Netflix Bends To Warner Bros., Won't Rent DVDs For 28 Days After They Go On Sale
I find this really interesting and almost a full reversal of what was going on in VHS. In the days of VHS rental stores would pay huge fees to get a copy of a movie about a month before it was available for sale, ever wonder why you would be charged ~$99 if you lost a video you rented.
For some reason when DVDs came out it many more people started buying movies instead of renting them. It is now obvious that the models have been reversed and the movie industry makes much more money from DVD sales then rentals, and we will now all suffer from that.
I am going to seriously reconsider my Netflix account if this trend continues.
View from our hotel room. Sapa Vietnam.
Obama's speech to students
This is a great speech, I think everyone should read it. It even makes me want to go back to school. One of my favorite excerpts:
It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?
The mainstreaming of crazy
If I sound angry, then, yeah, I am. I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.
It is things like this that really upset/scare me about the direction our country is moving. As a place that, in the last 50 to 100 years, has used science, technology, and intellectualism to become the strongest and most powerful of nations. Now when the fate of that strength is at such great risk, is the time to be encouraging our children to work harder, and question more, and study more. Now is not the time to be shutting them off and keeping them home from school, because of petty and unfounded arguments.
I don’t think Obama has all the answers and neither does he, but he is encouraging the children of this country to question and think, and those are two things that a lot of there parents, on both sides of the argument, are not doing enough of.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.
Why the Manager’s Schedule Blows Creative Productivity
In his latest essay, Paul Graham describes the difference between what he calls the maker’s schedule and the manager’s schedule. Makers–the writers, coders, designers, editors, creative types–need half or whole days to produce anything that solves complicated problems. Managers schedule out their workdays in hour-long blocks. When managers schedule makers into midday meetings, they kill creative productivity in real but not-obvious ways. Graham considers himself a maker, and describes why meetings are the enemy of creativity.
via Smarterware
i call it “finding a groove” and for me, it’s difficult to even look for a groove if i know i’m going to have to get back out of it in an hour. i’m learning to do so anyway.
I got nothing done today until 6:30 for this exact reason. It is very hard to write code with meetings all day.
App Store adds search keyword fields for apps
This is great news. So I went to iTunes Connect to add mine. This should give you a rough idea of what it’s like to use iTunes Connect.
At the home screen, there’s now a notice at the top that contains this info (plus other redundant elaboration I’ve removed):
You must separate your keywords by commas when entering them on the application information page and are limited to 255 characters.
Cool. So let’s see, Manage Applications, Edit Information. Keywords field. Good. Let me click the little “?” icon next to it to make sure I have all of the information.
Oops, clicking on the Keywords “?” button pops up the help bubble all the way up there for “What’s New In This Version” instead, because they probably copy-and-pasted the entire field and forgot to reassign the proper IDs. This is very common — I’ve hardly ever had those “?” buttons toggle the field I was actually on.
Oh well. Let’s get through this. I typed in my keywords. Do I need to worry about phrases? Will “read,later” cover the case of a user typing “read later” or “read web pages later”? Is there any stemming? Do I need to type “read,reader,reading” or will all of those be covered by “read”? Should I include any misspellings of common English words? More information would have helped here, but oh well. Baby steps. Can’t complain.
I typed 141 characters worth of keywords and clicked the Save Changes button. I was then returned to the form with a validation error:
- Keywords cannot be longer than 100 characters.
Well, that’s not what you said earlier, but hey, that’s OK. I’m used to this sort of thing with iTunes Connect. Let me just edit that field…
Oh wait, I can’t. Because, while it now contains my 141-character input, it’s disabled and uneditable. I guess I need to start over.
Since there’s no breadcrumb navigation anywhere in iTunes Connect, the best you can do to return to the home screen is retype the home URL or click on a lot of Cancel buttons (which only behave as “back-navigation” and don’t actually cancel any of the changes you’ve saved so far). So I clicked “Cancel” to return to the app management screen.
Cannot Process Request
An error has occurred processing your request. Please try again later or send an e-mail to itunesconnect@apple.com for assistance.
This is what it’s like using iTunes Connect.
But I’m glad they added keywords. At least, now, we won’t see the raw evidence of apps spamming their descriptions with the names of their competitors and unrelated top-25 apps to turn up in more searches.
I am always surprised iTunesConnect is designed/built by people who work for Apple. Also the Cancel=Go Back always confuses/scares the shit out of me, even if I know what it is going to do.
Bob Dylan Cover:
Oh Sister- Andrew Bird
Sent in by lstn
There's a guy on the LIRR with a blackberry and an iPhone. Two words
Douche. Bag.
As someone who has an iPhone and Blackberry I take offense to that. Although if I could get work email on my iPhone the blackberry would be yesterday’s news.
i JUST spoke the words "i need money, guys"....
AND MY PRAYER WAS ANSWERED VIA EMAIL TWO MINUTES LATER. I’M RICH NOW.
“I am sorry to encroach into your privacy through this manner; we have a Certified Check
of $300,000 in our custody that belongs to you. This check was brought to my desk last
week by a lady named Mrs.Christiana Wood who gave us your e-mail address to contact you
on the delivery.
You are advised to send us the following through the email address below…….
Full Name:….
Residential Address:…..
Occupation:…
Country::…..
Telephone:……..
Fax Number:……
We wait your response soonest.
Email address: upscourier95@yahoo.com.hk
Charles Brown
UPS COURIER SERVICES”__________________________
haha. does anyone actually ever respond to these? also, that’s lame info they’re requesting. nothing they couldn’t find out pretty easily.
Did Charlie Brown really just try and pull an internet scam on you. He has really gone down hill since Peanuts.
Serious doubts
I’ve never doubted the viability of running a serious business of writing iPhone apps before. For the first time, now, I am.
App Review is problematic when the delays are longer than a few days. Since its inception, having submitted applications about 12 times, I’ve never seen a delay shorter than 6 days, with 7-8 being the most common duration. And now that rejections for very minor issues are common, nearly every app update gets rejected at least once and needs to wait in the queue again.
Almost no app updates were approved during the entire month of June with no explanation.
Apple refused to field a single question about the App Store at WWDC.
The new age-rating system is forcing nearly all internet-content-based apps to forego promo codes and tell buyers that they contain frequent nudity, intense profanity, and drug use.
iTunes Connect, the interface through which developers submit and manage apps, is extremely buggy and frequently mishandles important operations. On multiple occasions, it has posted screenshots and description text from an in-review update submission to the live app page, revealing upcoming features to competitors, blowing press exclusives, and causing my customers to email me angrily asking where the features are and accusing me of bait-and-switch.
Past iTunes Connect form-validation bugs have prevented me from updating my app’s information for days, even to reflect new features or pricing.
A current iTunes Connect form-validation bug (rdar://7052003) has prevented me from editing the rating for Instapaper Pro 2.1 to comply with the new “17+” requirement, and they won’t approve the update until I do. The bug has been open for 4 days so far with no resolution. I’m completely stuck, inexplicably, until they get around to fixing it.
Trying to communicate with Apple is like talking to a brick wall. The ADC phone reps can’t do anything, emails are rarely answered, and nearly every response that actually gets through just tells you to keep filing duplicate bug reports (that rarely get answered) until the problem goes away, which may never happen.
Sure, some issues get fixed. But they’re introducing problems more quickly than they’re fixing them.
I don’t think any of this is malicious (except the App Store question dodging at WWDC). I think it comes down to a simple flaw:
Apple thinks this is good enough.
And that’s the scariest part of all.
Apple thinks reviews can take 8-30 days and web-capable apps need nudity warnings and the management interface can be buggy as shit and they don’t need us to be able to reach them and nobody really needs to take any of this very seriously.
Because it’s working for them. They’re making a killing taking their 30% commission on the 1.5 billion copies of $0.99 top-25 games that they’ve sold. Who cares if the App Store discourages good developers from putting serious effort into it? Apple doesn’t need to care. And, clearly, they don’t.
I don’t know if it’s possible to get past that.
I am in the same boat, I have an app update that was just rejected after a week of waiting because it has a web control(Safari, an Apple produces app with no rating that is imbedded into my application) that can access the web, and I did not rate it 17+. Now on top of having to rate my app 17+, which it should not need, I have to wait over another week to get it re-approved with that rating.
I also just got an app rejected after being in review for 35 DAYS!! why was it rejected you ask? Because the upload to iTunes connect corrupted the file. In the rejection email they said once it was uploaded they would “expedite” the review. That was over 3 days ago and I have yet to hear anything. Maybe in App Store world 3 days to review and app update that is nothing more then an icon change is expedited but not in the real world!
The real problem is that the whole process has gotten slower and generally worse in the last few months, for me and other developers. I would be more understanding if I saw improvement, but I completely agree with Marco on this, if it is going to keep getting worse then it is going to push more people away. You can’t run a business with this much friction in between you and your clients, and that is sad/scary for all the aspiring full time iPhone developers.
