a long time ago here), there were several such tools out there to improve on DOS file management. Then Windows Explorer came in with Windows 95, and for the average user, the need for these tools faded. But developers and other old-school type folks (such as myself) kept using Total Commander, so it’s kept going, adding features and supporting all subsequent Windows Operating Systems.

The first thing you’ll notice about Total Commander (and the other older ‘Commander’-style apps such as Norton Commander) is that there are two windows side-by-side – a ‘source’ pane and a ‘destination’ pane. These windows can have multiple tabs (which turns out to be every bit as nice a feature managing files as it is browsing websites). Working back and forth between the two panes, all the obvious file tasks can be done – but Total Commander can do so much more:

• A solid, fast FTP client (the best I’ve used), available directly from within the same Total Commander window you’re managing local files in.
• Transparent access to all networked resources (including non-mapped drives) – conceptually, Total Commander integrates the user’s Network Places into the local window structure (which is as cool as it sounds).
• Packing and unpacking in all popular (and a few not-so-popular) archiving formats, again right within the Total Commander window.
• Folder Synchronization – (really nice for ad hoc backup folders on other drives).
• Multiple File renaming (via rules or in a text editor).
• File comparison (not by name, by the actual contents – the actual 0’s and 1’s).
• File View (in Hex/Binary/Text).
• Search for duplicate files (again, by the actual bits).

I am by no means a power user – for me, what I love about Total Commander are the window tabs, the excellent onboard FTP client directly available from within the 2 Total Commander windows, and the archive functionality. For software or web developers (or anyone who does repetitive file management tasks), the deeply flexible configuration and hot key implementation might be the main sell – but if that’s not enough, there’s also a built-in command line interpreter, and there are plug-ins for almost anything you could imagine: creating ISO images, burning discs, creating AVI files from graphics files, using HTTP and POP, and much more – all within the window (it’s the polar opposite of interface-crazy software such as Nero).

In fact, my only frustration with Total Commander is that I know that there’s some much more functionality and productivity there than I’ve had the time to explore…

So feel free to submit your tips!

Total Commander – it’s not pretty. But it’s powerful, good, solid, non-bloated software.

And isn’t that refreshing?