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Final MWSF Tidbits: Things, Ampli-Phone, Music Skins, Psyclops
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$50 for a fancy to-do list. No thanks. Sorry if I get flamed for that one. When I first saw it, I thought...cool A to-do, calendar,PDA style transfer files to iphone all-in-one, but nope, just a fancy "to-do" organizer with the look of itunes. Ugh I'll stick with my free to-do app from itunes app store. 
EDIT: Oh I forgot. The app icon for Things looks like they ripped off file magnet because they are very similar.
EDIT: Oh I forgot. The app icon for Things looks like they ripped off file magnet because they are very similar.
I'm experimenting with GTD at the moment, and like the look and ease of use of Things. It just really is not ready for a $50 release. It still lacks several things that users have been pleading for for months, even when they seem really simple to implement. I'm no coding expert, but I'd have thought if they can do recurring tasks in 'Areas', they could easily implement that feature in 'Projects'? And the communication is lousy- they hired a communications officer in October and he has written two blog posts since. Currently the most recent posting is Nov. 11th...
Also the iPod version keeps unticking my completed to-dos. It's a bit annoying.
A previous poster downgraded to an earlier version of Things Beta. I'm thinking about doing the same thing- didn't see that many changes as the developers make sloths seem pacy. Am I right in thinking that those betas will 'self-destruct' in T-11 days though?
I like Things, I'm tempted, but it's a lot of money for a half-finished product without any clear roadmap or timeline for fleshing out the project.
Also the iPod version keeps unticking my completed to-dos. It's a bit annoying.
A previous poster downgraded to an earlier version of Things Beta. I'm thinking about doing the same thing- didn't see that many changes as the developers make sloths seem pacy. Am I right in thinking that those betas will 'self-destruct' in T-11 days though?
I like Things, I'm tempted, but it's a lot of money for a half-finished product without any clear roadmap or timeline for fleshing out the project.
Not to go all Econ 101 on you, but the fact that you are going to buy it at $50 by definition means that you think it's worth that amount.
Remember that $10 off coupon:
Coupon Code: THINGSPRESALE20
(valid through January 15th, 2009)
Why I am seriously considering a move back to Windows...
Because software programs and devices that I want to work fail to in OS X. There is no excuse to not be able to sync my BlackBerry device (that my work provides and requires) to my MacBook. Missing Sync does not work properly, and frankly, this is something that Apple should find a solution for if it wants to be serious about people using Macs for anything outside of photos and video.
I am also sick not being able to play decent games on my Mac, and when I resort to very old ones (Diablo 2 for instance), the new Mac OS X update breaks compatibility. And no, I don't plan to hack my MacBook for sake of playing one game.
I am sick of paying extreme premiums for a laptop when serviceable ones are available with more features at half the price. One only needs to look at a Best Buy ad to see what I am talking about.
My original reasons for buying a Mac (working with photos and videos) have not been as compelling with the rise of as good third party options on the PC.
Finally, I am sick of the crazy Mac fan boys who seem to exhibit some Napoleon complex about a company that can honestly give a crap about them.
I am giving my MacBook one more year before I shovel dirt on its plastic ass.
Because software programs and devices that I want to work fail to in OS X. There is no excuse to not be able to sync my BlackBerry device (that my work provides and requires) to my MacBook. Missing Sync does not work properly, and frankly, this is something that Apple should find a solution for if it wants to be serious about people using Macs for anything outside of photos and video.
I am also sick not being able to play decent games on my Mac, and when I resort to very old ones (Diablo 2 for instance), the new Mac OS X update breaks compatibility. And no, I don't plan to hack my MacBook for sake of playing one game.
I am sick of paying extreme premiums for a laptop when serviceable ones are available with more features at half the price. One only needs to look at a Best Buy ad to see what I am talking about.
My original reasons for buying a Mac (working with photos and videos) have not been as compelling with the rise of as good third party options on the PC.
Finally, I am sick of the crazy Mac fan boys who seem to exhibit some Napoleon complex about a company that can honestly give a crap about them.
I am giving my MacBook one more year before I shovel dirt on its plastic ass.
Not to go all Econ 101 on you, but the fact that you are going to buy it at $50 by definition means that you think it's worth that amount.
Hmm, I'd say there's a bit of a difference between what you're prepared to pay for something you might decide you need and what you consider a fair price... If a monopoly provider of water decided to charge $20,000 p/a for water then I'd have to pay it, but I wouldn't think it's a fair price. The fair price takes into consideration how much it costs to produce, time involved etc. The market price is often massively distorted by things like the availability of credit and inequalities. In this case, because GTD has such a following among executives for whom $60 is nothing, the price is artificially high, in my opinion. Still, it's better than $100 for Omnifocus' Heath Robinson app!
Things is a RIP-OFF!
You have to spend a combined total of $60 if you want to be able to synchronize Things with your computer. Things is a good program, but it's definitely not worth $60. Things is useless without being able to sync to your computer. It seems like the developers have posted their own positive comments in this thread.
If you want a BETTER alternative, you should use "Todo". It's a 4-star rating, it costs the same as the Things iPhone app, which is $9.99, but you do not have to pay the ADDITIONAL $50 to be able to sync it to your computer. It's Free! Todo is also more aesthetically pleasing. Things is only a 3 1/2-star rating.
Be Smart, not Impulsive.
You have to spend a combined total of $60 if you want to be able to synchronize Things with your computer. Things is a good program, but it's definitely not worth $60. Things is useless without being able to sync to your computer. It seems like the developers have posted their own positive comments in this thread.
If you want a BETTER alternative, you should use "Todo". It's a 4-star rating, it costs the same as the Things iPhone app, which is $9.99, but you do not have to pay the ADDITIONAL $50 to be able to sync it to your computer. It's Free! Todo is also more aesthetically pleasing. Things is only a 3 1/2-star rating.
Be Smart, not Impulsive.
The more things Apple designs for the 8-14 year old market the more they are poisoning our youth. Kids should be out playing in the yard or at the park, not going crazy without their ipod touch or iphone.
100% agree. I grew up with a Commodore 64, but if my friends called about playing some basketball, I was gone !.
Now, they put activites on hold for games and tech gear. Bad idea. I myself used a computer / nintendo etc from about 7-11. Then concentrated on school and sports. It wasnt until i was about 20 that I got back into computers and gaming.
Tech can suck u in. Like most things......moderation is key.
I'm not saying everyone should follow this guide line. Just watch it with all this Tech.
True, but you were talking about worth. If it's not worth the asking price then don't buy it. It's that simple and comparisons to a different type of product in a different type of market don't change that.
Cultured Code is a small, German indie developer with five employees. Unless you expect them to eat nothing but ramen noodles and live in a tent, I'm not sure that expectations of a, say, $5 program are based in reality. The company develops two programs (three with the iPhone app) and have spent many, many man hours developing these programs. What do you know about their expenses and the market they are in to be able to claim that the price is artificially high?
Things and Sycning
I just ponied up the $40 for Things on the Desktop and am very happy with the release. For software I use everyday, the price is fine. I bought the iPhone app months ago and it has been solid--few if any crashes and nearly trouble free syncing.
I do wish they provided an over the air syncing solution, but the current wifi solution works well. Yes, you do have to open both Things on the Mac and Things on the iPhone at the same time, but that's all you have to do. There's no need for hitting a sync button or even thinking about it more than that. Better, if you leave Things open on the iPhone, even if the phone goes to sleep, it keeps updating your Things database as you go. Since I leave Things open on the Mac all the time, all i do to stay in sync is remember to open Things on the iPhone when I plug it in for the night. In the morning, things are all ready to go.
I just ponied up the $40 for Things on the Desktop and am very happy with the release. For software I use everyday, the price is fine. I bought the iPhone app months ago and it has been solid--few if any crashes and nearly trouble free syncing.
I do wish they provided an over the air syncing solution, but the current wifi solution works well. Yes, you do have to open both Things on the Mac and Things on the iPhone at the same time, but that's all you have to do. There's no need for hitting a sync button or even thinking about it more than that. Better, if you leave Things open on the iPhone, even if the phone goes to sleep, it keeps updating your Things database as you go. Since I leave Things open on the Mac all the time, all i do to stay in sync is remember to open Things on the iPhone when I plug it in for the night. In the morning, things are all ready to go.
iPhone Stand in Pscyclops Photo?
Can anyone tell me what stand is being used in that photo? It looks like something I've been searching for. I don't believe it is the Naja King but I could be wrong.
Can anyone tell me what stand is being used in that photo? It looks like something I've been searching for. I don't believe it is the Naja King but I could be wrong.
I wasn't saying anything about $5 for Things. I'm not someone who feels cheated when digital goods aren't free, or next to free. On the contrary, I think many of the apps in the app store are artificially low, and even feel slightly embarrassed about paying just 59p for what seems like someone's labour of love.
I know who CC are, (though I don't understand why their number or nationality are particularly relevant, unless it is to induce fuzzy feelings towards indies and awe about their penalty-taking prowess?) and I like their product; I'm just saying that if the number of people into GTD was the same but they were dispersed across a broad cross-section of society, rather than being concentrated in the ranks of the wealthy and those of the umbilically-joined-to-computers, then the price would be lower. That hypothesis is, of course, pretty untestable.
If the combined price for the 2 apps (not three-I'm not interested in the other one) were, say $30-35 then I'd think I was getting a fair deal, and I'd probably evangelise about Things to my friends. As it is, if I do cough up for Things it would be rather grudgingly, and I would be a bit wary about recommending it to my friends. I don't think I'm alone in this, either.
The only way I would feel confident handing over $60 for Things is if I could rely on CC. If they had a record of regular, non-buggy updates and a published timeline saying what purchasers can expect, and the deadlines the team will do their best to meet. But CC are, to put it as politely as I can, in danger of slipping into parody. They have a Communications Officer who cannot communicate, and are a 'Getting Things Done' team that can't Get Things Done. 1.0 was supposed to be released last Spring, they still haven't implemented basic features on both apps, and they've only just put out their third update for Things Touch (which still lacks the major selling point of Areas.) I'm sure they are putting the man-hours in, but they don't seem to be making particularly efficient use of them. They should charge for the amount they can chew, rather than the amount they can bite off.
There is no such thing as fair in economics. If you bought something, no matter how much you complained about it, it was a fair price because you were willing to pay that much. If a monopoly provider of water decided to charge that much, and you truly thought it wasn't a fair price, you would enter a secondary market (aka black market), because you would calculate that the cost of the risk of imprisonment plus the cost of black market water would be less than the cost of primary market water. Overall, that's a bad analogy because water is not truly a scarce good (you can always move next to a stream), nor would a company deliberately price itself out of a market (even if it was a monopoly).
Leaving aside the unfortunate phrasing in that first sentence, I just don't understand this reliance on homo economicus. To homo sapiens, it's a fair price if both parties are happy because they each believe they are showing respect to the other party and being respected by the other party. If one side feels extremely cheated, and thus disrespected, then they may do all kinds of crazy things without too much concern for the consequences, other than a desire to see the other guy's face when he does the terrible thing. Now clearly, nothing on anything like this scale is happening with Cultured Code, I'm just illustrating the principle. A 'fair price' does exist, though I'm not saying the figure I plucked out of the air is necessarily it. Humans are really not as calculating as you seem to think, aristokrat.
A GTD app is clearly not as important as water(!), so yes, it's not a great analogy, but I think you'd be interested in reading about what happened when Bechtel privatised the water suppy in Bolivia, and raised the rates crazily high. It's also predicted that there'll be wars over freshwater in the future, and also I doubt whether many people would trust untreated water from streams these days...
The iPhone runs Mac OS X.
As for Mini and the other Mac hardware, I have a crate full of Mac OS6 and 7 diskettes that nothing Apple still makes will run. Is it still a Mac?
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It's ridiculously huge. And for what? A 10 decibel gain. Griffin makes a much more attractive package that does the exact same thing: the AirCurve. Even though the AirCurve is much smaller, it still produces a 10 decibel gain with similar frequency response. (There's not much that can be done to improve the frequency response of the iPhone's tiny speaker anyway.) I have the AirCurve and I'm please with how it works. But don't expect sumptuous sound from either product.
I strongly disagree. I have been using it in beta for months now and have the iPhone app as well. As a GTD system it's more than simply a todo app.
There are many reasons why someone will pay an excessively high price for something. That doesn't justify the price.
Things is way to expensive for such a simple app. Thank god I don't need it.
I mostly agree with this. Although a human brain can do some limited calculation (with training, education and practice), most people rarely use that capability. They just act on various impulses, which can often be influenced by irrelevant criteria.
By the same token, most people probably don't actually calculate or even think much about whether they made a "fair" (or better) exchange when they buy something. That's just an inference to homogenize population behavior, and draw some theoretical conclusions. So a "fair price" is just another (perhaps useful in some forms of analysis) theoretical fiction, as in "assume a spherical cow...".
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I guess I am insane then.
I don't it that big a deal to sync once in the morning and once in the evening. In between I am doing everything on my iphone pretty much.
I do agree that they should extend the RC and the 20% discount.
What does justify the price (any price) is that there exist legally competent adults who will actually pay it, completely voluntarily, e.g. without a gun to their head or some-such.
(I saw a bidding war on eBay over something that I had recently thrown one of in the dumpster with a "good riddance". Who would have thought?...)
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Understatement
That is the understatement of the year. 200-4000Hz frequency response? The output from that horn will sound VERY similar to the old-style wax phonographs from the turn of the 19th century.
You're MUCH better off buying a $30 pair of amplified PC speakers and plugging them into the headphone jack. At least then you might hear audio outside of the telephone frequency response curve.
I, for one, am incredibly surprised they actually posted a frequency response curve. That same curve, extended for the entire frequency range they tested (20Hz-50kHz) would look like a tiny speed bump.
C'mon, people! That might fly for PC users, but Apple users are a lot more intelligent and knowledgeable about these things.
That is the understatement of the year. 200-4000Hz frequency response? The output from that horn will sound VERY similar to the old-style wax phonographs from the turn of the 19th century.
You're MUCH better off buying a $30 pair of amplified PC speakers and plugging them into the headphone jack. At least then you might hear audio outside of the telephone frequency response curve.
I, for one, am incredibly surprised they actually posted a frequency response curve. That same curve, extended for the entire frequency range they tested (20Hz-50kHz) would look like a tiny speed bump.
C'mon, people! That might fly for PC users, but Apple users are a lot more intelligent and knowledgeable about these things.