iTunes Ping Sucks #Apple #fail October 20, 2010
Posted by Phil Groom in Music, Technology, Watching and Waiting.Tags: After The Fire, Apple, ATF, iTunes, ITunes Store, Music, Ping, Social network, update
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Here’s why:
iTunes says, "You cannot like or post to Ping about an item that is not currently offered in the iTunes store"
… to which I reply, up yours, Apple! No, it is NOT “OK” for you to tell me what I can or cannot like. The fact is, I like ATF’s Like the Power of a Jet — and all the data about the track and the album it’s from, Der Kommissar, is out there in the Gracenote database, to which you have access already built into iTunes and which you could readily integrate into Ping if you were actually interested in what your customers like instead of simply being obsessed by your own income stream (in case you’ve forgotten, you found all the track names from Gracenote for me when I ripped the CD into iTunes: thank you).
So please do yourselves and your customers a favour: if you want Ping to be a social network, stop telling us that we can only like things that you can sell. Strange but true, Mr Jobs: life is bigger than Apple’s bank balance.
Thank you for listening.
iPad iWant January 27, 2010
Posted by Phil Groom in Frivolity, Technology.Tags: Apple, Dave Walker, iPad
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Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons. Or head this way if you want the real thing…
Going on (or off) Safari May 29, 2009
Posted by Phil Groom in Technology.Tags: Apple, Firefox, PDF, Safari, Web Browser
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Safari. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s Apple’s web browser, available for Mac or Windows. I’ve never used it on Windows so couldn’t possibly comment on it in a Windows environment. But on a Mac, it’s way cool and fast with it.
Until, that is, it comes to pdfs. If it’s a piffling small pdf it’s fine, no problem. But if it’s a big one, it struggles… and when Safari struggles with a pdf, it doesn’t let you get on with anything else. It seems Apple’s programmers have been unable to find a way for Safari to load a pdf in the background whilst you continue browsing in another tab or a new window: instead all the browser’s resources go into loading the pdf and you, the end user, are locked out. You can either wait… and wait… and carry on waiting… and hope that maybe, eventually, the pdf will load; or you can force quit Safari and conclude that maybe the pdf wasn’t important anyway.
So I’ve come up with my own Safari plug-in idea: the Safari PDF Warning:
As you can see, it introduces a new way of handling error messages: straight talking. The buttons — well, I’m kinda hoping that the ‘Cancel’ and ‘Press on regardless’ buttons are self-explanatory. The ‘Bugger’ button is multifunctional: it fires off a debug message to Apple’s Software Development Team, opens the page in Firefox, attempts to open it in Safari and launches the Force Quit dialogue box to make it easy for you to kill Safari when you eventually give up.
Unfortunately it’s only an idea rather than an actual plug-in. I’m living in hope that come the final version of Safari 4 — presently in Beta — Apple will have fixed the problem and my plug-in won’t be needed…
Sad Mac February 4, 2009
Posted by Phil Groom in Technology.Tags: Apple, Apple Computer, iMac, Mac
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An ignominious end to a glorious future…
iMac Graveyard
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