Tag Archives: iphone

Drafts Changes Workflow

Leave a reply

The more I use the Drafts app for my iPad and iPhone the more I love it and the more I want to use it. It’s actually changed the workflow for my “Post-a-Day” WordPress blogging as well as my regular blogging in general. What I used to do was copy the Post-a-Day prompt emails over to my WordPress blog and set the post type to Drafts and let them sit there. I’ve never been a huge fan of the editor built-in to WordPress, but copying the emails to Drafts and storing them there, syncing them to Simperium which then synchronizes them across all my devices that have Drafts loaded on them, which is now just my iPhone.

The app itself has so many neat features, being able to store multiple drafts and have them swipe-accessible from the left makes switching files a breeze and then when the post is done and ready to be published I can swipe from the right and select as many services as I want to send my drafts off to. It’s the perfect promontory to launch Day One, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress. Generally speaking, the drafts themselves almost always follow a certain path, first to Day One then to WordPress because then WordPress sends links to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr on my behalf with the publicize feature. But sometimes I write things that don’t go to my blog, in that case I can send to Day One and Facebook. I have configured the apps representation in Facebook to conform to my “Sharing” security group, so even if I tap the Facebook option I don’t have to worry about my private sharing thoughts leaking out where they don’t belong.

The only thing (yes, there is one of these for every user) that I would really love is a Drafts app for Mac OSX. That would let me hack away on Drafts entries on my iMac without having to clear off workplace desktop space to set up my iPad. I think it’ll just be a matter of time before we see those options start to become available. I would pay $15 for an app like that without even batting an eye.

Cloze

Leave a reply

Discovered a neat new site and I sent invites out to everyone who I thought initially might find it useful. The site is called Cloze and it combines email and social networking in one view. There are free apps for iPhone and iPad as well. So if you got some email from me and you weren’t expecting it, now you know who it was from. I had to use my work email because many of the addressees on the mail were work contacts and they wouldn’t know who I am if I used my gmail account.

Workflow with Pocket

Leave a reply

I have recently fallen into a peculiar workflow arrangement between various social networking applications and Read It Later’s Pocket application. When I am following the flow of status updates from my Twitter stream I prefer to stay in-the-moment with the stream and select interesting-looking tweets that have links attached to them, but instead of actually following them in a browser, I send them to Pocket. My preferred Twitter application, TweetBot makes this as easy as tap and select “Send to Pocket” with a happy little sound confirming that my action worked. This really works well for me and doing this has spread beyond the confines of Twitter out to Facebook – however there is no convenient interface between Facebook status posts and Pocket so the workflow is a little more convoluted. I command-click on perhaps-interesting Facebook posts and this opens them up in tabs. Then I switch to the tab, click the Pocket extension, send the link to Pocket and close the tab. I don’t really want to see the links right now, I’d rather send them all off to Pocket and then queue them up that way.

Another really neat web tool that I’ve fallen in love with is IFTTT.com. This site allows you to connect a huge collection of services to their site and then construct “If This Then That” rules. This has actually simplified the Twitter-to-Pocket interface, in so far that if I like a Tweet then that is plucked by IFTTT and sent off to my Pocket automatically. This particular bit does muddy the waters between TweetBot and Twitter itself, but it’s not really a problem, just a build-up of near-miss convenience. IFTTT in this arrangement shines when it comes to Google Reader. I have subscribed to quite a lot of RSS and ATOM feeds from various sites and manage them all in Google Reader. If I “star” something in Google Reader, then IFTTT notices and copies that entry to my Pocket for later reading. As I am quite fond of having my cake and eating it too I’m always on the lookout for multi-product synergy and convenience. I really do not like Google Reader’s web interface, in fact, I really don’t like many “Web Interfaces” for products and would prefer the gilded cage of specialized client software instead. So there is a nice synergy between Reeder on my Mac computers which presents my Google Reader contents in a visually appealing way as well as Flipboard, which is the preferred way to view Google Reader on my iPad. By using IFTTT as the middleman-behind-the-scenes I can funnel all the stories that catch my interest and collect them right into Pocket.

All of these things can also be done with Instapaper and I was an ardent fan of Instapaper for a very long while, but I’ve switched over to Pocket. I still regard Marco Arment and his product to be very good, but for me personally I found that Instapaper on my 1st Generation iPad would jettison too much for my liking. It wasn’t as much a problem with Instapaper as it was the iPad itself. Embarrassingly outclassed by the applications that I was trying to force on it. I’d be able to stand by this, but Instapaper on my 3rd Generation iPad also jettisoned. I didn’t really want to bother the author with the yackety-schmackety bug reports and Pocket edged out Instapaper when it came to displaying video and audio media. The core functions between the two are quite similar and the only other small feature that pushed me over to Pocket was the ability to search on my Pocket list and perform actions on multiple items. I have no doubt that Instapaper will catch up and may already have caught up. The money I spent on Instapaper was money well-spent and I would suggest that people look at both apps before deciding for themselves.

So back to the workflow, this is how I naturally started navigating my social network stream of information. In a way, I follow sources which curate the noise of Reddit and other news aggregators into categories that I find most interesting and then I self-curate the longer pieces into Pocket for later consumption. As I used this workflow it occurred to me that what was happening was an emergent stratification of curation. Living generates a noisy foam of information, which crashes on the coral reefs of StumbleUpon, Reddit, Engadget, HuffPo and the like. Information seagulls, like @geekami (for example) fly over these coral reefs of information and pluck out the shiniest bits, linking them to tweets and shipping them out. Then I come along and refine that for things I really find interesting and all of this ends up crashing into Pocket. Arguably, Pocket is the terminal for all this curation, but it doesn’t have to be. I could (but I don’t) cross-link Pocket and Buffer using IFTTT and regenerating a curated flow of information turning me into an information seagull. I suppose I don’t follow that path because I already have enough to do as it is, reading, comics, FOMO, work, gym… the list goes on and on.

For all the apps and people I mentioned in this blog entry, I really do recommend that you Google them and see if any of this fits in your life as it did mine. If It works for you, or you found a better way of managing this flow of information foam, please comment with your workflow description. Just more curation. Lexicographers and Encyclopedists eat your heart out. ;)

Confusing Worthless Passbook

Leave a reply

Apple has stepped in it quite badly when it comes to their Passbook app. It comes down to which metaphor they’d like to use and please, stick to whichever it is. I write specifically after updating my Starbucks app on my iPhone and the app asked if I wanted to add a card to my Passbook. So far my understanding of Passbook was that there was a stump-app which led you to the App Store to “buy” apps for different companies, so Target, Walgreens, that sort of thing and that those “Apps” were to be eventually organized in a Passbook folder.

So I start the Starbucks app, and it prompts me to add a Passbook card, so I figure there will be another app icon called “Starbucks” that I can put in the folder with all the other unused “Passbook” apps that I don’t use. And there is nothing. Huh. So I looked at the app for a while and couldn’t find where it put my Passbook “App” icon. I figured it must have been broken. That the download was buggy or broken. I completely ignored the Passbook app itself, because it was just a stump, why the hell would I use it again? It led to the App Store and that was how you entered the App Store if you wanted to waste time screwing around with Passbook bullshit. So I tapped on the app expecting to see the lame text and the link to the App Store, and there was my Starbucks Passbook card. As an added bit of huh, the link to the App Store is gone. So, okay. No more Passbook apps then for me, which I guess is fine.

It’s this really loopy “It’s an app” versus “it’s a card” metaphor that I’m griping at. It could have been more elegant, as for usefulness, eh. I don’t think of my phone when it comes to buying things. Phones don’t do that sort of thing, except now they do.

When it comes to Starbucks, we have a host of other problems that are going to pop up. I can’t use my Starbucks card at Barnes & Noble because it’s not a true Starbucks store, it’s B&N’s Cafe that serves Starbucks products. How many people will try to use their Starbucks card or this Passbook app? They’ll get irritated and be disinclined to use Passbook again. I know that feeling because I tried to use my Starbucks app at a Starbucks shop in McCormick Place in Chicago and was told they only accept cash or credit cards. That was the last time I used my Starbucks app except for just this morning to engage with this whole Passbook bullshit. So, even if you walk into a store that sells Starbucks, is a Starbucks, they may or may not use what you have. So having your phone out and ready to go and make things speedy utterly fails and you walk away without what you wanted, angry at the embarrassment. Then what are you supposed to do about some of those Starbucks that have drive-thru service? Do you honestly think people will hand their iPhones to a clerk for scanning? How stupid do you have to be to hand your expensive iPhone to anyone else? What if a compromising text pops up while they are scanning your iPhone? What then? I know why Apple would like Passbook to be useful and I’m all for new ways of addressing old problems, but there has to be a better way to do it. I suppose this really would only work well if you walked up to a Starbucks store, and there was some icon stating that the Passbook card would be accepted for purchases on the premises, then maybe then. But at that point how irritated would you be that you had to go hunting and searching for it? Then would you really even be interested in buying anything or just skipping it altogether?

So, the worthless Target and Walgreens apps, the weird App/Card thing with Starbucks, and how you can’t even be sure that any of it would work leads me to think that this is all just so much DOA technology. You aren’t going to use it because it’s too much bother. I can’t wait until some airline thinks they can stuff a boarding pass into this thing. Do you seriously think that a thieving TSA drone will give you back your iPhone? They’ll hand you back your Photo ID and pocket your phone. But that touches on the criminals that work for the TSA, but it’s still a REALLY BAD IDEA. Perhaps there will be something eventually that makes Passbook worth anyones time and trouble. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

SupportPress

2 Replies

I just rolled SupportPress out to the rank and file at work. Or at least I thought I did. My day was going so well, so smoothly. I got my introduction email with graphics sent out (or so I thought) and I got all the invites shipped out as well. Everything was going just peachy – until I looked at the sent mail and noticed that when I sent the message by copying all the discrete addresses that only the first address took. So I didn’t send out any message at all!

To really get a grasp on how irritating this was, I couldn’t send a message to the LDAP alias that expands out to all the people I work with, the address is dar-staff@wmich.edu. The SMTP server at WMU was rejecting it out of hand. Turns out I figured out why – it was the screenshot graphics. That system they have rejects mail with pictures. So I had no choice but to copy down all the addresses from our Wiki and do it manually. Turns out when you copy that kind of information into Sparrow, it only looks at the first address and ignores everything else. It was my thinking that it would see the commas and figure out I was copying in 48 addresses. No, just one really long address.

When I noticed this, all I had was my iPhone and I was having lunch with Scott. I was cursing Webmail Plus and the LDAP directory for placing artificial limits on email and so I figured I could get the list of addresses and paste them into my iPhone and use the Mail app in my iPhone to do the heavy lifting. Turns out it suffered the same mental block, treating the addresses I pasted in as one giant address. So after lunch was over I was in my car trying to tap and copy one address at a time in. This is another bad idea because if you tap and don’t hold the iPhone thinks you want to email to just that one person and so dumps the draft you were working on and starts a new draft with an empty email. The forwarded bit with all the text and graphics? Lost. Three times lost. I was successful in the end, shipping my intro email out to all my coworkers despite all the technology surrounding me meant to make things easier.

Alls well that ends well, so we’re up online with SupportPress and I have to say that I am very happily surprised with what I see. Clients see a very simple version of the site and it’s compatible with every browser, every computer, including iPhone and iPad to boot! Now that I’ve let the genie out of the bottle it will be very interesting to see how it is received. There has been lots to say on that topic before, and in another post, a more private one, I’ll go further into the nitty gritty details.

So despite technological hurdles, I was able to get my automated help desk system off the ground and show it off to people. Monday is going to be a rip-roaring day, indeed!

Serenity

1 Reply

At work I get two 15 minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I usually just work right through them paying no attention to the time I could be devoting to other things instead of work. I get into ruts where I put my head down at 8am and pick it back up at 5pm and the whole time in between I’m engaged with something work related.

This can sometimes lead to irritation, aggravation, and this maddening buzzity restless feeling that sticks with me and starts to wear me down. If the weather is good and I’m in the mood for it I will take a jaunt around the campus which can help. Recently however I’ve been trying to find room in my life for meditation and it struck me that if I could find the right place, that I could get away for half an hour. I figure nobody would have a problem if I bound my two breaks up together and used it for something possibly good for me.

That’s exactly what I did this afternoon. Around 3:45 today I polished off the last of the tea I was drinking and grabbed my iPhone and found a little out-of-the-way place here where I could relax and meditate. I didn’t fall asleep, but I was able to get to that magical place. Each time I do it, it gets easier to reach it, each and every time. There are two apps that help keep me focused and keep me from running out of time. The first app I use to create natural sounds around me is called Naturespace and I went ahead and bought the “Entire Catalog” program option which unlocks all of their soundtracks. I especially prefer the track “Zen Wind and Water” as it features windchimes which I really like listening to. The program works with my earbuds to mask outside noises, so there is nothing to upset me while I’m trying to relax. The second app I use is Chronology and I set it for 30 minutes with a double-horn alarm at the end. When I prepare for my session I find a nice quiet place to sit, one that nobody is using and nobody would go looking for me in, and I start Naturespace and Chronology, get everything started and start to concentrate on my breathing. As usual when I’m coming down I can feel the relaxation hit my shoulders and neck first. As I’m trying to quiet my thinking my mind starts tossing stray noise at me to get me to do something else. At first it took a long time for that to quiet down, but after several sessions it doesn’t take that long and once I achieve my goal it’s as if my mind fits into a groove in my consciousness. The stray noisy thoughts are gone and they don’t bubble up. It feels almost like a physical ‘fwump’ as it clicks into place. I could try to bring in some noise but it doesn’t work. It’s just me and my breathing and nothing else. If I stay very still I can even slow my breathing down, I start to lose proprioception and unless I’ve got joints under stress I start to float away. It has nothing at all to do with falling asleep. There are no hypnic jerks, and there isn’t any loss of consciousness. I’m able to act if I must, but it’s quite nice just to exist in that state for a time.

When I hear the double-horn from Chronology I know that my 30 minutes are up. When I open my eyes and shift posture my proprioception snaps right back together but my mind retains this quality of serenity for a long while afterwards. I’ve found it’s easier to read and easier to concentrate afterwards, as if I’m still carrying crumbs of that meditative state around with me for hours afterwards. I still feel it even now, and it’s been about twenty minutes since I left that state. If nothing else, I feel much better afterwards than I did before. The maddening buzzity sensation is gone and I don’t feel quite as busy as I was just an hour ago.

If I notice any other differences, I’ll be sure to blog about them.

Spinning Governor

Leave a reply

I’ve come up with ways to cope with the network connection throttle that I recently discovered was behind a lot of my network woes here at work. In my regularly scheduled workaday use of the Internet I usually find myself consuming at least 150 connections if not more because everything I use was built with the assumption that establishing multiple connections is free and easy. There is no parsimony when it comes to using the network, and you see this exemplified most of all in the design of browsers like Firefox. When you fetch a page, most modern browsers will attempt to also-fetch possible pages you may want so that they can appear faster. This is fine if you have an unlimited number of connections that you can make to the network. That isn’t the case here.

I can live with the throttle. I understand why it’s in place and knowing that it exists helps in that it keeps me from questioning my sanity when I didn’t know it existed and thought the problem was with me or my computer. It’s neither. So there are some ways to address my problem. Specifically the route to a better life is ironically through the same devices that are at the center of the entire ‘running out of IP space’ problem, iOS devices. My iPhone and iPad have apps that can bring me interfaces to Internet resources that I need to use, and they can free up my computer so that I can help avoid the connection quota throttle. For example, instead of opening up Toodledo in Safari I can open up the Toodledo app on my iPhone. Different device, different connection quota. My iPhone doesn’t make so many connections and if I did need that feature I could very easily drop wifi and use the 3G data circuit. I can do a lot of other things too, like manipulate Asana, run my eMail through my iPad, that sort of thing.

So, in a way, the connection throttle has shifted the load from one device to three. At first this was kind of a pain in the ass, but over time I’ve come to see that this could become more efficient. It frees my computer up for the heavier things, like Google Reader and such. We’ll have to see how it goes.

Apple's Flapping Tent

1 Reply

Yesterday Apple unveiled their newest products. They’ve hashed out an agreement with Sprint and so they are going to add them to the list of approved iPhone 4 carriers and then they introduced the new iPhone 4S.

Everyone was hot to trot over the iPhone 5. The disappointment was palpable.

As I followed on in my Twitter feed, I read something that really quite irked me. About a week ago I saw a video touting a neat app called Siri, so I went on to the App Store and it was free, so what the hell. I installed Siri on my iPhone 4 and everything was quite cool about it. I liked being able to ask my phone for bits and pieces of random stuff and I was quite content. Then I saw on Twitter that Apple had bought Siri, then they were going to make it the “Assistant” in iOS 5. I of course am geeked about iOS 5 and I was happy that Siri would be removed as an app from my iPhone 4 and would end up in the firmware behind a held-tap home button. Then shit hit the fan. Apple is releasing Siri as the “Assistant” feature, but it’s only iPhone 4S compatible.

I call bullshit.

The iPhone 4 could do it, why not make Siri a general component of iOS 5? I think it’s a cash grab. I can’t believe that Siri, which worked well on my A4-powered iPhone 4 was suddenly too much in iOS 5 for the A4 to handle and needed the A5 to process it. If Siri wasn’t available as an app, I probably wouldn’t be so critical of Apple in this regard, but damn it all to hell, I was USING IT on my iPhone 4. What really makes me bent is that Siri is being removed from the App Store and won’t work after October 15th on my iPhone 4! Audacious bullshit Apple! Bollocks!

So, before I got really comfortable and happy with Siri I just up and deleted the app off my iPhone 4. I’m not about to push a new wave of device upgrades ahead of time just for this one, albeit really cool, extra feature. This move of Apples is definitely a dick move. I am still a firm Apple fanboy, but this did ding their halo quite a bit. To quote Will Wheaton, “Don’t Be A Dick!” – Apple, don’t be a dick.

In happier news, I was able to download and install the 1.2 firmware for my iPod Nano. The update makes it more appealing to use and enhances the fitness system so that it really gets close to the Nike+ GPS app on my iPhone 4. The new watch faces have me considering getting one of those iPod Nano watchbands and seeing how my Nano fares as a watch as well as my music iPod. This happy turn took a little of the shit off of Apple’s Halo for me, but the whole Siri thing still rankles. Appledontbeadick.

I am quite looking forward to iOS 5 and iCloud for my iPhone 4 and my iPad 1. For me, I think the best part of the entire new iOS system will be the notification overhaul. I get a lot of push notifications on all my iOS devices and these modal popups are starting to make my eye twitch, which is usually the precursor to a Microsoft-scale swear-a-thon. That this annoyance is going to be led out to a rainy crossroads and bashed over the head with a shovel and left for the crows and flies to pick clean.

It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature!

Leave a reply

I just got off the phone with my Apple System Specialist, which is staffed by a new person. I haven’t really had that great an experience with people in that position and I don’t know why. I think a great part of it was that our initial sales experience oversold that position’s effectiveness to customers like myself and that mistake has permanently tainted that part of the Apple-Customer experience. In many ways, after my initial contact (which left me feeling more meh than woohoo) I just stopped calling on them altogether. After the Tech’now’ledgy Expo that TotalTech put on, I make contact again with my “Apple Sales Team” and I’m not exactly sure it was the best move.

Before anyone gets upset, there isn’t anything that they have or haven’t done that earns my ire, so that’s not it, it’s just a general sense that they are more surface than substance. It’s an odd sensation and no matter how I try to kick it, it just hangs around.

So I got to talking to my systems person at Apple and the central question was iOS management. Currently I have 3 iPhones and 6 iPads (not counting my own) all in play. There are certain things I want to accomplish with these devices especially when it comes to setup. We run a different model than Apple imagines when it comes to iOS device setup. I get the devices, I set them up, get them all warmed up and fill them with a certain set of apps that the end user may like to use and then deliver a hot-and-running device right into their hands. This runs counter to how Apple imagines this should be done, they want each device to be set up by individuals and populated by individuals themselves for data and apps and whatnot. I asked about mobile management and my Apple rep told me what I already knew, that Apple had ignored this particular segment completely and they are letting other companies create products to “Manage multiple mobile devices”. This is a recipe for DISASTER and well, “NOT WANT” is pretty much the banner I’m running under for this. I don’t want some odd 3rd party with their grubby little fingers and stupid backwards code messing up my beautiful, sterile, pure Apple experience! Oh well. Apple won’t, they’ve kicked the can to 3rd parties and I regard those as lepers so – it’s manual-DIY for me and it’s not heartbreaking, it’s just a little bit of a downbeat to the heavenly host of angelic singing that rings throughout Apple. For me, it’s as if Cletus and MaryJo wandered into the middle of the Tabernacle Choir, picked up a songbook and joined in. What happens when you add 1 cup of wine to a barrel of sludge? You get sludge. What happens when you add 1 cup of sludge to a barrel of wine? You get sludge.

So I decided to just drop my interest. Right on the floor. I’m not going to pursue 3rd party vendors, I have no need to look inside a leper colony tent, I can assume parts are falling off and things smell like feet wrapped in bacon and stuck in hot leather. Ew. Nahhhh.

So then I brought up my oddity with the iPhone. Here’s what happened to me, there apparently are two universes here, we’ll call them Universe A and Universe B. In Universe A, where someone like me has many iOS devices (iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPad) and many Macintosh computers I can set the devices up on any one of those computers with an iTunes library and turn on the most important setting in all of Apple-land: Manually Manage Music and Data. It’s an unassuming check box on the Summary screen for every iOS device and every single one of my devices has it on. I like Apple, but I don’t trust iTunes. So in Universe A I can wander from Mac to Mac plugging in and managing every device. I can copy music, I can copy ebooks in, apps, you name it, no problem! Now, enter Universe B. In Universe B I have just an iPhone with multiple Macs. I set an iPhone up with my iMac, everything is fine, I check “Manually Manage Music and Data” and do what I always do. Then I take that iPhone and I plug it into another computer. Now iTunes has grayed out “Manually Manage Music and Data” but it’s still checked. I try to add or manipulate anything on the iPhone with another computer and iTunes tells me that in order to do so, it needs to WIPE THE IPHONE CLEAN and start over from scratch!

So there is this massive difference between Universe A and Universe B. It hurts my head because both universes are using the same code base, it’s all iOS. iOS on the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPod Nano. There shouldn’t be any behavioral differences at all! Wouldacouldashoulda. So I brought this oddity up to my systems specialist at Apple and he informed me that Universe B is the way it should be for all iOS devices. I took a pause and thanked him for his time. So what is it that irks me? Apparently I’ve been living with a pretty big BUG and I’ve been perceiving it as a crown jewel stuck to Apple’s Halo. I’ve been absolutely impressed with the great design of iOS and apparently a good portion of my perception of value here is based on some really deep-seated bug! If iOS devices are all supposed to behave like they should in Universe B, that is stupid and horrible! It spits in the face of multi-computer compatibility and squirts a nasty stain on Apple’s Halo.

At the end I got to laughing with this Apple fellow, mostly because I couldn’t get over the fact that a pretty nasty bug was apparently so good and important to me that I’ve actually used it in Apple sales pitches to friends and family! My Apple rep wasn’t really impressed either when I informed him that I discovered a way to work-around the iPhone issue. Apparently the procedure I have to defeat this oddity with iPhone is in some central way a really underhanded way to sidestep what Apple had intended all along despite Universe A being just a giant bug! I copy my iTunes folder to some other place, I tear out all the content folders just leaving the rag-tag group of 5 or 6 XML files behind and then use that little seedling iTunes library and copy it for other people to use. This makes it all work the WAY IT SHOULD, so that iPhones are gregarious. They really aren’t, they are still tightly bound to this one singular iTunes library, but since I’ve started handing out the stub Library, it’s as if I’ve bonked Universe B to fit neatly in the hole meant for Universe A!

What gets me is all the people I read about online who have iPhones who stomp and scream and carry on that their Mac died, they couldn’t recover any of the data off of it and had to start from scratch. When they get everything back and up and running and then they plug their iPhone into their computer (because they want to move stuff in or out) iTunes tells them that they have to wipe their iPhone! Well, now I know why. It’s because when iTunes creates a new library, it creates something special in those few XML files as well, probably a globally unique ID code. Since they don’t have the old GUID, their iPhone refuses to sync with the new library until they wipe it clean and start from scratch. Universe B strikes again! So for what I see, that Universe B is an EPIC FAIL BUG, it turns out that Apple considers Universe A to be the BUG and Universe B to be correct. This irks me, but I’m sure it utterly mystifies and pisses off people who don’t understand what is really going on here. What’s the practical upshot from this? Well, backup your iTunes library. Specifically everything in iTunes that isn’t meat. Backup that SKELETON. There is something very very important in those XML and plist files, the handful of them, that is life or death for iPhones (in Universe B). I can only pray that Apple never fixes it so that all their products work as they should in Universe B. But then again, even if they do, spreading stumpy iTunes libraries isn’t a problem. It’s 414KB of special sauce, not even a blip on any storage radar.

This does speak to something even deeper. I thought I got away from this stupid bullshit when I ran away from Microsoft, but it appears as though Apple is fond of this lame bullshit as well. It’s upsetting and dismaying. The same feeling you have when you learn that a superhero was caught stealing boxes of plastic chattery teeth. Why? I don’t know if Apple will ever address it or if they’ll “correct things” and start the downward anti-consumer spiral that Microsoft is at the center of. I can only hope not.

I’m going to boldly go forward with the design I already have in place anyways, to return to the main point, and probably continue to duplicate that “special sauce” in my iTunes library from my work iMac to all my client machines and continue to do things the way that I can without involving Apple. I’ll keep on doing so until they design me into a tight little box and then I’ll probably find some other way to get what I want done the way I want it.

I did learn something from all this. If something is working the way you want, just don’t bring it up to anyone else. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, even if the manufacturer thinks it’s broken and not working the way THEY intended. What really matters is how you use it. Once they’ve sold it, it’s pretty much out of their hands. Now I can only hope that my contact at Apple has forgotten all about me and my silly problems. Yes, please, please forget. Keep this coveted little bug going forever, we’ll just regard the iPhone as a quirky device.

Universe A FTW!

Tech'now'ledgy Expo

1 Reply

I attended for a little while the Tech’now’logy Expo that TotalTech puts on every year. In attendance was my friend Matt Merrill with CDW-G and Chris Doemel with Apple.

They are pretty much two out of maybe a handful of vendors that I do not want to pitch into a swirling abyssal vortex. The expo itself was a little lean on actual vendors, but HP and Dell were there, and my CDW-G vendor was flogging Lenovo pretty hard. I hadn’t the heart to really bust down Lenovo despite it being a cross between an IBM Stink-Pad and Cheap Chinese Plastic Crap. I can’t really get down on Lenovo too harshly, at least there wasn’t a Lexmark pusher there! Lexmark gets pitched into that aforementioned vortex.

Apple was pleasant as usual. I really love the company, and AppleCare itself can’t be beat, but my previous run-ins with Apple Sales has left me feeling a little quixotic. They aren’t as hold-your-hand as the rest of Apple is, but they are attentive and the reflected glory from the mothership in Cupertino does them a lot of good, but while I’m seeking out the ARD Development Team for body-breaking hugs, the sales team has always left me feeling rather tepid. They respond very positively when you tell them you’re sending clients their way, but everything else isn’t really that exciting for them, which I totally understand, but it is a little surprising that sales isn’t as rabid as the rest of them are.

Something that is coming up is iOS management. I’ve got a new systems contact at Apple, a fellow by the name of David Seebaldt. Should be interesting to see what he is going to recommend for us. Currently we’ve got 6 iPads in play and 3 iPhones. I fully expect that level to rise with time. I think one of my first queries will be why iPhone, and no other iOS device displays a single-Library preference. iPod Touches, iPod Nanos, and even iPads can touch as many iTunes Libraries as they like, but iPhones? One central library, the first one they see, and that’s it. It’s as if the iPhone imprints on the first Library it sees and that’s it for life. Odd.

I certainly hope that they get more foot traffic, because the lunch-time period wasn’t so rah-rah-rah.