Daily Archives: November 18, 2013

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.