by Veit on March 28, 2007
As Business 2.0 reports in a story called “How To Sell With Smell” in its April 2007 issue, Walmart will be rolling out “Smell-o-vision”, experimental DVDs with scent wavers that release odors at precisely timed moments during a movie. Can’t wait to smell a Western shoot-out or the nice smells of the Venice lagoon when I watch the next time.
The only problem is: I don’t buy DVDs, I rent them from Netflix. So how will they be sending me the wavers? In additional red envelopes? Do I have to send them back together with the movie, otherwise the movie doesn’t register as a returned movie? Or can I keep them until they are used up? Do I have to go to a Walmart store, since they probably have exclusives? And if I get them there, will these work with Netflix rentals or do I have rent my movies from Walmart as well?
Questions over questions — I cannot wait for answers!
by Veit on March 26, 2007
The last decision for my MacBook Pro software environment has been made. While I don’t really need Powerpoint or any advanced Word capabilities, I run some very sophisticated Excel macros. Over the weekend, I tested them on Microsoft’s Office 2004 version for the Mac. About half of them failed to run or produced runtime errors, so my Excel spreadsheets stay on Windows. Given this, I see no reason to plunk down hundreds of dollars for a version of Office. Instead, I downloaded a copy of Open Office 2.1 for the Mac. For what I’m doing with Word and some of the simpler Excel tasks, it will serve me just fine. If I ever need more, I can reevaluate this decision.
By looking at my installed software environment, it is very interesting that except for my Adobe licenses, I pretty much run my MacBook Pro with either open source software (Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office) or low-cost specialized tools (like Chronosync). I would not have thought I could work in a computing environment where I did not install a single piece of software from Microsoft!
by Veit on March 25, 2007
I first heard the “No User Left Behind Software” term when investigating Econ Technologies’ Chronosync. They used it for their software, since you pay once and all updates are free. So contrary to many packaged applications that are typically sold in retail where you must pay for upgrades and thus many users still use older versions because they object to having to pay for features they don’t want or need (”featuritis“), the makers of no-user-left-behind software save money, effort and resources by only supporting their users on the latest version of their software, since users can (and should) upgrade.
I see more and more software tools offering free upgrades for live. It not only minimizes support, it makes upgrades less painful and even provides for a happy user base. A lot of conventional software makers should evaluate this avenue. If you are currently offering a mature product (e.g., Quicken) and still charge for annual updates, you might want to run a focus group asking people what they think of the new features that they see listed on the front page of your retail box. If the users don’t care about these features, don’t even understand what they are or think they will never even use them (as it happens with me whenever I see the newest version of Quicken), maybe your product is mature and you should consider it to be ready to become a “no-user-left-behind” product? Are you listening, Intuit?
by Veit on March 25, 2007
Over the weekend, I implemented my backup strategies covering both Mac-only folders and disks as well as backing up Mac data to my Windows environment. Based on recommendations, the product I purchased to handle this on the Mac is Econ Technologies’ Chronosync.
Previously, I converted two 300GB Windows drives to Mac. One drive holds my photos (untouched originals, my workspace as well as stitched panoramas), the other one is a backup. On Windows, I had used MirrorFolder to run a software RAID (RAID-1, to be exact) to keep the two drives in sync. However, a software RAID can slow things down due to forced writes to two external disks during very disk-intensive editing sessions. While I wanted to keep them synchronized on my Mac, I want to synchronize them only every so often, so I set Chronosync to synchronize them once daily (I can always synchronize them manually, if I do a lot of photo editing at once).
Having taken care of my Mac-only photo drives, the second task was to backup my files on the Mac on a constant basis. Rather than converting another pair of disks to Mac, I decided to back my files up to my Windows file server that also receives the daily backups from my other Windows machines (through Microsoft’s SyncToy). The file server itself is backed up daily to two external 500GB disk drives (configured as a software RAID-1 through MirrorFolder). To backup my Mac, I first set up a shared folder on the Windows file server to receive the backup data from my Mac. Then I used ChronoSync to set up scheduled backup jobs for the Mac folders that need to be backed up (email, personal files, Lightroom database, etc). ChronoSync is now configured so that whenever the shared Windows file server folder is mounted on the Mac, the backup will take place immediately. I could even automate this further by using Automator on the Mac to mount the shared folder periodically (e.g., one every 8 hours), so I won’t forget.
Overall, this was a simple and very straight-forward implementation and it works!
