Disconnecting Skype from Facebook

Posted 3 weeks ago, under Shorts - 33 Views
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So I made the mistake of connecting Skype to Facebook, and soon realized that when somebody wrote me a Facebook message, Meebo made my iPhone ping, Meebo connector on my PC popped up, and my Skype blinked. In Skype, I tried to disconnect from Facebook, but there was only an option to connect to Facebook.

So, to disconnect Skype from Facebook:

  • go to Skype
  • –> Home (or press the Home-icon)
  • –> Connect to Facebook if the option to disconnect isn’t there
  • –> Disconnect from Facebook

Now the Facebook messages are gone.

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Fix: Jailbreak 5.0.1 Untethered breaks iBooks

Posted December 29, 2011, under Privat - 489 Views
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When iBooks didn’t open after my Jailbreak, I quickly explored what to do about that. There are two options:

  • The GizmoWebs Guide (I didn’t use it and can’t confirm it works)
  • If you have synced your books, installing iBooksFix2 from Cydia will work too. This is a step by step how to do that:
  1. Go to Cydia
  2. Go to Manage
  3. –> Sources
  4. –> Edit
  5. –> Add
  6. –> type repo.insanelyi.com
  7. –> accept, don’t care about an error, wait till it completes
  8. –> in Cydia, go to Search
  9. –> find “iBooksFix2″
  10. –> install
  11. –> after install restart phone
  12. –> open iBooks
  13. –> in the dialog, tell iBooks to sync
  14. –> it syncs back your books, everything is fine, iBooks works

Thanks to @asadwuddin for pointing this out :-)

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The Big Anti-Apple Rant

Posted December 19, 2011, under Projekte - 68 Views
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Fanboyism

Apple is not perfect, and I know it. I’m not trying to be a Fanboy, even if some people have a hard time distinguishing between Fanboys and and people who like things that are well-designed. No real ordering for my criticism:

Podcasts

Apple supports these, and the built-in support in the iPhone is better than any other app in the AppStore out there as far as I can tell. But I’d still like it to be better. I want to be able to subscribe to podcasts and have them download in the background when there’s WiFi. This feature is clearly missing (and please don’t tell me to 24/7 run my computer for this). Why do I have to do that manually?

Creative Commons License photo credit: eriwst

iCloud lock-in

Steve Jobs said that iCloud’s purpose is to lock people into Apple’s ecosystem. This is not the best for the consumer, unless to turn the argument around and say it’s better for the customers to go with Apple’s products only. Apple, open up an API for external software.

Windows compatibility

Another lock-in argument is that other times, the compatibility with computers running Windows is not great. For example, if I connect to the computer of my girlfriend, copying files is kinda slow and using her printer doesn’t work instantly (which differs to using some networked printer).

Window Borders in Lion

Yay, we can now drag windows on every side to with the mouse pointer to make them bigger or smaller! Sadly, most of the OSX windows were not programmed with this in mind and have zero pixels of borders. This means while I drag the pointer over the border a very short time the icon changes and I can grab the border, but often times I don’t hit this time-window. Apple, how about adding 1px of border on the outside of the window when I hover in it’s direct surrounding, so I at least have a change of grabbing it?

AppStore

The AppStore is your only hope to make money on Apples platforms as a developer. So, if you don’t get featured, you’re most likely lost. This is a lot of power on Apples side, and it should be more obvious how to get featured in the app store other than to make great apps that Apple’s employees like. You should also get more statistical data about the usage of the AppStore, so you don’t have your marketing guys spam keywords all over the place.

AppStore Search

It would also nice, if the Appstore would rank abandon-ware and very poor software lower in searches if was was a) seldomly downloaded b) poorly rated or c) not updated for a very long time. Maybe it should even forget thing that are too bad.

Network connections in Hotels or Academic Networks

Oftentimes, I connect to Hotel networks, free WiFi networks or networks in academic institutions and it just works. About 50% of the time, it doesn’t work and there’s a lot of fiddling with network specific settings involved before I get it to run. How about making this better, as usually Windows is king here.

Next generation programming language

Apple sticks with its old programming language Objective-C without having a contender for the next decade. For example, C# with .NET 4.0 is such an advanced language, that I barely have the heart to compare them. Please don’t comment this. I know you know better than me, but Apple has no solution for stronger machines other than making the devices more competitive by making them smaller.

Contracts

The iOS ecosystem is pretty locked down, with apps having only hacks to communicate to each other. How about stealing contracts from Windows Phone and Windows 8?

Sandboxing

That being said, Sandboxing is pretty bad for app developers if you forgot some entitlements that are necessary to run the software.

Preview

Preview doesn’t always work very good if the PDF is very big. Why, Apple?

Ergonomics vs. Looks

When there’s a design decision between the looks and the ergonomics of an Apple product, the looks win out (explained by John Siracusa on Hypercritical). Apple, please give us bigger arrow keys and better mice! (And Samsung, please don’t copy the questionable design-decisions from Apple!)

iChat / Messages / Twitter

Why is Twitter not integrated into Messages? Why is iChat not integrated with the iOS messages?

Conclusion

Apple is not perfect, and this is what I criticize. I’ll try to fill this list with more that I don’t like about Apple stuff, and remove things that get better. If you have comments, please leave out the price debate, as copying companies like Samsung show that the hardware in Apple-quality cannot be done cheaper.

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Google “Do a barrel roll”

Posted November 4, 2011, under Shorts - 52 Views
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Did you already try to search Google for “Do a barrel roll” or for “Tilt“? Or maybe “Let it snow“? Try it, these are some easter eggs and it’s funny, as Google will do as you tell it.

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Microsoft’s Vision of the Future is not Science Fiction

Posted November 1, 2011, under Rant - 25 Views
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This is Microsoft’s vision for the future:

I think that the OfficeLabs tried to make up some science fiction, about how the world could be one day. Science Fiction is not something that is very realistic in short term, but sci-fi usually tries to be realistic enough, given some time and scientific breakthroughs. To get my point, try to think of some science fiction you know.

Sci-Fi

One example that comes to my mind because it’s the last sci-fi book I read is “The Forever War”. Here in a not too far away future, humankind has gained the ability to use new found “singularities” in outer space to effectively teleport themselves to another point in the galaxy, making long-range space travel possible. The great thing about good science fiction is, that the author usually thinks of all the implications of the world he’s imagining. For example, if Microsoft Labs would have made up this dream, the whole galaxy would be colonized in a few years and everything would be awesome.

Joe Haldeman, the author of the book, tries to keep everything as scientific and real as possible even with the assumption that these singularities can do the teleportation of a spaceship. For example, people have to travel to these singularities in very high speed, which takes months and and puts a nearly unbearable gravitational force on the passengers during the first half of the flight, when the ship is constantly accellerating as well as during the second half, when it’s constantly decellerating. Then humankind meets another spacedriving species, which they don’t understand and cannot communicate to, which leads though unfortunate events to an interstellar war. The story of a soldier in this war is depicted, who comes back after his one-to-three-year-long missions while 30+ years passed on earth after each mission due to the effects of relativity. Every time he comes back, society has changed, the people the soldier has known are dead, and wars have occurred because of the lack of resources on earth.

This is not Sci-Fi

Microsoft doesn’t put bad things, or even new things in it’s visions. It imagines that electronics can work without physical circuits and the energy sources are weightless and/or invisible. Not even Star Trek puts things in such a utopian light. This is not science fiction, it’s more a fantasy movie, and I don’t see magic becoming real in the next 100 years. Also, why don’t they think of something new? Everything in this clip is just an extreme unrealistic version of things we already have today.

For example, I don’t understand why they didn’t think that in all the time this magic energy source will need to be developed, there won’t be a brain-machine-interface that will make the shiny UI and the speech input they dream of completely irrelevant? For example, why should I need all those low-power holo-emitters that seem to come to everyone in the wold at no cost, if all the info can be known directly, though your brain connecting to a network?

It’s also not thought through. If we have holograms, and computer-recognized speech input, then what are these glass-iPhones for? Why isn’t all the UI that flys around on the glass thingy in some no-power-smart-clothes computer? Then why all these gestures? Since minority report, many studies have found that working with gestures with hands and arms is extremely tiresome and will never become reality. And Usability? How are people going to know that they need to move their hands together from up and down to narrow the graphics in one of the holograms around them? Okay, I guess you could also say “Computer, narrow down the profit predictions from x to y”,

All that Microsoft depicts is that they think that there will be no problems anymore in the future. I believe every kind of science fiction should try to be as realistic as possible, even if the author picks some kind of science that has advanced beyond the today’s. The other What Microsoft’s OfficeLab produced is not science-fiction, it’s fantasy.

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