At home, I browsed a bit the internet for that song and stumbled upon a version of the song that might be even better than the original. Check out JoeySuki’s remix:

Very nice track!

First of all: Hell, yeah! iTunes Cloud finally removed the pain and anger brought by Apple’s policy of having an iPod Touch/iPhone only linked with one iTunes Library. For me, it has always been a pain to synchronize my music in a smooth way all over my devices (iMac, MacBook, iPhone), especially when it came to MP3s. The fact that iTunes didn’t consider MP3s when using “transfer purchases” took any chance (except of using “Home Sharing”) to get MP3s synchronized all over. With iTunes content I permanently had to go that way: Buy them on my iPhone, connect the phone to my iMac when I was at home, “transfer purchases”, reconnect the iPhone to my MacBook when I was at work, “transfer purchases”, all done. But with MP3s this didn’t work.

Now thanks to iTunes Match and iTunes Cloud, MP3s are being matched to actual iTunes Store content and, if nothing could be found, the MP3s are being uploaded to the cloud, from where they can be streamed/downloaded to all registered devices. Sounds awesome, huh?

Well, actually, it really is awesome. There are some downsides, for example the *very* slow iTunes Match servers for uploading data. I’m not sure if that’s only because of the instant heavy load that recently hit the servers or if Apple just didn’t spend enough money for the server’s to be the dog’s balls. Anyhow, besides of that everything runs just fine so far. Streaming/downloading works with good speed (no endless seconds of buffering, nor interrupts while playing), artwork yet seems to be a little problem since here it doesn’t seem to get synchronized instantly all over my devices and the iTunes Match recognition works okay (only have/had to upload around 1k songs of nearly 5k).

The only thing that really bothers me is the fact that my iPhone actually gets flooded with music and the only way I found to remove recently “streamed” (or “streamed and automatically downloaded) music is by scrolling through my list with nearly 5k rows and swipe-to-remove each song I’d like not to have on my iPhone anymore, so I can use the 16GB for more than just audio.

It would be really nice if someone could point me a better solution to fix that issue or, if there is none, if Apple could please implement a feature that allows me to “clear the least played songs”.

Oh well.

Seen on the german A8.

(just wanted to have that said)

It’s a hardware-unlocked model I bought from a shop on the first of February 2010, it’s in best condition (as the pictures show) and I even ship it within its original packing plus the bill (so you even have warranty left on it). I’m actually only intending to ship it within Germany. For more information, just read the description of the eBay auction.

Good luck bidding!

Fast forward to today and the Smartphones we’re using in our everyday life – Blackberries, Pres and Pixies, iPhones and N900s. What’s the biggest part in that whole cellular phone market that changed since the mid/end 90s? Of course, it’s the phone’s technology and the features they provide nowadays. But what’s more important, the whole accessories-ecosystem around those phones actually changed. Today, you see people buying additional battery-packs for their Blackberries, since the phones are already that “Smart” that you’d actually need a constant power-source to make them last for more than a couple of hours of heavy usage. When people buy a mobile phone, they also typically throw some on-the-go charger into the bucket. And maybe also some docking-station for the desk, or even equipment for attaching it to their car’s windshields.

Now the whole accessory-ecosystem goes that far, that people even buy overpriced socks or pieces of silicon formed as protection-sleeve for their Smartphones. Especially within the iPhone user-groups you can see such protection-cases being very popular. But let us look from another perspective at especially those accessories.

When someone buys an iPhone, of course, he’s interested in the phone’s features and probably likes the way the phone integrates with the rest of his personal infrastructure, like laptops, computers/Macs, etc. But of course, only a few people really go for the features-pack only. Probably 90% of the iPhone customers look forward to have a phone that’s so exclusive and so beautiful that you’d hardly like to take it out of the showcase. And exactly at that point, all third-party manufacturers of iPhone accessories come in handy. So, people go and get their iPhones, take them out of the packing and lock them right into some ugly silicon, acrylic, plastic or whatever kind of case to protect their beauty against scratches, dirt and other natural enemies of the glossy piano paint. Sure, I mean, they paid and ass full of money for a brick that blinds you by its glint, so why should these people not try the best to protect it the best they can?

Well, sure they can do that – but where’s the point? I think I can talk for everyone that has ever searched for an iPhone case when I say that 99% of them are ugly as hell and not worth the package they’re shipped in. So, why do people then actually buy an iPhone for its cool look, when they “protect” it most of the time with such a case where the phone’s actual look does not matter anymore? For what? So they can slide it out when they’re feeling lucky and show it to everybody for one blink of an eye and then pack it back into its sleeve?

Of course, you can’t blame the people for that. I mean, why can’t accessory-manufacturers produce electro-magnetic protection shields that build an own atmosphere around the iPhone that does not allow anything else to come through than the owner’s washed hands to touch the touchscreen? I mean come on, that’s what people are waiting for! F*ck invisibleSHIELD, f*ck the pseudo translucent plastic shields that doesn’t absorb hits that could cause the iPhone’s screen to break into million small pieces. The people want cases that doesn’t even allow the iPhone to fall down the stairs or into water!

Yeah, right. Now I can definitely remember those days when I got my first Bosch 509 and protected it with one of the dozen plastic-sleeves against the cruel reality.

Think different, people.

Enjoy!

However, I could philosophize even more about the pros and cons of this themeable-web-interface-for-YQL but I’m actually not that much into it to do so. The reason for registering was mainly for the hype’s sake and besides, I actually planned to reserve my everywhere used nickname “devilx” – unfortunately it was already taken by an as-it-seems porn addicted guy.
If this guy should coincidentally follow my blog and read this: I would be very thankful, if you could pass me that subdomain name, so I can make use of it for more than just an empty page named “Default” and following porn. Thank you!

Oh well, enough for today. Read (someday) more on http://mariusmm.tumblr.com/. Enjoy!

CandyBar makes OS X appear even more lickable than it already is. It allows to simply change each application’s icon and provides a cool management of all the available icon-sets. Besides, also the Dock appearance can be tweaked and managed. It would be really nice, if CandyBar would provide a way to sync the collection from one Mac to another, since now, I need to keep my collections on my iMac and my MacBook manually in sync, what’s pretty meh. However,  although it’s pretty pricy, it’s worth to have it.

Colloquy is the most advanced, free IRC client I’ve found yet. Its feature-list is pretty good and there’s a similar iPhone client available, too. I used this client already in 2006, when I still had my PowerBook and have to say, that it’s pretty bloated and slow on older hardware. But on the current generation of MacBooks, iMacs and MacPros it should be running like a charm.

Width Dropbox you can easily keep your files in sync over two or more different devices, regardless if it’s a PC, a Mac, a Linux or even an iPhone – all your data is always up-to-date. Besides, you can share files with friends and receive shared folder invitations yourself. 2GB of space is being provided for free, more is affordable for some cash. Though, I’d never put sensitive data “into the cloud”.

Echofon is probably the best Twitter-suite available on the Mac and the iPhone. Thanks to their Sync- and Push-Notification-Service it’s a pleasure to use Twitter, even with multiple accounts and on multiple devices. Thanks to the intelligent Sync-Service, Echofon notices when you’re not on your desktop anymore, and starts pushing notifications to your iPhone client when you get mentioned by someone else – very cool! Yet, the notifications will be pushed only every 15 minutes, but from what I’ve heard, the Echofon guys are already working on shrinking this interval. If you haven’t tried out yet – be sure to do soon!

Is there much to say about iPhoto? I think you can call it the image-management application on OS X. Since ’09 it also supports Faces & Places, what makes everything even more sexy. In combination with the photos shot on a GPS-able camera (like the iPhone) it even detects automatically, what place you’ve taken the photo. Although, yet the face-recognition doesn’t work as I would expect it to. You need high quality pictures with much contrast to get iPhoto recognize the people.

I used to be registered on Last.fm since I was using Linux with its Media-Players with Audioscrobbler plugin, so I’ve just continued using this pretty cool service. It let’s me tag the music I listen and discover new tracks I might like. I never tried out Pandora or similar services, so I can’t say whether Last.fm is better or not – I’m just used to it.

After discovering and trying out LaunchBar there was no way around it anymore – not even by using QuickSilver, what I did quite some time. LaunchBar is extremely fast, supports a ton of different Applications and even provides an easy way to write and include your own plugins. I wouldn’t want to miss it again in my daily work.

LittleSnapper in combination with its web-service (former QuickSnapper, now Ember) is a very nice enhancement to the OS X desktop, since it provides a very quick and easy way to share screenshots with others, without having to use “Grab” and manually upload the images to some service like ImageShack. In addition to the Desktop client, I also use the iPhone app to share camera-snapshots with others.

With Money managing finances became as easy as a finger-snip. I bought my license on a MacUpdate Promo for 20% less and have to say that it’s worth every penny, especially when there’s such a friendly and helpful company like Jumsoft behind. Money supports backing up the whole database to MobileMe and by that even synchronization of two Macs with each other. The iPhone client yet only supports sync over WiFi from what I’ve seen, but hopefully there will be MobileMe support in future, too.

Let me just call it “Poor man’s Photoshop” – in an excellent way! Pixelmator is, what GIMP is to the GNOME Desktop. It let’s me create/edit images in an easy and smooth way, without much knowledge of the actual application itself. Pixelmator provides me a light and intuitive application with a feature-list that fits my needs perfectly without being over-bloated.

As the name already says, Quiet Read provides you a way to temporary bookmark for example web-pages and read it later, when there’s more time for it. It’s actually the similar concept Instapaper follows, although it doesn’t really extract your site’s content for any mobile platform, nor does it have any web-service in the background to which you can sync multiple installations. MobileMe support would be a great feature, maybe Bamboo Apps will implement it some day.

Shovebox is a great companion for Things and Quiet Read which also provides a pretty cool iPhone client that’s for free. I got the App itself from within a MacHeist Bundle, where I didn’t need to pay anything for it – and maybe that’s the reason I’m actually using it. Yet, I would not really pay money on this App, since its yet pretty “small” (regarding its features) and I have most things already managed by Things and Quiet Read/Instapaper (free).

Yes, it’s Telephone! And yes! It’s OpenSource! This application allows you to use your VoIP account provided by your ISP directly on your Mac. At the moment, several ISP are supported and the list gets longer and longer. Telephone makes it easy to dial and receive calls on a VoIP account without much hassle.

TextMate – THE Editor. I think, there’s nothing better for writing any kind of code under OS X. This editor is light, fast and provides hell of a feature-set you’ll probably never finish to explore. MacroMates did an excellent job with this application and I know of many tries (especially on Linux) to re-create something similar, but yet no other (GUI-)editor reached TextMate.

Things is probably one of the most amazing task management applications for OS X available today. It provides all you need for successfully managing all your ToDos and even syncs them up to your iPhone client. Two big cons of Things are the yet still not available MobileMe sync (today, it does sync only over WiFi, without even using an encrypted connection) and the pricing on both, the desktop and the iPhone app. Still, the App is just lo-ve-ly and a must of everyone who’s really into task management.

A very nice newsfeed reader with excellent graphical user interface. Times provides you all basic-features you would expect form an RSS-reader plus the possibility to read the whole articles within the application itself. Very nice idea, and pretty cool implementation, though I’d wish it to be faster and not that bloated.

Versions – and you’ll never need to look up svn –help again. Since the last version of Version (ough, what a sentence) it even supports the latest SVN 1.6.x and provides you to work with several different SVN repositories at a time without much practice. Although, with $39 it this application is very pricy.

Viscosity is yet the best user interface for OpenVPN available on OS X, in my opinion. It lets you import your OpenVPN config-files and edit them within a very nice preference-window. Also, it shows you statistics about your running connections and makes OpenVPN easier than it already is – and with $9 it’s quite a fair deal.

Storing passwords, credit-card information and other sensitive data. Wallet allows me to manage all my logins and other passwords in a very nice and fast way, it provides me an add-on for Safari and Firefox and it allows me to sync my Wallet-database via MobileMe and even browse it on my iPhone with its iPhone app – although it took years until the iPhone pendant was available here in germany.

I think, that’s it so far. Besides those application, of course I use the regular tools like Mail.app, iCal, the Address Book, iTunes, the Terminal and all the other not-worth-mentioning programs that come with OS X.

Palm Pre Development Bundle 0.2

Yes, after not even four hours I’ve already finished building the 0.2-release of my Palm Pre Development Bundle for TextMate. In case you’re wondering what weird stuff I’m talking about, please read my previous post first.

However, this second release includes a lot more features than it had before, plus I’ve made use of the CocoaDialog now. Let me describe the new features from the top to the bottom of the screenshot on the left site.

First of all, there’s “Generate New Project”. This lets you execute a palm-generate with all important attributes and opens the created project afterwards using the “mate” terminal-command, which needs to be available for this to work. All you have to do then is simply to save the TextMate project right into your generated project-directory.

Next, we still have “Generate New Scene”. I’ve enhanced the feature now, so that you’ll get a cocoa dialog asking for the scene’s name. Beware: The generation usually works as it should, the only problem is the TextMate project-drawer, which doesn’t seem to refresh by itself. A workaround: Cmd+H to hide TextMate and then click on its Dock-icon to make it appear again. Then all newly generated files should be visible in its drawer.

The next three features work just as before, no enhancements at all. On the fourth, the “Launch Project in Debugging-Mode” feature, I’ve implemented a palm-launch with debugging options, that can be run on an existing, packaged and installed project.

Next, there are ways to close and remove installed Projects. “Close running project” of course only works, when the App is actually running and “Remove installed Project” removes the App from the device. As device for all those commands the first device found by the Palm toolset will be taken – so if you would like to use the Emulator, better disconnect your real device and vice versa.

I’ve also built-in two features that let you simulate test calls and SMS on your Emulator, if you changed from password authentication to SSH public key authentication. You can do this either manually or try to use the feature at the menu’s bottom named “Auto-install SSH-Pubkey on Emulator”. Depending on your SSH-key-setup it works out or… not.

The other seven features allow you to simulate GPS drives on the Emulator – again only if you’ve set-up SSH-Pubkey authentication.

I hope you enjoy this release of the Palm Pre Development Bundle for TextMate!

Download: Palm-Pre-Bundle-0.2

UPDATE: There’s a newer version available! Get it here. Or use GitHub.

The scene generation works like this: You implement your this.controller.pushScene(“Main”);-statement, select the scene’s name (Main, without the quotes!) and select the scene-generation command from the bundle’s menu. The command will immediately generate you a new scene named just the way you chose to name it.

The other three commands can be ran by pressing the keys Fn+Ctrl+F5/F6/F7. Attention: The bundle only works with TextMate Projects! Generate your Palm Pre project like you always do, by using the following command:

palm-generate -p “{ title:’ProjectName’, id:com.my.ProjectName, version:’1.0.0′ }” ProjectName

Then, create a new TextMate Project and drag&drop the folder palm-generate created for you (“ProjectName”) into the Project’s drawer. Save the project within your Project-directory (“ProjectName”) and then run the commands.

This is the very first version of this bundle and I’ll keep constantly improving it with other features that help me and hopefully others on the development of Palm Pre Web-Apps.

Enjoy!

Download: PalmPre-Bundle-0.1

UPDATE: There’s a newer version available now! Get it here.

However, after I bought Money, I exported my whole transaction info from my ING-DiBa account as CSV (since they do not provide me anything else) and tried to import it into Money – and it failed. I was using the latest version (3.4.4 v1938) and had quite a few problems with the CSV import. First of all, the columns haven’t been recognized automatically. Also, I didn’t really knew how to import the transaction-value, since I only had one column containing a positive (income) or a negative (outgoing) number, where Money expected “Withdrawal” and “Deposit”. Also, Money seemed to have problems with the punctuation of the numbers, what cause 1000€ to become 100€. And in general, the software didn’t work well with the CSV my bank provided me. I had to manually cut out the first few lines (which were just some additional information but not party of the transactions) and stuff line that. I was wondering, why this is so, since Squirrel automatically recognized the CSV and imported it just perfectly into my virtual account.

I wrote an e-mail to Jumsoft and explained the problems I have with my freshly purchased Money and of course asked for help. After some more mailing, I got a patched version of Money one day later. I tried it out and: Bam! It worked! The CSV imports work just as they should now, even if there’s still no automatic column recognition. Still, I’m very happy that Jumsoft helped my out that fast and in such an uncomplicated way – I’m not used to this from Apple-related companies anymore.

After I had all my data imported into Money and got everything categorized, synced the info up to my iPhone, what also worked out as smooth as I’d expect it.

The one thing I did not check yet are the possibilities to sync Money over two different Macs. I’m sure it’s possible by using the Dropbox-way, although I would not like to upload such sensitive information to my Dropbox. Maybe it’s possible to sync via W-LAN, dunno.

It seems to be possible to sync different Macs via MobileMe! Hurray! I’ll test it out and give some feedback as soon as possible.

Enjoy viewing!

Facepalm

For the past months now already I’m searching for a new desktop table, since my actual one is now already eleven years old and getting more and more ramshackly by each day passing. I’ve been at several furniture stores around me, including (of course) IKEA, Möbel Gamerdinger, Heyne Büromarkt, any some more. Also, I’ve been searching for tables on the internet at several different online-stores and even found quite a few tables that really fit my needs. The only thing that didn’t fit on any of the desks I liked was their pricing – and I really can’t understand how this could be.

What’s a desk typically contained of? Well, mostly, one big plate – in my case some rectangle one with for example 180cm x 80cm and legs, usually four in number. And actually this is essentially everything I want and need. If you would now stumble through the different (online-)stores and search for exactly such a table, you would probably be shockingly disturbed by the prices furniture stores charge for one piece of wood with four legs. Let’s take IKEA as example: They charge 179,00€ for a Galant Desktop-Table (160cm x 80cm), which is essentially only four table-legs, mounted beneath a frame which holds a plate made of pressboard – sold as a mass-production article, where the costs for fabrication probably are way under a quarter of the price they charge. Besides, at least the demonstration desks within the IKEA store were so shaky, because of their cheap built-up, that I wouldn’t want to have my iMac placed onto one of those, until I’d like to buy new hard drives every few weeks. And at last but not least: The way the table looks can hardly be called “design”.

Next store, same issue. Poorly designed desks made of cheap materials, ugly fabrication but prices within the range from two-hundred to five-hundred or even more Euros. And all I was thinking was “What’s the point?!” – there is no relation between the quality of those mass-produced tables and their prices. Don’t get me wrong, of course a lot of costs for crafting, producing, transportation and more come together – and I might not even bitch that loud if at least the materials they would use would have been real wood plates and solid steel-frames and -legs – but especially in those days I can’t see any relation between the price and the quality of those products. In my opinion, furniture stores achieved a status where they can just pull out the customer’s money off their pockets with nobody complaining about it. When some hardware producer prices its products at extremely exaggerated values you hear blogs and news-sites complaining about it. Why don’t they do so with furnitures? Are furniture-stores/-producers now already on the same level with car manufacturers and the music industry? For me, it seems so.

However, since I’m a person which works at his desk a very large amount of time and wants to feel comfortable while doing so, I’ve decided to not buy any of those mass-production-crap-desks for myself. Instead, I’m looking forward at desktops like Sublevel’s iDesk or Holmris’ Milk. Both of those tables are made of qualitatively high materials to assure stability and both look just gorgeous. Of course, those desktops are priced at a totally different level, although there’s one difference that should be kept clearly in mind: Those are no mass-products. Those desktops are custom design work, containing innovative and practical features.

I’ve already received the price listings for the different version of Milk and will yet keep looking around for a bit more, until I’ve found the table I really really really want.

Update: Yesterday I finally got a desktop table, although it was more like a spontaneous buy. I purchased the Galant table I was talking about, with the A-legs and, instead of a crappy wooden-plate, a gorgeous black glass one. For the whole table I paid around two-hundred bucks in total, what now really is a good price. Why I’m thinking so? Well, instead of the cheap and ugly want-to-be-real-wood plate I got a piece of glass which usually costs nearly two-hundred bucks itself, plus a half-way-solid frame with chrome legs that fit together pretty good. I’ve mounted the desk and yet, as I’ve expected, I’m experiencing “shocks” thru vibrations of the objects lying on the table (lamp, iMac, etc), but I’ve already found a way to screw the table’s frame to the wall behind, in an unobvious and clean way, to reduce the vibrations on the table itself. So, as I’ve said before, the table’s frame was not worth one penny, unfortunately there was no other way for me to get the glass-plate lifted to 70cm (or more) – besides building myself an own frame.

Also Still, I hope the furniture stores/industry to suffer from the depression just like the automobile industry has (and will continue to), so maybe the thinking there will change in a way to provide the people prices that fit the actual product’s quality/value someday.

An annoyed and disappointed goodbye for now.

I’ve been working on a web-site that used the jQuery framework to render content on the client side and get information from its back-end, via XmlHttpRequests. The whole built-up worked just fine of every modern, popular browser available in the market – like the Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari (on the Mac platform). Now, I had to test the site and make it workable on the iPhone-plattform as well. The site itself uses OAuth as authentication method and provides the information within a HTTP-header named “Authorization”. The theory is pretty plain: The back-end receives a request, checks for this header and responses accordingly.

However, iPhone’s Safari didn’t behave like the other browsers did. For whatever reason, the XHR was sent to the back-end, including every header that was set on the JavaScript side – except the “Authorization”-header. First, I though that Safari maybe could not handle the parameters of this header, but when I just renamed the setRequestHeader-argument to “Auth”, it worked. It simply just worked.

This happening made me search for other users experiencing this problem, unfortunately there doesn’t really seem to be many users testing JavaScript-sites on their iPhone – to be more precise, I did not find one result on Google that describes the problem I’m experiencing. I though, “Oh well, why not call Apple’s Technical Support?” – bad mistake. I got connected to a very annoyed and stroppy telephone-support which tried to convince me, that the iPhone’s Safari yet does not support Java. When I repeated myself by saying “It’s about JavaScript“, he didn’t really make the impression to understand the difference. I told him what the actual scenario was and all I got as answer was “Fill out the Feedback form on Apple’s site”. This made me a bit angry, because I more and more got the feeling of him trying to simply get rid of me. I asked for someone who is more technically involved into the whole iPhone stuff and he answered with “You’re already calling the most-advanced technical support – there’s no way to go further!”. At this point total disappointment overcame me and the only thing I thought of saying before I would hang-up the phone was “FAIL!” – luckily I was behaving more polite than the support-guy himself. Eh.

The end of the story is, that I (once again) wrote a report via Apple’s Feedback form (which from my impression is saving the submitted content to /dev/null) and implemented a workaround for myself by renaming the “Authorization”-header to “Auth”. Yet again a scenario in which I’m feeling like talking to a wall of bricks and have no possibility to get any information regarding my problem or maybe even correct this sort of bug. I think, this is the other side of closed-source software.

Google Wave Dev Preview

I can happily announce (or brag :-P) that I’ve just received my Google Wave invitation today and already created my account. I’m really excited of exploring and developing on Google’s Wave, especially with the ideas I already have in mind. Yet, I just clicked around a bit, due to the lack of free time, but as soon as I can I will take a deeper look at the API and try out some stuff I might even publish here. So stay tuned to see read (and maybe see) the latest progress of my Wavealicious ideas/implementations.

Btw, you can contact me on Wave via devilx@wavesandbox.com.

First of all, the App Store is great. From its theory to its practice, everything is implemented just the way it has to be. Sure, sometimes it’s a little slow and not that responsible as one would expect, but altogether the browsing experience is really great. Why? Because it has to be. Nobody likes to spend money somewhere he doesn’t enjoy browsing for things – regardless whether we’re talking about the #real-life or in virtual. It’s just fun to look through the Apps, find new ones, share them with your friends and of course buy them. And it’s so easy as well. One click, that’s all! Isn’t that just great?

Oh well, yeah, it would be – if. If Apple would have kept the essential concept of their App Store the way they actually planned and intended it to. I mean, let’s think back, to the time before the Apple App Store was launched (what’s only little over a year ago) – what was the general appearance of existing application stores (of e.g. Nokia or for the Windows Mobile Platform)? Exactly. Ugly, slow, confusing, a lot of useless tra…ehrrr… stuff. And then came Apple – BAM! Brand new App Store for mobile applications. Everything was clean, everything was very well working and simple for the end-user to access. Then ago, the App Store provided a few essential and yet well known applications by third-parties. Great apps, with great functionality that even looked amazingly cool.

But then, after a while, it seems like the whole BAM just BAM-MED even more. And more. And more. Of course, Apple was lucky about this fact – more Apps for sale, more cut-offs for themselves. Why not? And do you know what’s the best? Big numbers. What? Yeah! Just as I said it. Big numbers. From the moment on, from which Apple started literally raping the potential of the App store within every Keynote they presented people could see all those big numbers. Thousands of of Apps. Millions of downloads. Et cetera.

But did this really improve the Store? I’m looking around at this very same moment within the App Store and have to say: No. It didn’t. All it improved was Apple’s pockets and the big numbers on their Keynote presentations. I stumble through the App Store and see hundreds and hundreds of Apps, one more useless than the other – Bikini Babes, Gym Babes, Simple To-Do and of course a huge amount of games. Yeah, games. I’m not saying, that games are “useless” in that way. Sometimes, when waiting for the Bus or for your Girl getting changed you appreciate those little time-consumptions. But come on? I mean, spending more than $2 for a game that won’t last any longer than one hour to be played, thanks to Apple’s gorgeous batteries? Who should play those games? Shall I constantly keep my iPhone attached to the power-cord, so I can play two hours of Need For Speed? Isn’t the whole game stuff, that Apple’s trying to sell as “PSP/NintendoDS Killer” just plain dumb and totally impracticable? I’m not saying, that games on mobile phones are no fun in general, but are you re-charging your iPhone every three hours, just to be able to play some games? I mean, I still don’t understand what market Apple really tries to reach with that. My impression is, that people indeed spend money on games like NFS or Sims 3, but only to be able to show-off at parties or other occasions. I don’t believe anybody really playing (and by playing I mean the very same behavior you hear from 15-years old, Norwegian guys with a World of Warcraft account!) the games on the iPhone. At least not till their end. Also I believe, that 70% of the people buying games use in iPod Touch instead, in addition to their iPhone.

Eh, however. Back to the topic. So, the Apple App Store started providing more and more sh… apps, over the past year. Some, useless ones and also some totally useless ones. Of course, in between of all those crap, you’ll sometimes find a pearl, like for example Shazam, Daylite Touch, Things, LittleSnapper, Colloquy, eBay, Ego, Wallet, Squirrel, Shopper, Deliveries, Weightbot, iStat, Beats, Last.fm, RadAlert and many many more. Apps that really have a use and pay-back for the price you spent on them. Unfortunately, those apps aren’t the majority anymore – and it seems to become worse by each day passing by. So what to do?

Of course Apple could stop selling all those other crappy apps. Just reject when developers submit them – and instead include apps that would be worth including. *cough*GoogleVoice*cough* But to be honest, by that, Apple would shoot into their own feet. Why stop selling crappy apps, when there are enough users to buy them? Why rejecting the cut-off, even if it’s just some pennies per app?

So let’s see, what could be Plan B? Uh yeah. Plan B. Sounds always good. How about.. err.. an “Exclusive App Store”? An App Store exclusively for high-rated and (therefor) pricy apps. Yeah, that sounds good, doesn’t it? But wait… who decides what’s “exclusive”? The developers? The users? Or maybe the price? I don’t know how you think, but I’d probably go with the third option. As long as the price is high enough, I don’t believe Apple caring about the actual application’s quality – not esthetically nor functionally. So, what sense would an exclusive App Store have then? Well, I guess no more than just gather more and more money.

I’m really happy that at least there are Blogs and Sites on the web, which take the enormous job of searching through the App Store, filtering the whole crap away and bringing you the best and most beautiful applications available for your iPhone. Without them, I guess I’d have a hard time to fine *anything* that would fit my needs within the actual App Store – and maybe just switch to Android.

So far.

On August 23rd, I wrote an E-Mail to the SourceForge-Support:

Dear Sir or Madam,

some years (now already ago, I registred on SourceForge.net (Username: devilx) and uploaded some OpenSource-Projects of mine. After a while, my Account has been blocked without any (for me visible) reason. Now, I’m interessted in using this Account again, unfortunately I can’t re-enable it by recovering the password (or else).

I would like to ask, if you could help me re-enable the Account.

Thanks in advance,

bye.

On August 27th, the SourceForge-Support (finally) answered:

Hello Marius,

This account was removed for a policy violation. It may not be
recovered. If you choose to open a new account, please be sure to
closely review our Site Legal documentation (
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sitelegal/wiki ).

Best regards,

Daniel Hinojosa
SourceForge.net Support
sfnet_ops@corp.sourceforge.com

On the very same date, ten minutes later, I wrote back:

Hi Daniel,

thank you for your reply. I don’t know, why I should have violate your policy, since I didn’t do anything wrong on that account. It had been removed shortly after I created a project named “BFC”, what stood for Brainf*ck Compiler. I’m sorry, but it is not my fault for the Programming-Languag being called like that. If you rejected the project because of this fact, it would have been fair. But deleteing my whole account is pretty sad.

I was having some projects running under that account, which seem to be still available. Are there any possibilities for me to get my account named “devilx” (and all the project memberships I had) back?

Thanks in advance,

Marius.

On August 29th the Support wrote back:

Hi,

The account was closed at the time as there was a policy violation. We
won’t be restoring that account.

you may open a new account and if you desire, attempt to take over the
projects. If they are abandoned, this should be very easy to do.

Please be sure to be fully familiar with your Terms of Use:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sitelegal/wiki/Terms%20of%20Use

Best regards,

Daniel Hinojosa
SourceForge.net Support
sfnet_ops@corp.sourceforge.com

Half an hour later, I finished the communication:

Great! Say “Hello” to OpenSource and its support – that is, why people buy commercial, closed source products.

Thank you for no help.

Have a nice day.

And yeah, I know, it’s a free service and they have the right to do whatever they would want, blah blah blah. Still, it’s the fact that the support apparently had no idea what the actual problem with my account was nor why it really had been blocked. I’m not going to sign up for a new account, since nowadays there are (luckily) way more possibilities to get your own project hosted in whatever way.

Yet again a poor statement the OpenSource related projects/SourceForge makes.

Cheers!

invisibleSHIELD

Four days ago, I ordered the invisibleSHIELD at the invisibleSHIELD Germany GmbH, which arrived today – though the website told me something about 1 – 2 work-days.

After I got it, I unpacked it and read the sparse held documentation within the packaging about how to put it on my iPhone. I was not sure, whether I understood the few pictures right, so I searched on YouTube for a documentation video and found a couple. I looked at two or three and saw that everyone did it the same: Wash hands, turn iPhone off, clean it, spray hands with the solution shipped with the invisibleSHIELD, spray the foil with the solution, “just put it on the iPhone”, press out the solution from the center to the edges and wait until it dries.

And so I did. The first thing I’ve seen was: It’s a total crap to handle the foil. When it’s wet, you can’t really position it, but if you don’t, it will look odd when it dries. If you finally positioned it the right way and start pulling out the liquid using a credit-card or something else, it repositions again. Oh great. You take it of for several times and put it on again and then you finally have it! The middle dried out, it’s nearly “glued”, it’s good positioned and you can start “glueing” the sides. But now really just says “Hello!” again and you remember, that in real life, there is not room without tiny whiny dust-particles. You look at the already glued center of your foil and see that only half of the dust you see there can be removed – the other half lies beneath. Oh great!

invisibleSHIELD

Since it would totally over-stretch and destroy the foil, if you would take it off again, you just say to yourself “it’s not thaaaaaaat baaaaad” and just keep on going. You try to glue the edges, what seems to be pretty much impossible, since the cuts aren’t physically right done to make the foil bend the way it would need to. So you try and try and try and …. still it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. However, it already pissed myself, and I thought of taking it off again and sending it back, but I though.. “ghnar, I don’t want an iPhone case!”. So I took a hair-dryer and warmed the edges to make them less restive. After I finally finished the whole thing, Mr. Reality walked by again and said “Hello!” – again, in real life, there’s no room without dust. Because of this, the sticky foil-edges started to look more and more flooded by little particles of dust – even more than usual, since I had to use a dryer to get the foil into the form it needed to have. Ouff.

Altogether, I’m very, very, very disappointed of the result and I’m lucky I’ve searched and found videos showing how to remove the foil again before starting the whole thing. I can’t believe I really paid €19,16 + €3,64 shipment for something like this.

My advice to everyone who would like to protect his iPhone against scratches: Just be careful. Try not to let it fall down or let other things fall onto it. You won’t become happy with such a foil.

I’ve never actually been a fan of jail-breaking the iPhone nor the iPod, since it’s totally controversial. Most people who jail-break their devices think “Why should I just use 10% of what I could really use on that device?!“, though they don’t think twice: Why did they buy an Apple product like the iPhone or the iPod Touch? There are three kind of people who buy these things: The first type are the “cool” people. They like to pay the “Cool Tax” just to be cool themselves and impress other people. “Look how cool my new iPhone is!!!111“. Such people might jail-break, just because they’d like to be able to say “Oh well, sure, you got an iPhone, too, but look what mine has, that yours doesn’t!!!111“.

The second kind of people, jail-break their iDevices because they can. That’s it. Nothing more. These people are usually some people with more interest into technology, which just have fun doing such things. “Look, my iPhone runs an SSH session! And look, on my Xbox I have a media-center that looks just like Apple TV but has way more features. For free! And oh, my PSP runs Linux!!“. Those people in general do stuff like this because they enjoy it and don’t really much care of the device’s functionality. They don’t care if they won’t be able to play any games on their PSP anymore, they don’t care if they lose their rest-warranty on their Xbox and they don’t care if they won’t be able to read any e-mails on their iPhones anymore. They just don’t care, if it works properly (without hacking) or not.

What brings me to the third kind of people. Those buy products like the ones from Apple mainly because of one important reason: It simply works! You turn it on, you do what you need to do and then you turn it off. No hacking, no installing, no complex configuration, nothing. It just works.

However, the knowledge regarding IT/computers/devices of those people vary from none to I-could-write-my-own-OS. Those, who really know what they’re doing won’t jail-break their devices or if they will, they’re being kind-number-two. Those who don’t really know but hear from all kind of people (kind-number-one mostly) what cool things would be possible if they’d jail-break their devices, will also jail-break their devices one way or the other. And here the controversiality begins.

Why would someone want to spend the amount of $X on a device that’s totally managed, works exactly as it should and gives you only a number features, which therefor really work and then take highly experimental and nearly unsupported software, put it on exactly this device and try to do things with it that were never be planned to be done with that device.

Those people then realize, how crappy everything started to be, though their devices has an enhanced set of features now. They’re going to be yelling about everything that goes wrong and isn’t working out in a way you’d expect it from an Apple product – but they forget, that it’s not an Apple product anymore. At least not the software. Not all of it.

However, the same thing happens to people of kind-number-one, though the difference is, that those would never complain about their crappy set of new features in public.

Anyway, so as I said, I’m just restoring from the jail-break to Apple’s original. Not that I’m complaining or just tried to be “cool” – I was really interested on two things: First, if I manage it to jail-break it through a Windows XP VM and second, how the jail-breaking stuff evolved till now. I was really curious about the software available for the hacked firmware and the things you could do with it.

Unfortunately it’s still exactly as I thought: It’s nice to play around with, but it’s nothing for a productive, everyday use. The software is too unstable, too untested and totally hacked-together. The programmers didn’t follow any design- or usability-guidelines and in general everything looks too unstable. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that the people who’ve realized this did crap! I admire any hacker who’s contributing to this project. But that’s the exact point of it: Those are usually hackers/developers/freaks who don’t really care about usability-guidelines or stuff like that. Just like those people that were developing UIs for Linux once (and still are).

However, besides this, I didn’t really benefit of the jail-break. I used a cool theme, though my whole iPod got awfully slow because of that. As it seems, the original theme won’t be replaced by a new one, but instead it will be just “overlaid”. At least this was my impression when opening the Preferences, seeing the iPod’s standard theme, waiting some seconds for the iPod to become responsive again and then seeing the modified theme. And this of course also impacted on my battery life: By just listening to music I usually got 3 days of battery-life – and I listen a lot to music! With the jail-break installed, after one day I usually only had twenty-five percent of the battery-life left.

Eh, well. I played a bit around, I’ve seen the jail-break myself and I’ve also seen that it’s far from being called “oh this could really make me use it!“, at least by me. Oh, I guess my recovery has finished….

Anyway, after that, I wanted to take a look at the Reader Zinio provides for the Mac desktop, so I just downloaded and installed it. Before the installation finished, I had to enter my account info (e-mail, password) and so I did. Unfortunately, the Zinio Reader tried to connect but failed, because of my e-mail address seemed not to be existing. I tried it a few times and checked it for typos, but everything was correctly entered.

I decided to write an e-mail to Zinio’s support. I mentioned the problems I’ve been having with the Reader and also the odd, spanish confirmation e-mail I got. Yet (after over one day), they did not answer my mail and I’m wondering whether they’re going to. I’ll just be patient.

However, does anyone know any other sites that provide the same service Zinio does? And maybe allow me to download the stuff I buy as PDF to save it on my Mac?

I decided to bring it to the car-shop today, though I needed a car for driving to work and back again. First, I’ve called Andi and asked him, whether he could organize some vehicle from Sixt, on a holiday at around 8 PM in the evening. He told me, that it would be possible, but after I’ve heard the price for a Smart Fortwo, for one day, I already dropped the idea of renting a car there. Some minutes later, he just sent me a link to http://www.flinkster.de, together with the info, that I should register there to avoid the car-problem in future. I took a quick look at the site, completed the registration form and half an hour later, Andi, me and our girls were on the way to STR/Mainstation, so I can sign the contract and receive a customer-card. After that, he drove me to Echterdingen/Mainstation and I picked up my Alfa Romeo for today.

The first thing I have to say about the Flinkster stuff is, that it’s extremely cool, especially for spontaneous car-needs. The pricing is really attractive, since you only pay for the time you have the car and the Kilometers you drive with it. Per hour it’s €1.50 and each Kilometer costs €0.25 additionally. This price includes the gasoline, so if you need to refill the car, there’s a fuel card within the glove box you can use. However, the procedure is pretty simple:

You go to the point where you’ve chosen to pick up your car, mostly at main-stations, hold your customer-id over a scanner build right under the car’s windshield, on the lower left corner and the car unlocks. Then, you pick the keys from within a “scanner” built into the glove-box and can start your journey. When you bring back the car, you need to drive it to the exact point where you picked it up and park it on the very same parking space. Then, you just stick back the car’s key into the “scanner” and lock the car within your customer-id. Done. All data will be transmitted to the data-central and you’ll receive a bill within your customer-portal online (or even printed on paper, if you’d like to pay for that).

It’s a pretty cool and uncomplicated concept, especially if you’re lucky to get a car when you need one spontaneously. Pickup-stations are around Stuttgart and Cologne, but I think that as soon as the project gets more popular, the DeutscheBahn will provide more stations within Germany.

The pricing and everything is really cool and more flexible, compared to providers like Sixt or Europecar, though it’s only worth for short-distance drives that do not take too long. If you need a car for one whole weekend because you would like to drive several hundreds Kilometers, choosing a regular rented car would be the better idea.

The only fail within that service is the car itself. Flinkster yet only provides the new Alfa Romeo MiTo, which is a terrible car. It doesn’t accommodate good visibility, especially in parking-situations and it’s just to chubby for a city-runabout. A Mini or some other compact car would have been the better choice. And especially on the German Autobahn the car totally sucks. The speedo shows a Vmax of 260km/h, though at 180km/h in the sixth gear it already stops accelerating. And what’s even worse: It decelerates at a rise, so you need to change down to the fifth to keep your speed. Besides, the driving dynamics are similar to the ones of a eighteen-years old Dutch caravan. But eh, whatever, the car is not intended for driving drags or other races, only if it would be a bit smaller and provide better visibility through the mirrors/windows it would really kick ass.

First of all, let’s have a look at the drive itself. It’s plain. Really plain. No holes, no screws, nothing. How the f*ck shall we open this thing. Let’s take a look under its gum-feet. Nah, not even there. What he hack? So, as it seems, this drive can’t be opened. Wrong! Yes we can!

What do we need therefor?

A cloth, for not scratching the gloss

A strong thread

A modified paperclip

Okay, now we’re all set up. First of all, take the hard drive and turn it upside-down. Place it on the cloth to not scratch its lickable, glossy exterior.

Place it on the cloth

Next, take the thread and try to run it through the holes on the case’s bottom, so that you have something to pull the hard disk out of the case. Now try to bend the sides of the plastic-case out carefully and pull drive out piece for piece. You could also use some credit card or other thin piece of plastic (not metal, it will kill the plastic-borders!) for doing this. Warning, this could cause serious damage to your credit card!

Do the credit card-thing on the front-side, the left- and right-side. When pulled it out some millimeters on each of those side, take all the pieces of your thread and try to pull out the drive to the back (e.g. rotation of 90 degrees around the drive’s back-side). On the back, there’s the button for turning it on and off, so you won’t be able to pull it out vertically. If you’ve successfully managed to pull out the drive, the whole scenario should look similar to this:

Pulled out the drive

Pulled out the drive

Now, you can see the actual hard drive which is mounted to the bottom-part of the whole case. After inspecting the construction you can see that there were to glueing-points or any hooks we broke while opening the drive. This means, that if you’ve done it right, you won’t see that anything ever changed on that drive.

Now, I can finally get myself a 750GB (or even 1TB?) hard-drive and build that in.

Happy trying!

//btw: As you notice, LaCie builds in Hitachi Deskstars on these drives. These drives cost something around 50 bucks nowadays. The complete case is around 90 bucks.

The first thing I’ve noticed already within the installation was, that it doesn’t differ pretty much from today’s Vista regarding to the look and feel. The installation was pretty similar, as good as nothing needed to configure and the after-setup-configuration was as usual: Nearly 100% automated. The only hard question was the one asking for the current network-location (Home, Office, Public – muh).

Windows 7 RC

After the installation, a shiny Vista-ish desktop with a little fish as wallpaper welcomes you and some seconds later the bubble-floods already start again. Not as heavy as with Windows XP, but still he was announcing something regarding new updates and multimedia devices that have been found. It was less disturbing than on XP, but still it could have been solved a better way – in my opinion.

The first good impression I got was the speed. The RC of Windows 7 is faster than Scarlet Speedster, compared to Vista and maybe even Windows XP. I don’t know sure, I did not run benchmarks or stuff like that. I’m talking about the feeling I got after clicking half an hour around the whole desktop.

Windows 7 RC

Since I’ve configured the VM to be a Windows Vista in Fusion, I could even run and install the VMware Tools CD to get better (and of course faster) graphics. I did not test whether 3D-acceleration works out with Windows 7 under Fusion, yet, but I know that I’ve tried to start the Windows Movie DVD Something Maker and got an error mentioning something about my graphics hardware being not okay. However, I’m going to check whether and if yes, how fast the 3D-Acceleration works. Under my Windows XP VM I managed it to play Max Payne, heh.

I didn’t have much time to really work with the new Redmond system so that I can’t tell yet, whether I would consider a change from XP to 7 or not (no, I have no hardware running Windows, only VMs) – especially since I hadn’t have the possibility to check the compatibility features with Windows XP-and-maybe-earlier applications. The first impression is though pretty positive, I did not expect to get such an fluently working and smooth looking operating system from the folks at Microsoft. They really seem to have understood at least some mistakes they did with Vista and are now trying to correct them (or at least make them less painful).

I’m really excited about the Windows 7 release and I’m definitely going to take a look at that. We’ll see…