El Aura

Save As vs. Duplicate in Lion

Having used Lion for more than a month now, I do not understand at all all the bluster about the auto-save behaviour and the disappearance of the ‘Save As’ command. Not having to think about saving just feels natural to me. And duplicate also feels like the more natural way of doing things, since we always used ‘Save As’ as a means to duplicate a document.

Of course, the lack of a default shortcut might trip people up but it is the price to pay for having a stretched-out transition from the old behaviour to the new. Apple probably should have used cmd-D or cmd-shift-D but some people, including John Gruber, feel more comfortable with keeping their old habits, i.e., cmd-shift-S, and/or want consistency among applications as a lot of ‘legacy’ applications still have, and will have for quite some time, a ‘Save As’ command with an associated cmd-shift-S shortcut. Maybe Apple felt no shortcut was better than picking one of the two (S or D), particularly since it is easy to add one yourself.

Installing Lion on a RAID volume

Installing OS X Lion automatically creates a new invisible recovery partition on the volume the target partition resides on. Unfortunately, if the target partition is a software RAID volume created by OS X’s Disk Utility (or probably any kind of RAID), the installer is unable to create this additional partition (or at least without destroying the software RAID) and might fail.

Reportedly, you can install on a software RAID if you can boot the computer which hosts the RAID from another volume either via the official installer or by cloning a Lion installation/partition (belonging to the same computer) from this separate volume onto the RAID volume. Unfortunately, for computers that ship with Lion, the App Store version of Lion does not install (they need a slightly different build). Thus, you need to first obtain a Lion installer for this particular Mac and ‘install’ it on the separate volume. Once that is done you can create the software RAID with it and either install with the previously obtained machine-specific installer or clone to the RAID.

Currently the only way to obtain this machine-specific installer is via Internet Recovery Mode (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718). You have two options to proceed:

——— A ———

• boot into Internet Recovery Mode
• start installation onto separate volume (this takes time because it first has to download the installer)
• boot from the installation on the separate volume
• create Soft-RAID
• clone the installation you are booted from onto the Soft-RAID

——— B ———

• boot into Internet Recovery Mode
• create Soft-RAID and try to install onto it (this takes time because it first has to download the installer) and will ultimately fail with an error message
• (while still being ‘booted’ from the Internet Recovery Mode) restore the machine-specific InstallESD.dmg (that the installation attempt dropped somewhere onto the Soft-RAID) onto the separate volume,
• boot from there (ie, boot from the InstallESD.dmg which is the installer)
• install Lion onto Soft-RAID

For some reason, this will not install Disk Utility onto the Soft-RAID (probably because the actual Disk Utility binary usually sits on the recovery partition which does not exist on the RAID.

————

Method (B) is taken from http://translate.google.ch/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.skgm.de%2F%3Fp%3D405, method (A) is a patchwork gleaned from multiple sources including comments from the previous link and I thus might have jumped to conclusions with it.

My top XX iPhone apps are not your top XX apps

I am amazed when I hear that people only use a handful of apps. Loosely sorted by usage frequency, these are the third-party apps I use regularly:

1. BBC News (listening to the BBC Wordservice)
2. RSR (listening to my favorite music radio station)
3. Reeder (RSS client)
4. Shazam (identify music)
5. Skype (VoIP, lowers your phone bill)
6. Articles (Wikipedia client)
7. Simplenote (synchronised notes across all your devices)
8. SBB Mobile (public transport schedules)
9. ZVV Fahrplan (ditto, better at finding local bus stops)
10. Swiss Map (high quality topographical maps)
11. Dropbox (easier than emailing you files you might need on the go)
12. Weightbot
13. eBay (watching auctions on the go)
14. Amazon.de (looking up book titles, authors and lots of other stuff)
15. The Economist (reading or listening to your favourite newspaper without having to carry anything extra)
16. DB Navigator (public transport schedules for another country)
17. LEO (the best online dictionary between German and six other languages)
18. Ninjawords (the best English dictionary)
19. PCalc (clean and useful RPN-capable calculator)
20. i48 (when you need the full power of an HP48 calculator)
21. Flashlight-4 (use the LED flash as a flashlight)
22. IMDB (query the IMDB movie database)
23. Kindle (e-book reader)
24. Telefonbuch (German telephone directory)
25. mobility car (carsharing access app)
26. Public Toilets (find them wherever you are)
27. iWeather.ch (rain radar for Switzerland)
28. Star Walk (find any star or constellation, or just the moon or the sun ;))
29. Convertbot (convert between units)
30. Currencies (convert between currencies)

Apple Discussions - making sense of the nonsense

Apple’s new discussion pages offer a lot of options viewing the content. But as usual, just adding options rarely makes for a useful product, something that Apple is normally keenly aware of. Alas, this time they threw it all out and did not even attempt to provide a useful default view. Here is my overview of the available options, bold text referring to actually useful elements:

A) Content

• Apple Featured Topics (a global selection of threads Apple considers useful, unlikely to be useful as way too much and way too widely spread)
• Community Annoucements (this category seems to have disappeared again, though I still have it on my homepage)
• Recent Activity (current global background noise)
• Recent Announcement Posts (announcements by Apple)
• Recent Content (the same as recent activity, maybe minus announcements?)
• Recent Discussions (the same as recent content, minus the basically non-existent documents/user tips)
• Recent Documents (currently only two single entries from this month)
• Top Liked Content (most often user-voted posts)
• Top Rated Content (the same as top liked content)
• Unanswered Questions (current global background noise minus the small proportion of answered questions)
• View Document (sole way of editing any documents, if you did not find place for this widget among all the other 50 widgets on your home page, you cannot edit documents, not that you could create documents, that seems to be broken at the moment)
• Watch A Tag (put a subforum on your homepage, would work if people actually used tags, unlikely to happen)
• Watch A User (unless you stumble upon a user that mainly posts stuff useful to you, which is pretty unlikely, just some only slightly filtered noise)
• Your Content (only way to get to all your posts, or rather all threads with posts of yours, hopefully all, only useful when put at the lowest position of your homepage as it will be very, very long since it has no page breaks)

B) Places

• Communities (put the list of forums on your homepage)
• Places (same as communities but puts forums you have joined on top)

C) People

• Newest Members (if need some inspiration on choosing a username, a random list of new names)
• Recent Activity (same as recent activity, very original)
• Top Participants in Communities (across all forums, just look at the points and you don’t need this list)
• Watch A User (same a watch a user)

D) Other

• Formatted Text (add random text to your homepage, eg,  ‘This list below is completely useless)
• HTML (add random anything to your homepage, eg, if you prefer AD to Facebook)
• Recent Bookmarks (delicious for Apple Discussions)
• RSS Subscriptions (if none of the above gave you the right mix of AD content, add RSS subscriptions to it, if you don’t have an RSS reader, you use your homepage here as one)
• Your Bookmarks

————————————

So, besides forcing users to wade through 24 categories to find the handfull of them that are actually useful and then to configure the categories further it offers a parallel universe with the controls in the top-right menu:

1) Your Stuff

• Bookmarks (ditto as above)
• Discussions (similar to your content, except incomplete)
• Documents (presumably the same as edit documents, except that documents are non-functional at the moment)
• Communities (same as places)
• Notifications (that is new or is just another name for announcements?)
• Preferences (yeah, that is new, but creating your homepage is not part of your preferences)
• Profile (another section of preferences)

2) History

• (replacement for your browser history limited to AD, needed as a lot of pages do not get their own URL, partially overlaps with your content)

3) Browse

• Announcement Posts (ditto as above)
• Bookmarks (ditto as above)
• Discussions (ditto as recent discussions, ie, useless)
• Documents (ditto as above, and useless as non-functional)
• Communities (ditto as above)
• People (ditto as above)
• Tags (ditto as above)

————————————

And to top it all, people who are just browsing (ie, not logged in) get only a search box and a listing of the forums and the posts therein. They cannot see announcements, bookmarks by others, top-rated posts, featured posts, or documents. Great job.

Is Apple’s grab for a cut of iOS revenue worth it?

Three questions come up:
(a) Are we fine with Apple driving off all competitors for any market for iOS apps it chooses to compete in (iBooks does not have to pay a 30% tax to Apple, Amazon however has to, leaving very little room for any iBooks competitors, and that is before counting the private APIs and customer information advantage iBooks has)? 
(b) Do we think it is both fair and good for the platform we love so much that any iOS business can be destroyed or forced to withdraw from the platform by Apple at any moment?
(c) Are iPhones and iOS worth it to pay 43% more for every single service or product used on it, including products like Skype calls (that is if companies find ways to de-bundle their offers in a way that allows them to include Apple’s 30% into their prices, if they do not, they will either quit or raise prices for everybody)? And are iPhones and iOS worth this potential debundling?

Apple’s deal with the Appstore

With the original Appstore for the iPhone, Apple offered us a deal: We are only allowed to install applications through Apple’s vetted Appstore but if we would not charge our users, Apple would not charge us for hosting the apps. At least as long as we respected a set of overall reasonable rules. One of the least reasonable rule in many eyes was that apps should not compete with the core functionality of the iPhone. But even here, public pressure and inquiries by competition authorities finally led to the acceptance of apps like Google Voice.

With its, as yet announced and unreleased, new subscription service for periodical publications, Apple is now expanding what it sees as core functionality and thus starting to put that original deal into question.

Apple’s attempts to monetize on free apps

The recent private message sent by Apple to several European newspapers that it wants all access to paywalled content channelled through its own upcoming subscription service instead of going through free apps and an access code sold via the newspapers websites might primarily be motivated by giving its planned Appstore subscription service as much scope as possible. But it also serves as a first step in ending the concept of free apps.
While free apps are likely to remain available for the foreseeable future this marks the first step by Apple to start cashing in on the profits generated by free apps. While selling a service by channels other than the Appstore and then allowing users to access this service via free iOS apps might seem as an illegitimate way of bypassing Apple’s store and thus undermining its financial foundation, attempts by Apple to prevent this will come with a number of serious challenges.

For once, the notion that a company has to pay to the OS or device manufacturer to run an application on them seems out of touch with free and highly competitive markets other infrastructure devices like desktop computers, telephones, or transportation sectors have seen. Only in areas with little or no competition, eg, mobile devices with closed operation systems or cable television, do companies have to pay custom prices just to be present. No company has to pay a special price to be reachable by phone, no company is paying Microsoft to be able to install applications on its OS, at least not beyond standardized, non-discriminatory prices.
Determining what price a company should pay to be present on an iOS device, moreover, is a tricky business. Apple’s standard rate of 30% of income generated from selling an application seems like a simple enough formula. It however becomes close to impossible to apply when services are bundled, eg, combining online access to a newspaper’s (paywalled) website and to the same content via an iOS app. Of course, unbundling solves that issue but it mostly is not something that is attractive for customers, paying once to read a Kindle book on an actual Kindle and then pay again to read it on an iOS device.
In other areas it might be easier to determine the revenue associated with an iOS app (and apply Apple’s 30% take on it), eg, advertising inside an app. But even here, any bundling (eg, selling ads inside an iOS and Android app as a package) would conflict with it. Where it truly becomes impossible to gauge on what to apply a 30% cut on is for apps which serve as advertising or promotion themselves, eg, an airline’s app.
In the short term, Apple’s change of tack might only result in a set of forced unbundling, ie, selling newspaper iPad access separately from its online access. But that will only work for a limited number of services and it would be a very messy affair if applied on any larger scale (bidding through Ebay’s iOS app would direct some kickback fees to Apple but just watching auctions would not?).
Apart from some very limited and unpopular unbundling or likely illegal attempts to force all advertising in iOS apps to go through them, Apple will have little success in getting its share of the profits from free iOS apps. The company would be much better off to simply charge for the hosting and vetting of free applications (while exempting not-for-profit organisations and low volume apps). Applying additional fees to successful companies will be a very complicated affair and would likely be counterproductive.
Apart from the hosting and vetting costs, Apple should thus rather refrain from further attempts to monetize the Appstore as the availability of apps is something that in itself provides huge promotional support to its iOS devices.

Eye-Fi: How not to write software

The two main bugs I ran into were:

(A) When connecting to my Eye-Fi card for the first time, the Eye-Fi Center and the Eye-Fi webpage refused to let me create a new account, instead asking me to log into my account using my not-yet-existing credentials. Support told me that this should only happen with an already registered card but the Eye-Fi Center clearly showed my card as unregistered (see screenshot post below).

How did I solve it? No idea, at one point clicking somewhere in the window changed the screen from login to register. Trying to repeat this, it went to register right-away. In the end, it might have been that the ‘register’ screen only came up when using the version of the Eye-Fi Center software supplied on the card and not a downloaded, updated version (which the software initially prompted me to do before I even tried to register). Or it was just luck that it worked at some point eventually.

(B) Trying to set up a card became almost impossible on the second day (again it might be that on the first day I used the older card-supplied version of the software but I think I was working fine with the up-to-date software on day one as well). Basically, whenever an Eye-Fi card was directly connected to the computer, logging into my account (to start doing any changes) worked only for one or two seconds and then I would be kicked out again with the login screen appearing as an overlay. Eventually I managed to change my settings, but it was a real pain: hit login button, click field to edit, type one or two characters, be kicked out again, repeat until all changes are done. Every time, I was kicked out, the focus was lost and I had to re-center it to the field in question. A few times, I was able to bring up the settings window (via Eye-Fi Center -> Settings -> Eye-Fi Card) on top of the login screen and it stayed there.

Other minor annoyances are:

(1) Installing the Eye-Fi software required quite a number of Adobe Air updates (which required a felt ten mouse-clicks in total).

(1) Starting the Eye-Fi Helper requires typing four characters into the Spotlight filed (+ four arrow downs) or alternatively tying eight characters.

(2) After starting the Helper, its menu bar icon gives me the beachball for five to ten seconds.

(3) Almost every time I start the Eye-Fi Helper I need to re-type my credentials

(4) For some period, typing the password in the login screen was a real pain as the focus switched from the password field to the user name field after every single keystroke.

(5) At some point the helper software kept crashing on start-up, support told me to re-install, that fixed it for the moment but had occasional crashes since then.

I would not be surprised if part of the blame actually lies with Adobe Air, but overall this is one of the worst pieces of software I have used.