I still don’t understand why I, as a user, have to see folders called “deploy,” “packages,” and “payloads” in addition to the installer app icon, with all kinds of folders and subfolders inside them, but this is clearly something to which Adobe is very attached, and there is only so many times you can ask the same question before you start wondering whether anyone actually cares about such “details.”

…

One day, maybe, an Adobe engineer will understand that, when the user has to go through a lengthy installation process, the best approach is to let him enter all the required information (password, serial number, etc.) right away, and then — and only then — go through all the lengthy processes that are of no interest to him without asking for any user input, so that he can switch to something else and, you know, actually make valuable use of his time.

I do not yet have CS6, but it looks like all the stupidness is still there for the install process at least. Every complaint in this article is the same as I have had with CS5.

Also, on the icons, is it just me or are Adobe’s icons and splash screens just getting stupider and stupider?

Cybercriminals have created fake versions of the Instagram Android app, designed to earn money from unsuspecting users.

Apple also highlighted the workflow at Leverage which uses FCP X.

• The show shoots on RED in Portland, Oregon.
• Ships hard disks down to LA for editing.
• RED files are transcoded to ProRes Proxy for editing.
• The show is edited in FCP X
• X2Pro (from Marquis Broadcast) converts the files to ProTools for audio sweetening.
• XML exports from FCP X are sent to DaVinci Resolve for color grading
• Final conforming of audio and video is done in FCP X
• Final delivery is a ProRes file.

Apple also said the 10.0.4 update significantly improved broadcast monitoring performance, so they have removed the term “beta” when describing it. I specifically asked if 10.0.4 now has sufficient performance to support multicam monitoring and Apple said “Yes.”

THE GOOD STUFF

Then, Apple shared their plans for Final Cut Pro X features coming later this year (2012). Apple began providing “advanced looks” as part of the roll-out to the launch of FCP X and wanted to continue letting us know what’s coming. (I think this is a great idea, because it helps us plan.)

Here are the bullet points (none of this was demoed):

• Multichannel Audio Editing Tools
• Dual Viewers
• MXF Plug-in Support
• RED camera support

It’s just too bad that FCP X is not geared towards professionals… all these professional features in a non-professional app, being used in a professional environment… wait a minute…

In spite of growing numbers, not a whole lot of users actually like the current iOS app. In the US iTunes store, the rating average is 2 stars, with out the 21,803 ratings, 11,839 1 star ratings (!). One star ratings are often a sign of frustration, and you can see that in the comments. For most of the apps an average of 2 stars is deadly, but we all use Facebook so yes we will all have to use its iOS app if you own an iPhone or iPad.

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1. app is slow
2. inconsistent information notification icons say there are new messages or responses, actual window does not show anything new.
3. app is slower than mobile web site while everybody is used to speedy apps, the Facebook mobile web site is faster than iOS app, and offers almost the same functionality.
4. tons of other bugs scrambled views, photo upload, text boxes disappear, no sharing.

…

I did some network sniffing (I like sniffing ) and found out that the data that the iOS app downloads from facebook.com is a mixture of REST (XML format, no JSON) and HTML.

…

To display HTML in an app, a developer uses a Safari component called UIWebView. Very convenient, but also dangerous. The HTML downloaded is pretty big (15kb), and contains links to images, stylesheets and JavaScript. For a starter, caching of unchanged content cannot be controlled by the developer. The FB app downloads the whole timeline HTML every time, and it is up to the UIWebView to determine whether it needs to download images, stylesheets etc. again.

Pretty much the reasons that I thought the Facebook Mobile app was aweful. Read the whole article, even of you don’t use Facebook. It’s a good example of how not to do an app. I understand the reasons Facebook thinks that the way they are doing it is correct, but the results are such a subpar app that it is totally not worth it!

I frequently find myself in an unpopular position in the entertainment industry: I believe in network neutrality, I don’t believe that piracy is the end of the world as we know it (I particularly don’t believe that a download or file shared automatically equals a lost sale*) and I don’t believe in crippling the Internet to protect a business model that desperately needs to change.

Some ISPs are blocking all bittorrent traffic, because bittorrent can be used to share files in a piratical way. Hollywood lobbying groups are trying to pass laws wich would force ISPs to block or degrade bittorrent traffic, too. Personally, I think this is like closing down freeways because a bank robber could use them to get away

I also love the comparative images of downloading Ubuntu.

Glenn A. Britt, the company’s chief executive, said in a group interview on Friday that the challenge for digital video was that there was no simple way to get Internet-based video onto the television screen. He wasn’t familiar with AirPlay.

How is it possible for the CEO of a media company to be so completely out of touch?

“I’m not sure I know what AirPlay is,” he said, though he noted that he was an enthusiastic Apple customer. “Today we want to be on every screen. Today it’s a little bit clunky to get programming from the Internet onto the TV — not so hard to get it on your iPad.

This is just really astounding.

What’s hard is the plumbing, what wires do you connect, what device do you use. So the current Apple TV, the little thing, the hockey puck, really doesn’t do anything to help enable you to get Internet material on your TV.”

There are two cables to connect for an Apple TV: the HDMI cable and the Power cable. And what do you mean “…the current Apple TV … really doesn’t do anything to help enable you to get Internet material on your TV.” Have you heard of this thing called Netflix? How about iTunes movies and TV Shows?

They really don’t come any stupider than this folks.

Fox is shaping up its 2012-2013 TV season slate, and we now know, we’ll get a Season 2 of “Touch” and saying goodbye to “Alcatraz” and “The Finder,” which have both been canceled.

Wow, talk about canceling the good ones and renewing the horrible one. The Finder was okay, Alcatraz was awesome, and Touch is quite possibly one of the worst shows on TV.

Additionally, Bones — which was renewed — is getting long in the tooth and needs to wind down if they can’t restore it to its former glory. It used to be such a great show but it’s really circling the drain.

Glad that Fringe has been renewed. That’s probably the only really good news from Fox. It’s my favorite show right now.

I did not receive a lot of interaction in the comments on my article at Mac Appstorm, but I did receive one that I want to interact with.

Natalia Ventre →

As an early supporter of apps like Bohemian Coding’s Sketch and Pixelmator, I think I deserve the free upgrades. Just because Adobe charges you for one more useful feature doesn’t mean that’s the way to go. MacRabbit Espresso is sold outside the MAS and version 2 was released as a free upgrade.

I’m sure Natalia is a fine person. I see she works with ExpressionEngine and I love my fellow EE users. I don’t really mean to pick on her, this is just an excuse to talk about this app entitlement mentality. And she’s only one person, where I’ve heard this sentiment from lots of folks. Developers should give me free updates forever and ever (and the choir and the people said, “amen”.)

I don’t think anyone of this mindset usually considers how on earth that developer is going to make ends meet. How is a developer supposed to keep the lights on and feed his family? If all a developer does is continue to work on his application and provide updates and fixes for it, where is his/her/their income coming from?

This is a tricky proposition because I think it’s a good idea, and good business to provide free updates, bug fixes, security patches and the like. Yet I think that developers should be able to charge for major upgrades. My point in the article was that Apple has not provided a way to do this in the Mac or iOS App Store. Some developers have found ways to work around this, but the solutions aren’t great.

But let me interact a little with Natalia’s comments. She uses Sketch and Pixelmater and she thinks she “deserves free upgrades.” I wonder how she would feel as a web designer if she was required to continue to work on a website, to update it and design new parts of it, for free, after she had delivered it to the client. I doubt that would work out well for her. I’m not talking about her being paid weekly, or monthly, or yearly or something to continue that work. I’m talking about her being expected to do it for free. Forever. How is she supposed to make money? App developers are in the same position. They need revenue in order to continue the work and development.

As far as MacRabbit not charging for Espresso 2, I applaud them. I’m glad they can afford to do that. I used Espresso before I switched to Coda. It’s a good app. But a developer shouldn’t be expected to do what they did. They need to be able to make a living. They are quite within their rights to make money of their development.

I think we need to loose the entitlement mentality as users of great apps.

Late Friday night, Adobe confirmed its plan to issue free patches to fix the problems in all three applications—a reversal of its previous strategy that would have forced users to pay for a CS6 upgrade in order to rectify the problems.

That’s nice, but I think you guys already tipped your hand. Still, I won’t complain too loudly. Adobe heard the outcry against it’s stupid decision to not patch this vulnerability, and reversed that decision.

Of course it’s hard to take something back once it’s out there, but good for them for doing the right thing in the end.

So I’ve really been trying to get myself set up so that I can write posts and share links on Apple User Pro from my iPhone. I found this awesome ExpressionEngine control panel theme/add-on that makes the CP work much better on my iPhone. ¹ So that’s great, posting from my iPhone was always a pain just from the CP standpoint until I found that add-on.

But one thing that is really hard from my iPhone to this day is getting the link from the article or linked list item to go to the three social media sites I have selected to use for Apple User Pro. I know that a lot of folks follow sites that way, and I have some followers on each medium. I do not have an automated system in place to share to these social media sites whenever a new article is posted for a variety of reason:

1. No service or add-on that does this, does it in a satisfactory way. They always, always mangle something, or don’t post links they way the are intended to be posted etc.

2. I am not a developer of anything other than pure HTML/CSS and ExpressionEngine template tags so I can’t write my own add-on or script to automate the process.

On the desktop, it’s not all that hard to share to these three places every time I post. It takes a maximum of 60 seconds.

But it turns out that for Facebook and Google Plus, sharing a link in the intended way is not easy on mobile. In fact, for Google Plus is actually impossible to share a link to your page at all. Let me explain. In order to access a Google Plus page, you have to go to Google Plus, click on the pages tab on the left side, switch to your page, click on the link icon in the sharing area, paste in your link, and then click share.

The mobile app offers no way to manage a Google Plus Page.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Yeah… isn’t that crazy?

But it gets better. When you visit Google Plus from a mobile browser, you cannot access your Google Plus pages from the mobile version of the site and there is no obvious way to get to the desktop version of Google Plus.

So I tried an app I have called Dolphin. It has a setting/mode that allows you to force a site to serve it’s desktop version. And at first I thought that was going to be the way to make it work. It does work very slowly, scrolling and zooming are choppy etc. But I thought I could put up with it long enough to get the link posted. But there’s a problem, overtime I try click in the sharing field to type or paste something, the browser locks up and then crashes.

So, Google Plus pages cannot be accessed at all for sharing on an iPhone.

The Dolphin method actually does work for Facebook, although the full desktop version runs painfully slow. But it does work.

Twitter of course is actually the easiest. There is no official method for sharing a link, just paste and post.

But I did actually find a way to make Facebook and Twitter sharing extremely easy on my iPhone. Although I hate social media sharing buttons on articles and posts with a fiery burning passion, it does actually work better for mobile (at least on Facebook). I use Dolphin to force Desktop mode, and I have my site set up to only show the social media buttons to me if I’m logged in to ExpressionEngine (I don’t want anyone else to see them because I threw them in haphazard and I hate social media sharing buttons on posts anyway). Well as it turns out for Google Plus there is (again) no way to use that to share to your page (huh?), only to your personal Google Plus account. Are you noticing a pattern here with Google? Even though they are pushing Google Plus hard their implementation is still half backed and trashy.

As long as you are forcing desktop mode this actually does work quite well for Facebook. If you are not forcing desktop mode, there is no way to share to your Facebook Page, only to your personal timeline.

And for Twitter, it just makes things that much easier. Click, share, done.

So, Twitter gets an A+ in all this. Couldn’t be easier.

Facebook gets a C. That you can’t share to your page from Mobile is stupid.

Google Plus gets an F. Is there a grade lower than F? F-? Whatever, they get negative points.

So what’s the deal? It’s not like this mobile thing is just a passing fad, it’s here to stay in a big way. Why are Facebook, and more especially Google Plus so hostile to Mobile in these ways? I don’t get it.