just to let you know

recently bought an Apple product?

If yes and you had to find out that your shiny new purchase has been replaced by an even shinier fruit-logoed product, you might just have a case for Apple's Self Service Transition Program.

I could have done with it when I bought my eMac back in 2002 and lost £200 in 48 hours.

nice iPhoto side effect

Something interesting I discovered in iPhoto yesterday. A couple of months ago, our friend Brian came back from his 4 month trip to India. He downloaded all pictures from his digital camera nto our iBook and gave us a little presentation of his holiday memories.

When I checked the last 12 months" feature in iPhoto yesterday, I saw his images again - only this time his photos were all thrown in chronological order into the same big album as ours! What a surprise! Turns out that he got his Taj Mahal pictures taken around the same time when I stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. And when it was Milly's 1st birthday, he visited the temples in Cambodia.

Interesting to see what such a feature can cause

iPod: is Apple's marketing its own worst enemy ?

There has been a lot of talk about the apparently short life span of iPod batteries. iPod lovers counter any criticism quite rightfully by stating that batteries in MiniDisc players didn't last longer than 18-24 months either.

On the whole, it looks as if people seem to be really picky when it comes to the iPod - and I think this is not only because of the price. In my opinion, the problem is to be saught deeper. Now I am not trying to evangelise people here, but to me it's a fact that Apple products are top-notch design, intuitive and fun to use. Apple products make technology take the back seat and let people get on with the job at hand. In my book, that's how any tool should be designed. Over the course of the last years I found Apple users to be the most critical when it came to products and services. Why is this ? Apple users are so critical towards Apple because they - just like Apple - strive for prefection and usability. These people swim against the stream and live Apple day by day.

All the new iPod users do just the same. What do you think they've been doing since 1984 ? They have been watching Apple ads and for one reason or another never made the decision to cross the bridge to the bright side. With the iPod, a lot of consumers now hold their first bit of Apple kit in their hands. And they are looking for ways to show off their product. They want to have reasons and prove points. "I want my iPod to sound better, last longer and look nicer than any other player.". Why ?

Because it's from Apple !

Dreamweaver MX 2004, and make it snappy !

Anyone who has already trialled or even bought it might know what comes next. Everyone who hasn't: be warned... the new edition of Dreamweaver - MX 2004 is stupendously slow. An 800Mhz G4 with 640MB is struggling with and it became unbearable for me to carry on working with it. This is of course despite the advantages and bugfixes that were undertaken in MX 2004. It's such a shame, but how can something like this happen to a multi mullion $ company such as Macromedia who must be reliant on Apple Mac user on a much higher percentage than other software developers. What kind of tests were done? What machines were used to undertake the tests?

I have a suspicion that MM uses one of these G5 clusters for user acceptance testing :-) Anyway, let's all hope for a patch or update or something. The current version is unworkable.

P.S.: I've just read somwhere that decreasing the maximum undo-steps in DW preferences does increase performance. However I can't confirm this. Anyway - this shouldn't be really something a designer have to do in order to make DW more "snappy".

Imagewell - digital hub assistant

I discovered this nifty tool through a thread on MacAssist Tosh the other day.

Some of you might have spotted these simple alterations I make to some of the pictures on this blog. Well instead of using the what I'd call the "Heavy Artillery", I now use ImageWell. It sits on the top menu bar and accepts any drag&drop items and is also drag&droppable itself. You manipulate pictures in size, add comments, change colours, FTP and save in jpg format. The only bit of functionality I miss is colour reduction to decrease file size.... but hey ! You can't have everything !

For those of you who wonder what the little cloud next to the imagewell logo is: that's Himmelbar another gem. But I'll tell you about this another time :-)

If you're interested in downloading Imagewll, click here

Apple's iBook Recall Programme mk II

Some of you might have read my first episode on the iBook recall programme story. Well the news now is - there are not a lot news actually. After 18 days the iBook is still with Apple and appararently parts are ordered (hmmm... that'll be the main board then - I hope !).

The frustrating part of it is though that no one is actually able to give me a status update. My friendly local Apple dealer gave me Apple's contact details and I spoke to a friendly, oriental sounding lady somewhere on the other end of the planet. She found a message on the system that "repair has begun". But that's really all she could tell me. No indication how much longer it would take - nothing. I mean, she has no options either: after all, the iBook is in a repair department somewhere in Europe and she sits probably somewhere in India.

This is actually a phenomenon I have come across fairly often recently: Companies set up these call centres somewhere far away and route all annoying calls there. Call centre staff usually speaks English with a very strong accent so communication with them becomes somewhat difficult. I call this "One-Way Customer Service", because whenever you ask these call handlers to speak to a manager or superior person if you have a complaint, the reply is the same: "Sorry, sir, but there is no one here to speak to. Our managers are not customer facing.". In addition, if you ask for an address to direct your complaint to, they only tell you that this wouldn't make any difference.

How hopeless does this feel ? You have an issue, you feel treated unfairly... and all you can do is speak to someone who can not make a difference at all.

I really have to criticise Apple as far as this is concerned - they might have great products but their customer service and dealership communication has to be rated as poor, in my opinion.

Moments

Simon posted a link to his short movie "Moments" which he shot with his digicam yesterday on MacAssist. I think it's fab and again shows that sometimes you don't really need all these fancy effects in Apple's iMovie.

For a smaller 56k modem friendly version click here.

iVisit 3.0.4X

I've been playing with my new dlink firewire web cam for about a week now and had lots of fun using iVisit for any cross-platform video conferencing. iVisit is freeware and requires (free) registration with iVisit themselves in order to use the service. Once the straight-forward form is filled in and you've received your email with access password you're almost ready to go.

iVisit's UI is not what you would expect from a proper OS X app, but hey, connection and software are free with the "lite" version. Which part of "bargain" don't you understand?

iVisit is not a patch on Apple's iChat AV, but as long as iChat cannot be used on Windows iVisit remains the yardstick.

click here for Download for OS X version
click here for Windows XP/2000/NT/ME/98 version
click here for the iVisit web site