C’mon Apple, get your act together

The iTunes terms and conditions have changed again! This is beyond a joke!

What ticks me off about this:

  • the amount of times I have to do this, and the only time I get prompted for this is when installing new apps. When you have multiple devices this is a PITA
  • Instead of telling me bout what’s changed, they hit me with 101 pages of material to read! Hang on, I just wanted to download a free app!
  • The only way I can tell what’s changed is to make sure I download each one and do a compare on them, but…
  • I have just entered in 4 different email addresses and I’m getting an error ‘could not send email, try again.’ I have tried four! how many do you want me to try, and yes, one of them WAS the address I registered the account with. (This leads me to believe they are hiding something in this agreement they don’t want to share with me)
  • Why can’t I just use the old agreement? It’s worked fine for so long now

Imagine if you bought a car and once a week or at some random time, you got into the car and turned on the ignition and your car speaks to you, “sorry, the terms and conditions of you using this vehicle have changed, please accept this new 101 page agreement before I let you start it!” But to make matters worse, you’d have to go back inside your house to accept them! (after all it does throw me out of the app store and I have to restart what it is I was doing)

Seriously, take it for granted I accepted your old terms and conditions, just show me what’s changed! Don’t make me read EVERYTHING, because as we all know, that’s not going to happen.

I’m sorry, I do love grApple, but I seriously hate them too!

Gmail Shortcut Keys

I’ve never used them, and saw an article today about them.. So I thought I’d give them a go. I looked them up, there’s a ton of them!!! Massive amounts of keyboard shortcuts to do almost everything in gmail…

Let’s try it… G then S

nope, didn’t work…

Tried playing around a bit, different interfaces, checked settings and found they were disabled. I enabled them, went back to the inbox, pressed G then A (to go to ALL MAIL folder…)

Nothing happened…

Tried J and K which is supposed to move the cursor up and down… Still didn’t happen… Couldn’t figure it out…. I’m in Chrome, I’m on a mac running OS X. Should work… (one would think)…

I opened my mail in firefox and it all works like a charm.

I’ve been playing with them for a short time, not bad… Handy.

What is strange however, gmail shortcut keys don’t work in their own google browser (Chrome), maybe this is OS X specific, I don’t know, but it’s a bit of a bummer!

Here’s a link to google help with a list of existing shortcut keys:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6594

Dave and his iPad

So, I bought the iPad a few days ago and doing my first post using the WordPress application designed specifically for the iPad. There is also an iPhone version which I have used before and it is pretty good too.

This app seems to have it all, I’ll look more closely at it over the next few days.

What do I like about the iPad?

Well for starters it has made me remember some features of the phone that I had forgotten about. There is the nice addition of 4 punctuation symbols accessed through two keys on the bottom right. The feature I had forgotten about is tap/dragging where you tap the modifier key and then drag to the desired key and release. Works great on the ‘?’ and the ‘!’. But it also works great on other punctuation when you only want one followed by an alpha character. Such as when you type an open bracket (such as this).

Surprisingly the keyboard’s lack of tactile-ness doesn’t REALLY seem to be an issue. There is the quickest of learning curves, but it doesn’t seem to last long. The iOS error correction seems to pickup some (or most as the case may be) mistakes and it’s pretty good – in landscape mode. The portrait keyboard is simply too small and I often opt for the landscape one. But you get use to it. If you persist with the portrait keyboard, then going back to landscape the keyboard is massive and takes almost half the screen.

Moving on from the keyboard, when you get an app that’s specifically designed for the iPad, it is very sweet. Just about everything apple has a new and welcomed interface. Some could be better, but overall, pretty good. The speed over the iPhone is pretty good too.

Youtube has a great interface, which really I wish youtube would bring to their website. Some of the games for the device are simply awesome, and the apps are great too. I did purchase Numbers and Pages for the iPad and their flexibility is great.  Numbers even brings a minor addition over the OS-X version in that it auto freezes the first column and row in the table. Something you just cant do in the desktop version.

Anyway, I think this device is really a whole new paradigm in computing and interfaces. Now if only I just didn’t have to touch the screen at all!

A GIANT Rabbit on a hillside

Almost impossible to believe, but this is true… Follow the links at the bottom of the page…

The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent; and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy.

The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbitÌs body, a country dropped from the sky; ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines.

Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel. Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside.

Such is the happiness which made this rabbit.

I love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.

After almost 5 years of knitting the rabbit found its final place in the italian alps (close to Cuneo). It waits there to be visited by you. You might even take your time or check back every now and then as the rabbit will wait for you 20 years from now on.

Some links for your viewing pleasure:

Home Page

a page of many photos

google maps link (unfortunately, this link takes you to the general area, I wasn’t able to locate the rabbit… It sure looks “hilly”… I wonder if it snows here! It looks like it does!)

WordPress iPhone app – crashes ** FIXED **

Today I downloaded the WordPress app from the Apple App store, for the iPhone. I have been looking forward to this for some time since that although my site looks good on a mobile device, it doesn’t lend itself to be uploaded to from a mobile device.

Until now… Enter the WordPress application from the app store. errrrm… ok… But it didn’t work for me. It would consistently crash and restarting the app would just crash immediately. I determined this was because I am running a WordPress multi-site. Whether it is or not, I found the fix:

Hi.
Please open “your/wordpress/directory/xmlrpc.php” in any text editor, and rewrite the line 477,
'blogid' => $blog_id,
to
'blogid' => (string) $blog_id,.
Yeah! Now, you can use WordPress for iOS!
Cheers!

Now I’m a happy camper…

BTW, I found this solution here, look for the first comment dated 05/07/2010.

edit: today I upgraded wordpress to the latest version 3.01 and I checked the above file, it has not been fixed. If you install the 3.01 update, you will also need to re-edit and include the string cast for the blogid.

on a side note: I also use tumblr, and the tumblr app for the iPhone is equally FANTASTIC! Highly suggested and recommended if you use tumblr.

The price of fuel

These aren’t the best photo’s, so I’ll commentate. These are photos of two service stations in Woy Woy. This afternoon while refueling, the decision as to which one to use was pretty much determined for me. It was at the Shell service station that had cars lined up at the bowser.

Their price: $1.137, with a further 4c discount if you had a voucher.

Across the road is the BP service station, with not a single car in the driveway.

Their price: $1.199, no discounts available.

If I had a discount voucher (unfortunately I didn’t), the price would have been more than 10 cents cheaper!!!! This is right across the road from each other!

How do people like these stay in business?