Apple Offers Re-Download Feature, But Only to Americans

08. June 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", Apple, Rants · Tags: , , , ,

Being a Canadian citizen, I’m used to getting the short end of the stick when it comes to companies holding give-aways and the like. Apple is, of course, no exception.

I was excited to hear that, starting with iTunes 10.3.1, Apple would be allowing customers to download music that they had perviously purchased (before, if you bought a track/album and lost it, you would have to buy it again). In case it changes, the feature is described as:

Now you can download music you’ve previously purchased to all your devices. When you buy music from iTunes, iCloud stores your purchase history. So you can see the music you’ve bought — no matter which device you bought it on. You can access your purchase history from the iTunes Store on your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. And since you already own that music, you can tap to download your songs or albums to any of your devices.1

Note the (1) footnote indicator. That footnote reads as follows:

Available in beta now in the U.S. only and requires iOS 4.3.3 on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 (GSM model), iPod touch (3rd and 4th generation), iPad, or iPad 2, or a Mac or PC with iTunes 10.3. Previous purchases may be unavailable if they are no longer in the iTunes Store.

Emphasis mine. With any luck, once “iCloud” leaves “beta” (why are you push Beta software through the official update channel, Apple? Google should sue.) the functionality will be expanded to beyond the U.S. and let the rest of us poor suckers get back our copies of ‘Plastic Beach – Deluxe Edition’.

Windows Desktop Twitter Clients Suck (And Here’s Why)

17. January 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", Rants, Twitter · Tags: ,

I use Twitter semi-frequently. I’m more of a reader than a poster (in the 2+ years I’ve used the service I’ve only tweeted around 8,100 times), so it’s always struck me as odd that while mobile Twitter clients (such as Plume) do an amazing job working with the Twitter API, desktop clients never seem to live up to expectations.

Timeline Position

Mobile clients reign supreme in this, the seemingly hardest-to-master part of Twitter. I follow upwards of 170 people, and when they’re all actively tweeting my timeline fills up with sometimes ungodly numbers of tweets. These days, most mobile clients remember where you left off reading, and add new tweets above that point. Then, when you refresh the timeline, you just need to start scrolling up and you haven’t missed a thing.

Sadly, though, desktop Twitter clients still haven’t figured out that this is an important feature. I really love the look of MetroTwit, Seesmic Desktop 2, Blu, et al…, however it and every other desktop client I’ve tried will either scroll you up to the top of the timeline on refresh or do the same when you quit and reopen the application. This leaves a huge mess, and you need to remember the approximate time you stopped reading so you can scroll back through the mass of tweets that have collected since.

As a side note, a large number of desktop clients will scroll on refresh as you’re reading (I’m looking at you, MetroTwit). If I’ve just refreshed and scrolled back over 50 tweets, it really sucks to be scrolling up as I’m reading only to have the client force-scroll down as another 20 tweets come in.

View Conversation

A great feature in Twitter’s new website redesign is the ability to click on a tweet, and a tab will open up beside the timeline showing you the contents of the tweet, other tweets by the person, and most importantly, if the tweet was an @ reply to another tweet or series of tweets, it will show those as well. Mobile clients typically allow you to tab on a tweet and have the conversation show up inline, or in another view, but once again desktop clients have missed the boat on this one. MetroTwit requires you to right-click on the tweet and go through a few levels of context menus before you get to an option to show the conversation, and most lack this feature entirely, making it difficult, if not impossible, to find out what each of the 15 new @ replies are referencing. So far, Blu appears to be the only client to provide a quick-view of conversations similar to mobile clients.

Image Previews

Another feature of New Twitter is ability to click and tweet and Twitter will show you, in the pop-out tab, a preview of images linked to popular sharing sites like TwitPic. Mobile clients will typically add a small thumbnail (and some, like Plume, will allow you to view the image without leaving the client, as below).

Once again, the only desktop Twitter client to do this is Blu. The others still require you to click the link, switch to your browser, and then switch back to the client. Why not just use the Twitter website, then?

Your Retweets

Ever want to see which of your tweets have been natively retweeted? Unless you’re on twitter.com (or using Blu) you aren’t likely to find out. Even mobile clients fail at this one, despite the fact that native retweets have been around for over a year.

The Takeaway

So it might seem like Blu is the ultimate desktop Twitter client, seeing as it actually does most of the things listed here, right? Of course not! Much like other desktop clients, Blu lacks the option to configure most of it’s settings (there are exactly three options on its Settings page, and one is font size). Don’t want toast notifications? Screw you! Want to make the mouse scroll wheel scroll fewer than a page at a time? Up yours! Adjust the colour scheme? We’re blu(e)! Have more than one column, change the auto-refresh options, or tweak the font size (alright, they can do the last one)? Go to hell!

The TL;DR of the matter is, if you want a good desktop Twitter client, stick with http://www.twitter.com – it still has the most features, is less annoying, and doesn’t suck as hard.

Rogers Wireless Hijacks Wildcard DNS Records

07. June 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: "It's a Feature", Android, Apple, Hack, howto, iPhone, Linux, Rants · Tags: , , , , , ,

Rogers LogoAlthough I can’t confirm when this happened (it may have happened a while ago and I just never noticed), I was browsing the internet last night on my Google Nexus One and noticed that, when I mistyped http://imdb.com, I was redirected to http://www20.search.rogers.com (which doesn’t work outside of Rogers’ network) instead of receiving a normal Not Found error. This all smacks of the infamous VeriSign Site Finder fiasco.

I’m no fan of browser redirects in any form, and I’m even less of a fan of Yahoo which Rogers partners with to, among other things, provide results on their hijacked landing page. But what can you do? It’s their service, and there’s no opt-out link on the page.

Well, the answer is to manually opt-out. Unfortunately, you need to have a rooted/jail-broken phone to do this. As stated above, I have a Google Nexus One which runs CyanogenMod, but this should work with any other rooted Android phone and even jail-broken iPhones (although the paths are different — you’ll need to alter them as applicable).

To manually opt-out, do the following (assumes Android phone):

  1. Open a shell on your phone. You can use ConnectBot, Terminal Emulator, or adb shell.
  2. Assume root (su command).
  3. Remount the system partition in to read/write mode —  mount -o rw,remount /system
  4. Browse to /system/etc.
  5. Use your favourite text editor to open hosts.
  6. Add the following to the bottom of the hosts file — 127.0.0.1 www20.search.rogers.com
  7. Save and quit!

You’re done! You’ve just manually opt’ed-out of Rogers Wildcard DNS hijack. Now you’ll just get the normal ‘Not Found’ errors, as when Rogers see that the domain you’ve entered doesn’t exist and tried to redirect you to their search page, your phone will point that domain to itself and fail as it isn’t running a webserver.

TL;DR Version: To prevent getting directed to Rogers’ Search Page when you mistype an address, edit your hosts file to point www20.search.rogers.com to the 127.0.0.1 loopback address.

Update (05/01/2011): You can now officially opt-out using this link: http://searchassist.teoma.com/templates/rogers/optout

Rant: BP “SpillCam” is Windows-Only

26. May 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: Linux, OS X, Rants, Windows · Tags:

So in the wake of this whole oil-spill thing going on, BP was forced to drop a camera down to the source of the link and broadcast the footage out over the internet. Initially, the site was wanged (see the Penny-Arcade definition) due to the huge amount of traffic it was generating, however it’s working fine now, at this link:

http://globalwarming.house.gov/spillcam

Of course, unless you’re using Windows, that link is no good to you. Why? Because, in this age of HTML5 video and Flash streaming, the video uses the Windows Media plugin – specifically, the Windows Media 9 Codec. There are ways to get it working short of a Virtual Machine running Windows, but it shouldn’t be difficult. The video should be in an open, available format to allow everyone easy access.

Now, I’m no Microsoft-hater, and I’m not a Linux fanboy. All I want is to be able to watch video on whatever platform I want, be it Windows, *Nix, or even OS X. I don’t think this is too much to ask, yet apparently it is.

Update: A Flash-based stream is available here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127258287&ft=1&f=1003

Rant: Entitlement

06. January 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Rants · Tags:

Go figure. My first post of the new year, and it’s a rant. Oh well, I guess I have to start somewhere.

Earlier today, I was helping a presenter setup his laptop with our projector. While I was doing this, a random guy attending the presentation (with no affiliation to our organization, other than being there to listen to the speaker) suddenly spoke up:

Him: Hey, you’re the IT guy, right?

Me: Yep.

Him: You have to help me get games loaded on to my kid’s iPod Nano!

Me (Jokingly): Well sure, but my rate is $50 an hour.

Him (Ignoring the comment): I bought this damn thing from Future Shop, and they told me I could load games on it!

Me: Okay…as far as I know, the Nano is just a regular iPod. I’m not really an Apple guy, but I think you need an iPod Touch to do that.

At this point, the guy goes off about how he was lied to, and that to add games on a Nano one must break it’s encryption with a special code that no one wants to give him, and that everyone at Future Shop are a bunch of idiots. When he finally calms down a little, he just stares at me, expecting an answer.

Me: Well, you could always just take it back and exchange it for an iPod Touch.

Him (turning to the person next to him): See? None of these ‘IT’ people are any help.

The unfortunate thing is, this kind of behavior is all-to-common. An increasing number of people seem to be under the assumption that anyone who works with computers for a living knows everything about not only computers, but anything electronic. And aside from thinking that we know everything about everything, they also assume that *love* to help with every manner of problem, like it’s an addiction that they’re all too happy to feed.

I’d go on, but that wouldn’t help any. Suffice to say, this annoys me to no end. Hopefully I’m preaching to the converted though.