Yearly Archives: 2011

A bully gets his

Software

Avoid ‘in app’ purchases.

Did you know that every time you make a purchase of an app on your iDevice or using the AppStore icon on your Mac that you are giving 30% of the developer’s income to a corporation which systematically defrauds US taxpayers daily?

Yes, that’s the fee Apple extracts when you do so. The ‘sell’ is that it reimburses AAPL for running the AppStore (a bigger mess you will not find on the web) and that they are making your life easy. Trust us, we’re Apple and your well being is our sole interest – when we are not avoiding paying taxes on the $17 billion in cash we have stashed offshore, that is and have largely avoided paying any corporation taxes on our vast annual income.

Sure, you could still sell your app from your own web site, but the price had to be the same and no reference to your web site was permitted in the AppStore version of your app.

It doesn’t take a moment’s thought to realize that magazines, newspapers and small software writers could not possibly make a profit after Apple extracted its 30%. So not only was this policy ruinous to these vendors it actually hurts Apple. It’s never a good idea to put your providers out of business.

Well, in the good, old fashioned English public school I attended, we really disliked bullies. It was deeply inculcated in pupils that bullying is just not on. So well was this message conveyed that when there was a rare case of playground bullying, you could bet that the perpetrator would be approached by four of the burlier members of the rugby team, marched to the men’s room, his head stuck down the porcelain bowl and the flush cord pulled. What it lacked in subtlety it more than made up for in effectiveness.

Appropriately enough it took the British to put a stop to Apple’s bullying ways. Pearson, the publisher of the estimable Financial Times, just stuck the fruit company’s greedy head down the proverbial toilet. And flushed.

You can bet that the FT will shortly discontinue its presence in Apple’s AppStore all together. I changed immediately to the new app and can confirm it works just fine. And there’s more content too. Plus where else do you go for objective financial news?

At the recent WWDC hoopla (wow! Lion has more bells and whistles no one needs and screw you if you use Rosetta apps ….) Apple made much of how the AppStore was selling millions/billions/trillions of apps, or some such idiocy. Yes, and their growing software distribution monopoly nets them 30% a pop.

So here is my suggestion. By all means search for photography and magazine apps in the AppStore for your Mac. But when you find something you like, hop over to the developer’s/publisher’s web site and buy directly from them. (Sadly, you have no choice in the matter with iDevice apps, unless you elect to hack your iDevice). You put that 30% in the developers’ pockets, where it is sorely needed. You certainly don’t need to send it to a US corporation which has paid negligible corporation taxes for years and has $70 billion in the bank as a result. Yes, a big chunk of that is your money, US taxpayers.

Let Dr. P. put Apple’s ways in perspective for you.

Here’s the Income tax footnote from their last annual SEC filing:

Forget all that ‘deferred tax’ baloney. Those are not cash payments. So total taxes AAPL paid in 2010 were $3.1bn on net income of $18.5bn or 16.8%, compared to a federal corporation tax rate of 35%, or more than twice the rate AAPL paid. Then add in the fact that somehow Apple makes the claim that less than half of its sales were in the US and the most they will have paid in US taxes is maybe $1.5bn.

And you want them to extort developers and publishers for 30%? I didn’t think so.

Developers? Offer reduced function apps through the AppStore and get the word out that the real thing can be had from your web site. Stop feeding the bully. And make sure your AppStore version flashes a sign to your full featured app, just the way the FT is doing it. Apple has not had the brazen cheek to try and stop that.

CrashPlan – Part V

Software

Adding more.

In Part IV I mentioned that I had copied all my photo files to CrashPlan’s cloud storage.

As there are currently no limits on storage volumes, and I do not expect this status to prevail, I have been gradually moving other non-photo data to CrashPlan on the assumption that unlimited volume rights will be grandfathered if they decide to charge for large storage spaces. I have signed up for three years at CrashPlan and now have over 300gB of data on their servers.

Here’s how the storage paths selected for cloud backup look at CP:

CrashPlan directories.

When inputting new paths, the best way is to drag and drop the folder from Finder on your Mac to the above CP box. Typing in the path does not cut it – Finder omits the suffix “.aplibrary” from the Aperture database, for example, and without it the back-up will fail. Further, remember to add the trailing slash (‘/’) or the back-up will fail. Irritating quirks and CP really needs to adopt a visual icon based approach, compared to this geeky one.

How about Applications? Increasingly applications are purchased by download, so all you need keep in the cloud is information relating to your serial number and related access keys. Uploading gigabytes of applications to the cloud makes no sense. It’s also likely you will miss one or more of the hidden directories many applications use. Just re-download the app if you lose the original (assuming the vendor is still in business), then re-input the key. Rather than using CrashPlan I strongly recommend 1Password used in combination with a free DropBox account. The latter will not only store all your keys remotely, but also provides efficient syncing of all your 1Password data to all your Macs and iDevices. After many months of use I can confirm it works properly. 1Password is an application every Mac or iDevice user should own.

Here’s an extract of the Software section in my copy of 1Password:

What about software you bought on DVDs? For me that leaves the truly awful Intuit Quicken. I store that DVD offsite.

CrashPlan’s warning feature:

CrashPlan will backup even if your computer is logged out; however it cannot do so if the machine is switched off. That happened with my HackPro the other day when, for the first time in ages, I left it off overnight while doing some hardware maintenance. I received the following alert from CrashPlan in my email the next day – a nice feature:

The Finger

Photographs

The moving finger, having writ, moves on.

On 24th Street, east of Van Ness Boulevard, San Francisco.

At Ms. Terioso’s. G1, kit lens @ 18mm, ISO 320.

With apologies to Omar Khayyam.

The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a Word of it.

The Stein show at SF MOMA

Paintings

Quite special.

When it came to collecting early twentieth century modern art, none could outdo the Steins. Not only was their appetite voracious, their taste was also excellent. All of this is clearly on display in the show at SF MOMA which presents most of their collections, many of the canvases and sketches now spread all over the world. The fours Steins, author Gertrude and her two brothers and sister-in-law, left America for Paris just as Picasso and Matisse were rewriting the history books of art, and started buying much of these artists’ output around 1905. While the Steins were far from robber baron rich, they could afford to buy for the simple reason that canvases from these masters ran a few hundred francs a pop. Today, Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude would likely run to eight or nine digits, though I very much doubt its owner, the Metropolitan Museum of New York, is a seller.

The show is huge and exceptionally well curated. I’m no great fan of Matisse and Picasso, but confess that seeing the original sketches for ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ was enthralling. It’s one of the few mistakes Gertrude made – she bought the sketches but passed on the canvas, now largely recognized as being the dividing line between representative and cubist art. Picasso’s portrait of Stein is also really special, though my favorites were Matisse’s ‘The Girl with Green Eyes’, his ‘Woman with Hat’ and the two sloe eyed portraits of Sarah and Michael Stein. There was also an exceptional Picabia portrait of Gertrude, deeply insightful.

SF MOMA was fortunate that Sarah Stein retired in California and gave some of her best works by Matisse to the museum. Mercifully she did not live in Arkansas.

Matisse – The Girl with Green Eyes. SF MOMA collection.

Matisse – Woman with Hat. SF MOMA collection.

It’s amusing to learn about the ridicule critics laded on these works, having done the same to the impressionists not 30 years earlier. That’s what so distinguishes the Steins’ collections. They did not have great wealth, just great taste, and did not need anyone to tell them what to like. When you look at some of the great Robber Baron collectors like Henry Clay Frick (now in his mansion on 5th Ave, NYC – the collection, not the man) and Charles Tyson Yerkes (dissipated by creditors) they were all professionally advised. Someone had to tell them what was good. Figures, I guess.

The exhibition is large, but then so were the Steins’ collections. Half way through you can pop out on MOMA’s balcony and take a breather.

MOMA’s balcony. G1, kit lens.

Strongly recommended, even at $25 to get in. Despite going on a weekday, the place was full, so weekends are likely not much fun. The $250 annual membership option at SF MOMA almost makes sense, as it includes private ‘members only’ viewings of great shows like this. I would think that means fewer people crassly stepping in front of you when you are trying to enjoy a canvas on the wall.

If you want a fine biography of the American expatriate set in early twentieth century Paris, I recommend James Mellow‘s ‘Charmed Circle’. It’s out of print, but mine ran me all of $1 from Alibris.com. Or for more fun, just catch Woody Allen’s latest masterpiece ‘Midnight in Paris‘ where you can join Owen Wilson, transported back in time, to Gertrude’s salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus. A light as air confection, it’s every bit as enjoyable and amusing as the work of the artists the Steins supported.

Edwin Land and genius

Photography

The Real Thing.

It has long seemed to me that the greatest photographic invention is the digital sensor. It made immediate and cheap what was either seriously delayed – processing, printing in the film days – or very costly – Polaroid instant pictures. And it also made cameras better in every way – sharper, faster, smaller and more reliable. But there’s no naming the inventor of the digital sensor. The technology is so complex, the manufacturing process so capital intensive, that only committees of scientists and technologists could invent something like this.

The greatest photographic invention ever.

Until the digital sensor came along you could easily identify the great inventors who moved the technology of photography forward. In the nineteenth century they included Niepce (often credited with the first ever photograph dated 1826), Fox Talbot (calotype permanent images, 1834) and Daguerre (silver Daguerrotype images, 1839). George Eastman’s invention of roll film in 1884 made the taking of multiple pictures easy, allied with his preloaded Kodaks which you simply exchanged for a new one when dropping off the old to have the pictures processed. Eastman saw that messing with plate cameras and dark slides, all to take one picture, was not the future.

But it wasn’t until the twentieth century that four giants bestrode the field making quantum leaps in photographic technology. Interestingly, the invention of each was spurred by simple personal desire to make things easier, lighter or faster.

The first was Oskar Barnack of Ernst Leitz to whose failing health we owe the Leica. Barnack got tired of humping his heavy plate camera and tripod around in the mountains so came up with something light and pocketable to help allay his asthma. It didn’t hurt that he was a master engineer or that he had the inspiration of using 35mm movie film stock to allow 36 snaps to be taken on one roll.

The next two were ‘Man and God’ as they were known in Kodak’s Rochester factories. Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky were geniuses like they used to make them, and their chemistry skills gave the world its first usable color film, Kodachrome. Mannes and Godowsky were amateur tinkerers in pursuit of a dream and Kodak had the genius to give them time, space and capital to pursue their dream of a stable color emulsion. The result was the greatest film ever made, before digital swept aside all before it.

But to my mind, the greatest inventor of all, when lone inventors still existed, was Edwin Land. His daughter’s insistence on seeing the picture right after it was taken led this engineering and chemistry titan to come up with the Polaroid process. The original design required you to pull out the print/developer sandwich whose chemical sacks would open when squeezed by the rollers in the camera’s body, initiating processing, and a minute later you would have a moist print in one hand and the discarded caustic chemical part in the other. You would then have to coat the print with the provided squeegee to fix the image and prevent fading. Later, Land made a color version and I have nothing but warm memories of using both and, yes, you really did not want to touch those chemicals. I can still smell the odor of the fixer as if it was yesterday when I last took a Polaroid picture, in much the same way as I recall the aroma of a fresh roll of Kodachrome. Thanks to the Polaroid process, the thrill of the darkroom was now in your hand, and no work or blackout blind were required.

But Land was not to be satisfied. All that chemical detritus got to him and he determined to do better. His invention of a new process which would obsolete the separate tear-off chemical step and have the color picture develop in broad daylight dictated not only a huge step in chemistry but also required the invention of a completely new camera, the SX70. The history of those inventions is described in fascinating detail in Harry McCracken’s Technologizer blog, and you can read the whole story by clicking the image below.

Click the image for the article.

As McCracken elegantly writes:

“But greatness isn’t a popularity contest – not primarily one, at least. Maybe it has more to do with the concept expressed by Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: making technology indistinguishable from magic. By that measure, I can’t think of a greater gadget than the SX-70 Land Camera, the instant camera that Polaroid introduced in April 1972. We ranked the SX-70 eighth on that 2005 list, but the sheer magnitude of its ambition and innovation dwarfs the Walkman, iPod, and nearly every other consumer-electronics product you can name.”

In our modern world we adulate carnival barkers like Steve Jobs or copyists like Bill Gates. These two excelled at taking someone else’s idea and either slickly repackaging that which they did not invent or using monopoly power to sell mediocre products with no competition. Edwin Land was not of that caste. Along with Niepce, Daguerre, Fox Talbot, Barnack, Mannes and Godowsky, he was the Real Thing.