The scratchpad, the holding area, the ranting place
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Check out the comments for last week’s iTunes free single:
While I guess it’s true that you get what you pay for, kudos (I guess) to Apple for letting their customers vent. Now if they want some real kudos, how about offering something decent? (I did listen to the track, it… wasn’t for me, but the free downloads have introduced me to some great Canadian bands in the past)
Technorati Tags: user content, iTunes, Apple
What the heck, let’s make it an Apple day for posts - Mike Zornek has posted a summary of the first 100 days of his first software product’s sales. Billable is an invoice tracking application for OS X. According to Mike, his support time went through the roof in the first week, but in a good way:
When it came to the actual launch I vividly remember spending the first week answering tons of email (practically full time). Almost all of it was feature requests; very little of it was actual support. Since the launch I get a similar, but smaller, stream of feedback with very little support issues.
Congratulations, Mike! While I don’t use Macs as much as I used to (and use FreshBooks for my invoicing), Ange does freelance photography and this might be right up her alley.
Technorati Tags: Billable, invoicing, Mac Development
I wouldn’t be a responsible tech blogger without commenting on the Apple Keynote, would I?
Not only does the iPhone look pretty sweet, it’s going to save me a chunk of money. I was set to buy the E61, but now I’m going to wait for an iPhone, which won’t be available until June, and that’s because of FCC regulations, which means it might be even longer before it’s available in Canada. Yes, not spending money right away counts as saving money. I think that’s what it actually means. I didn’t always realize that, and remember several purchases when I was newly out in the world in my school days where I rationalized, “hey, I’m going to buy this eventually anyway, so I might as well buy it now…” Er, sorry, did I say “in my school days?” I meant “last week.”
The Apple TV thing looks cool, and I’m curious about the software behind it, but it looks too optimized for the iTunes music store, which doesn’t sell TV shows or movies in Canada. I currently have an old laptop permanently wired to the TV (it actually can’t move, because the SVHS cable is kinda glued on due to a broken pin - if anyone knows how to get a pin out of a SVHS socket, please please please let me know), which is bulky and inelegant, but it can play all kinds of codecs.
Steven Levy has a piece up in Wired about the birth of the iPod. It’s really weird to think that the thing’s only existed since late 2001 - about as weird as it is to think that 2001 was 5 years ago.
It looks like my fears about the MacBook Pro battery life were mostly unfounded, if this MacRumours thread is a sufficient enough roundup of factoids to be considered a source - most users are reporting around 3 and a half hours of use.
I’m still waiting for the rev B…
What other reason could there be that Apple’s replaced the mythical battery life claims of the G4 powerbooks with a footnote that says merely “battery life depends on configuration and use”?
I mean, it’s got to be better than the 45 minutes I get on my old ThinkPad, right?
Right?
Please?
I know Apple’s Mail.app junk filter is bad, and I shudder to think of the people who actually trust it enough to have it automatically put junk mail in the junk folder, but there are times when it just blows my mind away.
Like just now.
When it flagged a message FROM ME, TO ME, as junk (I’m on a group distribution list.)
The original’s in my sent folder.
It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it’s not like I was trying to sell myself Rolex watches or anything…
FYI, if you’ve got a USB headset, you might appreciate SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba - it lets you change audio input and output devices from the menu bar.
A quick “while I think of it” update that could also be a “while I wait for installs and reboots” (my ThinkPad got wonky while I was installing WinXP on the iMac - hardware jealousy or just a bad omen?):
If you can’t copy files from your iMac to your iPod, try unplugging your iSight (like you ever use the damned thing anyway). The Firewire ports on the iMac G5s are pretty low-wattage, apparently, and an external hub might not be a bad idea.
I love when online publishers inadvertently do this: the ad says the computer is “designed for future thought,” the copy says the system pictured is at End Of Life.