BobBigMac

Droidalicous

18 months ago I jumped on the apple-bandwagon and got myself an iPhone with the intention of developing a picNiche application for it… only after I had it though did I take the time to look into the details of how the apple developer programme works. In brief… it’s evil.

Their programme not only requires developers to pay a fairly substantial ‘registration’ fee just to get the appropriate documentation, with no assurance of even being able to get an application approved in their store once developed; it also has the majority of any purchase fees paid by the consumer go directly to the apple coffers, and pays the actual developers a pittance for their own work. Not only that, but the first rule of the apple developer programme, is that you can’t talk about the apple developer programme.

Apple is closed-source, apps are closed-source, even their rules are closed-source. I suppose I could agree to that if, and only if, I was a corporation planning on releasing only paid apps of the idiot-targetted variety (fart machines, sheep-shooters, bejewelled, that kind of thing) which have very low cost to build yet somehow manage to sell for $5 a pop to millions of people; but I’d like to release free apps to around 5000 people, and there’s no way I am paying $99 to one of the biggest consumer tech companies out there just so I can give stuff away for free.

Sooooo… Now I’ve discovered android thanks to a Viewsonic G-Tablet, purchased with my amazon mechanical turk earnings from the last few months, and frankly it’s pretty awesome. The android interface is much better than iOS and the dev platform is more powerful, more logical, and more stable than the apple equivelent…

I will be replacing my slow and persistently hangy technically underfeatured iPhone with an android mobile at my upcoming phone contract renewal, and for mobile developments for picNiche (or anything else) will be focussing solely on the android platform for the foreseeable future. If you’re still on iPhone and havn’t seen the holy light of the droid yet… you should. You really really should :)

Be Right Back…

This REALLY annoys me… people who say brb, when what they really mean is bbl, or bbs, or one of the other be-back-(time) statements.

Here’s a general guideline in ascending order of duration:

BRB: Be Right Back… generally very short, less than a minute or so. ie. Immediately. I will wait for you.

BBS: Be Back Soon… short, but not immediately, usually within a few minutes. I might wait for you.

BBIAB: Be Back in a Bit… Not quite soon, but not later, usually around 30 mins to an hour dependent on context. I probably won’t wait for you.

BBL: Be Back Later… Today, but not ‘in a bit’, generally within 8 hours or so. I certainly won’t wait for you.

BB: Bye Bye… Not today, maybe never ;) Bye bye :)

Life.com contest, will this make contributors happy?

azurelaroux:

At first I was surprised to learn that a respected company like Life.com would pair up with a less than respectable micro-stock agency like iStock for a photo contest. But then I remembered that Life’s images are actually owned by Getty. Is Getty under the impression that a photo contest will some how soothe contributors who are still upset by the massive royalties cuts, lack of payment for licensing of images, and security that was so lack it allowed $1,000’s of dollars in fraudulent purchases before being stopped to happen twice? Makes the theme of “Togetherness” seem ironic now doesn’t it?

The terms of the contest are interesting. The contest is only open to iStock photo contributors. According to the iStock forums images can be anything that is on iStock, Getty, Photobucket or Flickr but they can not be on other stock sites. This means that independent photographers will  have to create new works just for the contest, while exclusives can just pick from existing work that has already sold.

In addition to this iStock and Life.com have included the standard “we can use it in anything, and for anything and we don’t have to pay you” clause. The one difference is that this clause is not just for the winning image but for any image that is submitted as part of the contest.

This is likely to cause more upset than help the already hurting reputation of what used to be a great company, the only real question is will this hurt Life’s reputation as well.   

Pretty ridiculous competition… Yet another fucking ridiculous rights-grab preying on people too naive to know their work is worth something :/ I AM pro-microstock, but anti-exploitation. Getty and Life: please stop taking the fucking piss.

arenacreative asked: How many coffees did you have so far today? LOL

You just can’t beat a great cup of coffee, Though I’ve been trying to cut down a little on my coffee lately, so have been resorting to green tea, orange squash or milkshakes.

I’m down now to about 10 mugs of coffee a day, much less than that and I start getting caffiene withdrawal headaches… what a wonderful discovery :)

Each new day

Months and years
pass, and friends
leave or stay.

Pains and joys
seep, and fears
draw or stray.

Same though I
walk, and weave
each new day.

Priorities

I have a hard time with priorities. I always have had. Right now in fact I should probably be working on 20 other things more important than writing posts for my ‘opinion’ blog; though right now, this is really the only thing I ‘want’ to be doing.

I keep thinking: “oh what a great piece of software” beit outlook in 2006, evernote, producteev, tasksched, or whatever else, that that will be the “magic bullet” to solve all my productivity issues. I hope that it will get me onto the right track and help me work better, but I know that for me, the more ‘important’ something is… the less I want to do it.

Can you set your priorities, and really get down to them? If you can… I envy you :)

You can’t please everyone

I get a lot of questions from many people using my tools, software, websites or reading my various blogs. This is usually a good thing, but sometimes, just sometimes mind, I can NEVER provide a satisfactory response; sometimes I am too busy to get into something deep, or refer to the fallback of ‘google it’.

This doesn’t mean I don’t care about your question, just that it’s either been asked of me so many times I’m bored of answering it so I’ll send you somewhere which has, or that the question is stupid, it could be perfectly valid, but just something trivial which I would ‘expect’ you to know if you even got to the stage of ‘discovering’ me.

I know I can’t please everyone, and as much as I’d like to try… I’m a finite being. I’m happy with that, and you should be too :)

Social Media needs an I-Care button

Anyone else out there have hundreds of ‘friends’, ‘fans’ or ‘followers’ on their social-site lists? yes, me too.

I’d like to have the ability to set only some of them, those with something important to say, as people I care about, people I want to really focus on and be actively involved with.

This doesn’t mean I want to ignore everyone else, just there are some people who I actually care about what they have to say, and I’d like to be able to prioritise them as such :)

Tales of horror!

Once a week I get a coffee at my favourite coffee-place and take an hour or so to read the local paper (my friday-morning ritual I guess).

This particular paper I like because it’s fairly liberal and fairly light-hearted, but still manages to get a reasonable amount of new information (mainly I check the tech, cinema/theatre reviews, science news and local business sections) into an issue. There’s one thing that really gets on my wick though… “Mr and Mrs <whoever> returned from their holiday in <country of choice>” with ‘Tales of Horror!’”. It’s in every issue and of course there have been endless TV shows in the ‘<thingy> from hell!!!’ vein.

Really, horror? HORROR!?!?!

Yes, so there was construction nearby, or the toilets didn’t have doors, BFD. Please Mr and Mrs <whoever>… get over yourselves; unless you lost a leg or had your face eaten off, I’m pretty sure it’s not a tale of horror, it’s just mildly unpleasant. Think yourself lucky that you’re not locked in a cage, sold as a sex slave or forced to dig up ‘blood’ diamonds from the age of 6. Horror… what a load of bollocks. Bring back the british stiff-upper-lip and learn to tell the difference between true horror and a ‘flesh wound’ ;) Please.

Getting really tired of ad-packed blogs

I realise the web is fuelled by ads, and for the most part I’m delighted that it’s grown to run (and run well) that way. Content is (mostly) free for all, and for the most part it’s incredibly easy to find.

What’s really getting my goat lately, is article-directories, blogs and reposting ‘indexers’, which are coated floor to ceiling in advertisements, which usually have very little relevance, and end up cramming the actual content into a two-word-wide column for the entire post.

I confess I’ve taken to using ad-block tools like adblock+ for firefox and it’s helping with the over-the-top sites which google seems to give me a lot of results for. However, there’s a pretty major negative to this that there are a whole slew of sites I use regularly and do want to support, and whereas just a couple of years ago I would click an ad on that site, now they are all blocked (yes I know you can add exclusions but who has the time).

What I’d really like to see is a (truly) universal ‘Like’ button which at a single-click can just drop a 50cent tip to any website, blog post or any other content. There are endless half-measures around but the vast majority of sites don’t add this option. Love the content, hate the ads… hmmm.