iTunes 11 is not a good piece of software. In many places it has made organising your music/media collection a pain for anyone who owns more than a couple hundred of songs. Apple has been rightly criticised for improving an already mediocre product for the worse.
iTunes's purpose is to serve mainly as a gateway for the user's content, in this case letting you import CDs to put them on your iDevice(s) — and if you really like Apple, you can then push your ripped CDs to iTunes Match so they can live happily on a fluffy cloud with all the music you've bought from Apple directly.
With that in mind, here's something Apple did well in iTunes 11: The user interface and workflow for importing CDs has actually been improved. Apple has made it very easy to edit information for the entire CD as well as download and upload (!) CD information to Gracenote's CD-database.
But the biggest boon is the application asking how to encode the CD each time the 'Import CD' button is pressed. In previous versions you had to open the application preferences each time before importing a CD if you wanted to use a different encoder.
If you have a lot of CDs to import, being able to quickly choose whether to import a CD using the Apple Lossless encoder (for complex music, such as orchestral recordings) or the AAC encoder (for less complex music like pop) can be very helpful.
With most things in life, you only realise how complex they are once you step across the "superficial knowledge line". This holds true for technological topics and especially for food and beverages.
I love tea and have so for as long as I can remember, but I've ever only learned to appreciate the finer aspects of tea drinking and brewing about ten years ago. I started drinking whisky about five years ago and here, too, I was surprised how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Considering how much beer we Germans drink—also how much I myself enjoy a good glass of beer on a hot summer day— and how proud many people over here are about the brewing culture and heritage, we often don't think much about how we consume these great beverages. The video below I found through an article on The Loop, and it made me wonder how many beers over here in Germany might benefit from a decent glass. In any case, it made me curious for some IPAs.
I don't like ads. No, scratch that, I hate stupid, uninspired ads. Funny, unexpectedly creative ads I can't stop watching. Like the one below. (Seriously, I must've watched it about 15 times already and it still puts a smile on my face.)
Are you tired of reading utter nonsense from grown children who think Apple has given up? Do you lay awake at night wondering how a guy like Dan Lyons has any type of career in journalism? Well, stop. Stop paying attention to the clowns at these bottom-of-the-barrel blogs. Stop giving them your eyeballs and attention. They don't deserve it. They haven't earned it.
I totally and unconditionally agree. This is something we need to do in order for things to get better.
Case in point: I was trying to research Apple's record and general stance on Corporate Social Responsibility for use in a seminar tomorrow. The first ten hits on Google were link bait articles, mostly on Forbes, and factually incorrect. After a lot of searching DuckDuckGo spit out a few useable ones, but even here, a lot of the stuff that ranked up high was badly researched drivel.
So click the link below, head on over to Harry's site and stop paying attention to sites that intentionally put out link bait articles.
I always loved the design of the classic Porsche 911 (1974 and on), even today I think that the round headlights and the curvaceous body are among the most beautiful and timeless designs ever made into a car.
The company Singer re-imagines classic Porsche models and fits them with new technology—often adapted from race cars—reviving and reinvigorating these old beauties.
The embedded video by Drive shows one of the results of the Singer company's work.
Die EU Kommission will eine Privatisierung der Wasserversorgung in Europa ermöglichen, was es Konzernen erlauben würde einen 'Markt für Trinkwasser' in Europa zu schaffen. Das lebensnotwendige Allgemeingut, dessen Kontrolle in Deutschland in der Hand der Gemeinden liegt, würde zu einem Handelsgut werden, das von (multinationalen) Konzernen kontrolliert wird.
Wer nicht möchte, dass die Wasserrechnung in Zukunft von RWE (oder anderen Firmen) ins Haus flattert, statt wie derzeit noch von den örtlichen Wasserwerken, und auch nicht möchte, dass die Preise für ein Grundgut wie Wasser in kurzer Zeit wie die Preise für Treibstoff steigen, sollte die europäische Bürgerinitiative "Right2Water" mit einer Unterschrift unterstützen.
In einer neuen Richtlinie versucht die EU Kommission gerade der Privatisierung der europaweiten Wasserversorgung Tür und Tor zu öffnen.
Was die Privatisierung von öffentlicher Infrastruktur bedeutet kennen wir hier in Deutschland ja nur allzu gut: Die Energieversorgung wird privatisiert » die Preise steigen; der öffentliche Nahverkehr und die Bahn werden privatisiert » die Preise steigen, der Service sinkt und Verbindungen werden abgebaut.
Im Falle der Wasserversorgung zeigen einige Beispiele aus dem Inland und dem europäischen Ausland, dass Qualität, bezahlbare Preise und notwendige Investitionen in die Versorgungsinfrastruktur, nicht mit hohen Renditen für Konzerne vereinbar sind. Hierzu gab es bereits im Dezember einen Beitrag in der Sendung "Monitor” des WDR. Der Teil zur Wasserkommerzialisierung beginnt bei Zeitindex 19:31. Aus rechtlichen Gründen darf ich das Video oder Ausschnitte daraus leider nicht auf dieser Seite einbetten, deswegen hier ein Link zum Video:
Grosskonzerne wie die Firma Nestlé sind schon seit Jahren mit großem Erfolg dabei (besonders in Entwicklungsländern) die Wasserversorgung zu privatisieren. Sobald solche Firmen einmal den Fuß in der Tür haben, lassen sie sich nur schwer dazu bewegen die Kontrolle über das wohl wichtigste Gut unseres Planeten wieder aufzugeben. Wer mehr über die Ambitionen dieser Firma in Bezug auf die Kommerzialisierung des Wassers sehen möchte, soll sich doch bitte mal den Film Bottled Life ansehen.
Ebenso interessant wie Bottled Life ist der Film We Feed the World, in dem der Nestlé Chef in einem Interview sehr deutlich sagt, dass er Wasser für ein Handelsgut hält und dieses ebenso behandelt werden müsste. Der Ausschnitt zum Thema Wasserversorgung findet sich auf YouTube:
Auch von Interesse ist ein Beitrag des Senders 3sat von 2010, zum Thema Wasserkommerzialisierung in den USA. Hier der Link zum Video.
Die Folgen der Privatisierung der Wasserversorgung sind schwer abzusehen, allerdings geben vergangene Privatisierungsvorgänge anderer Teile der grundlegenden Infrastruktur eindeutige Hinweise; Preissteigerungen und Qualitätssenkungen. Im Fall von einem lebenswichtigen Gemeingut wie Wasser – mehr noch als bei Elektrizität und Verkehr – haben wir überhaupt keine Möglichkeit nicht zu konsumieren, was uns erpressbar macht. Dies mag wie Panikmache klingen, stellt allerdings einen Fakt dar, der von Konzernen wie Nestlé in vielen Länder schon zur Realität gemacht wurde. Dem muss Einhalt geboten werden.
Was können wir tun um diesen Prozess der Kommerzialisierung des Grundgutes Wasser zu stoppen? Der erste Schritt sollte sein, der EU Kommission zu zeigen, dass sie nicht im Sinne und entsprechend dem Willen der Bürger handelt. Die Bürgerinitiative Right2Water hat eine Petition vorbereitet die jeder unterschrieben sollte, der die Wasserversorgung auch in Zukunft in der Hand des Staates und damit der Bürger wissen will.
Belkin has just dropped eSATA support as well as the price tag of its Thunderbolt Express Dock. The price has been dropped back down to its original price of $299. Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock was quietly introduced in September of 2011 and made an official debut as a prototype at CES 2012. However, in June of last year, the device was changed a bit and had its price raised by $100. Fortunately, Belkin has just announced that it will be bringing the price of the device down by dropping eSATA support.
The ‘temporary’ price point of $ 399,– was absolutely ludicrous, but the old/new one isn’t significantly less stupid.
Sure, Thunderbolt is still a niche interface and will continue to be as long as manufacturers don’t decide to release more products for it — oh, and drop the price for cables to a sensible level. As of now it’s pretty much a technology for professionals.
So, with the current range of Apple computers in mind, what’s the target group for this device?
Macbook Pro users get at least one Thunderbolt port, two USB3.0 ports, an audio output and some kind of digital video output for their money.
Mac mini and iMac users get tons of ports on their computers, too.
What remains are MacBook Air buyers who for some reason need more than two USB3.0 ports at the best possible transfer rates (meaning that a decent USB3.0 hub somehow isn’t good enough) and FireWire 800 and an Ethernet jack and audio ports (I’m interested to know how these audio ports compare to even the cheapest USB audio card).
Belkin is making a mistake, because even professionals will think twice before buying an accessory this expensive, when the computers able to leverage the power of the Thunderbolt Express Dock are usually a) pretty expensive from the get-go and b) mostly feature a decent range of useful and fast ports by default.
Continuing this train of thought, you have to consider that Apple offers the Thunderbolt Display for $ 999,–. The latter is not only a decent display for the price (compared to displays with similar specifications), but it’s next iteration will most likely have USB3.0 as well. Now imagine a user who plans to buy a good display and also wants to leverage the benefits of the Thunderbolt port on his or her machine. The price difference between a good display + the Thunderbolt Express Dock, versus the Thunderbolt Display isn’t very big.
The niche for the Thunderbolt Express Dock is tiny and becomes only a bit bigger if you include older machines (like the 2011 Mac mini I’m writing this on). For those it constitutes an upgrade of sorts. The benefits from my perspective would be the additional FireWIre 800 port and, most importantly, three fast USB3.0 ports. Still, it’s hellishly expensive and costs about a third of what I paid for my top tier 2011 Mac mini.
I’m really curious about the cost of production per unit; it would give a hint as to whether Belkin can’t price this thing lower, or if they don’t want to — the latter of which would be perfectly fine, stupid, but fine. If I had to price this device for the consumer (or even the prosumer), I wouldn’t cross the $ 199,– mark if I could help it.
Apparently Kingston has today announced an USB3.0 flash drive with a whooping 1 TB capacity. It's not the smallest drive mind you, but the prospect of carrying 1 TB in my pocket and having access to the data at SSD speeds is very enticing.
The downside: Kingston hasn't announced the price of this marvellous little thing, but you can expect it to be somewhere in the € 600,– region, given that 256 GB flash drives go for around € 350,– at the moment.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine who had recently switched to a Mac, asked for help in finding a good email client, because Mail.app didn't feel right. The environment that friend is working in results in large numbers of emails that end up in his inbox every day and he has to send a lot of them, too.
He was coming from a perfectly customised installation of Thunderbird, that he'd been using for years without a hiccup. Due to Thunderbird's state of developer support, his employer is starting to prohibit its use and recommends moving to Outlook; so Thunderbird wasn't an option for the Mac. The application in question needs to handle Exchange, IMAP and two POP3 accounts (six in total).
Our first try was Outlook 2011 for the Mac, which proved easy to set up—especially the Exchange accounts—but overall less capable than the Windows equivalent, a bit buggy, poorly integrated with OS X, and in the end too much of a behemoth to be useful to him.
As I was a beta tester for Postbox before it hit version 1.0, I thought we should give it a try. The application is based on Thunderbird, uses the same underlying architecture for user data (e.g. profile folders, configuration files) and most Thunderbird extensions are compatible with Postbox. The application also uses an interesting approach to folders and attachments, which would've made it an even better fit than Thunderbird. The lack of Exchange support was the first hurdle, but since his employer also provides IMAP access to emails it wasn't a deal breaker. Setting up the accounts was pretty easy (I used the same information that had been saved in Thunderbird) and migrating the POP3 inboxes to Postbox was equally painless (Thunderbird, Postbox and Mail.app all use the MBOX-format for storing emails).
But now the problems started: Even though all IMAP accounts were protocol-compliant, Postbox wouldn't handle the folders properly. A lot of deleting and moving was necessary to make it a) see all the folder and b) load all messages within. Next was a lack of support for the system dictionary and spellcheck routines. Postbox, just like Thunderbird, relies on user created dictionaries and translations, which often simply aren't good enough. With everything set up the app did it's work for about three days. Then for no apparent reason—no error messages popped up, the logs showed no changes or errors—Postbox wouldn't connect to any SMTP server. Receiving emails worked fine, but he couldn't send any. After reading loads of FAQs, support entries, troubleshooting guides and forum posts, I tried and failed to fix this by;
Deleting and reentering all login data from Postbox.
Uninstalling and reinstalling Postbox entirely and reimporting all data.
Deleting everything, reinstalling Postbox importing the original Thunderbird profile.
Setting up a new user on the machine and manually installing everything there.
Manually setting everything up on a mint system (I usually have a spare HDD lying around with a SuperDuper! clone of a mint OS X installation).
Checking if my router blocked certain ports (a long shot, since I use the same ports for my email accounts), but it also didn't work in his work network and Mail.app was still sending and receiving just fine with the same data.
Nothing worked. It turned out that this is pretty much a known and unexplainable bug in the underlying architecture of Thunderbird and Postbox: For some reason at some point Thunderbird/Postbox refuses to connect to SMTP servers. Not one proposed fix worked and this isn't even limited to OS X; there are also reports of users on Windows Vista/7 having the same problem. What pushed me/us over the edge was the lack of customer support for the developers of Postbox. If you're not a paying user who bought Postbox in a very specific time period (my old contact email didn't work), you cannot reach the devs through any means. This is what a desperate customer finds on their support pages:
We have found that the best way to service Postbox customers is to help them, help themselves. In fact, 96% of Postbox users find the answer they're looking for right here on our Support Portal.
and
Please note that we do not offer one-on-one support offerings to new users at this time. All support efforts are currently dedicated towards providing better documentation and self-help solutions so that our users can more quickly find the answers they need.
We were thankful that there's a 30 day trial period for the app and even more for the fact that the error cropped up before my friend had to buy the application. For a paid application—even if it's only $ 9.99—this is unacceptable.
In the end I helped him set-up Mail.app and tweak it to his liking. It might not be perfect and he misses one or another feature from Thunderbird, but it works.