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?

 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.

Related Posts:

• Marketshare and Winning and Religion
• The “Move The Content” Paradigm, Criticism And The Future Of Mac OSX
• Firefox on Mac – Tabs Closed after Restart
• From PC to Mac Book Air 11”
• iOS5 iMessage must be the messaging solution

I never had this opinion. I would always look at how easy an operating system lets me fulfill the tasks I need to fulfill, including the initial learning curve, therefore I chose Windows on computers and iPhone on smartphones. I hate having to configure stuff all the time. I hate how the Android OS makes me click on way too small buttons and phone makers try to combat this with bigger screen sizes. I hate when I have to make way more clicks or text input to get anything done. And I really don’t like when the web browser stutters or I doubletap on a paragraph and it zooms to the sidebar. All pretty small things (yeah, rewriting the UI elements isn’t really a small thing), but if this were different, I’d definitely chose Android. And if Windows Phone gets more powerful and easier to use than iPhone, I’ll choose that one. I really don’t care about religion. And I never advised anyone to pick an iPhone “because everyone does” or “because it won”, and this is my only plea in this whole post: when you’re advocating for Android, please don’t mention that more copies were sold, as this has nothing to do with the quality of the hard- and software.

photo credit: kevindooley

As this post might have religious comments, here’s a disclaimer: I like iPhone best among smartphones, so in your opinion I’m a fanboy – no need to mention that again. I also love customization in my phone from time to time, so I’m jailbreaking – but I also didn’t miss it much when there wasn’t a good jailbreak available. And for the pricing: since here in germany the T-mobile monopoly fell, iPhone is not too pricy anymore – so leave me alone with “I can’t pay for it” – if you can pay 500€ in two years, you can also afford 600€.

Related Posts:

• The Big Anti-Apple Rant
• ToDo for Mac – Review
• Firefox on Mac – Tabs Closed after Restart
• From PC to Mac Book Air 11”
• Stop mocking Microsoft and Nokia

They seem to generate permalinks for the converted audiofiles. So if you listen to podcasts from time to time … here are the links. If the links don’t work anymore, give the site some time to come back up (or drop a comment).

Merlin Mann – Who moved my brain? (28.49MB .mp3)

Merlin Mann – Toward Patterns for Creativity – Macworld (25MB .mp3)

Webvisions 2010 Keynote – Merlin Mann: “Bold Ideas and Insane Possibilities” (25MB .mp3)

Inbox Zero (Merlin Mann)  (GoogleTechTalks) (26,84MB .mp3)

Merlin Mann on Time and Attention (Getting Things Done) (GoogleTechTalks) (32.37MB .mp3)

Oh by the way, if you need a nice Windows tool for downloading music or videos for Windows, try our Youtube Song Downloader (from Abelssoft, where I’m working at). It’s really a very nice piece of software.

Related Posts:

• Life is The Ultimate Game
• A Waste of Time – How (Not) to Reach Your Goals
• Timeframes of Life
• Programs you should have a look at
• Time Management doesn’t mean rushing

• The Dev Show: About Java, Javascript, Ruby and Python mainly, webprogramming and other programming stuff in general.
• The Talk Show: Apple & Geek show with John Gruber. Better than having the feed of his blog spamming your feedreader. ;-)
• The Pipeline & The Conversation & The Big Web Show: Basically all shows with interviews with people from the web industry, programmers, designers, bookwriters, and all kinds of interesting people.

I can definitely recommend all of the above shows and also did so on iTunes (where you can also get them). All those shows feature either an audio only (which I prefer for my way to work) or a video feed if you like that better. On the 5by5 website you can also find podcasts about Ruby, Podcasting, Photopraphy, and some other themes you might like.

Related Posts:

• Podcasts I listen to
• Programs you should have a look at
• My Blog gets old + iPhone Touchscreen writing
• TentacleprOn
• Writing and Reading Blogs

Its a podcast with a weird but unique name. Against all conventions, its pretty much categoryless, and from what I heard I’d put it in Philosophy if I was forced to. But overall, tante wants to pick up everything interesting he can find – as there are already so many categorized podcasts that you could listen to. A good point.

Episode 0 explains what the podcast aims to be and what ideas it should convey. I think this stuff definitely needs to be in textform easily accessible from the main blog page – as noone usually listens to 1 hour of “something” he knows nothing about. So at least try to be more descriptive about the contents in text form.

In Episode 1, the podcast begins with the fundamental concepts of reality and introduces us to the theories of Leipnitz – that all things are based on some atomar building blocks that don’t underlie the physical laws, don’t communicate and have different levels – of of them is the sentinent human spirit. Tante exlains that he wants to invite guests in the following episodes, and in Episode 1 you can easily understand why: talking about such a philosophical topic makes you want to get more views than only those of just one person. You’ll also want questions to be thrown in like “How do we percieve a reality, if our spirits can’t communicate with the sensory input our nerves / eyes give us?” But the shownotes are pretty exhaustive.

So, with no specific topics or categories set, I’d argue everyone should decide if he likes to listen to new, interesting stuff, and if so, if he likes the style Tante uses in his podcast. For my part, I like his voice, his choice of words and his use of language, he should just whine less about his german accent and his inferior knowledge. I seldomly hear people talking english that good and fluent and I bet he isn’t that dumb! ;-)

One small technical comment from a part-time Apple-fanboy: I’d love to get this podcast via iTunes (and this shouldn’t be hard to set up). As I didn’t see a better way than opening the feed, download the .mp3-file, put it in iTunes, mark it as podcast, synch it to my iDevice to listen to it on my way to work. Okay, I didn’t really investigate in that area – but it should be found in iTunes. iTunes after all is the first software that made up my mind about podcasts, because there wasn’t an uncomplicated method to get podcasts for me before, and so I didn’t listen to them.

Overall rating: Interesting. I’ll stick to it for now. Try it yourself!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Podcasts I listen to (ithoughts.de)
• Five Best Podcast Managers (lifehacker.com)
• New Podcast “tentaclepr0n” (the-gay-bar.com)

Related Posts:

• All the little things & This year of my life
• The Big Anti-Apple Rant
• The Human Flaw
• Marketshare and Winning and Religion
• Merlin Mann Talking

Since I’m going to work by bike and need between 15-20 minutes, I begun listening to podcasts on the way. I like tech stuff and software development stuff – so if you like that I’ll give you some hints here. The podcasts I listen to usually go between 1 and 2 hours.

Software Engineering Radio | The Podcast for Professional Software Developers: A nice english podcast (from the accent I think everyone can guess that these guys are germans after all) about software engineering in general. Mostly interviews, nicely prepared, no queer stuff, interesting interviewees. My favourite podcast at the moment. Gets updated all two weeks.

Z! – Zeitgeist, Entwicklung, Technik – der Technik Podcast: A german podcast from two guys about tech-news that I like a lot – updated about every two weeks. Decent and well structured usually. I prefer this one to the next…

Bits und so: … which is another german podcast about techie news. Nevertheless I listen to both of these, to keep myself informed and listen to different views on the things that go on in our binary world. This podcasts most of the time sports about 4 people, so even if they’re pretty good organised sometimes it’s quite a mess. Another negative factor is a lot of commercial stuff in there and a focus on the Apple side of software – but its entertaining and the “picks” where tools get recommended is nice.

.NET Rocks!: As fresh .NET newbie I tried out this english podcast and was pleasantly surprised with its quality. Its fun, updated once to twice a week and usually sports a lot of .NET – tech and interviews with .NETters.

Die Drei Vogonen: I only tried this german podcast once so far, so this is more of a honorable mention. When I looked on the duration of over 6 hours, I was appalled a bit, but took the test nevertheless. First, it was only 3 hours long, then the whole show began anew – to technical issues on this one. Then the guys were more relaxed, also talking about personal stuff like where they went for vacation … and it was also pretty unorganised, despite a well structured layout with picks (same as in Bitsundso), short news (that are too short compared to some beekeeping-hobby-tales) and “deep thoughts” where a certain topic gets highlighted (but in the case of GPG the speakers just didn’t have a clue what they were talking about). So preparation minus, organisation minus, nice ambience plus. As time is limited (in fact the most limited resource in our short lives), I’ll ignore this one till the others have no more stuff for me.

I also tried the chaosradio, but I didn’t like the style and attitude of this one. Oh, and I need to try out TentacleprOn by tante soon.

Related Posts:

• Programs you should have a look at
• Writing and Reading Blogs
• Increasing Speed: Evolution of Lifetime
• Merlin Mann Talking
• Get over your media collecting habits