But is this impersonalization actually something good or bad? Well, the web allows us to do such things anytime we want. There are no early closing days, nor are we dependent on any (public) transportation to get there. And especially when purchasing specific things, you don’t want others to see you buying or when doing specific other things, you would like to keep your little secret, the web gives you the desired privacy – at least towards your direct social contacts, if you still use to have any. Sorry for the sarcasm.

However, the downside of all this luxury is the desocialization of people, especially of those, who already had problems integrating and maintaining social contacts. Nowadays you could survive for years within your own home, only taking a step out of your door to throw away the trash. But is this how the future will look? Will groups of people maybe bulkhead themselves from social life? I don’t know, but I hope, that modern technologies won’t ever be abused this way.

Personally, I see companies like PayPal or Amazon as an easement for my everyday life. They save me time by providing me such services. Valuable time. Time I can spend on other things. For example, on playing a round of cards, heh. But even those leisure sites like PartyCasino bring me possibilities I wouldn’t have without them. There is no real Casino around me within miles. Nor is there a tennis court. At that point, the Web 2.0 doesn’t lead to desocialization, but instead it allows me to do things, I wouldn’t be able to do at all without it. To me, modern technology is cool – as long, as it’s not abused in any kind.

Okay, enough hot air. So what is it really? wirecurl.com just launched in the past few days after a while of planning and doing and other stuff to handle. With wirecurl.com, Andreas and me try to establish a web magazine that’s a bit more than just one of those regular “We write reviews of iPhone Apps” or “We test cool new websites and show them to you” sites. It’s more about the whole “2.0″ topic, from the web, over entertainment up to lifestyle and other sort of things. Currently, we’re having a hard time to fill up wirecurl.com with content and yet, there’s unfortunately still not that much to see – but we’re working hard to catch up and present you content you might be interested in.

I’m not going to annoy you losing too many words on this, but one thing I’d still like to mention: To sweeten you the launch, we already reviewed a brand new and yet barely known iPhone & iPad App named Flight+, and we’re giving away the App for free! Just check it out on wirecurl.com!

Hope you’ll stick with us and enjoy reading.

So, what’s it about? Some of you (probably the majority of Apple customers) might have heard about “Things”, an “Getting Things Done” (GTD) application suite contained of an Mac App, an iPhone App and an iPad App that let’s you organize tasks and projects for yourself. Several years ago, the developing company CulturedCode won the Apple Design Award with their pretty neat desktop application. Thanks to my buddy Andreas, who bought me my Things for Mac license in 2009 as a birthday present, I started using the software from it’s quite early 1.x phase. I really loved the application, especially because of its clean and simple design and its ease of use. After quite a while my needs started to change, though. I wanted to have both of my Macs in sync, for example. I played around with Dropbox and found a way to do that, although it didn’t allow me to have Things on both machines open at the same time. Soon, more and more people started writing about how they’d love synchronization features for things, especially OTA (“Over the Air”) sync. And CulturedCode reacted. In mid 2009 they already published a roadmap that was “not a roadmap” and wrote about them having worked since the beginning of that year on a “really sweet” OTA solution that should be better than the competitors’ products.

This means, they actually announced their work on an OTA feature in mid 2009 with the additional info, that they’ve been working already for around 8 months on it. The people who read that and don’t really know about usual timelines for such big IT projects might expect a solution to finally be there in a couple of weeks or maybe months, especially after reading a sentence like this:

Okay, those fanboys and Mac addicts who can’t wait for such kind of delicious features now got pretty aroused and everyone else (especially the people who haven’t spent around 40 bucks on a Things license plus another eight bucks on Things for iPhone so far) really started considering Things as serious solution for their task-planning needs.

Then, till April 2010, CulturedCode didn’t blog about anything related to sync at all. From August 2009 till April 2010, that’s nearly one year without letting users actually know what happened to OTA sync. Meanwhile, many people spent their money on Things, mostly because they trusted in CulturedCode and it’s blog post announcing their work on OTA sync in 2009. And yeah, they haven’t heard about the sync feature for quite a while, but still they saw that progress was made in other areas, so there was not much of a reason to think of CulturedCode being dead or something. Especially, after reading their follow ups about the team growth, people thought, “Eh, it can’t take that long anymore!”.

In the meantime, I became responsible for handling the Mac infrastructure at my employer. For me, it was pretty clear what solution I would be deploying on people’s MacBooks when they’ve been asking me for some GTD application. I thought of Things as a solid and reliable application and the fact that CulturedCode was a Stuttgart-based company made it even more attractive for me to order a volume-license for Things.

People were getting hungry about the OTA sync feature and I guess CulturedCode really saw a need to act, so in December 2010 (8 months later) they released it. Oh, no, not the OTA sync feature, I’m sorry. They released the first chapter of a set of blog posts regarding the OTA sync feature: State of Sync, Part 1. Instead of providing a first beta, what would be appropriate after theoretically 2 years of work, they provided information about general problems on OTA/Cloud synchronization and some nicely drawn wallpapers for your Mac, your iPhone and even your iPad. Hurray to the design department. But people didn’t yell at CulturedCode, not even after 2 years of waiting. Instead, comments like those were written:

This is what I’d call loyal customers.

However, in January, the second post about the “State of Sync” was published. It looked like there was at least some thinking and progressing on the OTA sync feature. Even if it’s not really what customers expected after over two years of development. In March, CulturedCode released part 3 of their blog odyssey, introducing a sign-up for for Cloud sync beta. Hurray, people could sign up and had to wait for the Beta to start. So they did and nearly two months later the first couple of users got approved as beta users and received the testing instructions. Unfortunately, Cloud sync was only available for Things for Mac at that time. It took the CulturedCode people nearly one year to introduce Cloud sync (beta) on iOS! By that time, other products like Wunderlist, that already provided OTA sync attracted more and more former Things users. For new users it was super-attractive too, since they didn’t charge 40 bucks for their desktop client. Actually they didn’t charge for anything. It has just been there. Free to use.

Existing CulturedCode customers became pretty sad or angry or let’s just call it pissed. Pissed about the fact that they still don’t have a fully working cloud sync solution. Pissed about the fact that they spent 40 bucks on a Mac software, maybe 8 bucks on an iPhone App and maybe even 15 bucks on an iPad App. For what? Yeah sure, you’re not buying software for what it might become, you’re buying software for what it is, I know. But let’s be honest, even Andy Potion, who’s pretty much a one-man-show, did a quicker job with The Hit List, in comparison to CulturedCode’s timeline. And not to mention that not too long ago, the creators of Wunderlist – 6Wunderkinder – just launched their new, web based Wunderkit service, that introduces collaboration. And by “collaboration”, I don’t mean the “I’m creating sidebar entries ouf of my Address Book information and drag Tasks onto them to remind myself who’s in charge, without any functionality of actually really letting the people know that they’re in charge”-CulturedCode-collaboration. I mean real collaboration, where you get notified about tasks that have been assigned to you. And it’s web based, too. And there are Apps for it. And it’s even free of charge. And all that it probably half the time CulturedCode had. So, let’s be serious: You do not buy software, for what it might become, but in consideration of such heavy-armed competition, you’d expect the developer to hurry the flock up!

Suddenly, people began to realize all that and the five-star ratings on the App Store became one-star ratings:

People got fed up and CulturedCode became quiet. Not much response on people’s angry tweets to calm them down, no more information about the actual progress, nothing. One possible response could have been to slash the prices on their software for a limited time, to allow existing customers to extend their suite. Another would have been spreading coupon codes for Things for iPhone or Things for iPad. They could have teamed up with several reviewing sites to get media attention on their existing products and their existing features. I mean, after all it still is a beautiful product. It might be over-priced, it might be slow in development and it might not support features that should be mandatory for a 2012 GTD application suite, but still it’s a good piece of software and the jobs it can do, it does extremely well. Unfortunately, CulturedCode has let the users put the focus too much on features they were clearly unable to deliver in an realistic amount of time. There was progress on Things, even if it wasn’t that much, but there was and still is – unfortunately this progress drowned in the OTA-sync-well created by the users. On one hand, CulturedCode had to respond somehow, on the other, they probably wanted to get themselves a bit more time, just a bit more time. In my opinion, their response was influenced too much by their user’s pressure and I got the feeling, that they did not respond because they felt the urge to provide information about what’s going on. The blog posts were nicely written and had some very cool drawings, still it’s not what the users actually wanted. They didn’t want to read philosophical posts about Cloud synchronization or comparisons between MobileMe and Dropbox. And I believe, that, if CulturedCode would have provided more information about OTA (and their other internal project / development progress) without users permanently requesting it via Twitter, E-Mail or even App Store reviews, the whole situation would look way more relaxed these days. I think in general it’s pretty simple to say: Either you try to make your internal development process more transparent to your customers, so they can get a feeling for what to expect and when, or you do it the Apple-way and shut the f*ck up until it’s ready. You don’t get people excited about a feature and let them wait three years for a first beta.

However, in February of this year CulturedCode started their public beta of Things Cloud, so now everyone can at least get a taste for what is probably going to be released someday. Still, people are mad, because rudimentary features like task-notifications don’t work so far – IT guys understand, that it’s pretty hard to notify the user about content you might not even have available on the specific device, regular people instead just get the impression that Things now stars getting OTA sync, but loses existing features for that, what’s a bit unsatisfying.

I had a testdrive account for their private beta and used (and sometimes still use) it – and I liked what I saw, to be honest. Still, I moved over to another solution, just because from my current point of view it integrates better with what’s important to me and costs less, due to the fact that the desktop client is built into OS X (Calendar) and the iPhone/iPad client is one universal binary, priced at something around three bucks. The app developer answers pretty quickly to questions, even via Twitter and customers are being involved right into the development progress, by asking about their preferences regarding certain, to-be-implemented features via Facebook and other modern social media. I mean, come on, it’s not that hard: If you follow some simple rules and strategies, customers will stay loyal at any time, no matter how delayed a long-awaited feature might be. I think, that one of CulturedCode’s biggest problems was and has always been the direct communication. I personally see them like people have probably seen Microsoft several years a ago: A big and massive brick where customers can’t really reach someone that has an open ear for their thoughts and their wishes. A machinery that produces software the way it thinks its best for the customer, without involving him in that progress. But we’re not talking about huge corporations with a super-huge user-base here!

Well, anyway, at last but not least, I would like to lose some words about direct communication to the customer. I’m not the person that posts Steve Jobs’ emails on my blog – not that I would have ever gotten any – and therefor I’m not going to post the details about my email conversation with Jürgen Schweizer, one of the CEOs of CulturedCode, here. Instead, I just want to talk about the feeling I had during that conversation. It started with a tweet from a guy I actually don’t know, complaining about – you might guess it – Things’ missing OTA feature. He had a short conversation with CulturedCode on Twitter about that and I got into it to confirm the points he made, since I found them totally true and understandable. I ended up writing a mail to Jürgen Schweizer, to answer some direct messages he sent me via Twitter. In my opinion, the mail was polite and reflecting the way I (and many other customers) felt at that time. No bitching, no screaming, just some honest feedback from one of their users. What I got back instead was a mail, that truly made me feel a bit stupid and uncomfortable. I was a bit disappointed, about the way a CEO writes to one of his paying customers and intentionally makes him feel, like he has been writing something he should feel bad about. This is not the feeling you’d expect from a representing person of a company, regardless of how rude the customer might have been. You don’t indirectly tell the customer, that he (and/or other users) are disrespectful. Never. It’s a paying customer who actually supports your product through buying it – and even if this customer should get sad, angry or really mad and no matter how upset or uncomfortable you are with the things he’s been writing you, it’s in your responsibility to always keep the conversation at a level where you can point out your view without indirectly making the customer feel insulted or whatever. It’s useless to try to argue, who’s wrong or right with a customer – in the end, the only thing that matters is, that people get the feeling, that this company cares about its customers and really wants their products to make them happy. It’s always bad, when a company’s way of leading conversation makes their customers get a negative feeling.
For example: Some while ago, I’ve downloaded a movie via iTunes on my MacBook. Later, I wanted to watch it on my iMac, so I transferred it to to my iPhone (because that’s the only way I knew) and from there I tried to transfer it to my iMac. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out and I lost the movie, literally. The file was gone somehow and I could not re-download it at that time. I called the Apple Support and told them, what I tried to do and that I found it pretty meh anyway, that there was no other possibility to get a movie from my MacBook to my iMac. Now, the Apple Support could have told me, that I was trying to do something that was not intended by Apple to be done and made me feel really stupid by that and leave me alone with my transfer problem. Or they could have provided me a way, to download the movie again on my iMac, so I could watch it there. Or they could have just hung up. But instead, the support guy on the other side added a credit for watching two movies of any kind from the iTunes Store for free, just because of the inconvenience caused. And see there, the customer was happy. I bitched about the fact that there was no possibility to simply transfer the movie from one Mac to another, but in the end, Apple just made up for that by allowing me to download the movie again plus watch another movie – for free! This is, what I call customer relationship. The customer is not an enemy threatening you with feature-requests, he’s the nice guy from vis-à-vis who loves your product that much, that he agreed on giving you a part – even if it’s just a small part – of the money he has been working for so hard, just to give you the opportunity to continue developing such a great product. So please, companies of this world, treat him like this.

Just my two cents. Thank you for reading.

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!

The site doesn’t contain any i18n, neither I used any PHP framework or other toolkits to built it up. It’s really just some stupid likes of PHP code bound together with the Facebook SDK. Now that’s what I’d call RAD!

It was pretty interesting for me to see, how little effort it takes to “socialize” a site, especially when it’s built from ground up with Facebook-operability in mind.

Yesterday, I additionally implemented an automatic Twitter status update. I’ve registered @likemichde on Twitter, created an Twitter Application, generated access tokens for it and implemented automatic twitter publishing within several lines of code, thanks to Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth for PHP.

It’s very neat how modern media allows us to spread information all over the planet, even with only little knowledge of technology. And if you put in the effort to dig deeper, you use these new technologies to reach even more people and provide connectivity to all kind of different sites.

For example, my photography site mariusmm.com is using Yahoo!’s YQL to query my flickr account for the latest photos and randomly pic a handful of them for displaying as a slideshow. And I’ve implemented everything in 100% JavaScript, there’s no single line PHP or any other server-side language.

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.

iTunes Match

Hello Little Printer, available 2012

AIDS Is A Mass Murderer

Seen on the german A8.

Russ Chimes – MIDNIGHT CLUB EP (Part 3: Targa)

I’ve always used my blog as platform to share useful information with others, get feedback from comments that were posted and mails I’ve received. I’ve slowly built it up step by step from the 20th of March 2005 with a pretty rudimentary and early version of WordPress at that time. Due to my interest and work within the open-source area around Linux and the GNOME Desktop at that time, I had pretty much content I loved to share with other people interested in those topics.

By the time passing, the content of my blog also changed. I slowly moved away from Linux as an desktop operating system, towards using Mac OS X and its tools. Meanwhile, I took my own know-how about the Linux operating system on a higher level by starting to use it heavily as server-side operating system. My blog posts became from “Hey, check out this desktop notifications daemon I’ve written! There wasn’t anything like that on the GNOME desktop, now there is!” and “Oh look, this would be a great idea for a Sync-Application on the GNOME Desktop” to information sources for setting up a Linux instance on Amazon’s EC2 service, stripping down Ubuntu Servers to several hundreds Megabytes and setting up a Debian server that provides SSL-secured WebDAV with LDAP as authentication back-end. So instead of sharing useful information for Linux desktop users, I transited to share information about my experiences and creations on the Mac.

Through the years, my blog grew bigger and bigger, with more and more content. I was pretty happy with how it worked out, except of one part: The design. “devilx.net” never really had an unique identity shaped by its own design. I switched the look & feel several times, using freely available WordPress themes with smaller changes hacked by myself. For the pure sake of information sharing it worked out, but due to that my blog never really got its “own face”. I wanted to change this fact for like ever already, unfortunately I never really had the time and – what’s even more important – the muse for doing so. Now, after all those years – and especially after the last few months, in which the majority of returning visitors probably thought of my blog being another victim by the Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms’ distraction-hype – I decided to take the time, search for at least some creative inspiration and replace my yet-another-downloaded-WordPress-theme with something made with my own hands, giving my blog its own shape and style.

My abilities in the matter of creativity and design clearly aren’t the best, but I thought like… “Man, 2011 is coming, you just have to!”. So I turned on Pixelmator in full-screen mode and started drawing. I kinda had like dozens of concepts, drafts and even several PXM-to-XHTML implementations, but none really was something I’d like to have running on the internet, with my name on it. Meanwhile, I was testing Posterous, one of those Web 2.0-“we can streamline your blog with your Twitter account, your Facebook profile and the two-hundred-forty-nine other platforms you might be using”-services, which should have been the second update for today actually. I really liked it and I liked their theme-templating. I gave it a first shot, by exporting my WordPress’ database and importing it into Posterous.

The result unfortunately was… well… pure fail. It stopped at twenty-one out of several hundreds and didn’t advance for a couple of hours. After contacting the Posterous support, I got the advice to first clean up my WordPress’ spam-queue, re-export the database and try it again. So I did and finally the import ran through pretty quick. Curiously I checked out how the imported Posterous site looked, since I didn’t thought of for example comments being also imported. For my surprise, they were. Unfortunately, the import was incomplete. Some why three-fourth of my WordPress blog posts were missing. Again, I contacted the support which answered after two days, telling me that they’re on the problem and can’t provide me any help yet.

While I was waiting for a solution to my problem, I already translated one of my drafts into Posterous’ templating format – but soon I kind of realized, that Posterous isn’t pretty much what I needed. It works for many people and it surely is a very cool service, free of charge! But for me, as someone that’s pretty much into technology it’s just way too inflexible and closed. For example, I have found a way to import my WordPress’ data, but none to export the Posterous data. I guess, hacking through the API is probably the only way to do so. Also, Posterous’ content delivery isn’t performing really well, at least when requested from Germany. I built in some Base64-encoded images and a @font-face (because Posterous does not provide you any space for actually uploading pictures, which is why you would need to pay for some webspace or at least an Amazon S3 account anyway) and as soon as they were live, the page’s loading-speed decreased to a quite ugly value. Also I was unsatisfied with the template-editor/-previewer Posterous provides – it is really slow and for me (as web developer et al.) a pure pain to use.

Please don’t get me wrong – as I’ve said before, Posterous (as well as Tumblr and all those other services) really is something great, especially when you’re into writing quick shouts most of the time. But for me, as a person who likes the ability to extend the platform for sharing information to fit my (growing) needs, Posterous and others simply are too limited.

However, after realizing that I won’t give up my WordPress from one day to another (and by that actually had no second update to share with you today while I’m still sticking with the plural “updates” in this article’s first few lines), I’ve re-started concept-creation, drafting, mocking and all that stuff professional designers probably do the whole day. In the end, I came up with a pretty neat design that fits my taste pretty good and isn’t too exaggerated or improper to be used on a blog: It’s the design you’ve been staring at for the last, well, I would say fifteen minutes, if I haven’t already talked you into sleep.

“Okay, so your blog isn’t dead yet, huh?” – Yepp, that’s right (and that is the second update, hah!). I’m really looking forward to the next years of blogging, sharing and communicating with others. In the past several years digital life changed a lot and blogs became more and more irrelevant thanks to the possibility of fast and instant exchange with each other through Twitter for example. Unfortunately people sometimes tend to forget, that all those tweets would be nothing without the information behind them, that contains more than only 140 characters.

Having said this, I wish everyone a nice evening (CET UTC+1) and furthermore a great year in 2011. Have fun!

I thought, it might be a cool idea to actually proof that something like that should be possible within a few lines of code. No C code, no Objective-C, even more simple: AppleScript (and a little bit of Bash scripting).

However, so I just took about an hour and a half and wrote down this little bad boy:

global used_codes
global code_used

on run
	set used_codes to {}
end run

on idle
	set promocodes to paragraphs of (do shell script "/opt/local/bin/wget --quiet -O - http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166916511.rss | while read sentence; do for word in $sentence; do echo $word | grep '^[A-Z0-9]\\{12\\}' | sed 's/\\(.\\{12\\}\\).*/\\1/'; done; done | sort | uniq")
	repeat with promocode in promocodes
		set code_used to false
		repeat with used_code in used_codes
			if promocode = used_code then
				set code_used to true
			end if
		end repeat
		if code_used = false then
			tell application "iTunes"
				launch
				activate
				open location "itmss://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/freeProductCodeWizard?code=" & promocode
				copy promocode to the end of used_codes
				set used_codes to used_codes & promocode
			end tell
		end if
	end repeat
	return 30
end idle

Simply hack it into your AppleScript editor and save it as “Application” with the “Stay Open” option clicked. Now after double-clicking the file that has just been created the script starts fetching a Twitter RSS-feed (in this case @verbsapp’s, heh) every 30 seconds, grabs all iTunes promo-codes it can find and automagically redeems them in the iTunes store. If the could is still valid – lucky you. If not, better luck next time! In any case each code will be added to a temporary “black list” so it won’t be redeemed again.

Feel free to customize and use this script! GNU GPL v2 and stuff. Enjoy.

//update: I’ve just adapted the script a bit more to include promo codes with more than 12 characters length. Besides, I’ve applied John’s “patch” to it – thanks for that one John!

global used_codes
global code_used

on run
	set used_codes to {}
end run

on idle
	set promocodes to paragraphs of (do shell script "for word in `/usr/bin/lwp-download 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166916511.rss' -`; do echo $word | grep '^[A-Z0-9]\\{12,16\\}' | sed 's/\\(.\\{12,16\\}\\).*/\\1/'; done | sort | uniq")
	repeat with promocode in promocodes
		set code_used to "false"
		repeat with used_code in used_codes
			if promocode as string is used_code as string then
				set code_used to "true"
			end if
		end repeat
		if code_used is "false" then
			tell application "iTunes"
				display dialog "Found a new code: " & promocode & " - use it now?"
				launch
				activate
				copy promocode to the end of used_codes
				set used_codes to used_codes & promocode
				open location "itmss://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/freeProductCodeWizard?code=" & promocode
			end tell
		end if
	end repeat
	return 30
end idle

(just wanted to have that said)

Twitter – Murder Bittorrent Deploy System

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!

BEN L’ONCLE SOUL