Message Me?

My tech rant for the day:

EVERY DAY I receive well over 300 individual messages on facebook, twitter, email, texting, voicemail, skype, google voice and linked in. Regardless of how well organized I am (which is pretty fuckin' organized btw), my mind is riddled with confusion about where a certain message is, or what response channel is best to use when trying to get in touch with someone in a timely manner.

When are major tech companies going to realize that what the user wants is to keep it simple. Android has taken some amazing steps to consolidate messaging in a unified way, but has Apple? No.

Instead they introduce iCloud, which is available only to Apple users. So someone texting me to my iPhone who isn't an apple user means I can't respond from the iMessage texting app on my computer. WTF!

Open your doors, stop trying to make people commit to your environment exclusively - it would save us all a tremendous amount of time and mental energy to have ONE PLACE, where it all comes and goes from. It would also help us trust that you have our collective interests in mind when designing apps that are central to our modern tech-filled lifestyle.

There used to be an app called Trillian where you could send and receive messages from any social media platform... that was fantastic, but many instant messaging service providers have made it increasingly difficult for third parties to consolidate it all, forcing you to use their product all the time.

APPLE! Use some of your 90 billion in the bank and give me an app that is my central communication center - call it 'iRespectyourtime' for christ sake and get us past this archaic, time consuming bull shit of fragmented messaging systems and time consuming processes that we're bound to like never before.

Caveat - if someone has a magic app that already does this by all means, school me.

When Tech Works: Stevie Wonder Remix found!

When Tech Works:

I just got an email from a dear Sister who comes to ecstatic dance. She sent me two Stevie Wonder songs and asked if I'd consider playing them. I listened to them right there in the email (cool) and went online to see if I could find some dance floor friendly remixes.

I went to SoundCloud and searched...

https://soundcloud.com/c2cdjs/steviewonderc2c

the FIRST result, was bad ass. Funky, sexy, super yummy. Soundcloud, for those of you who don't know, is an amazing experiment in DJ culture. Providing a free (or paid) platform for DJ's to throw up mixes, songs, playlists and get social media feedback + props.

It's a wonderful culture of music makers and fans where taste defines what the search results respond with.

I find stuff on there all the time that is amazing... and it's free... what a magical wonder that is, all thanks to silicon.

An Apple A Day?

A light tech rant for the day:

Apple is perhaps my favorite to rant about... I love them, I'm a die hard fan, they're the richest tech company ever, and some of their issues are truly frustrating and just plain suck.

Macbook bro - built in camera auto-darkens the video capture when it thinks there is too much light in the room. Causes me to fade in and out from dark to light while video chatting depending on how far from the camera I am. No setting for that anywhere, not even in Terminal - have to buy a 3rd party app called iGlasses to do anything about it. LAME.

iPhone voicemail - I have a list of 30 voice mails... to delete them I have to click edit, select one at a time, then click delete. Takes forever. No select all, no swipe to delete just like their email app. After deleting all 30, and having 98 in my deleted folder, I get an alert saying my voice mail is 98% full. LAME.

Yosemite's new full screen (green) button on desktop windows automatically puts the app into full screen mode. LAME. I don't want full screen, I just want the window to be resized to maximum. Full screen means I have to switch desktops to see what's behind it. They never did get the green button right... Windows perfected it long, long ago - what gives? And when I minimize a window using the yellow button it disappears and is difficult to get back. Again - windows figured that out back when Madonna was En Vogue and Salt n' Peppa was Pushin' It.

Why the f#$% do you still have to 'Eject' a hard drive, or USB stick? I wanna pull that shit out and go - not get the 'removed improperly' error. I've improperly removed so many things from my Mac over the years that I technically should be surfing through more corruption than you can find in the US government, but everything still works fine. Have the hard drive auto-prep for disconnection when it spins down. Solid state memory like USB sticks should be instantly removable because they can't become fragmented over time. As my laptop doesn't have a CD drive, it technically can't eject anything any more - so why is it still trying to be old school?

I hear you're getting into the smart car business - I'm down with the idea of an iCar, but as long as that doesn't make my iLife suck harder because you're too busy trying to anticipate the next big thing to leave the last few big things growing mold in a digital compost pile the size of Texas.