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

And using those better ways is like wearing a watch when you never did so before. It feels strange first, often you don’t realize it could help you, but then, you find enough situations where the quick glance on the watch is really much more convenient than getting out your phone buiried in your pocket, klicking a button and waiting the screen to apprear, only to have to lock the screen after that and putting the phone in its safe position.

photo credit: KatieKrueger

Related Posts:

• New year’s resolutions
• Get over your media collecting habits
• A Waste of Time – How (Not) to Reach Your Goals
• Great Software Engineers Fail
• What should a good ToDo Tool do?

1. 
   
   The first section of timeframes is driven by the outside. You begin your life as a baby and grow up under the supervision of your parents (hopefully). During this time, you cannot do anything to influence your development. Your parents and your surroundings influence who you will become.
2. Then comes the time when you slowly but surely can influence what happens in your life. This can be anywhere between 14 and 40 years of age, but will usually be around the age of 18. From here on, its a bit more finegrained. Usually, you choose which kind of job you will do for the rest of your life. You invest at least 1.5 years and maybe upto 10 years into that area of life – and it defines the next timeframe: work.
3. This worktime-section is the third timeframe. I guess you’ll be in this section for about 35-40 years if everything works out fine. Within this time, you’ll become an expert in your field and maybe climb the ladder to learn new things when/if you get bored with the old work. Or maybe you just do one thing till this timeframe is up. This is the longest timeframe in your life, and it will shape your mind and body, most often for the worse if you don’t watch it closely.
4. Then you’re old and retire. This is the part, where you’re expected to do nothing anymore, as your mind is too slow and your body too broken to get anything meaningful done. If you were lucky and your body still works fine and your mind isn’t shrouded by some mental illness or because your brain took damage in a stroke or accident, you might even be enjoying this episode for some decades, as you get your returns for your work and can do whatever you enjoy.

Now for the message of this post: the timeframe where you choose what your life will be like – timeframe no. 2 – is the most important timeframe of everyone’s life (that they can influence). No matter if it’s 1.5 years or 10 years – it’s well invested time considering that you’ll spend approximately one thirds of your awake-time in your work-life from now on and that this profession you chose will either keep your brain and body intact or maybe deaden your mind and break your body which in turn will be deciding when your turn old. You don’t even need to think about the monetary concequences here as money doesn’t define happiness.

The point is, that pupils in school need to understand the graveness of the time that follows. If you need to learn one single thing in school, then it should be that the post-school education will be the most defining factor of your life, that you have the power to influence yourself. (And that your life is pretty long and doesn’t end at the age of 30.) If anything bad happens during your childhood, you can’t do much, but if you pick the easy path and don’t learn a profession after school, you fucked up your whole life all by yourself.

Some few years define a lifetime. Don’t switch to No. 3 before you’re ready.

photo credit: Paolo Margari

Related Posts:

• Life is The Ultimate Game
• A Waste of Time – How (Not) to Reach Your Goals
• Increasing Speed: Evolution of Lifetime
• Merlin Mann Talking
• How to tell people to do Twitter?

Isn’t that a waste of time?

I was quite shocked, as I think that I can’t use my private time much wiser than by training the skills I’m earning my money with, having fun on a project I like and maybe get something out of it at the end that I might like to play myself and maybe even get some money via advertising, to come up for the server costs. So the answer is clearly: no, it’s not a waste of time. But it got me thinking what a waste of time is in my eyes. To answer this question, I must first address this question:

What is meaningful?

My first definition is: Wasting time means that you do something meaningless instead of something meaningful.

Meaningful would be something, that you had to do anyways or that gives you something in the long term. This includes learning for your job, acting to reach or keep your desired familiy situation (dating, learn to know new people – or spending time with your family), working to develop your economic measures and grow your character.

Not meaningful would be something that gives you nothing in the long term. Watching TV, playing games, consuming drugs / alcohol / cigarettes, surfing the web, listening music, comsume sports in the media, sleeping (longer than 8 hours), watching funny stuff on YouTube, relaxing on the couch, … the list goes on.

Hobbies

Hobbies are a special thing here – basically because everyone will constantly tell you that some of those “WasteOfTime”-activities just are important for them, as the person is not fullfilled or not happy without them.

Using time on a hobby for some time of the day makes you happy and fullfilled in the long term – so if you would count computergaming or watching a certain TV series as a hobby, I’d say its meaningful – for a certain amount of time, where its not procrastination of other things, that are really important or that would have to be done anyways.

If you don’t do the other stuff, that would bring you forward, hobbies are a waste of time. Especially the behavioural pattern of acting out this hobby is addictive – as usual for World of Warcraft-playing or online addiction nowadays – then I would clearly brand this as waste of time.

What helps me and others in doing meaningful stuff is the Getting Things Done-methods, that clearly stress your long-term-goals. After formulating them, you should try to do one task that is connected with your goal every day – which makes sure you evolve. (btw.: At Abelssoft we”re developing a ToDo-application that will also help you developing your goals, I’ll update you on this one as there’s still a lot of development to be done)

Bonus: the Time Eater

My definition is of course only a subjective view on this topic – even if I think its pretty nicely thought out. In spire of this, for some people, the most useful activity is giving in into some drive, like being lazy, eating or watching TV or gaming or taking drugs all day. THAT is clearly a waste of time in my eyes.

Especially the TV set earns an honorable mention here: is a time-eating machine. Most people burn time in their TV – and a TV set already is declared as a necessity of life by law! And as I already said in a former acticle I wrote in german: Time is the stuff that life is made of. Its the most precious good there is. With time, you can have fun, generate money, live your dreams. So don’t burn it in the TV-oven. Some also use the TV in a meaningful way, but that usually means watching the news – which doesn’t take long anways.

Final Thoughts

Make a list. Define who you want to be, which character traits you want to develop or get rid of, define which kind of social (family?) situation you want, which goods you want to have (car? home?), what you want to reach (professionally, skills, achievements) and put all this on this list. These are your goals. Try to do one thing that gets you into this directions every day, before you give in to your drives. It might take years, but you will see success sooner than you think.

Related Posts:

• Merlin Mann Talking
• Timeframes of Life
• Do you need a Smartphone? Or just want one?
• Increasing Speed: Evolution of Lifetime
• Those Nerds and their Tools

Since about 2 or 3 years, I’m registered on the german media-articles-exchange-platform Hitflip. Its a website where you can exchange media of all types, first and foremost videos and games, but also books and music CDs. There’s a certain virtual currency called “flips” to manage the exchanges, that you get by giving stuff away (or buying from Hitflip) and that you can use to get stuff from other people.

Hitflips Profits Skyrocket

Where we have a currency, and goods, we have a market. This is where Hitflip’s profit began – they created a market, and they can print the virtual money. This seems to be enough to rule the world. Imagine the possibilities: They could have expanded away from only exchanging media to all regular goods to become the second rise of eBay – with their own virtual currency where anyone is dependent on. Or they could have expanded to become a fully blown ClickAndPay clone.

Hitflip has a certain idea, of what things should cost.

But Hipflip wasn’t very creative to come to more profit. To be straight: they were just greedy. To be able to sell their virtual flips (they really wanted that!), they need to be sure that you can get something with those flips. This is the first time they failed badly. On a market, the price is always dependent on suppy and demand. They just cannot tell people, what their stuff is worth.

To not to give up a whole lot of money on this market, you (as Hitflips customer) will try to get things cheap (low amount of flips) and give things away for much more of this currency – its the natural way of approaching a market. This is the first factor that drove flip-prices to rise. If I got Super Mario Bros for 30 flips, I want to have at least 31 flips if I give it away.

The second factor is Hitflips greed. Instead of just having the profit of selling the flips to new members, they took 1 Euro for each transaction, and later rose this to 2 Euros for each transaction where a certain amount of flips changed the owner. This lead to me not wanting 31 flips for my Super Mario Bros, but 35. Oh, and lets not forget that I have to pay for the postage, so I’ll even want 40 flips for my game. Prices were spiraling up.

Image that todayI can pay 1 flip for 1 Euro and that a new Heavy Rain (PS3) costs 199 flips and God of War 3 (PS3) costs 289 flips. Usual other games with lower populatity like … say … the  nearly three year old Tekken 6 (PS3) cost 119 flips. On other markets, there are lower values. The popular (but now also quite old) Resident Evil 4 (Wii) costs 35 flips – and 10€ if you buy it somewhere else.

Hitflip forces lower prices for goods

Now for the reason I’m writing this post. About one year ago, they tripled all flips, for whatever reason. I guess they hoped that people would still put in their trading goods cheap, but of course everyone was now tripling the prices. A plain, meaningless fail. Then, they stocked up the pricing for each transaction that was above a certain flip-limit – hoping that this would keep prices below this limit. Which (of course) wasn’t the case. They just made me want 45 flips instead of 40 for the item I got with 30 flips, as transaction got even more expensive.

Yesterday, Hitflip began to use an automatic check for “too high prices” and took items, that were “too expensive”, in a pause-mode. I just put em active again, as what else should I have done? Next day, same thing. So they try to tell us, how high the market price of a flip is? They must have lost their minds! (Hint: later I’ll give you the solution they should use, as I like Hitflip … as it basically works).

Dear Hitflip: Why can’t all this work?

Three things:

1. Because there’s a certain amount of flips flying around. If everyone would just lower their “too high” prices, the cheaper items would gain in value and the more popular items would loose value. And I don’t want that, I got some good games lying around here!

2. Hitflip is printing money every time they give out flips for free (as when you begin on the platform or get an affiliate bonus for bringing someone on the platform) of for money (as when you buy flips). Printing money leads to loss of value of this currency. So, flips will be worth less over time … its just the way things are.

3. When everyone can better buy God of War 3 for 45€ and exchange it on Hitflip rather than buying 280 flips for 280€, it should be clear for Hitflip that noone will buy their flips anymore. Their flips aren’t worth 1€ and never will be, no matter how hard they try.

Dear Hitflip: Its hard, but not that hard

You have to accept reality. Don’t try to dictate the market. The market will correct itself. What you can do to sell flips again – and make new members happy?

1. You have metrics, how much an item is worth if I buy a new one, and you can find out how much people want on your platform for this item. Make an approximation over 10000 items of different categories and calculate the real value of a flip in €. Take into account the “age” and “condition” of that items. Put that estimation online, so every member (including the new ones) can transparently see that. Do that calculation every day or every hour, as the market might change.

2. Now that everyone knows, how much value a flip really has, make it possible to get flips by paying you that exact exchange rate plus a (very small) transaction fee (that might diminish for higher amounts of flips purchased). People WILL buy them, as they’re priced fairly. This might lead to people rising prices even much higher in the first few weeks, as much more virtual money will enter the market – but in the end you have no other options.

3. There will be grief. You must  pause all items of existing members, so they can adapt to the new market. As their flips aren’t worth the same anymore, I would advise you to grant them “real money” on their accounts according to how much flips they had as exchange for the lost value.  Say someone has 100 flips and the real value of a flip is only 0,25€ This would mean they can do a lot of transactions for free, but at least they don’t sue you for robbery.

4. Take away that higher fee for exchanging higher priced articles. It will only distort the market and let people take much higher prices than necessary.

Final thoughts

If you like Hitflip as I do, you know that something has to change. Please make them read this article. They have a german blog and they’re on Twitter. Dear Hitflip, please let me know what you think. If you want to hire me as a consultant, go for it. But don’t try to tell me that you understood that you have a (pretty free) market there and that you know how to handle it well.

Related Posts:

• Get over your media collecting habits
• Flattr – Future of High Quality Content
• Why Social Media only works for the Winners
• What is Viral Marketing?
• The Big Anti-Apple Rant

I listen to some software-engineering postcasts, read some SE-blogs and generally try to get better at what I do for a living (which is developing software). But I listen to those bloggers and postcasters,  who have often developed software for two or three decades (this means 20-30 friggin’ years), and wonder if they think we all did so. No, we didn’t. And this is where they fail.

They are gurus. Nerdy heroes. They developed languages, built enterprise software, know all the technical details and some may even be able to read assembler code. They work at google, microsoft or some agile startup that will do it all right. The wiser ones tell us what the best practices are, which design patterns are more superb than others and why dynamically typed languages rule now that we’re doing test-driven development. The lesser wise ones use other buzzwords like SEO, Social, Scrum, Semantic, … S-omething. Some are talking about architectural layers, loose coupling, ORMS, SQL vs. NoSql databases, the importance of version control, team-management and the big difference between computer science and the software development craft. Dependency inversion and injection. They’re talking about a wide array of frameworks, tools, libraries and assemblies. Damn, and they still talk about command-line-tools, grep-commands and build-scripts.

But they fail to realise that the usual software-developer out there doesn’t understand what they’re talking about. I see it every day. Computer scientists that finish with a university-degree know next-to-nothing about software development. People programming everything in PHP. I mean the easy stuff and the complex stuff – and PHP wasn’t made for both. I met doctors of “buisiness informatics” with no clue about Software Development – but a good skill with word and powerpoint. Project planners who taught this at university – but fail at leading a team finishing a project in real life. I experience it in my own skills, that I may know all the ideas, but in the short time, I haven’t worked with 1% of what the gurus talk about. We didn’t get taught that at university – and if you try to teach it to yourself, you’re doomed to fail (for some time at least). Try pair programming alone. Or getting the idea behind version control – alone. Try to write structured code – if you’re the only person reading it. Try learning programming as the one guy not having programmed for 5 years besides two others who have. They won’t wait for you, and you won’t learn.

Image via Wikipedia

All just Buzzwords? Well, what about those fancy Design Patterns? Architecture? MVC? Unit-Testing? To be true, I know that the gurus are right. Many gurus also think about these issues. I work for a real guru who also understands that the fresh programmers need to learn, and he’s a good teacher and patient with us learners. And I try to get used to all the best practices, the agile development, the continuous learning, the new tools. But I think that 80% of the developers out there just want to do what they were trained to do, not knowing that at school or university, they just saw 5% of what they really need to know. And they truely have no intention to learn even more – as 8 hours of work a day certainly is enough!

But are CS-students software developers? Or do those developers come from somewhere else? India comes to my mind. But no, thats not what I meant. I believe good software developers are born from themselves – no school is gonna bring you to developing good software, the only thing that will help you is an unlimited thirst for knowledge. I heard the word “Infovore” somewhere, and thats exactly the kind of people that transcend into those good developers. Enjoying learning new stuff.

I don’t mean SuperBrains. Well, there are the few geeks that came on this world with the fun to code and which were born with a linux-kernel in mind, but please try to realise that software development tools and techniques need to be usable. And that at universities more practical work needs to be done. And people should have more basic-courses. Learn programming more. Get lessons on source control, on getting to know different IDEs. On learning using basic libraries. Get told more was object oriented means instead of giving them a definition and telling them “this is better than goto”. WTF is goto? Show them! Let them make some Basic or Pascal code. Let every wanna-be developer do a lot of projects with different focusses. And let them explain their code afterwards, so they’ll do it themselves. Instead of people from China who just earned 20 bucks.

There are only so many people speaking binary even if they’re developing software. I heard Linux has reached 1% market share. By making better GUIs. Go figure.

At the end, I want to give you the link to a really great post by one of the wiser programming guys: Confessions of a terrible programmer. You may think this is all BS. :-) See ya.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to Become an Expert Developer (basilv.com)
• There Is No Room For Zealotry in Software Development (regulargeek.com)
• Test Driven Development Worked for Me! (nofluffjuststuff.com)
• How Can Software Development Avoid The Need For A Hero? (regulargeek.com)
• More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues and Practical Advice (oreilly.com)
• Doing It Wrong (downes.ca)
• Iterative software development (mndoci.com)
• Publishing scientific code (mndoci.com)

Related Posts:

• What should a good ToDo Tool do?
• Those Nerds and their Tools
• Filtering Information & New Idea for Twitter.com
• Firefox on Mac – Tabs Closed after Restart
• The Safe Route of Registration on the Web

After trying out many different ToDo tools, I found that none of them makes using these tools fun. I don’t have a mac, otherwise I would certainly use something like “Things“, as the introduction movies look pretty nice and simplicity defines the software.

Nothing on the PC? Well, not entirely: we have A LOT of REALLY BAD solutions for Windows. Firstly, Outlook. This one is too simple, and office is high priced. You cannot organize ToDos with Outlook. Then an unlimited number of applications that fill your screen and give you 1 million buttons. Require about 10 hours to use first time. Missing a good PC-ToDo-tool, I looked for web applications. Toodledo is a nice service, but the interface just sucks. And you won’t use a bad interface anymore, as we’re living in modern times where usability engineeriing is reality … sometimes. Additionally, the web-software needs me to keep an eye on the browser everytime, which I just don’t like. If I want to get things done, I shouldn’t need the browser for that as we all know where that leads (youtube).

Therefore, I only depend on the iPhone-”Todo”-app, the only one thats pretty much usable. Sadly, I don’t have a 3GS, and the 3G needs about 5-8 seconds till I can see the screen and the app is started, so thats not perfect too. I often let this app run at work, but seeing the screen still takes 3 seconds.

So, what would you do? Usually, if you want a certain software-tool that exactly fits your needs, you just try out some, and after you didn’t find what you were looking for, you just use the next best thing OR just decide to throw away the idea completely. Well, that is, if you’re not programming software. So I decided to write down some requirements and asked at Abelssoft (the company I work at) if we could do something like this. Well, we could try :-)

So I’m asking you: What is the most important requirement, a todo-tool should fullfill, so that it would help YOU? What we found out is that it needs to fullfill the following:

• easy to use, intuitive to use
• small, compact interface thats in the background, popping up from time to time to ask if you still do <this>
• tells me what I should do next
• rapid way of adding new todos (and a rapid way of setting importance, due dates and stuff)
• only necessary properties of todos (some want projects, some categories, everyone contexts, some tags, some planned time…)
• good organisation of todos (projects? recurring todos? inbox?)
• good filtering (if I search something, I need to find it instantly)

We had another giantic list of things that COULD be nice, but we’ll be trying to keep it sleek. And we found out that most people have very different ideas, what a todo tool should do more than the above. My boss wants project planning stuff like how much hours will this item take (I won’t want this). I want it to be able to synch to my iPhone (others don’t use iPhones). Some want dependencies between single todo-items (like this one can only be ready after another one), but how can you build this in without blowing the tool up to one of the complex tools already available? Some want projects while others find them confusing. Some want time-management-functions inclused. Some want further project-planning stuff like delegating ToDos or connectors to projectmanagement solutions like JIRA included. Choose and divide, young jedi.

Also, the GTD-philosophy seems to get in the way sometimes. For example, “Folders” don’t make any sense to me when you have contexts. They’re some kind of tags gone worse. That said, I like tags more. For these and some more reasons, I’m not sure if we should follow a certain philosophy (like the 30-year old GTD), as these were born in times when computers were not that essential in people’s everyday lives.

What do you think? Which feature would let you use a ToDo-organizer?

Related articles by Zemanta

• 12 Lists That Help You Get Things Done (lifehack.org)
• Why using ToDo Lists & GTD? (ithoughts.de)
• No Time to Read This? Read This (online.wsj.com)
• Toodledo – An Online Task Management App With iPhone Integration (makeuseof.com)

Related Posts:

• Great Software Engineers Fail
• Those Nerds and their Tools
• Microsoft Office 2010 encountered an error during setup
• Big Fonts and Clean Design
• Windows 7