An informative article for webshop owners this time, all about how to make people blog about your company. Everything you need to know about online customers, the power of the internet, and how good old moral values still work and can be leveraged to your advantage. Or not.
This weekend I tinkered around with Apple Keynote. I thought I’d make something useful. In this video I’m trying to show you how much money the bank makes on your mortgage. Banks like you to pay a low monthly fee on your mortgage because it keeps the loan higher for a longer period of time. This way the bank can cash in on the interest rate, and then cash in again at the end of the mortgage contract, when you are still hopelessly in debt.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI6N583mBEw]
“Financial advisors” working for the bank will throw sand in your eyes, saying that keeping your debt high gives you all kinds of tax breaks. But in the end, it’s them who get better of that construction, not you. Don’t fall into this trap. Understand your mortgage contract, learn how the model works, and check your model against the bank’s model (without that financial advisor or the lady at the helpdesk talking to you). You have more room than you think. Use it.
True to their tradition on the Mac, the Calendar and Addressbook applications on the iPhone are, let’s say “lacking finesse”. As good as Apple can design products and user interfaces, their focus is clearly not on calendars and address books. I’ve read somewhere that “iCal is proof that Steve does not maintain his own calendar”.
After trying out various replacements on the iPhone, I finally stuck with a pretty darn good calendar for the iPhone called “Week Calendar”. The main reason for switching to that app is that it actually has a week view, but when I started using it more intensely I found myself using the month view the most. Until somebody at Apple stopped the show.
Dear Apple,
I am truly sorry for the huge loss and wish every Apple employee, family, and friends of Steve strength in these tough times. Through Apple, Steve improved the lives of many people in the world, including mine. By hiring great people and (re)building the Apple brand, he will continue to do so even long after his death. Steve lives on in all of us.
“Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Joining our virtual group hug,
Rolf
Dear Tim,
I am certainly not the first, nor the last to congratulate you with your new position at Apple. I’m sure there will be many great things to come for Apple and it’s customers.
Apple has become the doctor that doesn’t fix the pain, but cures the illness and improves our daily digital lives. Please make sure Apple keeps it’s focus, perseverance and good taste in the endless search for true quality.
Tell Steve and Jony I said hi, and keep up the good work. If there’s anything I can help you with, you know how to reach me 😉
Cheers,
Rolf
This weekend I tried to add beat markers to a video for a colleague. But the beat marker menu option was grayed out, and I spent some time searching for the “Clip Trimmer” everybody was talking about. I was in a bit of a hurry and all the right-clicks, top menu, gear-icon popup menus, and shortcuts made me overlook the thing I was looking for. Maybe you overlooked it too. It’s not much of a tutorial, but if you need to add beat markers to your background music, here’s how to get to the correct “Clip Trimmer” in iMovie ’11.
You know how it is on vacation. You take your camera, shoot pictures, and when you get home you see that you forgot to set the date/time on your camera. Even worse: your wife also took a camera with her, and she actually read the manual and set the time correctly. So now you have two sets of photos with mismatching date/times. Now what?
It turns out that there is actually a pretty simple trick to solve this, and you don’t even haven to install exiftool or do funny command line voodo. If you have iPhoto and a mouse, here’s what you do:
I was happily playing around with the appstore, and came across this funny free game called “Hedgewars”. Originally a free Linux game, it apparently got ported to the Mac and put in the App Store, just as a slew of Flash-based games (yes, Steve has some ‘splainin’ to do).
I tried to install Hedgewars on my trusty Mac Mini and got this message saying “This Application can not be installed on this machine”:
If Santa treated you particularly well this season, or you have put some of your savings to good use, chances are that you have a brand-new Drobo looking at you right now. Meanwhile, your Mac is happily making Time Machine backups to that trusty old local USB disk. So you want to use that new Drobo for Time Machine backups, but don’t want to loose history? Here’s how (baby steps, no tools required, screenshots included):
Stephen needs a new car. Being dilligent and a car lover, he takes the time to write down all criteria for a great car. When he finishes the list, he notices that the only car matching all his criteria is a Ferrari. Well, he always loved a Ferrari so that makes sense. To make things more realistic he adds another criteria, called “price”, and starts looking for alternatives.