marco f dot net

The dutch apple news site MacFreak has a small news article about a new european Apple clone maker named PearC. They offer Leopard pre-installed clones in a case that looks quite similar to the MacPro cases, but not really. Their argument for creating and distributing the clones is that the Apple EULA isn't valid in europe because it cannot be read in advance (before opening the package). That's an interesting take on a legal tidbit, and I leave it up to Apple, PearC and the EU to judge if this is indeed true.

But that's not the point of my post. I discussed this with a good friend and co-geek before, and what is noticable is that there is a huge gap in the Apple line-up. Yes, what Apple needs is a mid-range computer between the iMac and MacPro. It should have more possibilities than the iMac, but should not be as extensive and expensive as the MacPro. There is the Quadcore MacPro (default config €2299,-), but that is still too expensive: personally I'd like to have a quadcore computer, with 2.93GHz cpu, 8 gigs of RAM, a 1TB harddisk and an ATI GPU. But when I configure the basic macpro like that it'll cost me €2800,-- ! The high end iMac makes it even more expensive since 8 Gig RAM in 2x4G slices is extremely expensive. So, a computer with 3 or 4 memory slots would be a great option.

For the next iteration of apple hardware updates, I hope they will leave the quadcore macpro intact, except using Intel i7 CPUs, and drop the price of the standard configuration well below €2000 (€1899 is a nice price). Still more expensive than a clone, but I'm happy to pay a little more for the design and component quality (also case). But not a lot more like currently is the case.

Until that is done, the clone makers actually have a business case that may work for them, selling quality products for better money than the Apple offerings. Maybe Apple will create new iMacs that will have 3 or 4 memory slots, that would actually convince me to get an iMac, but currently the offering is not tempting enough (I value RAM higher than raw CPU speed).

The 3rd party Push notifications have been announced two years ago, and are finally available for general use in iPhone OS 3. Apple has put up push notifications as an alternative to multitasking, mainly because multi-tasking apps running in the background would drain your battery quicker and multi-tasking would use more memory. 

Well, it is a fact that the more apps you are running simultanious, the more memory is used. And yes, especially if an application is polling the network for new messages, that can consume battery life quite quickly.
 
So, push notifications is the solution and holy grail for iPhone users.
 
Now, back into real life. I installed Worldvoice, a "radio" application that uses push for notifications of new "broadcasts" and such. So I switched on the push notifications and played around with the application a bit. I then switched the app off and pretty soon, a push message was shown. Cool. I got bored with it, and switched off the individual notification settings for Worldvoice. The general Push setting remained "on" (because I forgot about it) - see screenshot.

After half a day, I noticed that my iphone battery indicator dropped significantly more than I am used to.
 
Did some more tests during a few days and yes, even though you're not actually receiving any push notifications, just having the push notification enabled makes that your battery drains quite a bit quicker than usual. Because the connection to the push server and phone is open constantly.
 
I am now wondering if this push is actually such a good idea. It drains battery, even without using it. This is with only one app, with very few updates. If you have three or four apps, with a lot of updates (say a twitter client with notifications for DMs and Mentions, and an MSN client with notifications for messages, etc), I think your battery will be gone after a few hours. That sucks, and I think is not much different than just run the apps in the background, really.

Do more people have the above experience (or not?) and willing to share their opinion?

The iPhone 3G and 3GS are wonderful devices. The iPhone OS3 is amazing. But the implementation of podcasts is still not very good. And that's an understatement.
 
The way it works now is that users subscribe to their beloved podcasts in iTunes and sync their iPhone with it. However, iTunes biggest flaw is that if you do not listen to the podcast for a while (actually: do not listen in iTunes, it doesn't see that you listened in the iPhone), it stops updating. Yes, you can manually open the iPod function in your iPhone, go to Podcasts and push "find more episodes".
 
That's fine and dandy, but it needs the user to check if there's a new one or not. Cumbersome. Not to mention there's a 10MB limit on podcast downloads over 3G. But that point is moot compared to the other issues.
 
There's been a podcast app for the iPhone for quite some time: RSS Player. You can subscribed to RSS podcast feeds and it will download to your iPhone. I love the app for the ease of subscribing and downloading podcasts but I really dislike it when it comes to user friendliness. But the major no-no is that it cannot run in the background, like the iPod can. That's not the developer's fault, it's that Apple won't allow these background processes. When I'm on the bike or scooter, I like to pause, skip, control the iPhone using the mic button on my earbud cable. Not possible in RSS Player. Once you click the mic button, the iPhone starts the iPod function .. Closing RSS Player along the way. Stupid.
 
So, here is a proposal I'd like to see imlpemented on the next OS update, for a NATIVE podcast experience that works:

• The user subscribes to podcasts in iTunes (or iTunes.app on iPhone)
• The subscription data is stored in your iTunes account, so it's available online (and could eventually be downloaded as an OPML file)
• The Apple iTunes backend systems send out a PUSH notification to the iPod application on the iPhone if there's a new episode for download.
• The user can then open up the iPod app and download the episodes. 

 
The "old school" iTunes syncing is still available, with one small adaptation that the podcasts don't stop updating when not listened in iTunes. Any subscription updates are stored in the cloud, instead locally on your mac/pc. So you're always up to date whereever you listen.

We have a MobileMe family account and with the event of iPhone OS3 I thought my wife and I would finally be able to share our calendars. So, I published my calendar on iCal, my wife published hers and we cross-subscribed to eachother's calendar on our iPhones.
 
However, new events weren't visible for either party. Sucks. And what do you know? According to this support article: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1213 The shared calendars do NOT sync through MobileMe! Which means to get this working computer syncing is a neccessity. Big bummer and fail.
 
So, since MobileMe family package allows for 5 accounts and we're with 4 people in our family (not counting the cats, who may want an account too..), I thought I'd just set up one central "family" account and use that. Bummer again, the iPhone does NOT allow two active MobileMe accounts and activating one account will remove the other account's calendars on the iPhone.
 
Dear Apple, please solve this, it's rediculous that if you have a family account you cannot do anything that is really shared and it's even more weird you cannot have more than one MobileMe account on your iPhone!

Okay Apple, why are you doing this?
 
The close button on the windows Safari 4 are on the opposite side of the tab than the Mac OSX Safari 4 version. The idea behind is probably platform UI consistency (windows has the "X" in the top right corner, OSX in the top left), but it is annoying as hell when you are using both platforms.
Okay cmd-W/ctrl-W is the keyboard way (which I use mostly), but this is confusing for mouse use.

Look out Tweetie, Twitterific, Twitpic and TweetPhoto. There are new guys around that can make your life just a little tougher.
 
I started tweeting on my iPhone using Twitterific 1, which was nice, but once Tweetie came out, I was quick to jump ship. The new Twitterific has improved a lot, so Tweetie and Twitterific are now almost equal.
 
Twitpic is a long standing twitter picture hosting service, and a lot of alternatives (like TweetPhoto) are popping up because their service and uptime is kind of flaky.
 
Not too long ago, Posterous introduced an API for clients to use for sending pictures to Posterous instead of twitpic. Most twitter clients (Tweetie (Mac, iPhone version not yet), DestroyTwitter (AIR), Twitterific (iPhone)) have implemented the API in some way or the other.
 
However, there's a smart developer around called Hwee-Boon Yar who develops SimplyTweet, the other iPhone twitter client. Yes, it may not (yet) look as slick as the big ones, but looks can deceive. His new version, to be released in the AppStore soon, has extensive support for Posterous.
 
It's not just posting pictures to Posterous, it can post multiple pictures to a Posterous gallery post. It also puts the twitter hashtags in proper Posterous tags. And last but certainly not least, you can write more than 140 char tweets. Longer tweets will be posted at Posterous and your tweet will get a nice post.ly link to the post. Amazing isn't it?
 
Just try it, Posterous is dead simple to start (just send an email to post@posterous.com ) and simplytweet can be freely downloaded from the Apple Appstore. Simplytweet lite has no ads as well. A more extensive version can be purchased for a small fee, giving you some extra functionality. Maybe the developer can comment below what the differences between the lite and paid version are?

(Can you tell I'm a fan? :-))

More and more people are using Posterous currently. And it is not difficult to imagine why.
 
Posterous is, quite literally, dead-simple. Just email your stuff, be it text, movies, images, documents, sounds, and it'll be published in a great way for everybody, or only the people you want to, to read. And the user support from Sachin and Gary is also excellent!
 
My whole web "life" is now centered around Posterous; I've set up 4 Posterous sites:
http://post.marcof.net - my main posterous where I keep my blog
http://pix.marcof.net - my photography portfolio
http://bibble-expert.com - the site where I want to post tips about Bibble 5
 
And last, but not least:
http://tweets.marcof.net - my tweesterous site where I put all my tweetpics.
 
The Posterous API enables twitter clients to post images to Posterous.

I've been using Tweetie on my iPhone for a long time, but that one still doesn't support Posterous.

However, an excellent alternative (with some quirks, but that's being worked on) is SimplyTweet (to be found here: http://motionobj.com/simplytweet ). SimplyTweet not only supports the Posterous API, but it is (I think) the only one that fully supports the multi-image posting in a correct way, namely not a post per image, but a post with all images for that post/tweet included.

Now all that needs to be implemented to make it even cooler for tweeting is:

• API search possibilities
• a way to have tweet text inside the body instead of post header
• an alternative to "twitlonger". Use posterous for longer than 140 character tweets.

And possibly more neato stuff....

In any case, the future looks bright for Posterous, it's about time to conquer the world!

Oh, I'm still waiting for Posterous merchandise ;-)