http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110907/local/Maltese-love-to-shop-online-from-overseas.383608

Apparently Maltese love purchasing online especially from foreign retailers. Ever since I was a kid Maltese have flocked to London and Sicily to buy better quality goods and lower prices.

The reason? simples – we’ve been the victims of economies of scale and also of outright greed by the local businessmen.
The ability to scour online retailers for better deals and to get what I want is a huge boon. I buy nearly everything I can from sites such as play, amazon and also ebay.

In the past this was mainly due to price differences where we’d be fucked up the arse. Examples in electronics based on my obsessions with all things apple – you’d be able to go to NYC, buy mac book pro and have a nice holiday for the price they were selling a macbook pro here. I saved almost Lm100 on my ipod touch when it first came out.

Fortunately things have greatly improved – one great example being Klikk – their prices on Macs and PC components is fairly competitive with those abroad and their recent price match policy allowed me to get a game for the same price as what was available on play.

One massive problem consumers face here is that most items retain their original RRP throughout most of their shelf life rather than being aggressively discounted like they are abroad.

Also convenience wise – if I want to buy a pari of particular trainers I have to go Marsa or visit 10 different stores – instead I can check online and have items delivered at my door.

I would not want to be a Maltese retailer facing competition from abroad, the local ignorant customer (cos let’s face it, if you remove those who shop online from the local customer base you end up with a less erudite profile), the government taxes etc. However they still have to shape up and improve.

Though I am bewildered at the number of PS3 games that go missing in the post mmm…

I managed to install the damn thing on my macbook (2gb dual core 2ghz). It’s getting on a bit and only has an old intel integrated gfx card. Pretty long process as I installed it from a dvd. A pen drive would’ve been much quicker. I forgot to install the server options so I had to go back and install those.

First impressions are a mixed back. You expect to be wowed by apple but with this kitty, your first feeling is annoyance. Starting with the inverted scrolling. That’s going to throw lots of people off and fidgeting for the option to revert it back to normal. The scrolling paradigm used in touch devices doesn’t apply too well on desktops or laptops i think. I want the page to go down I tell the scrollbar to go down not up.

Another annoyance is the lack of display markers for open apps. It’s a bit confusing especially for someone who wants constant knowledge of what’s going on. I find it off-putting but once you get used to the way the OS treats apps you begin to see the reasoning behind this.

The icons in the sidebar – they are colourless and larger and they’ve changed the order. Why change things for change sake? That’s a MicroSoft way of doing things. The sidebar icons were fine as were other widgets.The new ios slider widgets are a hit and miss.

The scrollbars disappearing are a good idea – increases space. Good be slightly larger. The windows can now be resized better as you can resize them from all sides. Some window position snapping functions would be nice. Also, some better real time icons readjustment. In Snow leopard I have to keep readjusting window settings… cleanign up the icons and adjusting the thumbnail size. There should be an auto size function that better displays icons in a contact sheet format within the finder – a kinda built in photo viewer, integrating features you’d expect in iphoto, aperture or preview.

The dashboard has changed as well. Why? I don’t like the dull lego like grey background. there is a function to return it to the original transparent effect which is more pleasing.

The new dashboard is cool. I like it as an app launcher – does its job better than the previous stacks based solution from the dock. Still will be using keyboard based launch tools such as quicksilver though.

Mission control is cool – very intuitive but a bit buggy still (to be expected).

Full screen apps – hit an miss again – I like some of them but when i’m in full screen mode I’d still like to have my dock and the menu available permanently rather than it autohiding.

Screens – first introduced in leopard are now a bigger part of the os X paradigm. The full screen feature for apps basically gives the app its own screen. Switching between screens and desktops is very quick and intuitive. Lots of these features are great productivity increasing tools for portable computers. I am not sure how well these will translate on large screen desktops or multiple monitor setups.

Mail – not a fan of the side viewer – I’m too used to the top view fortunately there’s an option for that. Still no back and forth history browsing. Many times I jump between many unrelated emails without opening them – would love to be able to not having to hunt and peck for the same email three times in the space of 10 minutes (I know opening them will solve the issue).

Now for the good – Apple have created a new paradigm for working with apps in their new OS (paradigm is officially the word of the day here in frogbatia). Whereas before apps were opened, left open worked in then closed and the biggest and most important development in desktop OSes in the past 25 years was the ability to multitask and have multiple apps open at the same time, there was something artificial in this method. Apple are now moving towards a more intuitive app management system. With the big kitty you can almost consider every app at your disposal to be perpetually open. You run the program for the first time, it’s there, you quit it will save its state and when you reopen it it will resume that state with any documents you had open.

This extends to crash handling which will let you try and salvage your work before the app crashes all this will be interesting to see work with major and bloated apps such as those from MS, Adobe and even apple’s own very crash prone video software.

Performance is quite decent and though it was a clean install, the hardware is old – Safari felt a bit more sluggish but that was mainly on flash related pages and heck it’s a developer preview so there… Once you get passed the quiblles and the unnecessary changes you get the feeling that there is a lot of stuff going on that is there to make your experience better. However this will have to be testes in a demanding work environment to see how these new systems will behave when dealing with 1.5gb photoshop files, fucked up fonts etc

I managed to somehow obtain a copy of the new kitty. This one’s meant to have quite a loud roar. Unfortunately as i’m all hdded out, and didn’t feel like spendin more moneuy on my puter at the mo… I went for plan c. I burnt the os dmg onto a dvd.. it fits – yay. Now, I couldn’t install it on my laptop cos my laptop drive isn’t the original hdd.. it was a recycled external drive and doesn’t have a guid partition table. That’s something the os requires to install apparently. Wonder how come the previous smaller, mountain cat managed. So what i’ve done is remove the hdd, plugged it into my desktop and am using some partitioning sw to create another partition which will then be reformatted using guid tables (hopefully) and then place back into the latop in order to install the big kitty.

Rawr.

In all of Apple’s success with their iDevices (iPad/iPod/Phone for the uninitiated), I feel that perhaps, one of their biggest flaws is often overlooked, which is in my oh most humble opinion, the fact that to enjoy an iDevice’s full functionality, you need tether it to a desktop OS running device (aka a computer). In fact in order to better manage your device and its contents you do need to use iTunes and what’s more, you can’t really use most of the devices without activating it through itunes.

This is especially so in the context of a future dominated by these devices as they are poised to take over from laptops as being the most successful Personal Computing device.

Now, imagine a virtualised OS X that you can access via the web or at least a virtualised iTtunes… an online repository where all your media is handled on powerful servers with data back up and recovery. This may still be some way off – maybe 3 to 5 years into the future but who knows?

And the reason why i reckon this is necessary? Well, we’re now supposed to be living in the post pc age – in the tablet era. However an iPad and an iPhone still have an umbilical chord tied with a pc – you can’t really use the iPad without a computer running iTunes.

If apple offered an online virtualised home folder, the first screen when i switch on a new idevice would be a page asking whether i want to connect to a computer or to the virtual host service. This would let me activate any iDevice I have, anywhere I have an internet connection. For example, I intend travelling to buy my iPad 2, but I’ll have to wait till i fly back home to get it started… ah well

As a side effect.. or “halo effect”, it will also bring more non mac users to an online mac experience – an online iTunes / mac system which can be a building block in apple’s attempts at establishing some sort of social network. Basically offering a cloud mac experience that could compete with google apps and maybe even take on Facebook.

Okay not quite, what with the newly released OS X Lion developer preview, Apple has however fulfilled one the many items on my wishlist – namely that of integrating OS X client and server editions into one. One thing that is very important that I’m looking forward to but hasn’t been mentioned is whether Lion retains OS X server’s easy domain management. I used to use an app called headdress previously but since upgrading the dev box to snow leopard I use BB edit to manually edit the Vhosts file. No biggy but it’s nice to have a gui.

The iOS layer seems to be making its way in bits but we’ll see. Now for my next big wishlist.. the iPad 2. I’ve been resisting a whole year and have not yet bought one which I desperately NEEEED aherm. The iPad as it is with an added camera and some beefier insides would be nice. However with the release of the lightpeak Thunderbolt i/o interface I really hope this makes its way to the iPad. This one single port will add a whole new dimension to the iPad and make it an even more versatile computer. We’ll find out tomorrow…

I know nobody ever reads these.. it’s really just a way for me to keep the site alive with some sort of updates (google likes that sort of thing). And usually all I ever do is bitch and complain. But today I’d like to say a big thank you to the staff of Mater Dei and especially the Rainbow ward  as well as the volunteers and charity foundations such as puttinu cares that have strived to make the kids’ and parents’ stay there as comfortable and pleasant as possible.

OK, I’m very happy with my macs at the mo. Snow leopard solved some of my biggest gripes with new finder features (thumbnails icon size slider) and since 10.5 they’ve got rid of the horrible finder crash/stall when disconnected from a network drive. As well as much improved printing and a multitude of other little features such as hitting CMD -r in a file requestor to show the file in the finder.

Now that Lion has been announced with some nifty launch features I’d like to take this opportunity to list some of my top wants for the new OS.

Add an iOS layer. It is obvious that at one point the 2 OS branches will meet down the line and with the line blurring between Mac devices and iOS tablets, I reckon we’ll see a gradual move towards a reunified OS. Apple claims that touch doesn’t work on large screens, I agree but they are working and will support touch via things like the touch pad. Having said that, ever since the studio was equipped with new 27″ iMacs, no client has resisted the temptation of touching the screen (much to the design monkeys’ chagrin) and one even asked if it’s a touch screen like an iPhone, mimicking the pinch to zoom gesture! However, the smaller macs like the new MacBook Air would definitely benefit from a tablet mode where the screen would double up as a touch panel. It would make it the fastest iPad out there but with a physical keyboard and camera! This might finally truly fulfil the promise of those early tablet pc attempts. Also, developers will suddenly have another 4 million or so devices running iOS per quarter and these are users who spend more time with their devices on and are a more captive audience than the normal iPhone user.

Next major updated – Finder

1) Spotlight: For the love of god improve spotlight searching! First add more control on how it operates – I do not want search as you type – slows most machines down, even a powerful machine will lag if you have 12TB of attached storage. Make options more straightforward too – the privacy tab should be something more obvious like “exclude from spotlight search”! And there should be options to schedule the indexing. I’ve been mucking about my mac pro, exchanging HDDs whilst trying to upgrade to snow leopard, it had lots to index but I couldn’t wait for it (48hours???) also, had to re-index when I swapped back to Tiger! That ate 10-25% of my CPU not to mention the constant disk accessing. When running a busy studio from this computer the last thing I needed was spotlight indexing to eat away at my CPU cycles. I’d like to have the option to index later and have the computer shut down when done.

2) Finder list view: Is it that difficult to allow me to sort by whatever parameter/meta tag I like? Searching is more cumbersome in many cases where I need to isolate a number of files in a folder by file type. At least I’d expect to have the same filters I have in a normal Finder window when I browse through search results. As any user knows that is not the case! Likewise, why can’t I sort through files in open save dialogues in the same way.

Server technology

Now that apple has discontinued the Xserve and doubts have arisen over the future of OS X server, it’s time that Apple consolidates its OS into one offering even further. A lot of the server features come from modules, many of which can easily run atop OS X client. 3 features I definitely would like to see in the client version -

1) A GUI for creation of multiple sites through Virtual Hosts. Utilities like headdress and virtualhostX do an admirable job of providing a simple UI but I think that enough people use macs as web development machines that this could be simpler and built in.

2) A DLNA upnp server: Again this can currently be taken care of by 3rd party software such as eyeconnect and playback. I do understand that Apple might wish to avoid this as it circumnavigates their iTunes ecosystem. However this comes built in most versions of Windows OSes these days and I think many people would find it useful.

3) Home iHub :- they could add more home server features, besides the above DLNA media server, some power monitoring features and something like an app update server for both iOS and OSx. OS X server has the nifty feature built in where you can download 1 update and it will be installed on chosen machines on the network. Wouldn’t it be great if a central computer would be able to handle all software updates for all apple devices in a household? Why do I have to waste so much bandwidth if apple releases a 1gb update (I Have 4 macs and 2 iPod touches at home).

GUI – Consistency and refresh

1) There are many GUI elements that aren’t visually or behaviourally consistent anymore (many never were in spite of Apple’s guidelines). There are too many different types of window and dialogue boxes. I want most of my GUI to be similar – that’s why there is an OS GUI in the first place – imagine if every app developer reinvented the wheel with each app!

2) The floating palettes: Firstly I’d suggest apple removes the micro window toolbars. You know the ones – they can be found on the character palette or the colour palette – actually on most palettes. Things have improved since moving to a unified toolbar but it’s still not the best solution. Also it’s time to update those tired palettes anyway! The font selector, the colour palette etc. – they are a great way to allow programmers to insert these tools into their apps but they feel they have been left behind.

3) Better gui widgets: We’re still waiting for vector based GUI elements and we can see that this will be great for app developers to create resolution independent scalable user interfaces – from the iPad to the 27” iMac. In the meantime we can have new scrollbars for OSX. ITunes appears to be the test bed for new GUI elements, and them scrollbars sure need to be smaller. Better selectors

Default settings

1) Dock magnification – turn it on – people always want it on, it’s the first and most prominent bit of eye candy OSX has to offer and yet it’s off as default.

2) Mouse setting :- increase the mouse tracking speed to more than half and for the love of all that is holy in the world of flying amphibians (chocolate, curry, pizza!) enable the 2^nd mouse button as default.

3) Limited open/save dialogues – WHYYY? Apple why do have to click on a disclosure button every time I load a newly installed app on a new machine. Mercifully it’s something that the app usually remembers and does not have to be set again. However a global setting somewhere should mean an end of this for once and for all