03/09/2010

Using Vodafone Mobile Connect with Snow Leopard (10A432)

26/08/2009 By Ralf 28 Comments

h1107Preface: I love to get in touch with my readers. Are you on Twitter? Follow me @24z please!

If you happen to be a The Next Web subscriber, you might have stumbled across my How-to-get-Snow-Leopard-early article. I’ve been running Snow Leopard for a while and the speed improvements on my MacBook Pro (one of the latest unibody models) alone are a reason to upgrade every one of my iMacs within the next two days.

While 99% of my software library has always been working fine for all previous updates, I regularly ran into severe issues with Vodafone’s Mobile Connect hard- and software. As far as I am concerned Vodafone Germany never managed to get out a software update in time. In fact, I occasionally had to wait for 8-12 weeks until I could use my UMTS modem on a new operating system. For a corporation which claims to always be at the edge of technology it’s a shame.

And again, my Vodafone Mobile Connect card did not work on Snow Leopard. It started with obscure error message during install and ended with the device not being found.

Twitter tipster @svhennig pointed me to the solution:

The Austrian A1 website offers a version of the “Mac OS Dashboard Software” which works absolutely perfect on Snow Leopard. Though the system requirements state “Leopard 10.5.0 – 10.5.6″ I can confirm Version 3.04.01.00 (14,6 MB) is fully working on 10A432 with Vodafone Germany. This is the direct download link. (Version 3.04.06.00 seems to be available, too. I did not try it. In case you’ve been successful, please leave a comment.)

Thanks to Sven sharing the link. Hope it helps others, too.

If you’d like to get more random thoughts about Snow Leopard, iPhone Development and everything else from me, start following me on Twitter.

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Filed Under: All Things Apple

Calling Linus Torvalds to build a new social network aka Facebook acquires FriendFeed.

10/08/2009 By Ralf 6 Comments

nlc_kleinToday marks an important day in the short history of social networks or – as you might prefer to call it – the real-time web: Facebook announced the definitive agreement to acquire FriendFeed. As the FriendFeed founders have put it, they’ve accepted Facebook’s friend request.

While the internet is a buzz about these breaking news, it’s sad news for me.

A quick glimpse at FriendFeed right after the announcement it appears to me, that the majority of FriendFeeders seem to dislike the idea of being forced to become Facebook users for what FriendFeed delivered to them, as well; some have even started to cancel their accounts.

It’s very likely only a matter of time until Facebook kills FriendFeed as a product, slightly “adjusts” content ownership policies and starts using the FriendFeed history for behavioral analysis and “targeted” ads. We’ve all seen this before.

To me it reemphasizes the need for a community owned, community driven, non-commercial platform. This might sound stupid, but it has worked before with programming and scripting languages, version control solutions and even entire operating systems. There’s no obvious reason why it shouldn’t work for stuff that forms the real-time web.

Having sold my own company, which did enterprise communication solutions, to Alcatel in 2008, I can very much understand the founders motivation to agree to the deal. But this only strengthens my point: At a certain time any founder will be offered enough money, to agree to the deal of his lifetime. And even if they claim not to, we might see Twitter being acquired in the near future, too.

Ultimately the only solution might be, to ask Linus Torvalds to do us one more favor and kick off a real-time web platform, that let’s us build a social network that can stand commercial interests and ask the Gates Foundation to fund it. If Linda and Bill don’t come to our rescue, we might ask users to voluntarily donate in favor of guaranteed privacy.

I’d love to see how that “business model” would work out.

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Filed Under: Opinion Tagged With: facebook, FriendFeed, linus torvalds

The Day our iPhone app ranked #1 in Highlights!

04/08/2009 By Ralf 1 Comment

AppStoreHighlightsI’ve recently release an emergency pharmacy finder for German iPhone owners [iTunes link].

In Germany 2.000 of a total number of 21.500 pharmacies are on emergency duty each day, available for 24 hours. The problem the app solves is how to quickly find the nearest available pharmacy on duty in case of an emergency.

Other location based apps, like “Telefonbuch”, “Around Me” or “Meine Stadt” provide users with the nearest pharmacy, too. However, they don’t take into account whether the drugstore is open or closed. In case of an emergency you might very well end up standing in front of closed doors, using one of these to find the nearest pharmacy.

The app, which has been conceptualized and designed by aperto move and developed for the iPhone via my personal holding acceleract GmbH, has experienced tremendous acceptance by iPhone users across Germany.

I’m very happy to report that today it entered the top #1 position in Apple’s “Highlights” section.

This drives the application to the default front page of the mobile and the desktop iTunes App Store and I’m eager to find out how this might impact application deployment.

Given that more sources claim that the App Store is only about games these days, it’s good to find out that an application which delivers true value can still make it into top positions within days. (“Apotheken” ranks #3 in “Utilities” and  #29 #20 #8 #7 in “Top Paid Apps”.)

Numerous iPhone Developers have asked via Twitter, why we’ve not chosen to go the EUR 0,79 route.

The rationale is simple: For once I personally very much dislike the trend to offer your app almost for free, just to get into the charts. Nobody can produce a quality iPhone application and give it away for nothing AND feel happy with it.

Second: Maintaining and updating the list of pharmacies which are on duty for every single day is a manual and time consuming task. We believe, it’s in fact really worth a one-time fee of EUR 2,39 – maybe even more.

Last but not least: I never really understood the pricing debate itself at all. The iPhone is not the best value-for-money cellphone you can get if you focus solely on hardware specs, yet we all love it and happily pay for it. We frequently pay more than 3 Euros for two glasses of diet coke. Why do we even think that purchasing an app which took a fair amount of time in design, development, testing and support should cost less than two drinks? :-)

With that said, I’d like to thank all customers for supporting “Apotheken”, the great amount of feedback and positive reviews and hope to stay in touch!

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Filed Under: News