Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

No one can blame me that I am anti-Apple. I own more Apple products than Microsoft. I have 2 ipods, an iPhone, a Mac Mini in our house’s living room, I have some AAPL shares in my portfolio and recently I put my hands on a MacBook Pro. I thought that after 15 years or so on a PC, the time has come to fully migrate.

I’ve installed plenty of utils (thank you versiontracker.com). I’ve learned by heart tens of shortcuts. I’ve even got used to looking for the [x] button on the top left corner. But, after two weeks on a Mac as my primary work machine I have to admit that I still find it very difficult to get used to the fact that some basic applications, such that I have been using every day, are missing or partially available on a Mac, and that there is no good alternative. In many cases, I feel 50% less productive than I used to be on a PC.

Here are a few examples — in case you have answers or suggestions to some of these issues, please leave  them in the comments section:

1. Entourage is a terrible email client compared to Outlook. Plenty of basic features are missing (I don’t know where to begin…). It is also very slow and feels like Outlook Express v 2.0 to me.

2. Spotlight cannot index my Outlook PST files. From what I have been reading, the only way to overcome this issue is to import the PST files into Entourage. But then I would end up with a huge and slow inbox. Am I missing some hidden plug-in or am I expected to give up years of email archive?

3. MS Office in general, and PowerPoint in particular, for Mac is bad, really bad. On Powerpoint for example, If you need to edit/open/edit presentations made on PowerPoint you are in serious trouble. Fonts do no render properly, print is almost impossible and the overall experience is really slow. Yes, I have Keynote installed and it is amazing, but when you are part of a company that has a majority of PC users, I have no choice but using Office.

4. I need to have ability to run IE7 (or my favorite Maxthon). There are many sites that are not compatible with FF and Safari (at least Israeli ones). Also, my job requires me to look at everything we develop at Snap on all three browsers, especially the one with the largest market share. A side note: seems to me that Microsoft made a big mistake when it announced that it is not going to support IE for Mac OS any more.

5. My favorite desktop blogging client, MS Live Writer, does not have a Mac version. Anyone has suggestions for a really good alternative for Mac?

I know what some might say–just install Parallel and Windows on the Mac and use the PC apps that you like. But then I would work on Windows most of the day. Besides, what is the point. I could buy an apple sticker and stick it in the center of the cover of my IBM Thinkpad…

The Israeli music industry has changed a lot in the last ten years. The leading radio station, GalGalatz (Israeli Army Radio #2), created in 1998 the playlist — a list with a limited number of popular songs, selected by powerful music editors, that is being played repeatedly and sets the public taste and opinion. Despite the criticism GalGalatz received, claiming (rightfully IMHO) that they became focused on ratings rather than quality, nothing changed.

These days, Galgalatz gets exclusive rights to play new singles before all other stations which makes them even powerful than ever. The result – small group of musicians, mainly mainstream, get the glory, while others are completely ignored.

But all of this does not matter if you are lucky enough to get discovered by Apple’s marketing folks. This is what happened to Yale Naim, a fairly unknown Israeli singer that made her career in France. One of her latest album’s songs, New Soul, is used as the soundtrack of the new MacBook Air TV ad.

The result is great – she is now on the world’s most popular playlists — iTunes Store (2nd most popular song!) and YouTube (with 1.5MM views as of Feb 1, 2008)!

Macbook Air is not the only creative thing Apple came out with this week.

Today Apple started running a new campaign for Leopard. I saw it on the home page of the New York Times. In this 30 seconds ad (which you will want to watch it again and again – trust me), the PC guy climbs the ladder and breaks out from the Half Page Ad unit to the Leaderboard, hangs the "NOT" sign while talking with Mac and then goes down the ladder. The synchronization between the two ad units is perfect and the experience is fun and engaging.

Can you imagine that? There are web products that are dying to get to the level of user engagement this ad has. Harry up and watch it yourself on NYTimes.com

A few weeks ago, a new company bought the license to sell Apple product in Israel. Today, I read an interview with Eran Tor, the GM of that company, iDigital, and one of his quotes caught my attention:

אין משרד פרסום שלא פנה אלינו, כי כולם מבינים מה הולך להיות פה.

My own translation: There is not a single advertising agency that has not spoken to us, because everybody understand what is going to happen here…"

Yes, the advertising agencies understand that plenty of $$$ are going to be spent, but what about the consumers? Who is going to care of their needs and make sure Apple products are full localized to Hebrew? and how about allocating some of these marketing $$$ in order to buy apple.co.il? or making sure the iDigital site works properly on Safari for Windows and does not break(see below)?!

And what about the language used on the site? The English & Hebrew mishmash sounds really bad. Couple of examples:

• What does this mean in Hebrew?
  

• How should it be called? Mac or מק or מקינטוש

 

At least, iPodHE, the utility that adds Hebrew support to iPod (but not iPhone) is finally free.

I find it pretty funny that the most searched term on Apple’s Support site is “Blue Screen”…

When do you think a “Leopard vs Vista – my blue is nicer” ad will be released?

• Gmail announced the addition of IMAP support. Finally my inbox can be kept in sync when I read emails using my iPhone. This is how to set it up.
• Meebo, my favorite web based IM service, released a very cool and useful Firefox plug-in. Try it out.

Last night I decided to extend my iPhone’s functionality with a few goodies.

The first thing was to hack the iPhone.

Then I added Hebrew fonts to Safari & the built in RSS reader. The lack of Hebrew support was one of my biggest pains with the iPhone and with the ability to read a few Hebrew web sites (not all sites render properly) things are a little better, although I am still waiting for the full native Hebrew support.

The next thing was to add several applications and personalize the device with a custom ringtone. I installed iBrickr on my computer and use it to manage my iPhones apps, ringtones etc. 

Among the applications that are currently installed on my iPhone you can find:

• Communication applications: Apollo IM & Twitterrific
• Games: Light Off and a few Nintondo retro games running on the NES emulator
• Utilities: VoiceNotes & the text editor Scribe
• Configuration Utilities (launch and manage the iPhone applications): Launcher & recombinant SpringBoard arranger
• and my favorite utility, the Dock, which brought the famous Mac OS feature to the iPhone

Technorati Tags: iPhone hacking, iBrickr, Twitter

And it took Apple and it’s amazing marketing machine 5 1/2 years to reach this milestone…in other words one ipod every 1.7 seconds…(18,181,818 per year = 1,515,152 per month = 49,8001 per day = 2,044 per hour = 35 per minute)

Another impressive achievement is the sale of 2.5 billion songs on iTunes….more

But, and here’s the but…The fact most songs these days come at 196 kbps makes songs sound quality just horrible, with no decent depth & spectrum. Will the next generation have any ability to distinguish subtle sounds or appreciate the mix of music, dust and scratches on a vinyl record?

Photo: by jbl_nyc.