Stilgherrian » apple

Links for 15 August 2008 through 16 August 2008

del.icio.us — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 01:45:09 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 15 August 2008 through 16 August 2008:

iUSBCam | Ecamm Network: Software to make a USB camera work with Mac OS X as a webcam, not just Firewire cameras or the built-in iSight. I haven’t tried it yet.
Down for everyone or just me?: Sick of people asking you whether some website is “down” for you as well? Point them here.
CNN: Is Obama the Anti-Christ? | YouTube: A CNN compilation of US news reports speculating that US presidential candidate Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ. The proof? That there are 900,000 Google search results for “obama anti-christ”. And this makes it 900,001. Idiots.
Oz-IA/2008: Australia’s Information Architecture conference, to be held in Sydney on the weekend of 20-21 September. I’ve been invited to go and do some live stuff. Should I?
What’s Behind the iPhone 3G Glitches | BusinessWeek: A discussion of possible causes behind complaints of dropped calls and choppy Internet connections… and of course Apple’s usual denial of any problem and no further comment.
The Unclutterer Workspaces Pool | Flickr: A group pool of folks showing off their elegantly uncluttered workspaces. My desk cannot appear here.

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Immobilised by Apple’s MobileMe

Stilgherrian — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:32:17 +0000

[This article was first published in Crikey yesterday. As I write this, the affected MobileMe customers are still without email.]

As the hype surrounding the god-like iPhone slowly, oh so slowly fades, a problem emerges from the shadows…

Apple’s subscription email service .Mac was rebranded MobileMe to coincide with the iPhone 3G launch. Existing customers have been moved to the new platform, but for some (Apple claims 1%) it’s a disaster. They’ve been unable to use email for five days — not from their Macs, not from their iPhones, not via the web. And that’s not the only problem. As .Mac user Ed Dale said, “Not pleasant to log in and see four years of mail gone.”

Crikey’s First Dog on the Moon, also a MobileMe-er, says “it’s been crap”.

According to AppleInsider, a mail server crash and fibre-optic line faults have added to the problems. One subscriber told them he knew at least 10 people with MobileMe and all of them were affected.

“Now either it’s just a coincidence that everyone I know is in the 1%, or Apple is flat out lying,” he said.

Sydney businessman Mark Bowyer, presumably like many .Mac customers, subscribed years ago assuming that paying $139.95 per annum would deliver greater reliability than free services like Hotmail and Gmail, as well as features like shared calendars. Today, he’s angry. The only message from Apple has been “we’re working on it”.

“There is no phone [support] available for [MobileMe] in Australia,” he told Crikey.

“Despite the army of Apple personnel selling iPhones and other gadgetry, nobody here can answer any enquiries about the problem.”

Not that this would make any difference. Ultra-secretive Apple never provides information beyond its official statements.

Although, in a very unusual step, it has apologised to .Mac users, sending this email:

We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.

Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running.

Another snag we have run into is our use of the word “push” in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe “cloud,” changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word “push” until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.

We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks…

The Terms of Service say MobileMe “is designed for personal use and not intended to be used for commercial business purposes.” Bowyer, who does run his business email elsewhere, reckons that shouldn’t make a difference.

“I have become painfully aware of how I have entrusted so much of my life to Apple — banking, subscriptions — including my Crikey subscription — credit card statements, not to mention an international network of friends and contacts. Who’’s to say I don’t value my personal life more than my business?”

This personal/business distinction also seems odd given that Apple markets MobileMe as “Exchange for the rest of us“, a reference to Microsoft’s corporate messaging server. Perhaps it’s irony, given Exchange’s notorious reputation for being difficult to manage.

Will this hurt Apple’s reputation and sales? Not one bit. It’d make Kim Jong-il proud to see the fields filled with happy iPhone-waving infoworkers smiling for Chairman Steve, oblivious to the obvious flaws around them.

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Aussie telcos bend over for the iPhone

Stilgherrian — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 05:59:17 +0000

Australia’s mobile phone carriers may not completely grok Apple’s new iPhone 3G, but they know it’ll bring them customers — because they’re all scrambling to be Steve Jobs’ iPhone bitches. It’s an embarrassing spectacle.

Three carriers have announced packages available from tomorrow: Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. (Presumably 3, who’ve been asking their customers to beg for iPhones, haven’t bent over far enough.) There’s a comparison over at news.com.au.

According to my sources, all three Aussie telcos have bent over even further than US carrier AT&T. Apple already demands a bigger subsidy from carriers than other smartphone manufacturers. In the US, for example, AT&T pays Apple US$325 per unit compared with the usual $200 or so. However two individuals working within Telstra confirm that all three telcos offering iPhone here are also paying Apple an ongoing percentage of revenue. AT&T has escaped that revenue-sharing deal, but not the Aussies — and that’s presumably reflected in the somewhat disappointing plans on offer.

All three Australian carriers have missed the key point. Yes, iPhone can make phone calls. But its true role is a pocket-sized internet-connected computer.

In May, by my count 80% of the audience at Australia’s Mobile Content World conference were so out of touch they’d never even seen an iPhone screen. “They were deer in the iPhone’s headlights,” wrote entrepreneur Rand Leeb-du Toit. “The full browser experience is going to shake their businesses to their foundations.”

Overseas, data from the first year of iPhone users bears this out. They conduct 50 times more Google searches than other phone users. In Germany, they consume 30 times more data.

Australian iPhone plans are all skewed towards cheap voice calls and expensive data.

As John Allsop’s analysis points out, on Telstra’s data packages just looking at the smh.com.au home page would cost you $8!

When Vodafone release its pricing yesterday morning, comments on Twitter were scathing. “Vodafone gives you 5GB on modem. but all telcos have weighted plans for calls, not data. Wrong wrong wrong,” said one. “Nice to see Vodafone continuing the theme of gouging iPhone customers,” said another. And: “Boo Vodafone Australia iPhone plans, Optus here I come!”

Without a doubt, Apple’s new iPhone 3G is sexy. It will be a huge hit. But it does have flaws.

Just one of the Top 10 reasons to hate the iPhone 3G is the sealed-in battery. A year from now, when you no longer get a full day’s usage from one charge, your choice is $100-odd for Apple to replace the battery or $199 for the new model. Like the iPod, consumer replacement cycles get ever shorter, and the mountain of toxic used electronics grows — just like Apple’s profits.

[Note: This article is based on material I wrote for Crikey yesterday and today.]

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Links for 26 June 2008 through 29 June 2008

del.icio.us — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 02:26:36 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 26 June 2008 through 29 June 2008:

Creatives grow better in the South West | YouTube: A brilliant 4-minute video explaining how to nurture creativity.
Top 10 reasons to hate the iPhone 3G | APC: A suitably well-researched piece to help counter the Apple fanboy hype. A phone is a tool. Not all tools are for everyone.
LEO Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch: A very fine-looking English-German dictionary site.

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Quote of the Day, 18 June 2008

Stilgherrian — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:17:29 +0000

Such a fuss over new version of the Firefox web browser today and Apple opening a new shop in Sydney tomorrow! The feral goldfish are all a’flutter, feeling left out if they don’t have the latest news this very second. Thank the gods for Richard Chirgwin.

In a discussion about how digital rights management will affect sales of Vista, he writes:

The actual adoption of Windows-based broadcast TV recording among mainstream users is pitifully small. It’s easier in every way for Joe Sixpack to buy a black box hard disk recorder.

Hence, although in many ways I think Vista is a dead duck anyway, DNR flagging won’t change its future one way or the other…

I can’t get the excitement about media centres, myself. Quite simply, why would I rearrange the house or run cables just to hook the TV to the computer, when I can put the recorder where the TV is?

PC-based Media Centres, whether Apple or Microsoft or Linux, have a specific target market: people for whom getting this sort of crap to work creates a sense of achievement which serves as a surrogate for the ability to do things that are actually useful…

Hear hear!

In a follow-up, Avi Miller said:

I challenge you to find an HD-PVR with the same functionality, size and form of the Mac Mini.

“Challenge”, eh?

Yes, let’s issue “challenges” about arbitrary mixes of functionality in a particularly-shaped black (or, in this case, white) box. Lets “challenge” someone to find something that isn’t a Mac Mini that looks like (has the “form” of) a Mac Mini.

As first glance, this looks like precisely the kind of techno-macho-wank that Richard was talking about.

Running water and sewerage, people, then health care and education… and then perhaps we can worry about what shape the digital TV recorder is…

[Update 8.40am: Avi Miller writes: "Sorry, I seem to have misplaced the in the original email. My reply was intended to be the exact techno-macho-wank previously implied." Ah, irony! Such a tricky beast...]

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Links for 16 June 2008

del.icio.us — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:36:59 +0000

Here are the web links I’ve found for 16 June 2008, posted automatically.

OpenAustralia.org: Are your Representatives working for you in Australia's Parliament? A new and much easier way to see who's saying what in federal parliament.
The Possum Box: A new Australian political blog hosted by the mysteriously large-brained Possum Comitatus.
Why Me? | lonelysandwich: A delightful essay pondering Apple's new MobileMe branding. "Apple is removing the Mac from the Apple computer experience and laying the foundation for a browser-based OS, the thing that Google has been threatening all this time."

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Aussie mobile providers “like deer in the iPhone headlights”

Stilgherrian — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 05:22:30 +0000

Dropping into Day 2 of the Mobile Content World conference last week was a step back in time. And not in a healthy Kyliesque mirror ball way. The hyper-connected Twitter rumour mill had told me something was wrong: they didn’t seem to understand what was happening. The rumours were right.

When user experience expert Oliver Weidlich of Ideal Interfaces showed them screenshots of the iPhone on the big screen, around 80% of the 150-odd audience sat up, alert, seeing it for the first time.

Huh?

Sure, Apple’s groundbreaking product isn’t officially available here until the (rumoured) 19 June opening of slick new Apple stores in Sydney and Melbourne. You don’t have to have bought into the whole Steve Jobs personality cult, bought one overseas and hacked it for Aussie networks. But if you claim to be professional and haven’t at least read about the iPhone a year after its release you should be shot.

Serial entrepreneur Randal (Rand) Leeb-du Toit thinks the industry has got it very wrong. The iPhone changes everything. “They were deer in the iPhone’s headlights,” he wrote. “The full browser experience is going to shake their businesses to their foundations.”

And the iPhone is completely different. “When you take it out of its box, it feels like they’ve built this product with you in mind,” says Leeb-du Toit, who’s been using an iPhone for a couple of months. “A mobile phone feels like it was designed by an engineer with engineers in mind, by the people who put the content on there, the telcos’ walled gardens.”

A lot of the conference was about getting users watch the content from big TV, movie and games houses. Twice the guy pimping one content management system said, “It’s all about creating a more addictive experience for young people.” What sort of ethic is that?

One session talked about “bringing the lounge room experience to the small screen”, which seems as sensible as bringing the tennis experience to the swimming pool. Meanwhile, iPhone users download stuff that’s meaningful for them, connect to their own computers to access their own data and, according to Google, generate ten times the search traffic as non-iPhone mobile users.

“The carriers see they’re about to be hit by the truck, so they’re over-analysing and over-complicating the situation with all their business models about content,” Leeb-du Toit told me. “They should be going open and simple.”

It’s appropriate that the conference was held at Sydney’s Star City Casino. Anyone ignoring the iPhone is gambling big. The dice are rolled 19 June.

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Links for 15 May 2008

del.icio.us — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:26 +0000

Here are the web links I’ve found for 15 May 2008, posted automatically.

Zero Latency Studio Setup | Hugo Schotman: More information on the studio setup, this time to remove the annoying delay in headphone monitoring.
Advanced Podcast studio setup with Skype and Audio Hijack Pro | Hugo Schotman: Even though it dates from 2005, this article gave me the information I needed to sort out my broadcast setup.
Cory Doctorow: How to stop your inbox exploding | guardian.co.uk: Five simple but effective email management tips.
Why you should be using social tools in your organisation | acidlabs: Smart suggestions from Stephen Collins.
The new rules for buying a Mac | Macworld: Sensible article about choosing which Mac to buy.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Apple becomes biggest music retailer in US

Stilgherrian — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:05:54 +0000

Apple is now the number one music retailer in the US, surpassing Wal-Mart in January 2008. Apple now sells 19% of all recorded music in the US, Wal-Mart 15%, Best Buy 13% and Amazon 6%. Hat-tip to Daring Fireball.

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Remember 20 megabyte hard drives?

Stilgherrian — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 03:30:49 +0000

I just found this while cleaning up the office: the start-up disc for Apple’s Hard Disk 20 from 1985.

This was the first hard drive for the then-new Macintosh. My beloved Fat Mac — “Fat” because it came with 512k RAM, not the original 128K — had two ~~800kB~~ 400kB 3.5-inch floppies, one of which held the operating system

So this drive extended my data storage from under ~~1MB~~ half a megabyte to a gargantuan 20MB. I was in heaven!

Later that year, a legal settlement from a traffic accident provided the funds for the other cool tool for geeks: the original Apple LaserWriter printer. I remember being extremely chuffed because it was on special: marked down from the list price of AUD$10k to a mere $7.7k

Yes, seven thousand dollars! In 1985 money!

This was the desktop publishing revolution!

Everyone — simple everyone — wanted to look at the glorious 300dpi print quality. And because I’d gotten hold of JustText, a code-based tool for professional typesetting, I could pass raw PostScript commands through to the printer and do complex layouts. TAFE offered me a job on the spot — which I declined.

It all seems so passé now…

This disc looks in pretty good condition. I wonder if it still works? Anyone got the hardware?

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Is it really so wrong to mix business and politics (and religion)?

Stilgherrian — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:00:24 +0000

So last week Apple announced new products. Yawn. The Cult of Apple worshipped their God, and millions of words were written praising His Wisdom. However the most interesting comment I’ve read so far was about the political content of Steve Jobs’ presentation.

Alastair Rankine writes that the Macworld Keynote has moved from slick-but-reality-distorted marketing into the realms of straight-out entertainment, and then criticises Randy Newman’s performance. Not because it was crap (which, being Randy Newman, is inevitable), but because it was political.

Criticism of the Bush administration is something I obviously have a lot of time for. But is it suitable for a consumer product launch? …

Mix politics with business and you take a risk with a relatively small upside but a big downside. If your politics match mine, we are no more likely to do business together than before we knew each other’s positions. But if our politics disagree, this difference becomes a barrier that we each have to overcome in order to do business together.

I’m not arguing for censorship or anything. I’m just saying that the separation of politics and business is crucial for the success of both.

I disagree.

Business is about making money, yes, but sometimes I think it’s wrong to “leave politics at the door”. In fact, is it even possible?

Here’s how I responded on Alastair’s website:

Deciding to continue doing business with someone even though you disagree with their political aims is a political decision: a decision to wimp out and fail to pursue your own political goals. A decision to support your political enemy because money is more important to you than your principles.

Mind you, I fail to live up to my own high-sounding rhetoric.

I faced an ethical dilemma. I discovered that one of my clients is run by members of Hillsong Church — an organisation which worries me. Did I stop working for them? No. Or at least I haven’t yet. However I have turned down a project which would have been working directly with the Church’s own business interests.

On the other hand, can I be accused of religious discrimination? Perhaps. How would it have sounded if I said “I don’t work for Jews”?

It’s presumably OK to say “I don’t work for the baby-sacrificing Turnip Cult”, though, so where does one draw the line?

Was Apple wrong to include political commentary in a product launch? (Did that happen because Al Gore is an Apple board member?) Where does one draw the line between business and politics (and religion)?

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Technology review of 2008 (sort of)

Stilgherrian — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:58:14 +0000

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has a technology review of 2008, including:

September

Apple’s second generation 3g iPhone goes on sale. This time, as well as signing up to Apple’s network partner, customers have to bring a DNA sample to enter on the company database before the phone can be activated. “We’re just trying to make sure iPhone users all feel part of the Apple family,” a spokesman explains.

October

Nokia brings out its latest smartphone, the N99. As well as featuring music, live television, a manicure set and a device for getting stones out of horse’s shoes, it offers an ice-cream cornet with a chocolate flake. “And, unlike, the new 3g iPhone,” a spokesman explains, “it is 4g, making the mobile internet work properly for the first time.”

Hat tip to Memex 1.1.

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A Tale of Two Cults

Stilgherrian — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 18:45:01 +0000

They must put something in the water at places like Google and Apple.

I mean, isolating everyone at a “campus” even to the point where they only eat with each other is one of the classic cult-creation techniques. And both have a personality cult thing going with Steve Jobs and Larry Page and Sergey Brin

But check this Google software engineer gushing over the chance to do menial work in the kitchen:

How often do you get to cook fine cuisine for 800 people — especially while learning from some of the finest chefs in the business? Our Google chefs offer a limited number of culinary internships, and I was lucky enough to win one. So one fine Thursday morning I got to spend 4 hours in the Google kitchens working with, and learning from, our amazing culinary engineers.

Like so many software people, Dave MacLachlan seems amazed that other professionals actually have systems too, and know what they’re doing.

The chefs even get to choose where their produce comes from…

I didn’t realize that the chefs at Google all have their own private knife set…

For some reason, I was expecting Kelly to have an exact recipe, but she did pretty much everything off the top of her head, with a quick taste here and there to verify that things were going as planned.

Wow, just like every other commercial kitchen on the planet. Perhaps the “culinary internship” was valuable after all.

Back in February, another Google guy wrote about their day trip to Apple. And Apple’s cult status was in full effect. Nothing about what they learned from Apple colleagues, just merchandise and cult stuff.

[We] spent the first part of our visit at Apple’s legendary Company Store, where we admired all the new Macs and iPods, and wandered through the selection of Apple-logoed clothing, pens, notebooks, and other chotchkas. Strong willpower kept us from buying too much stuff.

After the store visit, our Google gang entered the main Apple building at 1 Infinite Loop and walked to Caffé Macs. We chose our food from among the sushi, burritos, soups, and other fare that was somewhat Google-like, paused to pay for our lunches (which was not Google-like at all), then took our seats.

A few minutes later, as we were enjoying our lunch and chatting with Apple friends, we noticed a slight disturbance in the room, as if all the air had rushed to a single place, over by the salad bar. As you have probably guessed, it was Apple CEO Steve Jobs, grabbing some lunch with Jonathan Ive, Apple’s industrial design guru. As the two moved across the room, there was no great commotion — after all, this probably happens just about every day at Apple — but our Google group and many other folks stopped eating long enough to follow the two rock stars around the room for awhile.

I know someone who was so eager to buy the latest iPod that he was wanting to sell his body to get the extra cash.

Guys, Apple and Google are just big companies with products and services, and they have employees. Sure, they might have better working conditions and slick PR, but that’s all, OK?

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Mac vs PC spoof ads

Stilgherrian — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:34:01 +0000

OK, so this morning I was going to write a rebuttal to Zern’s essay Dog food, exploding laptops and chlorine dioxide, but I got distracted by these wonderful spoofs of the Mac vs PC adverts.

There’s several, including that one about performance, plus others on security, gaming, upgrading, networking and portability. And if you watch any of them on YouTube, you’ll soon see links to other people’s efforts along the same lines.

Oh well, there’s 10 minutes of our lives we won’t get back…

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iTrapped!

Stilgherrian — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:47:54 +0000

An “amusing trick” for owners of the over-hyped iPhone. If you take photos of your friends against some glass (or with a scanner) and make that their contact photo in your iPhone, then when they call it’ll look like they’re trapped in your phone! Thanks to The Apple Blog for the pointer.