March 31st, 2008
Is it just me, or is the button that adds an RSS feed to your Inbox in Mail.app really perplexing at first?
I’d prefer not to have my feeds show up in my inbox as I try to keep the inbox as empty as possible. Instead I just browse the feeds occasionally for interesting articles or news.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in UI Design | Comments »
March 30th, 2008
Right after I finished configuring and polishing my Wordpress installation, Wordpress go ahead and release Wordpress 2.5:
WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.
“The improvements in 2.5 are numerous” - Of course they are… I just spent all day yesterday setting up and configuring the old version. (Leo Laporte effect anyone?)
Anyway, the new interface looks great and upgrading was simple, so I’m not really complaining. Nice job Wordpress!
Posted in Wordpress | Comments »
March 29th, 2008
As you might have noticed, I’ve moved the blog over to Wordpress. There’s nothing wrong with Blogger, but I wanted to host the site on my own server and that was really simple with Wordpress. (The iPhone admin interface is also nice to have…)
(For those interested importing my posts from blogger to Wordpress was really simple: Wordpress includes an import feature and aside from one or two formatting issues everything was converted perfectly, I hope - let me know in the comments if you find anything odd!)
Posted in Wordpress | Comments »
March 21st, 2008
A relative of mine recently had a birthday and I wanted to send him a digital version of the Neko Case album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.
So I fire up iTunes, found the album and chose the “Gift this Album” option.
But when you read through the terms, it turns out you can only redeem gifted albums if you have an account within the country that the gift certificate was purchased. I live in Germany, but most of my relatives live in the UK. Now I can understand this limitation if it’s an item that isn’t available in the country of the recipient, but that doesn’t apply in this case.
In Europe, iTunes is pretty much the only game in town Amazon hasn’t launched their digital music service outside the US yet, so I had to go for a physical CD bought on Amazon.co.uk.
Not a big deal, but I do find it bizarre that something so trivial can be made so complicated. It’s time Apple launched a single pan-european iTunes store.
Posted in Opinions | Comments »
March 16th, 2008
Lots of Mac Developers who signed up for the iPhone SDK beta program received rejection notices this week, prompting outcry that resonated across the web that Apple intends only to let a selected few actually develop apps for the iPhone, contrary to what was implied at the introduction event.
But what hasn’t really been made clear is exactly what they were being rejected for: This is the program that grants some groups pre-release access to the 2.0 firmware and allows you to test your apps on the phone itself.
The problem is partly Apple’s own fault: The way they presented the SDK as “available immediately” sends the wrong message: In fact the SDK is available now, but they won’t let developers release apps or run them on their phones until June.
What kind of SDK doesn’t allow you to actually run the apps on the target platform?
The fact that such an integral part of the SDK isn’t available until June effectively means that the SDK isn’t available until June. Of course announcing a delayed SDK wouldn’t be very Apple-like at all, hence the beta program announcement and releasing the XCode part now.
I think Steve’s a victim of his own RDF this time.
P.S. Update: Besides - a little birdie told me that not everyone was rejected… 
Posted in iPhone | Comments »
March 13th, 2008
There seem to be 2 camps of opinion as to why the SDK wasn’t released until almost a year after the iPhone’s release:
I tend to agree somewhat with camp b), but I also think that another factor might have been relevant as well: Thanks to the “development via webapps” farce that Jobs presented last year at WWDC, the iPhone has more websites optimized for its user interface than any other mobile device available.As iPhone-optimized websites seemed to be the only way to achieve any sort of interaction with iPhone users, not only can those users they access the “real internet”, but they can actually use a “version” of the internet custom-designed for them.
Whilst some people have derided iPhone-optimized websites as missing the point of MobileSafari being able to render “real” webpages, I personally love their simplicity and they’re perfect for getting things done whilst on the go. Would all that effort have been made if developers went after the real prize, namely nabbing the native iPhone app market? I doubt it.
Getting developers to focus on the boring task of optimizing websites would be impossible with the shiny, exciting iPhone SDK occupying their time.Did the SDK need time so Apple could add some spit, polish and padlocks? Undoubtedly, but I believe the quality of the user experience while browsing the web on the iPhone is much better for that delay. Was the delay intentional? I wouldn’t go that far… but it certainly didn’t hurt the platform as a whole.
Posted in iPhone | Comments »
March 12th, 2008
I just noticed a neat little feature on the iPhone I hadn’t seen elsewhere before:
If you manually dial a number, the iPhone will notice if it matches a number stored for one or more of your existing contacts and displays the name(s) at the top of the screen.
It also disables the “add to contacts” button, to prevent you ending up with duplicate contacts.
Not really groundbreaking, but indicative of the attention to deal found in every nook and cranny of Mobile OS X.
(Note: For some reason the video preview looks weird, but it plays fine once you start it..)
Posted in iPhone | Comments »
March 9th, 2008
The alarm clock feature on iPods is hardly ever mentioned, but it’s one of the features I’ve actually come to really rely on: Normal alarm clocks just annoy me and I just switch them off and roll back into deep sleep.
The iPod’s alarm feature lets me set an alarm that starts playing a playlist of tracks about 10 minutes before I need to get up… That slowly wakes me up and by the time I need to actually be up, it’s not such a struggle any more.
The alarm clock on the iPhone has the same basic features as the iPod’s alarm, but with one caveat: You can only set ringtones as your alarm sound. There’s no option to pick a playlist.So I’d like to humbly request a playlist alarm clock from all of you clever iPhone app authors out there..
Posted in iPhone | 1 Comment »
March 9th, 2008
Here’s a quote from an email I just received from tribe.net (for those of you that don’t know Tribe, it’s basically your run-of-the-mill social network, except none of your friends are there):
“We hope you excuse this mass mailing. Some of you getting this email specifically have told us that you don’t want email from tribe.net and we generally don’t send out emails to the entire userbase. We wanted to let you know about the big changes that have happened here at tribe.net, and if you haven’t checked in with us in a while we encourage you to do so.”
Bullshit translator:“Hi! We’re sending you spam, despite promising not to any more”.
So what’s this important news they’ve got to tell everyone, even people that have unsubscribed?
“We’ve listened to our users for solutions to our site instability problems. The overwhelming consensus is that our users love tribe.net so much that they are willing to pay for a premium subscription for all the functions that we now give to you.”
Bullshit translator:“We don’t have any money and Google won’t buy us… can we have some of yours?”
So shilling a new subscription model is so important that Tribe needs to tell users who have specifically told them they’re not interested? Bravo guys, now I really feel like giving your my money and more personal information…
Posted in The web | Comments »
March 7th, 2008
Yesterday’s iPhone SDK announcement is great news for all Mac developers and a huge opportunity for Apple to establish the iPhone platform as a real alternative to Windows Mobile, as well as Symbian and Blackberry devices. But what caught my attention was the mention of Cisco IPSec VPN support in the upcoming firmware update.
That’s great news for University students as a lot of university’s require you to log on to their VPN network if you want to use a wireless access point. And the majority of institutions use Cisco’s VPN implementation. So come June I’ll hopefully have full WLAN access at home, work and now University as well. A great move by Apple…
Posted in iPhone | Comments »
