Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

3
Sep

Apple’s Ping is a big pile of steaming dung

   Posted by: Swizec    in Uncategorized

A few days ago Apple released a social network. Gee, how bloody creative of them and they used to be so cool. There are enough social networks, too many actually. But I digress.

Yesterday when I updated iTunes and got the slightly odd new version (what’s with the vertical window buttons anyway?) there was no Ping in sight. Very well then, failed already as predicted by my tweet?

Well today when I opened iTunes again. There it was! Let’s go click that bad boy.

The first screen was pretty nice, some blahblahblah about how this is a social network and can do socially stuff. Create account!

Ok, first thing that’s a bit odd is that my Ping account is the same as my iTunes store account. Luckily I have a slightly hacked one so I can use the US store, otherwise Ping wouldn’t even exist for me.

Fail #1 – only exists for US people like I suddenly woke up in the middle ages.

Another thing that strook me as odd was setting up an avatar:

I can swallow the fact there’s no Gravatar support but what’s this nonsense about my avatar being approved!? What the flying fuck is going on here?

Then there’s this lovely tidbit about being forced to choose a whole of three genres of music that I listen to and being forced to choose between a very poor variety of stuff.

Fail #2 – nobody likes more than three genres and certainly nobody listens to Metal, Punk, Alternative Rock, Punk-Rock, Cabaret,  Swing, Folk and so on. Just the top10 chart on last.fm lists stuff from at least 6 different genres, most of them not on this list.

Coming to terms with the uselessness of this profile creation screen I finally clicked “Continue” and was greeted with this little ditty:

Sure, alright, I have to allow them to scrobble what I like. This makes sense. But what the hell!? They … they aren’t scrobbling what I’m actually listening to? Just what I’m … buying? What the fuck Apple? Don’t you realise the last time I bought any music was a few years ago and even that was only after I had been a fan of the artist for a few years and only really considered that CD merchandise?

That’s Fail #3 right there – need to buy/rate/review stuff through the iTunes store for Ping to do anything.

And then, then I was greeted by the most hilarious thing ever:

Quite obviously they recommended some weird stuff. Ok, granted, I like Linkin Park. Good guess. But Katy Perry? No, good boobs, bad music. Lady GaGa? LoL! And U2? Not really a fan, some songs are good, but meh. And I have no idea who Yo-Yo Ma and Jack Johnson even are.

This is a problem that Ping could easily have solved by syncing with my last.fm account that contains the past 4 years of my listening habits.

Fail #4 - obviously commercially inspired music recommendations are obviously lametastic.

Ok let’s try searching for some of my favourite bands so I can, you know, follow them on Ping and hopefully get something useful out of this pile of steaming cow dung.

Cherry Poppin’ Daddies – nope, not there

The Dresden Dolls – nope

Amanda Palmer – nope, just some fat chick, no sign of my beloved Amanda Palmer

Inkubus Sukkubus – nope

Voltaire – nein

Cruxshadows – negative

Jack Off Jill – nope

Blink-182 – halleluya they’re there, but as a … user? O.o

Ok now I found someone and … where the fuck is my search box? Ah ok, it was a few clicks away.

The Doors – nothing

Dropkick Murphys – nope

Meh I give up, there is nothing worth following on Ping. The artists I do find are labeled as users and everybody knows it’s not really them there, it’s some automated bot thing to keep us notified of their stuff. But none of the artists I’m actually listening to are there …

Fail #5 – Ping is empty. There are no artists or anything of worth following.

I’m going to give Ping the benefit of the doubt. They’re just having a bit of a cold start problem and nobody at Apple was smart enough to put at least placeholders for some of the most popular bands/artists of recent decades on there. Even Marilyn Manson, Iron Maidden and Offspring aren’t there …

Oh and here are some more fails:

Fail #6 - Everything is locked in iTunes, you can’t send music to people, can’t use other players, nothing. It’s just plain old locked to the single worts music player in the history of music players

Fail #7 – can only invite via Email, who cares about twitter and facebook where my social network actually is? Yeah, nobody cares about that

Fail #8 - no integration with anything. at all. Last.fm would make sense, but at least Twitter and Facebook? Anyone? Yeah I didn’t think so. Who uses that crap huh?

Fail #9 – oh yeah, there’s already a ping.fm, which, coincidentally, is a social network for music that integrates with stuff and works pretty well from what I heard

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27
Jan

Apple pulls another Newton with the iPad

   Posted by: Swizec    in Uncategorized

Lately we’ve been hearing a lot, and I mean a bloody metric shitload, of rumours, speculation and other fun things about the soon-to-be-announced Apple tablet. You know how those Apple fanboys get, the first time hype started building about this thing was several years ago, but lately it’s been getting soooo pervasive you just knew it was the real deal this time.

Of course after all this hype the features I expected were:

  • the casing is made of solid gold
  • it can make me a sandwich
  • it brings coffee
  • it fits in my pocket
  • it is very very useful
  • it can wipe my arse after I take a dump
  • it can fly me to the moon and back
  • it works like The Guide mk.2 (If you don’t know what this means you should be ashamed of yourself)

So let’s see what Apple gave us:

  • oversized iPhone that can’t make calls

Errr … what!? Seriously Apple? Seriously? This!? Really!? We’re doing this again!?

Ok look, I love Apple, hell I even want an iPhone. And I really believe the devices they create are marvelous pieces of technology that work very well. But this fucking piece of crap is the biggest technological let-down I have ever had the displeasure of seeing.

I mean seriously, what the fuck was Apple smoking when they designed this thing? They’re supposed to be this sooper innovative company performing feats of magic right before our eyes, but instead, they take all the old technology, add nothing of the new, and call it the next big awesomest thing.

Fuck off Apple. Call me when you start making useful and exciting stuff again.

At least with the Newton it was marvelous technology that was too far ahead of its time, the iPad is just boring, mundane and boring.

Oh and you can tell they know it’s boring and useless because it’s PRICED THE SAME AS THEIR OLD PRODUCT!

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12
Nov

Howto convince the iStore you’re from the US and circumvent regional copyright restrictions

   Posted by: Swizec    in Uncategorized

Copyrighted
Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday somebody shared a cool podcast with me.

Well I should say they tried to, thing is, I didn’t have an iStore account. But whatever, I’ll just make one right? Well … no. That particular podcast is only available in the US due to copyright restrictions or something, or maybe it’s just that most of the store is US only, but whatever. Thing is, I had to make an account and I had to make an American one. Not a Slovene one.

No biggie right, go to the iStore, make an account.

Well no, you can’t choose where you’re from.

So let’s change the language/locale to US and voila, american store. HEY even paypal is available now (yes we’ve got PayPal in Slovenia but Apple is an idiot and doesn’t aknowledge this fact).

Yay, choose paypal, make account. Nope, says I’m not from the US. Fine, I’ll give you my credit card info … well fuck you mister Swizec, credit card says you’re not american. Fail.

This is the process I had to go through to have a valid US Apple ID and iStore account.

  1. Find a free App.
  2. Download App.
  3. Create account
  4. Choose without CreditCard (they can’t demand payment info for free downloads, some legal stuff afaik)
  5. Enter some US address found on google maps (I used M5 Industries because Mythbusters is made there and I love Mythbusters). Btw this isn’t identity theft because you use your own name.
  6. Rejoice, you have a valid US iStore account

Great! I can now download FREE stuff that is, for some strange and utterly absurd reason, only available in the US. Why have region restricted copyright when the content is bloody free is … can anyone explain this at all?

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2
Sep

Snow Leopards in mah rooms!

   Posted by: Swizec    in Uncategorized

Snow Leopard
Image by mwboeckmann via Flickr

Yesterday I finally installed my pirated version of Snow Leopard and thus bringing yet another large kitten into my bedroom. It was a shame that I had to go out and buy a dual layer DVD, but such is life when no external hard drives are available to burn the .dmg to and install from there.

So far I must say I haven’t noticed much difference between Leopard and its fluffier cousin. It’s obviously more responsive, something I’m particularly fond of since the old install was getting a bit sluggish for some reason. The fact they managed to trim the operating system’s footpring by almost ten gigs is simply mind blowingly awesome as well. But as a certain mate put it, that only means the previous version had a serious flaw.

Another thing I really love about the new OS is that … I don’t notice it’s there! At all! When you move from XP to Vista, Vista to 7, everything is so vastly different and horrible. Even moving from one Ubuntu version to another can be quite a shattering experience. But updating to Snow Leopard … nothing. The installer made sure to transfer all of my Time Machine backups and everything is as I left it. Down to the tinniest of settings. Awesome! Even all the software migrated properly :D

But despite the update being quite unnoticable, there are small jars here and there. Things that aren’t exactly as you’d expect and make you go “Whoa!”. I think it’s a bit of an uncanny valley problem, the changes are so subtle you don’t expect them and it makes you queasy.

One such example is that dock menus are now black and transparent, wtf? It honestly startled me when I first saw that, simply wasn’t expecting it. Another is that expose’d windows now get a jarringly fugly blue border around them upon mouse-over. Another wtf. The fact they now have their names spelled out under the screenshot is rather useless as well, makes ‘em look like desktop icons … but not quite! I preferred the old way when the window simply highlighted (became brighter) and there was no name, it’s essentially usless information anyway.

Perhaps the most noticable of changes is that everything, absolutely everything, is more saturated now. Can’t quite say whether I like or dislike this GUI tweak …

PS: I only pirated because Apple is so stupid as to not sell their software in my market and, worse still, not allowing shops in nearby markets to ship to me. So fuck ‘em.

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