Apple is on top, iPods and iPhones are still selling in nice numbers, the notebooks have gained market share… But there is a fine line between luxury, premium and overpricing!

Customers like premium, no doubt and Apple has been  en vogue for a number of years.  Premium is justified by a mix of product quality, customer experience, image.  Design plays a big role, in Apples case both the form as well as the interface.  Innovation is equally important, and Apple has truly innovated over the years: iPod, iPhone, iTunes,  multi-finger input, interface, ease of use, sexy design…

Though I contribute a lot of that success to the overall value for money which until about 2 years ago included a competitive price.  There was always  a premium and it was worth it.  Since then Apple again has become comparitively more expensive to the tech device world.  In other worlds, whereas the rest of the IT hardware prices have fallen a lot, Apple has only done so very slightly, preferring to justify the price with hardware and software improvements.  That is ok up to a certain point, the famous tipping point. Example the screens.  Yes Apple uses great displays, but they are shiny and glossy.  The resolution is ok and comparable to typical customer notebooks. But those tend to be half the price. Maybe Apple designers and Steve Jobs say, more resolution is not needed, but  a lot of customers might disagree. Example mobile iDevices and iTunes, incredibly desirable but increasingly obstrusive, riddled with restrictions and even intrusive action to undo, disable or delete stuff.

Apple is walking on ice.  Macs, iPods & co have become fashionable and for some people must-haves.  But fashion is short-lived, especially when pricing and value for money drift apart, when premium becomes a luxury or worse a rip-off.

And then there is the question of love!

Protection becomes a lock-in for customers and a lock-out for competitors and third parties, but what if you lose your key? What does it say about trust? About respect?

Protecting the company against copycats and competitors is about defense and seriously goes against an easy user experience. I have to worry about how many times I have distributed my music files over different devices, I have to worry about what system / hardware I am using, I have to worry about not being able to listen to my music again. I have to worry about Apple disabling applications on my iPhone…  I was in love, but I am not so sure anylonger.

Aiming for a monopoly through proprietary protocols and patents makes you lonely and ultimately vulnerable.  Everybody will take a shot at you, especially if it is lucrative and promising.  Yes, it has worked for companies like Microsoft in the past, but those times are over. Yes Apple has had the advantage of being loveable, but love can also turn quickly against you – if the love is not reciprocated.  Isn’t love also about trust? Does Apple trust you?

Note: I have been using Macs for about 4 years now. I have now an Ubuntu notebook and am not sure if I will get another Mac anytime soon. What I want is open protocols, a worry free experience,  and better screens which don’t glare back at me and offer a better resolution for more visible content. And I want fairer pricing. I hate to be locked-in or locked-out.  I want to leave and join as I want, I love freedom, I love choice. I expect mutual respect. And I want Apple to love me too

Well I started taking notes “electronically” on my old Palm Pilot, sorry no, my old Handspring Visor deluxe.  I remember first thinking: “why do I need that memo button?”  But it has made sense since.  Under Lotus Domino / Notes one of my oldest databases still in use is a widely replicated personal Journal which has been incredibly useful archive for years.  When I got my old Powerbook (PB) 4 years ago, I started using MacJournal – until a couple of months ago it had crashed.  Unbelievable – I tried to re-install, to no avail.  And I am not in the mood anylonger to try for days, though I am sure it probably would have worked somehow.  Fortunately I had archived my MacJournal notes as html and txt files before.  And since then, I simply started opening a text editor on my machines and every few days saved the file in a journal folder.

So with my new Ubuntu notebook I decided to have another go at the journal / notes question.  Ubuntu comes with a mix of applications aimed at that issue.  There is Tomboy (weird name), Rhinote (still weird, but funny, though as a German my association is not so much the mix of Rhinos and Notes, but more the river of Rhine).  Then there is Xpad and Knotes (borrowed from the KDE environment).

So what am I looking for?  A web-based “center”, a nice off-line app, also a great mobile app on my Nokia would be nice too.  Something like Evernotes, especially because it also integrates images and pictures nicely.

So here is a first take on that quest:

The web apps:

Google Notebook – free and quite nice.  What’s missing is a syncable app on the desktop. Google Gears doen’t work on my AMD64 Ubuntu version (yes, unbelievable…).  Pics are web linked, so Google Picasa could be used for pics, of course Flickr & co as well.  Other Google contenderws could be Google sites (basically a wiki), a private Blogger account and of course Gmail is also a big container of notes as well…

Evernote – I like it, though there is no Ubuntu / Linux client.  A workaround could be the Windows client wrapped up in wine. And Evernote is proprietary and as a premium service unlikely to publish a Linux client any time soon.  Though a local Gears or Adobe Flex client might be a possibility…  What I really like is the container idea.  Just put everything in it, including pictures.  The idea is that you local app syncs with Evernote on the web and the pics are even scanned for texts and indexed.

TiddlyWiki – a personal wiki which works both on your desktop (of course through the browser) and on the web, either through your own web installation or through hosted services like TiddlySpot.  There are even two GTD (Getting Things Done) versions.  Initially I was ready to discard TiddlyWiki , but the more I think about the whole thing, the more I like it.

The desktop apps:

Tomboy is great – in the desktop world.  Yes you can set up a webDAV. Yes, with virtual web disks like dropbox, you can have a web version of tomboy.  Yes, it integrates with Evolution and has a “tasque” task manager addon.  And it has an easy link language comparable to wikis.  A bit like a personal desktop wiki.  Though I am not yet convinced, especially regarding the web side of things.  Maybe an integration with evolution and a sync between evolution and Gmail / Gcontacts / Gcalendar could do the trick… A bit complicated, on the other hand I have to chose a email desktop client anyway.  And the game between Evolution and Thunderbird is still undecided.

KNotes looks nice, a sticky note app.  Of course it is closely linked to the KDE world’s Kontacts. Have to check it out more.  Same for Rhinote.

My very short-lived experience with Vista Business.
This message has been written on Vista’s Notepad and will remain the only productive work ever produced using this system on my machine.

OK I never planned to keep Vista.  But when speaking with Andy, he was impressed that with my 650 EUR Vista Business was included.  So I decided to check it out a bit.  Checking out meant switching it on and well, watching a DVD   Twice the computer went down, only rebooting it allowed me to continue to watch the DVD.  WinDVD never remembered where the film was interrupted, so I had to manually go there.  The second time I switched to Windows media Player. Well, some file was missing and the media player never started ok.  The only way to stop the player was to launch the application manager to brutally stop the media application to get rid of that missing file message

Oh hey did I mention that when switching on the notebook the setup process took more than 90 minutes?  How do I know.  Well, I had to watch the first DVD yesterday on my Mac PB, since switching on and entereing the user name isn’t enough.  My HP Compaq first asked which of the 4 I would like, Vista Business German, German 64, English, English 64.  The language question is OK, though this shouldn’t take long.  But why should I decide 64 or 32? My HP can do 64 and from my short research I gathered that only 64 can handle more than 3Gig of RAM. (What a question in this day and age…).

And then it auto-installed… and went on  and on…. altogether something like 2 hours or more, I didn’t hit a stop watch.  Fortunately with relatively little interaction needed, but why all this drama in the first place?  The MS PC world is always arguing that Windows is so easy and for everebody as opposed to Ubuntu and other Linux flavours.  Even I had to check to decide whther 32 or 54 is apporpriate and if I wanted I am sure that a lot of forum discussion could be found around that issue, and what the drawbacks are….

I bet you, the whole installation process from DVD with Ubuntu will need less time – including the tweaks with Wifi which thanks to a stupid industry is mostly based on proprietary drivers.

If ever the question about whether I should keep Vista along with the Ubuntu installation, that experience clinched it.  Why did I have to pay for having it on the machine in the first place?

Bye, bye Vista. Hello Ubuntu.

You are the hub! The groups, organisations, devices and applications orbit around you. So the design of syncing calendar and contacts should reflect that.  Either you choose a device which is very portable and that you use most of the time or you choose a virtual center of these two resources on the web, your time management and your contacts.  

There is no one-for-all sync solution if connecting

Remember the “mayday, mayday we are sinking” advertising clip.  The response in our case is not the germanic response “what are you sssinking about”, but “what are you syncing with”

Is Google Chat proving very unreliable.  The problems I am seeing with GoogleChat include not seeing any other people on-line, previous chats not being saved to email.  I think that is it!

This article serves as well as a post-it to myself: the search for tools to better organise and leverage our lifes, work including experiences, using and recording memories as well as leveraging those with techniques and technologies. And because we are what we are, we have our unique perspective though we live and exist with others.  The productivity techniques and technologies are best when we can tab the life of others and leverage their experience and findings.  It’s a give and take.  Productivity tools need to collect and process our discoveries, automate that as much as possible and provide ways to use that compilation.  Productivity tools must also connect to tools and their experiences, proactively as well as analytically. (I haven’t bother to test and check my few sentences, might be BS, repetition, pseudo-science, whatever. Please be nice ).

The point here is not to build a scientific basis or a philosphical observation, it is more like a “state of the quest”…

So CRM wise we haven’t much progressed, it is summertime, holidays etc.  Salesforce answered the request for user license donation.  They want legal proof, some kind of documentation, that tickerTXT is either an association, a charity or whatever.  TickerTXT is a startup PROJECT, therefore we can’t get Salesforce donations unless… another charity donates those donated licences to us. I only know one such org and they might need those 10 or so licenses for themselves. And we at tickerTXT don’t have the time to chase anybody or to create an association purely* for the Salesforce donation programm.  Bureaucracy!!!  Stuff it.

Contact management and sharing

So simplicity rules, we are using Google Apps, Google provides a simple contact sharing functionality called Google Contacts (Google product naming is so… whatever). So all we need from GContacts is to be able to run an RSS feed which we can use as well as providing web links from and to contacts for reference and bingo, there is our simplistic but powerful Contact management.  Those feeds and links will be managed through a simple internal Google Sites aahm… site.

For synching I will use SpanningSync, I won’t look any further, the MAC OSX Leopard does allow sharing Mac.Address contacts via iPhone (or a hack), but primo I am still stuck at Tiger and what I really need is to sync it to my personal account as well as a sync a selection of my contacts to our Google Apps.  Spanning sync allows that as well as syncing calendars.  So SpanningSync, you have a new customer…

Of course there are Google Docs, twitter, Google Blogger, Google Calendar, GTDinbox, RememberTheMilk, Flickr/Picasa, Google Apps, Gmail, Gtalk, Skype…  which we already use.  Interesting potential newcomers are:

Scheduling Planning Coordinating

The classic biggies like upcoming.org (Yahoo), eventbrite, amiando, but also mixx & co.  Though in order to process the invitations and coordination, services like Presdo and the like…  We need to combine that with Google Apps Calendar which we need to sync with our own personal environment, Mac, Windows (Andy!  AARrrGgg), Nokia & co.

Notebook, collectors, processers

There is Evernote (web and desktop) and similar though less powerful tools (Zoho Notebook, tiddlywiki, tiddlyspot, monkeyGTD, Google Notebook, journler, MacJournal, for Linux BasketNotePads Tomboy, for web Luminotes, Zim ).  Scanning using camera devices (Nokia & co) , to a lesser extent I also include services like tumblr and soup.io, as well as stumbleupon, del.icio.us, digg, technorati and co.  We need to use and leverage at least some of those tools and services!

BTW

*We are actually thinking of founding an association “to support the development and the project of tickerTXT” which under German law would help us managing small donations and fees, give us some legal grounds and leverages for Salesforce and the like That way we don’t build some “corporate” structures because those might make our lives complicated when launching tickerTXT with substantial equity funding later this year.

Links and more will be added later.  I also think of simply RSS feeding some del.icio.us bookmark.

IBM has finally recognised Ubuntu as a first class Linux ditribution.  And it’s about time, as many customers have long used Ubuntu on their IBM machines as the default OS.  Why? What’s the secret sauce of Ubuntu?

First Ubuntu is unashamed and proud of Linux, server side and most importantly desktop-wise.  Ubuntu has a clear agenda and policy, is backed up by Canonical but independent of “political” machinations. No one fears that a takeover of Canonical would change what Ubuntu stands for.  

And that is in sharp contrast to Novell/Suse.  …

Suse has had a proud customer/community base, however the commercial versions have always been the primary target and therefore they followed the old software licensing model. The desktop with KDE preference looked like a techy version of Windows and was never a focus.  And then Novell changed it’s politics and made a deal with MS in 2006.  Rather than anticipating next generation economics, the management declared it’s preference for the old world, ie short term monetisation through licensing. (Ever tried to license SLES at a decent price?) 

Even Red Hat seemed to be rooted in this old world believe system that business means licensing: yes it’s open source but you need to buy it to get a good deal.

And then came Ubuntu in 2004.  Both Red Hat and Novell came out with their own “free” distributions, Fedora in 2003 (more like a stepchild and a by-product) and OpenSUSE in 2005 (as an answer to Fedora and Ubuntu).  But somehow, both projects feel like an afterthought.  Ubuntu however is genuinely a community project.  Canonicals business is derived from that, not the other way.

This transparency leads to trust and confidence. The desktop approach is fresh and different, not a copycat.  People are proud of using Ubuntu, not defensive.  And they particpate by contributing expertise and experience through forums and blogs. 

The first prominent hardware company to endorse Ubuntu has been Dell.  Now IBM has acknowledged that a lot of admins around the world have been using Ubuntu on their servers for quite some time. Check our stories about installing Lotus Domino on IBM servers running Ubuntu (it seems, that since then, installations have become even easier). And we are not alone: here is another one of many others. 

When people say that one argument pro-Windows is the ease of installation they a) have never really installed a fresh version of Windows and b) have never installed an Ubuntu Linux either.  Just the time it takes to update Windows with all those fixes…  patch-up boys

BTW, after 4 years of proud Apple Powerbook ownership, the author is contemplating buying a non-Mac notebook, not with Vista, please, oh no, with Ubuntu. One of those rare non-glossy 15” screens with WSXGA 1680×1050 recently caught my eyes. Resolution-wise that is better than the MacBook Pro for roughly a third of the price of the Apple 15” laptop. The HP qompaq 6715b can be ordered with FreeDOS instead of Vista – trouble is where?  Most retailers have it only with Windows.  The only issue for Ubuntu on the 6715b seems to be the Wifi support, a classic problem due mostly to proprietary drivers and stupid manufacturers.  More on 6715b with Ubuntu.

The alternative looks like the Dell Inspiron 1525 with a similar but glossy WSXGA screen (though I have only found the 1680×1050 option on the German Dell pages, and only for the Linux version, not the “normal” Windoze 1525, go figure).  The Dell is roughly 300EUR more expensive with the specs I’d like.  That is half the amount of the 6715b, which you can get for the street price of around 600EUR.  The Dell has a slightly better performance due to the Intel Duo Core, but as mentioned before, the screen is glossy, ie less practical.  Advantage of the 1525 is that Ubuntu is pre-installed, no hassles there.

It worked a while, now tickerTXT.org refers to the stupid placeholder page at Gandi.net.

It’s not all bad:

www.tickertxt.org

…works just fine.  Omitting the WWW just doesn’t.  I know, it’s not easy, our DNS management is with Gandi.net, not with Google, though Blogger offers that exact service (or better optional “tick”-selection), see here.

So I’ll have to spend some more time on this grrrhh.  Maybe creating a redirecting webpage for the default tickerTXT.org with Gandi?

Spoiler: this post describes the problem when an Internet domain is is setup for Google Apps AND Google Pages is activated.  If you want to use that domain for Blogger as well instead of the xyzabc.blogspot.com, Blogger refuses to accept that domain with an error message (see below).  (There might be other causes for the error message as suggested here.)

“Another blog is already hosted at this address.”

You wanted to submit something like www.mymegadomain.com in the Blogger publishing settings instead of myverycomplicatedname.blogspot.com.

That is the error message that Blogger gave me for a couple of days, though I had done all the requested changes to the DNS configuration.  At first I thought it was temporary, it often takes time for DNS settings to take effect.  Then I tried again, same message, no time to fully investigate, researched a bit, rechecked settings, no solution, no time, mmhh, postboned. And again… until urgency crept in and it had to be solved…

I remembered my pal Google, incidentally the step-father of blogger.  Over 9000 hits. Mmmh. I am not alone, the reassuring feedback when faced with a problem.

After a couple of sites, eureka, it’s a bug. And a quite old one.  Turns out, it is a problem with the combination of Google Apps (combined with the domain name you want to use for blogger), activrted Google Pages (Google Sites seems innocent) and Blogger.  Google Pages and Blogger apparrently share a table regarding the Google DNS management.  The web, ie Google Groups offered two solutions: a rather months old one and a newer one, both workarounds.  The first one is based on the experience of some bloggers.  A lot back and forth, de-activating Google Pages from Google Apps, then re-activating and a bit more.

Then I found a semi-official Google workaround. Funny enough hat one demonstrates a usage of a public Google spreadsheet as a web form, called the Magical Custom Domain Form.  MMMhh.  Magical, right.

Okay, my Sherlock brain combined: they haven’t solved the bug yet (July 2008), the problem still needs a manual workaround either by a Goggle guy via the form or the DIY de-activation of Google Pages plus… mmmh.

I decided to first try just disabling Google Pages which was activated for trial purposes only.  Waited a bit more than 30 minutes.  And bingo.  After another go to change the publishing setting, it went through, everything is fine.

Message: simply de-activate Google Pages, if you don’t need that service and wait for more than 30 min, maybe a little longer. Then try again submitting your web address for Blogger in the <Publishing> section.  Magical.  Less is more.

If you need to re-activate pages, do it as the blogger in Google Groups suggested. I have no need for Pages, which seems to be orphaned within Google anyway, Blogger is much better and powerful as a customisable Google web hosting solution.  Google Sites is more practical especially for intranets, the user friendly wiki Intrathingy. Blogger offers so much manipulation of the HTML and CSS code (search for anything you want to do, strip it of blogger elements, new templates, Javascript whatever), that you can basically use blogger as a powerful CMS system, hosted for free.  It would be nice to be able to combine Blogger and Google Sites more easily, especially using the logins of Google Apps etc.  But boy, the combination of Picasa (heck even Flickr), blogger, widgets, Google Sites, Google Analytics, Google Apps, Gmail, Calendar, App Engine is damn attractive. Search for specific solutions, there are so many scripts, workarounds, tricks, APIs available, the problem is not if they exist but rather, will I find the right one in the masses of possibilities.

Oh and before I forgot, I wondered how to point the domain default without the “www” prefix to the blogger site as well.  Problem is, your DNS wants the default to be an IP number, not a domain.

Once the www.mysuperdomain.com is accepted, Blogger offers the option to use the domain setting without the “www” as well, hurray, next headache prevented.

In the previous post I described how we went from “just buying new DECT phones” and the idea of integrating 2 S0 ISDN” lines, combining them with VoIP and Skype to the discovery of new concepts such as virtual PBXes, also named netPBX or hosted PBX solutions.

I had to let that sink in.  The biggest bummers are: more than one single ISDN feed makes PBX blackboxes such as Belkin or AVM Fritzboxes much more expensive than the classic all-in-one boxes including PBX/WiFi/Router. Those boxes usually only feature a single S0 Basic Rate Interface (BRI)  with a single ISDN line allowing two parallel calls.  Also those wonderboxes usually do not support Skype for phone handsets.  So here is our current thinking for our 2 test cases, the association with a small office and the startup with currently no office…

PBX box for the office (association)

Either keep current one o replace with low cost SoHo box with interesting features, such as an AVM Fritzbox, which is easire to setup. Also SIP (VoIP) is supported, which may help to reduce the monthly costs.

Virtual PBX (association and startup)

A netPBX or hosted PBX is interesting, because we can easily ditribute calls to team members and their landlines or mobile phones with moderate costs.  By using some clever deals and tools (such as Gizmo) we might reduce significantly our costs of communication within the team.  We are still discovering the opportunities, so if you got further ideas and experiences, don’t hesitate to leave a cmment.

Skype (association sometimes, startup uses Skype frequently)

The Skype problem is it’s non-standard technology, meaning, it is not SIP.  There are 2 ways: the first is to use Skype 3rd party products and services to route Skype calls into a VoIP PBX (SIP).  This is low cost.  So we might eitherroute it to the virtual PBX or in the case of the association, it might also be a new cheap PBX with integrate VoIP (SIP).  The second otion is to by DECT handsets which have Skype integraiton, so we are using a normal PBX setup and the personalised handsets connect directly to Skype va LAN, WAN and the boadband connectoin of the network to Skype.  What is more practical?  It may depend on the address book functionality and integration.

Mobile phone services

So far we have tried a few, some which need a special software (such as Skype and VoIP services) and others which use a go-between service, such as callback or conferencing.  The tricky part is that we are spread through different countries, sometimes 3G sometimes barely correct GSM connections.

Skype has been surprisingly good using the FRING client.  We have used advertising go-betweens, the quality was usually below Skype or VoIP and setting up the call was a tad to tedious, connections often failed.  Cellity and others have provided a decent qualty.  Ideally it woul be a service at very low cost, including SMS.  The service should be working regardless of where we are. Conferencing might be very useful.

We have to check out a few interesting contenders like Jajah.

We will look into integrating the mobile services with a virtual PBX.