Yes, it's entirely my fault that the account has lapsed: I took a bit of a sabbatical for full-time grad school, and it was a very busy few years.
But how crazy is it that an email marketing company thinks it's a good idea not to inform users before an account is deleted? At the very least, you'd think they'd use it as a scare tactic to drive paying customers back to the product: "If you don't send a campaign in the next X days, we'll delete your account!"
Another "design contest" post warrants another "NO SPEC!" link, warrants another comment.
Here's the thing. For a brand new mom-and-pop florist, they're trying to find a logo to put on their banner out front. There's a huge crowd of entrepreneurs who only have $500 to spend on branding their new company. These contests work for them.
There are lots and lots of creatives willing to do a little work for the chance of winning $500 and seeing their work used by people not related to them. Could be a janitor doing graphic design at night for some extra scratch, or could be some dude in #{foreign_country} where the USD exchange rate works in his favor. These contests also work for them.
If someone can't (or just doesn't want to) run out and spend $10k on branding, should they not be allowed to have a logo? What should they do instead?
Bottom line: If the payment and risk is worth it to them, and the work is good enough for the client, then why should anyone else care?
Designers care about "spec work", as the idea was originally conceived, because they were routinely getting jerked around by big companies. It had apparently become standard practice among major brands to select design vendors by running contests, and then using elements of all the contest submissions to improve the work of their preferred vendor.
Designers care about sites like 99designs because the most responsive (and, frequently, most successful) contract entrants are Southeast Asians who will turn in work indistinguishable by a layperson from professional for 1/100th what an NYC designer will charge.
The weakest argument against this practice is unfortunately the most popular: that the work product of an untrained "amateur" turning out 99designs submissions all day out of Vietnam is fundamentally inferior, in ways meaningful to business, to the work turned out by an NYC designer who can take the time to study a brand, a business vertical, conduct wireframing, &c.
This argument is uncomfortably transparent: if both kinds of work product are indistinguishable to the buyer's customers, the extra work put in by a pro designer has zero value, but is instead being bundled, and this argument attempts to promote that bundle cartel-style, by arguing that no designer should break up the bundle.
There are better arguments against sites like 99designs, but I have zero incentive to make them.
Designers and agencies often do a lot of unpaid work when they pitch to a new client, and this is accepted industry practice. How are design contests any different?
They are in no sense different. "No spec work" is a totally bogus movement. Even graphic designers should reject efforts by their peers to manage their profession as if they were "realtors".
I read the no-spec site and while I kinda see the POV when thinking about large design projects, I don't see what the problem is for small things like a banner ad as the Kickoff Labs post was discussing.
There are creatives all over the world eager to get paid a few hundred bucks for a bunch of small jobs. Sites like 99designs/crowdSPRING provide an efficient market for them.
I needed a logo for a super-lean startup idea. In a few days, spending $400, I got a kick-ass logo via one of these sites.
OK, I "confess" that I downvoted your post because I considered the question disingenuous. The risk/reward may not always be clear to all participants, and in a fairer world such choices might not have existed in the first place.
My vote is really against encouraging people to view design contests as fair enough, not you personally.
You'll have to let me know what the problem is with spec work when it's the designers choice to enter or not enter a contest. I didn't hold a gun to anyones head and say "draw pixel monkey!"
I posted a request. Told them I'd select a winner. Ran the contest. Worked with the designers. Selected a winner and paid. I even was upfront enough to eliminate designers that were never going to win so they stopped wasting their time.
RAM and HDDs in MacBook Pro machines are user-replaceable parts. No warranty is voided provided you install the proper stuff, and don't break your system in the process. I believe the manuals include detailed instructions for the replacements.
The RAM is _very_easily_ upgraded in an iMac. Apple's even designed a nifty door to make this process incredibly easy.
The only point of annoyance here is the HDD in an iMac. The design simply doesn't allow for the HDD to be accessed, and hence it's not user-installable. Personally, I'd never buy an iMac, and I very seldom recommend them.
To replace the hard drive in my computer I need the essential tech tool, the Phillips screwdriver. I bought one for $14.95 and the UX on it is amazing.
I do all my DSP algorithm research in Octave, because the price of MATLAB is just too high. I think I'm looking at somewhere on the order of $4k for a single license to obtain the signal processing stuff that I need in addition to the core license.
Would I prefer to have more graphing options, and some assurance that researchers' MATLAB code will work out of the box? Of course!
That said, Octave gets me really close for a fraction of the price. Also, I can peek inside the Octave source and get an idea of how the underlying routines work.
I've been using it for exactly the same purpose. When I think about how much it would cost me to get the Matlab equivalents I feel like sending the developers some flowers.
Python/Numpy works pretty well for this sort of thing too though, and the graphing features seem a little more sophisticated.
I've always wanted to try Numpy for this purpose, but I get exposed to so much MATLAB code in research papers for DSP that it hardly seems worthwhile.
Furthermore, I've built an entire Objective-C math framework (https://bitbucket.org/liscio/smugmath) that operates very similarly to MATLAB (i.e. vector-oriented) and allows me to easily translate DSP algorithms found in research papers over to shipping products (http://capoapp.com, http://fuzzmeasure.com).
And yeah, since Matlab is pretty much the standard it's a big plus to be able to use code from papers etc directly in Octave. Translating to Numpy is usually straightforward but it's definitely an extra step.
Numpy becomes very nice when you need to do some more general-purpose coding along with your numerical stuff though.
> Numpy becomes very nice when you need to do some more general-purpose coding along with your numerical stuff though.
Once you get used to "cell arrays" and "structs" and "struct arrays", you can do most anything in Octave that you can in Python, but the weirdness of those syntaxes is quite off putting for a lot of coders.
I think there's not much benefit of staying on Leopard if you run an Intel Mac these days. The upgrade cost is pretty cheap, and the benefits do developers are quite heavenly.
I've been keeping Leopard support in TapeDeck because it's been pretty easy to do so, but with the work I'm doing on 1.4 right now, I've been tempted to hit that kill switch...(But I won't.)
I've got a fairly large install base, and I'd like to keep them happy if at all possible. In the future, when I have to get them to buy a v2 release on the App Store, then ideally I've made a good impression on my customers and they'll happily buy a license.
It's also not that big a deal to do. As long as the developer tools continue to let me target 10.5 from 10.6, I'll be OK.
I hadn't thought about upgrades for existing customers, that makes quite a bit of sense. I was only considering that all New customers were 10.6+, so targeting 10.5 didn't make much sense.
If they email you the .app, it will be locked down to the purchaser's machine.
In terms of Snow Leopard-only, that's not necessarily true. However, it will be Intel-only.
The version of TapeDeck I submitted to the App Store had to be stripped of the ppc binary in order to pass validation. However, the version on http://tapedeckapp.com (the demo) is ppc/intel and 10.5-friendly.
I've yet to have one of the "bad" problems with PayPal, but I'm always trying to stay a step ahead of them when I can.
For instance, if you're expecting a higher-than-normal sales volume (e.g. a launch day, version upgrade, promotion), it doesn't hurt to give their Merchant Services department a phone call (the number I was given was 866-837-1851).
Be sure you ask for Merchant Services if you're not connected to them by default—it's a whole other support organization from what I could gather on my last phone call with them a month or so ago.
They may be taken aback by the reason for your call, but you can go over your phone numbers and addresses with them to make sure they can get a hold of you in the event that a fraud trigger is hit. If they can't speak with you, they have no other choice but to shut you down until you call them.
You can also get them to put a note on your account about the expected volume increase, so that when the activity does go into review, it may not be such a harsh reaction (e.g. freezing withdrawals temporarily rather than totally shutting down incoming funds.)
For the price of their service, the wide range of things you can do with their APIs, and the support I've received thus far, there's not a whole lot left to complain about IMO. Maybe my tune will change if I experience some of the "trouble" you hear about online, but I think that the proactive approach I describe above may help prevent that from ever happening.
Poor battery life? My Magic Mouse would last 3 weeks of constant use with NiMH batteries on average.
However, this was only the case after I applied the software update for my aluminum bluetooth keyboard. The first few weeks with the mouse would get me only a few days worth of use, at best.
Maybe there's another bluetooth device nearby that's causing your Magic Mouse to work too hard, and suck up too much juice?
(Note: I don't use my Magic Mouse anymore because I've since fallen in love with the Magic Trackpad, which has survived even the most precise work with Photoshop for mocking up pixel-accurate UIs.)
Interest and thanks - maybe I have something going on there, I'll investigate.
I'm also comparing it to my old bluetooth mouse (a small laptop mouse by MS), and I only changed the AAA's in that maybe twice a year. Seems odd to me that a device running 2 AA's would need replacing twice as often.
3 weeks with NiMH batteries isn't a good counterexample.
I use a Microsoft bluetooth mouse (the best bluetooth mouse I have ever found) and the batteries last about a few months with heavy daily use. It takes 2 AAA batteries.
It's hard for any company to try and work against the carrier-subsidized pricing of handsets. As long as carriers are supplying the access, this will continue to be the case.
To pay $500 for a phone, versus the $100 subsidized price, is a silly move—especially if you're planning to upgrade every 2-3 years.
I say this because the service from the carriers still costs the same regardless of how you obtained the handset, and in some cases you may be paying even _more_ for service if you don't have a contract.
(Of course, I'm speaking with the US/Canadian carriers in mind. I know things are better outside of North America.)
Are all the features accessible in non-contract plans?
I've got a few contract-only perks here in Canada on Rogers, such as the 6GB data plan add-on for $30/mo, and an "Employee Purchase Program" discounted voice service at $17/mo.
I don't think you can get non-contract data plans for under $30, and that only buys you 250MB/month, and voice plans start at around $25-30/month.
I may be able to set up a similarly-priced plan up here, but I would lose out on many of the important features (tethering, visual voice mail, larger data caps, free evening/weekend calling, etc.)
I think that the kind of folks who are _capable_ of building significant iOS based apps simply choose not to, instead of simply producing fart apps.
I avoided the platform for as long as I could. During that time: the tools improved, hardware and APIs have improved greatly, provisioning hardware got a lot easier, and the review process shortened significantly.
So now, I'm dipping my toes in and embarking on a fairly significant app. However, because I'm a long-time Mac developer, much of my existing code and experience moves over without much fuss—perhaps the developers of "signifiant" apps just have a different kind of "fart app"?
Rob's situation is fairly unique, and unfortunate. The whole ordeal is a load of BS, and I hope things change for the better for him. Briefs is a great idea, and it was easily the coolest iOS product demo at C4[3].
But how crazy is it that an email marketing company thinks it's a good idea not to inform users before an account is deleted? At the very least, you'd think they'd use it as a scare tactic to drive paying customers back to the product: "If you don't send a campaign in the next X days, we'll delete your account!"