When I wrote my Podcasts article yesterday, I had not yet had a chance to listen to the <a href="http://5by5.tv/amplified/13">latest episode of Amplified</a> (which had come out earlier in the day). Dan and Jim talked a little bit about Apple’s Podcasts app. And I do agree that this can only be good in the broader market because it will bring more attention and spotlight to Podcasting.
And again I agree, those of us already using apps like <a href="http://vemedio.com/products/instacast">Instacast</a>, or <a href="http://www.downcastapp.com/">Downcast</a> are in a minority of podcast power users. The average user does not care about most of the features we care about, and that’s if they are interested in podcasts at all. Which of course circles back around to the point, if they weren’t interested before, perhaps with more spotlight on podcasting they will be interested now.
However, my point was and is that I think Apple has made some things unnecessarily complicated for the average user. Specifically and mainly my points about how awkward and unintuitive subscribing and syncing is. My thoughts when I first opened the app went from, “very nice looking app, beautiful even - ooohh, cool tape deck effect,” to, “What on earth is going on here, why are basic functions so hard?”
Those of us who love Apple and Apple products love them for a reason. We like nice things, we like well designed and easy to use nice things. And this often times makes us very critical. I for one am not afraid to voice my opinion when I think they blew it, and I personally think that this Podcasts app is not a very good app. Not for me, and not for average consumers.
All the problems are fixable though, and sometimes Apple shows a willingness to listen and fix things so I’ll be perfectly willing to revisit this app and my opinion of it a version or three down the road.

Podcasts - A Quick Follow Up

<blockquote>
Apple has pulled Thunderbolt Software Update 1.2 from its list of available downloads, MacNN has discovered. Although the update was only meant to add support for the Thunderbolt-to-Gigabit Ethernet adapter, some users have complained that it caused serious boot issues such as kernel panics or freezing at the gray boot screen.
</blockquote>
I noticed this morning that the update was missing when Software Update popped up to tell me about some software updates and it was not among them. I expected it to be since I didn’t have time to install it the first time it came up.
Good to see Apple pulled it.

MacNN

Thunderbolt Update Pulled

<blockquote>
First, the good news: Airfoil Speakers Touch is once again available in the iOS App Store. You can download it directly on your device or click here to learn more about sending audio from your Mac or PC to your iOS device.
Unfortunately, Airfoil Speakers Touch can no longer receive audio directly from other iOS devices or iTunes. Read on for more information about this troubling change, as well as the reasons behind it.
</blockquote>
When Apple makes mistakes, they make doozies. This is a doozie and I hate it a lot.

Paul Kafasis on the Rogue Amoeba Blog

Airfoil Speakers Touch Back (sort of)

<blockquote>
Late Friday night, Adobe confirmed its plan to issue free patches to fix the problems in all three applications—a reversal of its previous strategy that would have forced users to pay for a CS6 upgrade in order to rectify the problems.
</blockquote>
That’s nice, but I think you guys already tipped your hand. Still, I won’t complain too loudly. Adobe heard the outcry against it’s stupid decision to not patch this vulnerability, and reversed that decision.
Of course it’s hard to take something back once it’s out there, but good for them for doing the right thing in the end.

Macworld

CS5 To Be Patched After All

I did not receive a lot of interaction in the comments on my article at Mac Appstorm, but I did receive one that I want to interact with.
<a href="http://mac.appstorm.net/general/opinion/mac-app-store-paid-upgrades-how-apple-should-fix-a-broken-model/#comments">Natalia Ventre →</a>
<blockquote>
As an early supporter of apps like Bohemian Coding’s Sketch and Pixelmator, I think I deserve the free upgrades. Just because Adobe charges you for one more useful feature doesn’t mean that’s the way to go. MacRabbit Espresso is sold outside the MAS and version 2 was released as a free upgrade.
</blockquote>
I’m sure Natalia is a fine person. I <a href="http://nataliav.me/">see she works with ExpressionEngine</a> and I love my fellow EE users. I don’t really mean to pick on her, this is just an excuse to talk about this app entitlement mentality. And she’s only one person, where I’ve heard this sentiment from lots of folks. Developers should give me free updates forever and ever (and the choir and the people said, “amen”.)
I don’t think anyone of this mindset usually considers how on earth that developer is going to make ends meet. How is a developer supposed to keep the lights on and feed his family? If all a developer does is continue to work on his application and provide updates and fixes for it, where is his/her/their income coming from?
This is a tricky proposition because I think it’s a good idea, and good business to provide free updates, bug fixes, security patches and the like. Yet I think that developers should be able to charge for major upgrades. My point in the article was that Apple has not provided a way to do this in the Mac or iOS App Store. Some developers have found ways to work around this, but the solutions aren’t great.
But let me interact a little with Natalia’s comments. She uses Sketch and Pixelmater and she thinks she “deserves free upgrades.” I wonder how she would feel as a web designer if she was required to continue to work on a website, to update it and design new parts of it, for free, after she had delivered it to the client. I doubt that would work out well for her. I’m not talking about her being paid weekly, or monthly, or yearly or something to continue that work. I’m talking about her being expected to do it for free. Forever. How is she supposed to make money? App developers are in the same position. They need revenue in order to continue the work and development.
As far as MacRabbit not charging for Espresso 2, I applaud them. I’m glad they can afford to do that. I used Espresso before I switched to Coda. It’s a good app. But a developer shouldn’t be expected to do what they did. They need to be able to make a living. They are quite within their rights to make money of their development.
I think we need to loose the entitlement mentality as users of great apps.

App Entitlement

<blockquote>
More releases, more features, and more performance, are all planned, but on fewer platforms: Adobe is giving up entirely on supporting smartphone browsers, sticking to the core desktop platforms for its plugin
</blockquote>
Who would have guessed. Oh wait, ME!
Yours truly on Flash:
<a href="/blog/2010/08/10/its-about-time">It’s about time! →</a>
<blockquote>
Flash is a deplorable product and I avoid it all that I can!
</blockquote>
<a href="/blog/2010/08/23/news-flash-flash-really-isnt-good-for-mobile-devices">News flash, “Flash really isn’t good for mobile devices” →</a>
<blockquote>
I have said from the beginning that I simply do not want Flash anywhere near my iOS devices. I determined even before the iPhone that Flash was a curse upon the internet and have been employing flash blockers of various kinds for years on my desktop web browsers.
</blockquote>
<a href="/blog/2010/08/31/flash-on-android-nope-not-the-droid-you-are-looking-for">Flash on Android. Nope, not the droid you are looking for! →</a>
<blockquote>
I continue to maintain that if my phone was flash “capable” I would be looking for ways to block it as I do on my laptop browser.
</blockquote>
<a href="/blog/2010/11/03/adobe-flash-is-a-killer">Adobe Flash is a killer! →</a>
<blockquote>
…if we could completely eliminate Flash content from the web, said web would be a better place!
</blockquote>
<a href="/blog/2011/11/09/adobe-to-cease-developing-mobile-flash">Adobe to cease developing mobile Flash →</a>
<blockquote>
I have no doubt that Apple would have included flash in iOS if it was viable for mobile platforms. But the fact is Flash has never been a particularly efficient technology. It used to serve its purpose. It was decent for desktop experiences at one time. But trying to shoehorn it onto the mobile platform where battery life and system resources are at a premium was always a bad idea. And Adobe has consistently proven that they are incapable of adapting Flash to mobile platforms.
And the bottom line here is that Apple has not “won” because we aren’t transitioning from Flash (a proprietary web publishing platform owned by Adobe) to some Apple proprietary technology. Flash is being superseded by web technologies that are much better, and that are more open and standards driven. This is a win for everyone
</blockquote>

Ars Technica

The Future of Flash

I <a href="/blog/2010/09/14/os-xs-last-birthday-nope-dont-think-so">linked to this much earlier</a> in this blog's life, and at the time I didn’t have a Claim Chowder category (which I have even still been sadly neglecting). As such, I sort of forgot about it, didn’t check up on it. So this is way back talking about there not being a 10.7, much less a 10.8.
Still, with the announcement and first looks at Mountain Lion (10.8) it seems appropriate to point this out as failed claim chowder now.
<blockquote>
OS X 10.6 is the cherry atop the lovely sundae that is Apple’s latest operating system. It’s a fond farewell to a cat that’s grown rather long in the tooth, and I don’t think we’ll see a 10.7 in the series. Why? Apple has another OS it’s pushing, and it’s clearly serious about it. I’m talking about iOS of course, which recently got a name change that makes it much more platform agnostic than the original iPhone OS.
</blockquote>
Here’s what I had to say <a href="/blog/2010/09/14/os-xs-last-birthday-nope-dont-think-so">the first time I linked to it</a>:
<blockquote>
What a sensationalist load of garbage. Beside the fact that as it stands right now iOS would never work well on a full size computer, there is the fact that you have to have a Mac running Snow Leopard to develop for iOS. If Apple let’s the Mac platform stagnate, it’s iOS platform will also stagnate.
</blockquote>
…
<blockquote>
I fully believe we will indeed see a 10.7, and even a 10.8. I could not speculate at this time what they will look like, and how much of the iOS feel OS X will take on, but there’s way too much going on with the full grown OS X platform to abandon it any time soon.
</blockquote>
Looks like I was right. And I’m going to go on record now and say we will indeed see a 10.9, and another after that, though I don’t know what they will do for naming convention… 10.10? They’ve shown a willingness to do that after the third dot in the past. With 10.4 Tiger, they went all the way to 10.4.11. There’s no doubt there’s a lot of branding fuel behind OS X and it’s hard to imagine throwing that away. I give a good chance of them going to 10.10, 10.11 etc.

The Apple Blog

OS X’s Last Birthday?

I’ve been <a href="/blog/2012/02/06/no-moon">making a bit of fun</a> at <a href="/blog/2012/02/07/galaxy-note-iphone">the expense of</a> these big old Android phones. But here’s HTC admitting the problem.
<blockquote>
HTC “dropped the ball” on its 2011 devices, the company’s CFO has admitted, with LTE-equipped handsets simply too thick and offering insufficient battery life. Speaking on the company’s financial results call today, following HTC’s unappealing Q4 2011 results, Chief Financial Officer Winston Yung conceded that HTC had plenty of work to do improving both “design and components.”
</blockquote>
I like <a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/02/06/whoops">John Gruber’s take</a>.
<blockquote>
I, for one, am shocked — shocked! — that big thick phones with poor battery life fared poorly.
</blockquote>

Speaking of Overlarge Phones

This is a follow up to <a href="/blog/2011/12/14/just-how-flexible-is-expressionengine">my previous article on creating a URL shortener with ExpressionEngine</a>. It turns out I was doing it the really complicated way. My new way uses all EE code and doesn’t require any PHP. The only thing I’m using that isn’t included by default in ExpressionEngine is a plugin called <a href="http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/http-header">HTTP Header</a>. I use this to set the header to 301.
I still use the short domain name “aurpro.us” hosted on the same server. From the original article:
<blockquote>
<h2>One ExpressionEngine install on two domains</h2>
The next step is to copy the index.php and .htaccess file from Apple User Pro’s web-root to the aupro.us web-root. But we aren’t quite done yet. Since I’m copying the index.php from the main site, the system path is already declared in the document, but there are some other variables I need to configure. Lines 89 through 93 of EE’s index.php contain some variables that are commented out.
<pre><code>// $assign_to_config['template_group'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['template'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['site_index'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['site_404'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['global_vars'] = array(); // This array must be associative
</code></pre>
For this purpose, I only need two of those. I need to declare the `template_group and “template” to override the defaults I have set in the EE control panel. That way, if someone loads up aupro.us without anything more to the URL, EE will not serve the default template, but will instead load my URL shortening template and redirect them to the Apple User Pro home page.
So I configured like so:
<pre><code>$assign_to_config['template'] = 'u';
$assign_to_config['site_index'] = 'index';
</code></pre>
</blockquote>
So that’s all the same except I changed my template group to “s”. S stands for Short URL (to me anyway). I kept the “u” template group around and simply embedded the “s/index” template for backward compatibility with older shortening URLs.
<pre><code>{embed="s/index"}
</code></pre>
So, here is my much simplified way to use short URLs with EE.
First we’ll use the HTTP Header plugin I talked about:
<pre><code>{exp:http_header status="301"}
</code></pre>
Next we’ll call the appropriate channels.
<pre><code>{exp:channel:entries channel="appleuserpro|linkedlist" limit="1" disable="categories|category_fields|custom_fields|member_data|pagination" require_entry="yes"}
</code></pre>
The require entry is very important to the next bit of code. If no entry is called when visiting aupro.us, I want it to redirect to appleuserpro.com. So I use:
<pre><code>{if no_results}{redirect="/"}{/if}
</code></pre>
Next, we need to call a redirect for the entry.
<pre><code>{if channel_id=="9"}{redirect="article/{entry_date format='%Y'}/{entry_date format='%m'}/{url_title}"}{/if}

{if channel_id=="13"}{redirect="linkedlist/{entry_date format='%Y'}/{entry_date format='%m'}/{url_title}"}{/if}
</code></pre>
Now in my case, because I’m using two Channels for my content here on Apple User Pro, one for Articles, and one for my Linked List, I have to use some “if” statements to redirect to the right URL. If you are only using one channel, you can just remove the if statements and the second redirect, change to your appropriate URL format, and you’re good to go. But as you see, in my case, I have to figure out which channel the entry being called is in, then either redirect to the Article URL, or the Linked List URL. Even so, it’s fairly straight forward.
And finally, all that’s left to do is close the Channel Entries Tag:
<pre><code>{/exp:channel:entries}
</code></pre>
And that’s it.
And one more thing I’ll reiterate from the original article. It’s very easy to add a short URL to your entries. Here’s how I do it:
<pre><code>&#x3C;a href="http://aupro.us/s/{entry_id}">Short URL&#x3C;/a>
</code></pre>
As long as that code is within the Channel Entries tag for the entry in question, <code>{entry_id}</code> will call the entry ID number.
And that’s the short URL; much easier than my first round of code. But isn’t that how things go? You always learn new, more efficient, and better ways of doing things.

ExpressionEngine URL Shortener Revisited

Following up on my earlier link about Rosetta problems in the latest Snow Leopard update.
<blockquote>
Restoring to a pre-Security Update 2012-001 Time Machine backup is ideal, but if you can’t do that the next best thing is to use a bandaid patch created by an <a href="https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3706348">Apple Discussion Board user</a> that restores Rosetta app functionality
</blockquote>
I probably would not recommend this bandaid patch business. Ideally, if you have a Snow Leopard install hanging around because you need Rosetta, then do not apply this update until Apple has resolved the issues. If you already updated and have been bitten, then perhaps this is worth a try. Again though, I don’t think I would recommend it or do it myself. Mixing in files from a previous system version to overwrite replaced files from the last update seems dangerous to me.
If you do decide to try this, be certain to have a FULL BACKUP!

OS X Daily

Fix Rosetta in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

<blockquote>
I’m disabling comments for a bit, though. I’m tired of reading nonsense and of interacting with people that solely troll this site just to get a rise out of other commenters and start a holy war in the comments section.
</blockquote>
Another site to recognize the problems with comments. Unfortunately Geller says they are working on:
<blockquote>
a much-improved solution for commenting on BGR.
</blockquote>
Should just give it up in my opinion, which if you are regular reader here, you already know. Oh well, I hope they figure something better out. I’m glad comments are off for now because it’s less temptation for me to scroll down there and read the muck and mudslinging going on…

Jonathan Geller writing on BGR

Commenting on BGR

<blockquote>
In consideration of the reader, how we want the site to look, and due to the amount of time we can spend keeping an eye of this stuff, we will be removing comments from the next iteration of MacStories.
</blockquote>
More and more people are realizing how broken commenting is these days.

Posts tagged “Follow Up” from the blog