Monthly Archives: November 2013

Apple are driving me mad

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If this email doesn’t look appropriate for you to deal with and you have no actual power to change anything then please pass it on to someone at apple that has vision and balls enough to listen >

what is all this paint by numbers dumbed down to absurdity, select from the minimal rubbish options we give you ? im beginning to hate almost everything you do and stand for as a company ? if theres a single person with any integrity at apple, you need to get on top of the things you are getting wrong, you seem to be lurching from one awful disaster to another?

This support site is rubbish ? whats wrong with a good old form ? I know you have to pay someone with a brain to read it ? the current support pages are the equivalent of some shiny god awful automated telephone system with call waiting desperately trying route you to some rubbish automated FAQ help system ? I went through the process to arrange a call to my mobile and the system said “we are unable to schedule a call for you. please try again or choose a different solution.” ? It seems today that as a company you have forgotten the “user is king” and youre off on your own trip making everything worse with a huge sense of self congratulatory ego in the process, I’ve been using your gear since the apple II, but the last ten years you seem to have been doing nothing but trying my patience, technology and computers are supposed to aid my life not hinder them, and not to be some closed loop walled garden of a digital retail channel for a company grown very greedy and lazy,

if you ever want some unbiased reals views about supporting and using the products and software apple make, you know my email address, if you carry blindly on the way you are I’m going to have switch to being the opposite of an apple evangelist, and recommend against everything your making, to all the people i know, Ive done allot of promotion of apple over the years but recently you’ve give me nothing to shout about.

Tuneup Version 3 auto dumbed down bullshit, stick to V2 until V3 sorted out.

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As a person who bought a lifetime license, I have not yet upgraded to version 3 as automagic seems like a disaster in the making, I don’t want your software automatically doing anything from the start without my permission, I need control over how the auto part of the software operates completely.

I have remained on version 2.4.6 and will continue to do so and will get very little value fro my tuneup purchase unless you iron the auto ness and lack of control in version 3 on startup ? please don’t make the errant decision of dumbing down the software to the extent i wont use it because I cant get control over what its doing ?

My library was organised using version2 in a largely manual and overlooking the software actions ways and I don’t want V3 going back over stuff already done and auto correcting it without my say so, on my itunes library ? its bad enough that apple keep making itunes worse (10.6 to 11 was an abortion of gross simplification and dumbing down), I dont need you making your software any worse as well.

The kind of auto i like is where it does its best to judge things and then offers me the choice of the corrections to the item in question and I can select which bits I think the AI in tuneup has made a good decision on ? as most of my library is now organised. also CDDB gracenote etc is full of errors sadly that are very difficult – as a user to get corrected. companies that don’t leverage the contributive power of the users own AI, are wasting a possibly valuable resource.

The parts of your software I do use >
I use the clean tab and its sublevel clean tab pretty exclusively

I might use deduper or find artwork if it didn’t even 2.4.6 give the impression its going to auto remove the duplicates, or auto correct the artwork you want description that describe what user control is available, does deduper auto delete ? i don’t want to run it, as I don’t want it to auto delete anything. is it finding absolute duplicates named duplicates does it check for bit-rate duplicates and select which is the better quality ? where are my controls as a user over this ? In fact autopilot features in 3 should all be completely disable-able and when running auto have two modes / control over it, mode one that requires full confirmation for changes , per album confirmation or no confirmation ie full auto, that will give the user full control, ok supposedly your app has the ability to undo its actions but in a way i don’t like the idea of the app keep track of every action it does so it can then undo it, sounds unnecessarily complex, I am using other apps sometimes to get track orders and rename files and do some basic metatag changes before putting through tuneup, as some tracks are to rough for tuneup to get right without external manual intervention, usually where the tracks are labelled track1 track 2 etc and its only the folder that has the album name and info necessary to label the tracks correctly, obviously their cddb track timings should resolve this kind of stuff but sometimes some manual work has to be done which I don’t mind, but I would concentrate efforts on making it find info for the some of the worse mp3 files where maybe the only pre-existing tag info is track timing length and the fact their in the same folder together.

Tuniverse is a wasted programming effort for my use . I’m not interested in apps using cpu cycles or bandwidth wasted on features that endlessly want to use those resources without my permission for non core features, if i want to find concerts and venues i will do that by other means, don’t try to become some one stop shop platform thing, every useless app and website are trying that diversification jig and its irritating, and it divides your strengths.

Where to spend your programming energy>

KISS> ie spend your energy on the core features of the product, until it feels fast smooth, accurate and polished. then I will be able to recommend it to everyone. I would prefer all your effort to go into making the results better quality, the quantity of tracks that can be dragged & cleaned at once in the clean panel without crashing to be maximised etc. the deduper to offer to remove the lower quality duplicate, or the artwork finder to offer to replace a lower quality artwork with a better on for that matter offering full size, side by side artwork comparisons as sometime larger is more compressed or blurrier and not alway better quality etc, AI will find it hard to determine image quality truthfully other than analysing file size dimension and compression which dont always tell the whole story ? The opportunity for user to contribute to corrective information something that is now daftly difficult with cddb, as so many variants of CD’s have come out with track listings, it might be better for tuneup to prefer to 2 or 3 possible album tagging for a set of tracks ? certainly I like the auto part of the software to offer corrections rather than just going ahead and doing them. Also I want a way to mark tracks to be ignored by tuneup after its come across them, as they maybe tracks I’ve created, user content obscure website podcasts etc other stuff that will be impossible for tuneup to correct as it doesn’t exist in any database etc.

Second Life Marketplace , lack of relevance in search results

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bad search results relevance wise

Ok this is feedback re the marketplace, my sales on xstreetsl used to be like once a day, since the changes LL wrought, moving xstreetsl into the marketplace and then removing magic boxes and implementing their new system, all these disturbances now mean, I seem to get no sales per day, that is my experience of the impact of LL’s decisions, obviously SL avatar numbers have changed allot since then, so it cant all be lain at your door re the changes you have implemented, but the effect is dramatic, Now this bothers me, but a much more damaging problem is the lack of relevance of search results in the Marketplace ?
for example – humour me –
do a search for banana or any fruit orange etc, fruit happen to be the things that I sell.

The fact that the specific individual banana objects, barely turn up on the first pages and instead island sets and clothing coming up instead shows how awful the search results formula is, even when set to filter by relevance, how are people supposed to find relevant objects except by wading through multiple pages of mainly unrelated stuff, I know this cant be helping sales for anybody’s objects. The results it returns on page when I search for banana ? > a stripy b&w shirt top is coming up, well before a banana fruit of any description let alone the banana i am selling, This needs resolving, I certainly also find it ridiculous the top level categories and a “food” category does not even figure in that? you’ve buried it under Recreation and entertainment ? why ? who would think to look there ? The net gist of my arguments is that marketplaces search results are effectively making it look like there are very few such bananas on second life or any relevant objects, ie the quality of the search results are really very poor when it comes to being relevant to the search criteria used ? LL really need to work on this. This could be resolved by a not relevant to search results button ? which Marketplace learned form or ranking single keywords higher than overuse of unrelated multiple keywords ? whichever way at the moment the search results in marketplace arent very good, and im not just saying this for my own benefit im saying it for the benefit of the search results in general.

Bitcoin is speculators dream – a car with with no breaks that will careen from tree to tree

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The danger with Bitcoin is its a car with no breaks, its the perfect speculators currency that can bubble up and fizz pop, purely unrelated to anything but belief in it. Cartoon style careen from tree to tree. Its not enough for a virtual token of currency to be limited in supply it must have a secondary measure of utility other than that of pure speculation. Gold also has its real world uses. Bitcoin has no use but speculation ? and therefore is not a civil currency. The people who whore the markets out for their own selfish profits, dont need any more speculative toys to play with !

speculative behaviour in its unfettered form is a cancer on society

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speculative behaviour in its unfettered form is a cancer on society nought more than putting 200 dollars on red the end of the spin and the the week its worth 900 dollars, that has to be the ultimate speculators currency, and where ultimate speculation runs, misery is soon to follow either for the investor or those who suffer the consequences of it. For instance with bitcoin, being that its based ultimately on speculative belief in its value, and that value thats invested in it is taken from some other token of value and placed in bitcoin instead, in that sense they’re are the losing currencies, who value is stripped form them to fund it, the problem being that those established currencies are already weak, pure speculation where the value of something multiplies by a factor of 4 in a week without in any way having reduced entropy in the human world in any useful way, are exactly that speculative currencies behave like and are therefore easily recognisable, And if governments don’t reign in or control such speculation in society it will ultimately erode at the hard won spine of steady measured fiscal prudence, which is already battered enough and destroy the non speculators and small savers value. Unfettered speculation is a cancer if we don’t limit it, the world will be full of gibbering morons just waiting for the next crap to speculate on.

ibooks author – crap for other platforms 4:3 apsect ratio locked – waste of time

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Perhaps companies should consider that technology and software platforms should not be about artificially constraining people and locking them into your walled garden of a cash till ? perhaps do something decent for technology users for once which is open and shareable between all platforms, after all apple has massively lifted from open source software projects for its own use without adding much back to the community ?, rather than just considering your own profits. The idea ibooks author has been programmed to only work with the aspect ratio of iOS devices ? how does it handle the taller aspect ratio of the iPhone 5s then let alone other devices. Your basically dooming users whose lives are already burdened enough – with unnecessary complexity, to have to use different software for different devices and platforms and layout everything out many many times in different software ? This is far worse than the situation need be ? but its not just apples fault either adobe are rubbish at the create once publish many idea as well, in fact this whole thing has stagnated for 6 years, from what I can see with nobody providing a decent solution to the ‘create once publish many’ platforms problem, apple your platform doesn’t live in a vacuum nor do your users wish to, it ain’t healthy. Why should I waste my time creating my content in your software if that means I’m locked into your platform with those files from then on ? its not in my interests thats for sure to only be able to sell my ebook on the iOS platform ?

indesign completely shit at create once publish many formats

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My god has anything been more hair-pulling than converting a spreads based facing pages print document to a non facing pages single portrait page ebook edition ? yeuck – vomit – 10 years to make this right and adobe still cant organise this properly, the process is so manual and indesign interferes and balls’es the whole thing up such thats it probably easier to create a whole new document from scratch.

advertisers responsibility

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keep telling yourself your own philosophical mantra – on no day – will it ever be true – remember promotion as long as its promoting something that has a large well of underlying substance and function is alright. The problem with advertising, its its often helping to push the idea of fashion and temporary-ness and vapidness as the product, and sadly that mentality is entering the tech arena to, thats why he says ‘move on’ because advertising, markets and products today are all temporary slash and burn agricultures with no integrity.

function first form second always, especially when it comes to technology, you don’t land on the moon by purely pursuing form. science and function have to be very solidly defined first, and then form is brought into play to make something palatable to the eye, too often design starts with the reverse of this process, i think its a legacy of the streamline design era. Advertising has to be aware of the pitfalls and not market bad products for the sake of being paid.

tech companies are too greatly wanting to get away from specs and ui refinement, and declare everything as some kind of lifestyle rubbish.

icloud keychain local items more mess and confusion

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again apple change stuff, that may well cause more problems, certainly from a UI point of view, keychain access is now worse, as i have to make an extra click to switch between login or local for a keychain item, im hunting for, dependant on where mavericks decided to place it in either local or login?

more mess and confusion well done apple ! and the fact local gets renamed icloud when that is setup, I have not dared turn icloud keychain on, just incase makes things a great deal worse, especially as you now need another password/pin to secure the darn thing.

All additional features should be by default off and when OS upgrading, and only turned on by the user I don’t want this local keychain particularly, and would certainly like a technical explanation as to when mavericks decides to create a keychain item within login or local ? and whether there is any control over this, presumably this mess means that only new keychain items are put in “local items” post mavericks upgrade, when syncing with icloud will actually be synced, like the abortion of “icloud notes” “icloud calendars” and “icloud contacts” where sometimes form a sync perspective post upgrade it will ignore older notes/calendars/contacts it deems not to be in the icloud syncing group – messy messy messy.

and as per usual apple will give little obvious explanation or user controls as to how to resolve such complex issues, because they magically promote “it will just work” when in fact it very often doesn’t and resolving such scenarios is made by obfuscation and a lack of visual user control.

I also doubt that apple will provide an app to view keychains cleanly on ios, SO i will stick with keychain2go as a solution to my problem, which enables me to view and edit around 10,000 various passwords in 500 notes all secure in iOS, i very much doubt iCloud syncing can handle that and give the user access, its all no doubt hidden and in the background.

Also note apple I have alway despised your disappearing outbox on all your platforms, it has caused me no end of grief, make it permanently appear and remain or give me a user setting to be able to decide for myself whether it is visible or not, turning of internet access to make it appear is an awful kludge.

CS6 the final f’ing straw

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I sometimes use creative suite at work and photoshop has been becoming less reliable for at least the last 4 versions, and the thing is now a schonky peice of shit

awful buggy expensive, cant even write pdfs properly, crashes on printing, actions not saving files, do like living your life on adobe forums ? because that where your going to spend most of your time.

Buggy as hell, the 80% of features that pro users actually uses are buggy as hell, sloppy sloppy sloppy.

if you want to spend 15 hours working out why photoshop no longer seems capable of exporting pdf’s with vectors in it that aren’t all balls’ed up, considering PDF is there own f******g standard, the fact it fails to write them properly is an endightment of adobes current state.

and if you want them to never fix it and then release cs7 and tell you to upgrade to that then by all means buy this heap of shit.

if you also want to work why actions now seem incapable of writing files to disk when they get to a point in the action when you ask them to save a file.

If you want to have to diagnose why it crashes when attempting to print ?

unreliable as knackery, adobe has completely lost its stability and reliability over the last 5 years for a load bloatware feature noone asked for, they must have lost some quality coders, because the the no doubt outsourced indians they got on it now are destroying the software.