Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

Last week, when I was at the TheMarker COM.Vention in Isreal, I noticed the presence of a very impressive Apple booth on the Expo floor. It was very nice and added to the feeling that this is a true international event (beyond the fact the program was in English and dozens of speakers and many attendees arrived from the US and Europe).

While I was at the Apple booth, I was looking for one of the iDigital mangers to provide some tips & feedback, but since I could not find any of the managers, I will use this post to do it.

Since I first blogged my thoughts about Apple’s web site in Israel, I have been receiving questions and comments from people who visited Israel, purchased an Apple product there, and later on had a need for customer support. Since iDigital’s web site is only in Hebrew they could not find their answer there, and so using the help of Google, these people searched and landed on my blog. I was glad to help as much as I could with basic questions & translations, but did not have answers to all of their questions. So, here’s tip #1 for the iDigital team – create an “English” page with at least “contact us” information. You’d be surprised how many people who do not read Hebrew are looking for a way to contact you.

Anyway, the last question I received was from a woman who was looking for the customer support phone number for iPod, so I visited iDigital’s website and saw that they have recently started offering group workshops and one-to-one training, similar to the training programs that are available at Apple stores across the US. These are great news for Mac users in Israel (but still not for iPhone users since it is not officially sold there yet and therefore not supported) but there is one difference that makes it look somewhat wrong in my point of view – the price.

• Workshops – In the US, group workshops are free and cover a wide range of topics (I sat on a few in the past and learned a lot), but in Israel they cost a small fee and they are limited only to “Introduction to Mac OS”
• One to One – In the US, one to one training personal training costs an annual fee of $99, but in Israel you pay 225 Shekels/hour – roughly $65/hour. I can understand why these private sessions who are done at the client’s house (since there are not Apple stores in Israel) would cost more, but still, the price difference between one to one training is ridiculous.

So here is tip #2 – if you really want to build a market share, look at how things are done where Apple is gaining market share, and then mimic. Only good things could happen if you would do that.

I really wanted to try Yahoo Mobile on the iPhone. I swear I did. So as soon I saw this invite to upgrade to the best mobile experience for the iPhone, I hit the Download link.

But then I got this message that my phone is not currently supported…

Confused? Me too.

I guess I will have to keep using the Yahoo Mobile Web version,  a poor client, that has no way to select & delete emails without opening the email and scrolling all the way to the bottom!

Good thing that I’ve migrated most of my email accounts to GMAIL (with IMAP support) which works great on the iPhone.

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…

LinkedIn seems to be releasing a lot of new products lately. Yesterday they released their iPhone version.  Today, I noticed a new feature – Company News (still in beta) are displayed at the top of the member’s dashboard. This feature, built similar to Facebook’s news feed, presents the recent news about the companies I have worked at  (and their competitors/industry) based on my LinkedIn profile.

To make this feature useful and intriguing enough to interact with, I think that the sorting algorithm needs to get improved. Don’t just sort the stories by their popularity (strong bias toward large companies such as AOL in my case) or release date but factor in the employment dates and penalize stories from/about companies I worked at long ago. After all, I care very little about a place I worked at 5 years ago but I am very interested to learn what is written about my current company or the one I recently left.

I have the feeling that for many start-up employees who used to work at big companies this is going to be a common issue, which could affect the user engagement and adoption of the “Company News” feature . I am curious to see how this feature is going to evolve over time and I hope to see some end user’s controls being added to help fine tune the experience.

UPDATE (3/23/2009):

This method no longer works. Information about the new method can be found in this post.

Original post starts here:

Thanks to ziPhone and Hebrew BidiSupport, I like my iPhone (ver 1.1.3 1.1.4) again…

It is amazing how simple & quick this process was compared to what it used to be a few months ago. No need to downgrade/upgrade/use iBricker etc. With ziPhone all you need to do is plug your iPhone, check a few boxes (unlock/activate/jailbreak), run and after 3 minutes the process is over.

Once you are done with jailbreaking/unlocking, use the Installer to add a new source: http://repo.hebrew4iphone.com . Then refresh the list of sources and under the “Install” menu look for a new category called “Hebrew 4 iPhone”. Once you find it, install Bidi Support (1.1.3/1.1.4) and Hebrew Keyboard (which uses Russian keyboard).

After installing, restart your iPhone, select Settings>General>Keyboards>International Keyboard and turn on Russian keyboard.  Then, whenever you have the keyboard open, you can use the globe button (left to space bar) to toggle between English and Hebrew.

Big Thanks to iPhones.co.il

I like the new “Recent Readers” widget MyBlogLog released. The glossy design shaped as an iPhone, the simple configuration process (less is more) and the ‘flyouts’ – those little nuggest of information about a reader that appear when you point to a member, very much like Snap Shots.

Check out the new widget on the right sidebar of this blog.

Several readers and friends have asked me for tips and suggestions on how they can improve their blog or how to start  a blog. I thought it would make sense to list what powers this blog.

• Hosting service – I host this domain on BlueHost.com were I get much more that what I used to get from my previous crappy provider. I get more space (disk space, # of domains, email accounts etc), better tools, good CS support and a good price.

• Blogging platform - I use WordPress.org (self hosted). In my opinion this open source blogging platform is the best. It keeps evolving, improving and it provides a large variety of themes and plug-ins which extends ever further the platform’s capabilities. I have tried using other platforms such as Typepad, Vox, Blogger and the hosted WordPress.com and none come close to the capabilities of a self hosted WordPress.org blog.

• WordPress Plug-ins - One of the great things about WordPress is the variety of themes and plug-ins. The control panel inside WordPress makes it very easy to activate/deactivate plug-ins or switch themes. Here are the ones that are currently installed:
  • SnapShots – The product I am very proud to be one of its creators, provides a better user experience and an entirely new source of ad inventory for every web site owners.
  • Akisment – eliminate blog comments spam
  • WordPress Blog stats
  • All In One SEO pack
  • iWPhone – A plug-in that automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone.
  • AddThis – social bookmarking & sharing made easy
  • WordPress Database backup
  • Current theme installed is ISM – this might change in the future

• Other Sidebar widgets
  • Lijit – Search tools for a blog
  • MyBlogLog
  • Feedburner for content syndication (don’t forget to offer a “Subscribe By Email” option)
  • Site Analytics done by Google Analytics, SiteMeter with help from Lijit and MyBlogLog (all services show different stats for some reason…)

• Desktop blogging application – Windows Live Writer makes blogging very easy. I wrote in the past a detailed post, followed by another one, about it.

I hope it helps those who are currently blogging or about to start blogging.

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.

• 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.

I am happy to announce that the experience for my readers who use iPhone or iPod Touch to read this blog has been upgraded.

I installed the iWPhone WordPress Plug-in on my blog. This plug-in automatically reformats the blog content for optimized viewing on an iPhone and iPod Touch.

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, iWPhone, iPhone, iPod Touch, Usability, Mobile