I HATE APPLE

this was discussed in the observer at the weekend (says pretty much what everyone's said upthread)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/04/apple-ipad-apps-subscriptions-revolt

Schlafsack - the 30% cut isn't really the bone of contention afaict. more serious is that publishers lose their direct relationships with the customer. apple holds all the info about them. so FT - or whoever - can't start bugging you to renew your subscription, or upsell you totebags, or whatever. and all the advertising is controlled by apple as well (iAds).

otm

agh of course, I completely forgot about the loss of data. Massive factor. As usual, Apple's self-imposed gatekeeper role is nice for consumers but quite an arrogant dick move where industry is concerned.

Found this via koogs's link:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/31/us-apple-ft-idUSTRE77U1O020110831

The Pearson-owned FT and Apple had been in negotiations for months but ultimately failed to reach a compromise, an FT spokesman said on Wednesday.

(re FT pulling its apps)

agh of course, I completely forgot about the loss of data. Massive factor. As usual, Apple's self-imposed gatekeeper role is nice for consumers but quite an arrogant dick move where industry is concerned.

― Autumn Almanac, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 11:28 (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

the new yorker gets around this i think, even if you subscribe in the app. you have a new yorker log-in and enter it into the app, in return it realises you're a subscriber when you try to get access to the web archive. so they've got your details regardless of the apple opt-in. plenty of other publishers could copy that, and at least the customer gets something in return.

it's not true that the advertising is controlled by apple, afaik no publisher uses iAds (not least because they're better at selling ads than apple is).

Ha yeah. I read recently that Apple's acquired office space in the US to expand iAds so I presume it's got some pretty solid plans for that.

I did notice that you can subscribe off-app and just log in. The problem with that is that you have to give the user an option to sign up through the App Store (afaict) and give Apple a 30% cut. Ready to be proved wrong with all this btw – I'm still struggling to pin down the way Apple implemented this bloody thing.

i think the bigger point is that it's probably wrong to expect things to change more quickly than they have done. the ipod took about three years before it had much impact; the kindle was a flop for a similar period. the ipad has taken off more quickly but it's still only 25m people, in many different countries, which isn't a very dense population for publishers to aim at. the fact that they've got so many publications on board is probably an indication that they're not doing much wrong.

also: still no competition. (and when the kindle was the only successful e-reader, amazon charged 70 per cent.)

Yeah that's very true, and I do remember all the noise (and rightly so) about Amazon charging 70% for ebooks (iirc Apple's entry forced Amazon to reduce its cut).

Especially considering your point that global ipad ownership is still relatively low, the Condé Nast pubs are pretty good value imo. The annual subscription rates for e.g. Wired and the New Yorker work out to be very reasonable per issue, but as mh said upthread there's probably not a great enough difference for print subscribers to drop their paper deliveries en masse and go digital.

Terrible apps, gigabyte downloads and insane pricing are what's killing iPad magazine apps. The good apps -- New Yorker, Economist -- are doing pretty well, by all accounts. It will be interesting to see how the FT does with that woeful HTML5 site.

The Apple terms were revised a bit to make them more amenable to publishers (though that no-link-to-a-store thing is still indefensible rent-seeking nonsense). The experience isn't quite as good as it could be, but it's totally possible to have an app and sell things without a 30% cut *and* keep the data, provided you have a viable web presence as well.

the good apps are GREAT, which is why i have trouble imagining that ipad publiushing will die

imo one of two things will happen:

1. ipad penetration will grow to such a critical point that publishers will go "fuck it" and just give Apple what it wants (they will cash in by dint of sheer numbers)

2. HTML5 apps will mature, more publishers will use them and Apple will back down just enough to bring in some business

I do doubt ipad publishing will just die (despite my gestures in that direction yesterday) but it will certainly become more focused than it is now. The "daily newspapers" will need to either integrate live updates or focus entirely on in-depth features – the ZA one I linked upthread is excellent for lengthy analysis of current events, but the news briefs automatically lose to RSS feeds and news apps on the same device. Condé Nast's magazines are excellent for features, but because they're faithful to the print editions they're still jamming a load of "news" up the front (btw adding a video to two-week-old news doesn't make it any fresher, guys).

imo things will change more as magazine advertisers shift models, not before

linux will win on the desktop before html5 apps replace native apps.

I think 4Q this year will be the proving ground for 1). Either everyone gets an iPad at Christmas and this creates an iPod-like unassailable lead, or some other tablet, poss Kindle, will fracture the market before it's too late.

1) is far more likely. I can see a US$250 Kindle tablet picking up some market share in maybe three or four countries, but Amazon doesn't (yet) have the global presence, either in the head or in the shops, to damage Apple in the next year or two.

In the last few days, an empty (blue/green) folder has appeared on the right of trash - but not actually on the dock. It's impossible to move or delete it. If I right click and get info, it says it's the desktop folder.

I'd go to a geniusbar, but it's my iMac which is too heavy.

first try relaunching finder (cmd-alt-esc then select finder then releaunch)

if that doesn't work, does the folder have a name? maybe paste the output you get when you type "ls -altr ~/Desktop" in a Terminal. the terminal app is in /Applications/Utilities. you should get something like

$ ls -altr ~/Desktop/
total 7984
-rw-r--r--    1 mike  staff        0 12 Jul  2010 .localized
-rw-------    1 mike  staff     3389  8 Feb  2011 no_smo.param
drwxr-xr-x  109 mike  staff     3706 14 Jul 23:24 fig
-rw-r--r--@   1 mike  staff  4052928 29 Aug 19:08 progit.pdf
drwxr-xr-x+  79 mike  staff     2686  7 Sep 10:40 ..
drwx------+   7 mike  staff      238  7 Sep 11:00 .
-rw-------@   1 mike  staff    24580  7 Sep 11:00 .DS_Store

feel free to delete anything from the output that you don't want to post here.

hmm. something strange going on - it says:

-bash: Is-altr~/Desktop: No such file or directory

and if i try to save something to desktop, I get a message:

"The document “london.jpg” could not be exported as “london.jpg”. You don’t have permission."

"Is-altr~/Desktop"

are you missing spaces in that command?

also you want a lower-case L and not an upper-case i in ls

Erm - yes....

total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob6 bob6 0 7 Sep 01:50 .localized
drwx------+ 3 bob6 bob6 102 7 Sep 01:50 .
drwxr-xr-x 42 bob6 bob6 1428 7 Sep 10:17 ..

hmm, that looks ok (apart from the absence of a .DS_store).

some suggestions are a bit hacky, so maybe start by running fix permissions (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility then click on your disk on the left, then choose "repair disk permissions" under first aid) and then rebooting for luck.

When I receive a new mail in an IMAP mailbox on my iPhone, there's no "new mail" badge. No notification whatsoever that I've received a new mail. I have to go into the specific account, and then go into the IMAP mailbox, just to see if there's anything new. Is this a bug, or what?

(x-post)

Thanks - tried repair desk permissions, but didn't seem to work - so reinstalled Lion, which has resolved the problem.

No idea what caused it - only thing I an think of is that in the last few days I installed the software that came with a Nikon Coolpix - so maybe it was that.

Tracer: what is your fetch mail time set to? If it's manual, it won't be checking until you go into the mailbox.

btw congratulate my wife on her new MBP

― now I have to imagine your penis (DJP), Monday, August 29, 2011 4:06 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

UPDATE: the new MBP is still in its box

MONEY WELL SPENT

wtf Dan's wife

in fairness she's been slammed at work and we had rehearsals plus preparations for a Labor Day weekend trip all week, plus a rehearsal last night

still, mh OTM

You should take it out of the box, replace it with a piece of wood painted to look like a MBP, and claim total ignorance

what the dickens is an MBP

macbook pro

i was about to go 'what why would you even MBP takes longer to say' but then i remembered we were all robots on the internet

Are you using some sort of voice-to-text feature to talk to us? Are you on iOS 5?!?

lol

"why are you using an acronym that's been used by ppl on this thread for 5 years, it just doesn't make sense"

"that is more difficult to say aloud, why do you keep typing it"

stet it doesn't matter what the fetch mail time is, the behavior is the same (For the record, it's every 15 minutes):

New messages for my inbox produce a red badge on the Mail icon. New messages for any other IMAP mailbox do not.

I mean, I've searched high and low about this, found ONE thread about it on the Apple discussion site, and the last, lonesome post on that was from 2008. Given that IMAP is kind of the main thing now, you'd think more people would give a shit about lots of their email not producing any notifications!

I'm guessing it's deliberate - that a new mail badge for any IMAP mailbox would send you on a wild goose chase through all those different folders, meaning you'd need to drill down into each account, heirarchically, and go through the mailboxes for each one, searching (just as you do now).

The solution would seem obvious - bring all IMAP mailboxes up to the top level, just under "All Mail".

Still, I'd rather know a mail has arrived and then go look for it than wonder whether it's arrived and look for it without knowing if it's even there.

Oh wait, I thought you meant it wasn't badging for messages in INBOX. I'm pretty sure that's all it does badge for; messages coming into sub-boxes don't get badged. That's a fairly recent option for desktop Mail too, isn't it?

I don't really know about desktop mail, for some reason I don't care about it as much there. But yes, that's exactly what I'm saying - it only badges for mails that come to my inbox. Given that some of my IMAP mailboxes are set up specifically because I REALLY CARE about those emails it seems perverse to pretend they haven't come in.

UPDATE: the new MBP is still in its box

MONEY WELL SPENT

― Tal Berkowitz - Vaccine advocate (DJP), Thursday, 8 September 2011 04:10 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

uh oh. Was going to do this for 'er indoors, may reconsider.

tracer you're not using your computer right. you need to be filtering out the bullshit and keeping important stuff in the inbox, not vice versa

Or use gmail where it can be in two places at once

Tracer, don't know if you're on Lion yet but this feature in Lion Mail is something I've been liking a lot: http://mattgemmell.com/2011/09/07/favorite-mailboxes-in-lion-mail/

or you could do smart mailboxes instead of actual folders

or you could do smart mailboxes instead of actual folders

Won't help with Tracer's question though (getting the unread count badge to display unread from all folders, not just inbox)

baja - I already filter out the shit - it gets tagged by spam assassin and sent to the junk folder. everything else I care about, at least in theory. there are a few mailing lists that I probably don't need to be constantly apprised of. so why not just have the option? "alert me for new mail in this mailbox - yes". the only alternative is to have literally everything you care about unfiled in one massive inbox, which is like.... pre-Eudora level thinking

not on Lion, my MacBook isn't supported