Blasi Blah

Yet again groups of iPhone owners complain because they are morons with a weird sense of entitlement.  If you recall the first outcry just after the 2Gen was announced and the price drop was made on the first gen iPhones which prompted Apple to give a $100 store credit to customers.

Now in reading some of the comments to this Engadget post I find yet again that iPhone users are still heavy in their sense of deserving and that everything should be given to them because they paid for a device several years ago.

A few of the Anti-Sentiments:

That’s some excellent customer service right there. Apple really knows how to keep its customers.
dreamerkm

Welcome to Apple’s intention for all of its devices. They have been doing this since the days of the iPod. Apple’s ultimate goal is to make these things expensive enough to make them a crap load of money, yet cheap enough so when they come out with the next model and say no software for ju…people will shrug and go buy another iFad. This has been Apple’s goal for years and they they suck *** worse then Microsoft ever did.
John Doe

A few of the Realistic Views:

Yes on the one hand, it isn’t that hard for them to upgrade the iPhone, given the hardware similarities.

However, even though I am by no means an Apple lover (maybe even a hater in some case), even I can see that they have absolutely NO obligation to update your phone. Most manufacturers don’t even give you ONE update, much less multiple ones over three years (even for smart phones). So Apple has actually has been quite good on updates. I think as Anatidae says above, it was actually Apple that set the trend of updating phones. Now everyone expects smartphones to be continually upgraded and I think Apple played a big part in that.

The contention is the cutoff point. I think 2 years after the last date it was official up for sale is a good cutoff point (since usually that is the contract ending date). Of course, logically the cutoff point is when the hardware actually doesn’t support it anymore (which could be shorter or longer than 2 years, depending on the hardware).

Jakey

What’s the problem here? The 3 yr old iPhone will continue to work exactly as it always has. You want a better phone? Go and buy one. Don’t sit around bitching that the manufacturer won’t upgrade your 3 year old phone for free. You already got 3 years of upgrades for nothing on an 18 month contract. I had 5 phones before the iphone and I never got any OS upgrades to any of them. Ever.

What’s the alternative, ask Apple to stop pouring money into new hardware and instead put it into upgrading old technology? We’d all be living with upgraded brick phones with that mentality and never progress. Hate to tell you but, when new stuff comes out, the old stuff is….old. Don’t expect it to magically get better.

Putzy

The complaint is that the 1st Gen iPhone will not get the OS4 update.  Well I guess if you want it call me and I’ll install it, when your phone runs extremely slow look in the mirror and smack yourself in the face.

Fact is operating systems as they grow larger and more feature rich require more system resources to run those tasks.  We do not complain when computer operating system force hardware upgrades, but it seems when a SmartPhone does its blasphemy.

You will see the same thing happen with the Android, Palm, Winmo phones as well during their life spans.

For a more practical example, dose your Windows 98 machine support Windows Vista?  Is Snow Leopard running on your iBook? The answer is no, could you get it on there, well maybe in some cases but it will run ridiculously slow and remove any practical use for the machine.

Another example for those console gamers, did you complain when the PS3 came out that it’s games would not work on your Playstation? Is Sony evil for this?  Is Microsoft evil because you cannot play Xbox 360 games on an orignial Xbox?

I also look at this, for 3 years the 1st Gen iPhone users have been receiving free Operating system upgrades would you rather switch to the PC model and pay for each new upgrade?  You cannot argue it is unfair, since you as a 1st Gen owner got 3 free upgrades, the 3GS owner has not yet had any.

Technology changes, older technology cannot support many of the newer features you find today.  When you consider there is more memory in your phone today than your computer 15 years ago had as pure storage you can see the way resources change what you can do.

So yet again we find another reporter who cannot remain unbiased in their efforts report the news. Now Kara Swisher yet again shows how she would rather report on controversy and try to fan a flame with one sided arguments.

Check out her interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch. While Kevin spends the time trying to speak about their product and hopes for the future, Kara would rather spend the time talking about “apple sugar” and how bad Apple is. As Kevin says it is not just about Adobe, Kara jumps in and says “yeah it’s about Adobe”.

Instead of going over the full issue, let’s just poke at part of it. The fact is that the issue between Adobe & Apple is not one sided by any means, there are changes and compromises that should be made on both sides. There are good arguments being made by both companies for and against the decisions being made on the iPhoneOS so why not report the entire story.

I find it so frustrating to listen to her in this interview with such an extreme apparent biased on the issue.

So as I suspected, Google has changed their graphic again this time representing couples figure skating.

This being the case, I think I will stick to my previous conclusion into Google’s change from the Luge graphic.  While I may still be wrong I think the evidence currently available supports the scheduled changed rather than that of public opinion change.

So here is what is going on:

There was a horrible accident during practice at the winter Olympics in Vancouver where 21-year old Georgian luge competitor Nodar Kumaritashvili died while practicing on the world’s longest luge drop.

After this Google in typical fashion had a logo graphic featuring the Olympics, in this instance the Luge events were pictured. (shown below)

Shortly after making it way online the public decided this was in bad taste due to the events of the previous day.  There were Twitter posts, Facebook comments, blog posts all bashing Google for poor taste and judgment.  At the same time there were two other views I saw which appeared in slightly lower numbers, those views being that it was a good tribute and that it really made no difference at all.

Here is the current graphic as of this post:

Personally I tend to fit into the later, I simply do not see the huge issue of the graphic.  Before I get a ton of hate mail, I agree the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili is a horrible tragedy and not something to joke about in any way.

I think hitting Google for the graphic on their site is really just a cry for attention by those who are feeling lonely behind their screens, the fact is that Google on a regular basis creates custom homepage graphics to publicize events happening around the world.  A few additional examples of this include the Sesame Street anniversary week graphics, New Years, Christmas, Thanksgiving and the list goes on.

Now I read by Samuel Axon on Mashable that “Individual sensibilities differ regarding this, but Google apparently decided to play it safe by replacing the logo.” which was in response to the article “Google yanks luge-themed search page after torrent of slams from Web’s poor taste police” by Larry Mcshane of NYDailyNews.com.

In all of these articles no one ever mentions or even considers that Google may have planned on pulling the logo at that time.  Considering that they created an entirely new logo I would seem to thing that it was planned or they called in a designer last min as an emergency.  While either is possible there are no facts to claim either side, so reporters in typical fashion take the emotional site and play it up until they cannot find anything else to say.  Just another example of professional reporters for major news networks reporting what they feel without having ALL the facts to justify it.

While I am not surprised to see this on NYDailyNews.com as I have been noticing it more and more over the last 18 months, but I am surprised Mashable staff writers had no  thought to consider Google’s regularly changing logo and homepage graphics during memorable and historic events.

Today I woke up to check the sites I worked on that I was getting ready to submit to a few awards and when I got to PlayPumps.org I at first thought something happened to the DNS or the site template on Backbaud Sphere (Kintera Sphere) only to finally find out they did it on purpose.

Here is the site Before (left) & After (right):

PlayPumps.org was the main site for PlayPumps International, with the primary portion of the site hosted on Kintera Sphere (now Blackbaud Sphere) which manages all of their online forms, donation and constituency as well as most of their content web pages.

The blog, gallery, and the videos were all managed on a sub domain blog.playpumps.org which was running an instance of WordPress which I had customized while working for Changing Our World Inc.

The blog functioned straight forward like a blog, that is the main tool in WordPress anyway so the only change there was to styling and layout. For the gallery the Flickr API was used to create a custom layout and pull in all of the photos, comments and tags used on Flickr. The images could then link to a larger version in a light box or to the original image in Flickr whichever they decided. The video was all YouTube based, so using their API I pulled in all of the information you could see or want from YouTube including the video, rating, YouTube link, embed code for the video and the description used on YouTube for the video.

On the PlayPumps homepage there was a nice flash element that rotated through 4 tabs which could have their text and content changed via an XML document on the server. This means by editing a single XML file they can change the text on the tabs, the link to the button and the url for the image. Also in the flash was a sample pump, basically it was the pump on the left with a water tower on the right, the tower filling based on a value in the XML file to the level of donations received.

In the end this is all gone, and what is going on no one knows. There has been no outward communication from PlayPumps or parent Case Foundation about the changes happening at PlayPumps International. The only news is that they are investing in Water for People (waterforpeople.org).

After all of the brainstorming, strategies, suggestions and helping hands held out to them, it has all be denied. Anyway, it seems my hopes for this organization are falling away faster and faster…