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The Mac App Store

Works really well… ((huge sarcasm signal here folks…))

Screen shot 2011 04 14 at 23 33 14

Until now i have managed to hate the update process, the root ownership of the apps, the lack of option to choose where i want them installed and the garbage that accumulates on your “purchase history”.

This litter is created from every single free app that i choose to download, try out and erase if not useful or the quality i was looking for. With every other app i would download, try, delete the app and the dmg file and there was no more. But not with the App Store. It keeps them there, if i ever want to download 10 different solitaire games again. I might you know?. And the ones i paid and actually want to install again ? i need to look in to all of the garbage to find it, as i can’t simply selectively erase the “purchase history”

Add to that the absolute moronic behaviour in computers with more than one user and different apple accounts, and for me the app store is done. Either they change radically that crashing train or i’m not on board anymore.

When i started thinking about this blog my main point was to alert to the dangers and faults of a company run like ” a small boutique” by an all controlling maestro, that mainly only controls what he thinks is interesting or stimulating, while at the same time all of the other “boring” stuff, day-to-day corrections and consumer care are being neglected and simply exhausted of man-power.

I have no idea of what goes on at Apple. But i do know that you can’t run a company with over 40 K employes that has over 50 millions consumers/users (in the Mac world alone) with a small 100 person A team so that Steve can memorise its names… (( I read that info on a very interesting interview by John Sculley to Macworld i think.)) It’s unheard of and simply it’s not working. Either Apple gets more folks and start having a “regular” enterprise structures (even with all of the unfortunate bloat that carries), without concentrating everything on a small enlightened leader or the big step forward Apple has taken in the last years will be followed by a big client drain as soon as possible (by any other option).

This kind of mess, the mess represented by the idiotic, poorly thought out and completely rushed to the consumer App Store, is just one of the many signals of the deteriorating quality control and attention at Cupertino. You don’t have to be Ballmer to run a company to the ground. Any leader that doesn’t know when it’s time to change gears or pass the ball to another kind of leader, can do that too.

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Freebies #001

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You can get a couple of nice (& free) templates for Pages, Keynotes and Numbers as well as some vectorial 3d objects for your presentations at the Jumsoft website, courtesy of the Jumsoft Team.

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Radio

Listening music from our iTunes Library is a great aid for work. However, it has the typical downside that you find yourself listening to the same musics over and over, even if you have a 90 GB library. Humans tend to fall back on known patterns.

Many times i consider buying a small radio to put on my office. However, either by the expense alone either by the fact that i anticipated the predictable discussion with my “office-mates”  regarding the station and volume it should set on, i’ve never actually seriously considered the purchase. Until now.

I’ve discovered this little app, Radium, that allows me to tune in and listen to endless internet radios. It’s light, clean and functional. And i love it. I’m now going through the trial period, considering if it is worth the slight high price for a app of this kind (25€). I would consider half of that a much fairer price. But i have to admit that i actually like the application allot!

I know iTunes already has a internet radio section, but in a typical Apple style, it only has some selected radios, the vast majority of them American, and i can’t figure out how a simple way (or any way whatsoever) to add my own favorite radios.

Also the sheer difference in resource consumption between Radium and iTunes justifies it. I like to keep my mac lean and fit. I hate over consumption of resources, whatever they are. And iTunes always consumes over 100 Mb of memory. Just for listening to music. Radium is a stable ~30 Mb.

So now i can listen to my hometown radio all day, even when i’m 200 km away. Local politics here i come!

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Should be fixed: Search

I was going through this little article on Macworld about a “gem” for searching the mac and remembered one of those little annoyances that i don’t understand why hasn’t been already fixed.

The Mac Spotlight, although it roughly works and makes it easy to do queries, is annoyingly limited. You can state endless fields to look for, including if a document has a certain font embedded, or if a photo has an alpha channel. But i can’t specifically state a path/folder to include or exclude. Nor can i see and order by it on the columns on the finder.

My Downloads folder is a mess. A giant mess thanks to Safari, ((which should also be fixed, but i’ll elaborate on that on another post.)) which doesn’t allow me to specify in what folder i would like to save this file. So everything gets droped on Downloads, either i want it or not. I’ve tried to put an end to that mess. So i put a couple of “major” ((I generally create “major folders” by assigning a number before the actual name as 00.Applications , 01.PDFs, etc, and by giving them colored tags with the finder. This way they are always on top if alphabetically ordered and are easy to spot by me using the colors.)) folders to sort things out. One for applications, one for pdfs i want to integrate in my work, etc etc until i can delete everything else and just analyze what i selected first.

If i do a search for .app files, i would expect to be able to exclude the ones i already moved to the Downloads/00.Applications so that i could find whatever application files are present in all of the subfolders, made for example by decompressing a compressed archive. Or sort it by its locations so that i understood those that are related with one another.

And this is where it gets useless. I can’t do that with spotlight. I can’t do specify anything related with its location besides “search This mac” or “search This folder”. What annoys me is that, if i could just see the path in a column on finder, i could then sort it out myself. But i can’t do that either. i’m reduced to a giant list of files that could be everywhere on this folder, and the only way for me to check it is to select each one and look at the “crumble path” at the bottom of the window. Which would do just fine if i had a couple of finders. But if i’m using spotlight is exactly because i don’t just have a couple of folders…

So, the mess justs grow bigger and i desperately try to find an cheap/free alternative to Spotlight. Of course Apple knows this. They have been criticized for it, i think since the beginning of Mac OS X. And again, if you go to the Apple forums you can easily find threads relating to this. But, this is Apple. The 20/20 eagle eyed visionary company that has a severe hear impairment…