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The iTunes 10 UI is an abomination

By on September 2, 2010 in apple, diatribes, opinion and libel, shit stirring

So, iTunes 10 looks like Apple's col­lege intern office bitch slapped the design together over the week­end while on a ben­der. What hap­pened to those LEGIONS of UI design­ers they employ?

Let's Talk About That Icon

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NNTP readers on OS X are built from failure

By on October 13, 2009 in applications, mac, opinion and libel

In the office where I work we use/maintain a news­group server with a vari­ety of inter­nal news­groups where every­thing from items for sale to com­plaints and has­sles are posted. Late last year I went pretty much all-Mac, all the time, with a Remote Desk­top win­dow con­nected to a Win­dows machine in the office which I used for Out­look (because we're an Exchange shop) and Thun­der­bird (to read the news­groups). Won­der­ing if I could cut ties a lit­tle fur­ther, I looked into NNTP read­ers for OS X.

A small bit of back­ground first: I'm using Snow Leop­ard and I'm unwill­ing to deal with the vagaries of less-than-native clients. This means that I'm not using ported Unix apps. So no Gnews, news­post, Pan, Pine, Slrn, or Tin. Those are right out.

This left me with a list cob­bled together from MacUpdate:

I had intended this to be a mar­gin­ally com­pre­hen­sive review of my time using these clients, but I barely got into the account setup with most of them, if I installed them at all. Here's how it broke down…

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Software Regret

By on January 11, 2009 in applications, shit stirring

Alex Payne of Twit­ter (the social net­work every­one but me uses) has posted a well struc­tured list of soft­ware he's paid for but no longer users. I am in a sim­i­lar boat thanks to sites like Mac­Zot, where I have licenses for shit I will never, ever use again or for appli­ca­tions whose func­tion­al­ity was replaced by some­thing bet­ter later on.

Through Mac­Zot

  • Audio­book Builder
    This came with some sort of bun­dle that I pur­chased, and appar­ently I kept no records of it. I never used it, and I don't know that I'd ever want to, but I did tech­ni­cally pay for it.
  • Disco
    Some­how Austin moth­er­fuck­ing Sarner horn-swaggled me again and took $10 of my money to con­tribute towards his inabil­ity to get a fuck­ing hair cut. What was I think­ing? Why did I buy this when Burn does all of this shit for free using the same pub­licly avail­able OS X frame­works and with none of the lame bull­shit UI?
  • Hawk­eye, rooSwitch, KIT (now called Together)
    Hawk­eye suf­fers from one a pretty com­mon prob­lem in OS X, in that it wraps open source soft­ware in a cocoa front-end and then charges you money for it. Since I don't give a fuck about DVD mas­ter­ing, it was an unused license. rooSwitch swaps pref­er­ences. Neat trick, but use­less for me. How­ever, in that same bun­dle I got Together (then called K.I.T., or Keep It Together), which has actu­ally been a pretty handy tool for sort­ing and man­ag­ing the sheer vol­ume of inci­den­tal fluff I seem to invari­ably accumulate.
  • Data Guardian
    This seemed handy at the time, worked and looked like shit when I paid for it, and now I can­not get the insanely over-complicated license man­ager on the site to rec­og­nize that I ever paid for it. High regret over the money I wasted on this Epic Fail application.

  • Direct Mail!
    Came in another bun­dle (maybe the one with Audio­book Builder?) and it's another appli­ca­tion which does some­thing I just don't give a fuck about.

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fuck you, austin sarner

By on February 23, 2008 in applications, diatribes, shit stirring

Matt Ball has posted a siz­able write-up which neatly sums up the ris­ing tide of back­lash against the so-called "Deli­cious Gen­er­a­tion" of soft­ware devel­op­ers cur­rently bilk­ing milk­ing aban­don­ing their installed base every 6-to-8 months.

I had been work­ing on some­thing sim­i­lar, though admit­tedly much, much less details when this dropped. My inter­est in this was strictly per­sonal, as I've been bit­ten by Austin Moth­er­fuck­ing Sarner twice now: I am a recov­er­ing license holder for Cat­a­log and Disco.

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