Mac20Q Podcast 123
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This weekend is the weekend of the Geek Photography Book. I was all excited and completely delighted to finally get the first * book out of the Scrivener application on my Mac and published with Amazon. This is a Kindle book and it will be exclusive with Amazon for the first 90 days. This is because I have enrolled the book with KDP Select and there is a requirement to be exclusive. At the end of this period I will almost certainly publish the book in other digital bookstores including the iBookstore. I’m looking forward to making a version of the book in iBooks Author.
Get the book for free this weekend
As part of my marketing and promotional activities I have set the book to have a free promotion for this weekend. This Saturday and Sunday you can get the book from the Amazon Kindle store and no money will be required. This is to help Amazon see that there is interest in the book. This will be further helped if I can get a number of book reviews from my readers. So if you download it, can I ask you to leave a review on the Amazon site. Hopefully I will get some four and five-star reviews, as this will also help with promotion of the book as we go. If you read it and find that you really don’t like it then I still would love to hear what you have to say about it. Constructive criticism is always welcome and I would prefer to get that within an email. I will be able to make my subsequent books better and I can also go back into this book and make changes where necessary.
Has Apple software got so bad?
The mo
aning started off with the developer responsible for the application Overcast. An application for listening to podcasts on your iOS device. Marco Arment wrote a blog post complaining about the quality of Apple software. As you might expect with Apple commentators and bloggers, one or two others joined in as well. My view on this is along the lines of asking the developer to quit throwing stones while standing in a glasshouse. The Overcast application has crashed my iPhone 6 five or six times this week which is rather annoying to say the least. It took me a while to work out what it was that was crashing the system. It was confirmed when I saw a message on the phone to say it was audio-based. Marco, the developer knows about this and has over the last couple of days updated the software. It’s going to be interesting to see how the Overcast app behaves since the update.
I don’t think that the overall state of software development from Apple is particularly bad. There is no such thing as a finished software application. Unless we are talking about Aperture which is finished in terms of the sun setting on it and it will be no more. Dead, deceased and not longer of the world. There are always going to be niggles and things that were working okay being broken by upgrades. There will always be things that we would like to see changed or made better in some way or other. It is quite possible that we are getting more picky and expecting higher standards. Perhaps we should be getting it better given the amount of money that Apple has sitting in its bank account. Surely Apple can afford to pay for the best software engineers and have more of them, so that the software gets better quicker. In any case, I am generally quite happy with what I can do with my Apple computers, Mac OS X and iOS. I love it that often it seems like we are already living in the future. It is going to be extremely interesting when Home Kit takes off. The Apple Watch is going to be another piece of the jigsaw will both have the Apple fans complaining and adoring at the same time. I am of the opinion that with Apple we are getting something that will work as a complete system. There will be links between the software and the hardware we get to play with. It is all going to make our lives better in ways that we don’t yet realise. I am prepared to put up with the small irritations along the way just so long as there is a big plan in place for something marvellous at the end of the day.
