iPods suck. Right?
Some have said that I kiss some Apple arse, and that may be true. But there is a good reason for that. It works. I am not going to rant and rave about how Mac is the superior OS or the better hardware and things of the what not, no, I will save that for another post (:P jokes, each has its own benefits). I intend to have a rant about iPods right now.
The common myth that iPods break easily. Everyone has heard it from someone, seen it on the news, read it in a paper, magazine, etc. The numbers of broken iPods sure are astonishing, I won’t at all deny that. But you know what is more astonishing? The sales numbers. Lets use some pretty basic numbers as an example here. Lets say we take an MP3 brand called ‘mpMe’ (I apologize if this resembles anything real, that was of no intention, I was just pulling shit out of nowhere), and now lets say 1 in 10 breaks or has some faults which require it to be replaced. Now lets assume the statistics for an iPod are the same, 1 in 10 breaks. Now pretend in month, mpMe sells 40 MP3 systems, 4 will break in that month. Now lets assume apple sells 10,000 iPods in that month, 1,000 will break. 1,000 broken iPods seems like a damn lot of wasted money for consumers, but its not looked at comparatively. Also, the 1 in 10 statistic is not real, it was hypothetical.
Logic would state that the highest selling MP3 player in the world would also have the highest break rate just by sheer ratio, right? Apparently not.
I am constantly bombarded by people who claim iPods suck because they break easily. I won’t deny that they have faults (namely the battery or that short screen crisis they had), everything does, but what gets me is the people who tell me this at the sight of my iPod. At least 90% of people who have spoken negatively about iPod’s to me have never themselves owned an iPod, they just bitch and moan based on what they have heard or what has happened to people they know.
You frequently hear the horror stories ‘my brother got 3 and all 3 broke’ and shit like that. Is it ever possible that they just don’t take care of their iPods correctly? This Apple kiss arse post is not based on nothing either, it is based on own experience. 3 years ago next month myself and my two sisters purchased a 30GB iPod Classics (5th gen) each. Alas, on November 10th, one of the 3 broke. Took almost 3 years though. And it was by no means Apple’s or the iPods fault. No, instead it broke because my sister left it on the floor and stepped on the screen. I would expect my heel to do damage to any MP3 player on the market.
I have had some argue that it was because they were the newer ones that they lasted (yet they argue that ones that came out after ours are still crap…?), which is just not true. I have seen black and white iPod’s last 3 years without needing replacement, and how old are they! I have even been lucky enough to use a functional, and in use second gen iPod earlier this year.
I am not trying to force anyone into buying an iPod, its their loss if they don’t in my opinion. But iPod’s seem to carry a stigma with people who have never owned one and never will due to. I can respect someone’s decision to purchase an alternative because lets face it, iPod’s probably aren’t the best thing on the market, but they sure as hell aren’t the worst.
I think what it comes down to is how much you respect you’re iPod or technology in general. I know for a fact that a well treated iPod will last a long time. Hell I have even dropped my iPod from roofs and had it kicked in the screen and mine is fine, so apparently you don’t even need to show them that much respect.
I know (in fact I planned and hoped on it) that this post will probably piss some hardcore anti-apple enthusiasts off, its your place, stand up for what you believe. I will however direct you to my comment form below. I want to hear everyones story, the horrible stories about how iPod’s are lemons and the great ones about people who have owned their iPod’s since the mid Triassic period. Go wild! And hell, prove me wrong. Nothing like some food for thought.
WordPress 2.7! Will it impact me?
It is a well known fact that many of you designers (particularly web) out there are WordPress junkies, such as myself. Needless to say any decent new update, plugin, all the jazz will make you pretty excited. And often with good reason.
So I, like many of you, got pretty excited when I heard about WordPress 2.7 and needless to say, I downloaded the Beta and gave it a thrashing on my localhost. And what can I say other then ‘BRING ON THE STABLE!’. It is very nice, the main difference is the Admin panel (image at end of post) which is very customisable, allowing you to move around and even hide all the little useful bits on all the pages (admin home, writing post, etc).
But while testing, the question popped into my mind… ‘Will this effect how I design in any way?’. Naturally, my cursor dashed to my google search bar and my fingers hammered the question, but not much came up. Apparently it was either a question nobody had asked, or a stupid one that didn’t need to be asked. So I figured the best way to do it would just be to play on my localhost, and the verdict was… drumroll please. No, the template system and tags worked exactly the same thankfully. It has no effect on designing templates and old templates still work on it.
I then realized that it probably was a pretty stupid question, particularly after looking at the new features. Very few of which have anything to do with anything related to templates, and most of which are fixes and features that are either completely superficial, or perform out of common use and sight. So I slapped myself once again and went back to Photoshop.
In short, no, it doesn’t effect us as designers, but damned does it have a cool admin panel.
New section
Just a quick news update, I have added a new section to the website; the ‘Downloads‘ section. Do have a look, currently all that is there is a free WordPress theme, but hopefully I will be getting more up soon. This new section is also causing minor issues with my design, leading me to contemplate a redesign and a new layout… just a maybe though.
Simply Great WordPress Theme
This is a simple WordPress theme with a smooth clean layout, however the true beauty of this template lies in the Admin panel. This template has a built in options page where you can control just about every aspect of the themes colours, fonts and even layout without touching any code! The screenshots below show the admin panel and how it can be used.
A decent downtime?
As some of you -if not all of you- will notice, there has been very little activity on the website recently and for this I apologize. I was pretty busy for quite a while there as I was in my last year of high school (yes, I am only young) and my final exams were approaching a lot quicker then I had initially anticipated and indeed hoped. But now with that shit out of the way (I sat my final exam day before yesterday) I have the time to actually do some work on this website (and other projects). So, expect more. And more importantly, expect better. I had pretty good feedback from the articles I posted previously and I hope to only better the standard. This should be helped a lot by a few key factors;
- For starters, now that I have graduated high school, the next stop is university where I will be studying, you guessed it, graphic design (visual communication to be a little more specific).
- I now have the time to work on more design projects and templates which will be for both personal gain and profit.
- I should (if all goes well) be starting a job in January designing for a local magazine.
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