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.

Enjoy!

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?

53F9 D987 BB30 94E3 24DF 05D9 95C0 28A3 5D4E ED42

You can also find it linked on my contact page. I’ve also already revoked the old key on the MIT-PGP server, it’s just a matter of time until it gets unusable on all the other servers, too.

That’s it already. Later.

You have just received a virtual postcard from a friend !

You can pick up your postcard at the following web address:

Click here to pick up your postcard

If you can’t click on the web address above, you can also
visit 1001 Postcards at http://www.postcards.org/postcards/
and enter your pickup code, which is: d21-sea-sunset

(Your postcard will be available for 60 days.)

Oh — and if you’d like to reply with a postcard,
you can do so by visiting this web address:

http://www2.postcards.org/

(Or you can simply click the “reply to this postcard”
button beneath your postcard!)

We hope you enjoy your postcard, and if you do,
please take a moment to send a few yourself!

Regards,
1001 Postcards

http://www.postcards.org/postcards/

… this is what I constantly keep getting by e-mail since the past few weeks. Not that I would not have friends sending my postcards, I just find it interesting that a closer look at the “Click here to pick up your postcard”-link redirects me to the following URL: http://64.34.214.139/~admin2/E-Greetings.exe. Okay, so, now I’m wondering, which of my friends would send me *.exe-files as postcards, through some electronic postcard service. Well, let’s just remove the filename and browse the contents of the ~admin2/-folder in that URL. Oh okay! Now I know! My friends from The Branch Community Church send me electronic postcards in .exe-format! I always knew, the saintly brothers and sisters would think of me.

But okay, let’s cut it here. So as it seems, postcards.org is using (or being used?) spam to deliver .exe-files to low-brow Windows users, which might even click them. I actually did not check, what’s inside that *.exe, but I think it’s clear that it won’t be a postcard. I find it funny, that the web-presence of http://www.thebranchcommunity.com/ is being used for such a crap – talking about credibility.

So, now I’m searching for some way to block this address (maybe report it to SenderBase?) and maybe I’ll also take a closer look at the Host providing the executable.

So, after I’ve reconfigured the Demo VM to speak SSL, I created two different Groupware users and created the account for the first user on my iPod. I only tested the whole product using the E-Mail sync-service – since I did not wanted to lose my existing contacts or calendar entries – and configured “Push” for the new Exchange account. With the credentials of the second user, I logged-in via Zarafa’s (damn ugly) web-interface and wrote an e-mail to the first user, while having my iPod Touch lying on my table, unlocked, in “Home”-screen. The second I clicked the “Send”-button within the browser-window was the second in which a new badge popped up on my iPod, telling me that I have one unread E-Mail.

So actually the whole Zarafa/Exchange/Push stuff seem to work pretty good, though I don’t know yet how reliable it is. I will test this out a bit longer some time, because if it works the way it should, I could really think of using Zarafa on my private E-Mail account. Nor the world’s most advanced operating system‘s E-Mail client neither the iPod support IMAP IDLE yet, what makes it pretty uncomfortable when waiting for new E-Mails.

But eh.

Okay, so actually this kind of stuff is nice. It makes me glad to see that the work I’m doing in OpenSource really benefits to myself in a way. Though, I don’t really like the way this whole Headhunting thing is being performed. Sometimes I even feel a bit insulted by the texts I receive, because they are all looking pretty much like they would be automatically generated by some tool and sent to me plus one thousand other people. When I receive such a mail I at least expect to know why the guy’s writing me? Where did he got the information about me and what’s his reason for offering me a job possibility? Because the first thing I’m thinking when receiving such mails is “oh crap, spam again…” – it just looks like every other mass-mail, what makes it pretty senseless. I personally would like to know whether I have been getting that mail because I did/have something they are interessted in or just because I “might have a nice CV and knowledge that could be useful to them”. The point is, that I’m not a fan of sending my CV through the whole internet for nothing – if I would want to do that I would apply myself for a job at these companies.

However, I think that these Headhunting people would have more success if they would inform themselves a bit more about their targets and maybe would personalize their request. But still, it’s always fun to read these kind of E-Mails, heh.