Apple Store Pricing Sucks

OK, it's time for grumble.

I was looking at purchasing Aperture 1.5 from Apple. I'm not a professional photographer, but I do take a lot, and Picasa on Windows and iPhoto on the Mac don't seem to cut it for me. I wanted something more stable (iPhoto takes ages to load with 5 years of photo's in it).

So, I took at look at the UK Apple store and it was listed at £219 inc tax. Not bad, I know it was originally over £2000. Just out of interested I pulled up the US Apple Store. $299.

Hang on, I though. That's like £160. So I added a Florida Zipcode (relatives house) to the basket, and got a final price of $319.

To cut a long story short, I checked out the US, UK and Ireland Stores, and found the following pricing differences.

Store	USD	GBP	Euro
US	$319	£168	€251
UK	$415	£219	€327
Ireland	$404	£213	€319

Pricing correct as of 26/09/2006. Conversion prices from www.xe.com/ucc

So, the UK and Ireland pretty much on the same price. But there's a massive gap between them and the US. Taking the above, the UK difference to the US is over £50! That means that UK Aperture user are paying a 24% premium for the same package.

I rang the UK Apple store and spoke to someone about the pricing. They tried the "The US tax is less" trick, but that didn't wash, as the untaxed price is still a lot different. They then admitted that the US prices just were cheaper. When I intimated that I had friends who regularly travelled to the US, he admitted that it would be cheaper for them to buy it for me, and that it would work perfectly well on my Mac.

Does anyone else think that Apple are taking the piss? Talk about rip-off Britain (and Ireland this time).

Technorati: Aperture | Apple | Apple Store | Ripoff | pricing | apple software

GoDaddy Hosting and Search Engine URL's

I've recently put up a new site, and had real trouble trying to get search engine friendly URL's working.

The following URL,

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?view=5

isn't very nice for search engines, as they tend to ignore the variable part, just leaving

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php 

to be indexed! This is because they don't want to index what they deem is dynamic content (signified by the variables).

The solution, if you can configure it on your host is to change the URL to

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/view/5

or, even better

http://www.yoursite.com/view/5

This requires a combination of Apache configuration (using mod_rewrite) and PHP code to understand the new variables.

If your host doesn't have mod_rewrite, then your pretty much out of luck. Either move, or badger them to death to install it.

Apache Configuration

First you need to create a file call .htaccess (note the period in front of the file name).

Here's what I've got in the file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteOptions MaxRedirects=10
RewriteCond $1 !^(favicon.ico|index\.php|inc|images|css|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?$1 [L]

Break it down

RewriteEngine on

This turns on the Apache rewrite engine, to allow the incoming URL (/view/5) to be turned into another URL (index.php?/view/5).

RewriteOptions MaxRedirects=10

Sets the maximum redirects, so that we don't inadvertently end up in a loop.

RewriteCond $1 !^(favicon.ico|index\.php|mailer\.php|inc|images|css|robots\.txt)

The guts. This says that if the URL doesn't contains:

 favicon.ico
 index.php
 mailer.php
 inc
 images
 css
 robots.txt

then follow the next rule. You'd add any other files here. For php files in directories, you only need to add the directory name. For example, if you had http://www.yoursite.com/app/index.php, you could just add the app name into the list above. Don't forget to escape the periods in filenames!

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?$1 [L]

The rule. It takes what ever was entered as the URL and converts it to the new format. The new format is not seen by the user. They continue to see http://www.yoursite.com/view/5.

So now, instead of having http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?view=5, I have http://www.yoursite.com/view/5. The search engine can know successfully spider your site, without knowing that it's dynamically generated!

PHP Code

In PHP, the script is know being called as index.php?view/5

To get hold of the string, just use

$actionPath = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']

The variable $actionPath will know contain the string "view/5".

$actions = split("/", $actionPath)

You will now have an array $actions, which will show

Array {
 [0] = "view"
 [1] = "5"
 }

In your script you can now decide what to process as before!

Hope this help someone out there.

Technorati: mod_rewrite | Apache | PHP | SEO | Search Engines

Lotus Notes Designer on Mac OS X - CrossOver Office Mac Beta

Following on from Ed's blog entry about running the beta version of the Lotus Notes Client today, I saw on SlashDot that CodeWeavers had released a beta version of their CrossOver Office Mac product.

I couldn't resist trying to get Notes R7 running under it, so here's what I've got so far.

1) CrossOver Installation

First, go to CodeWeavers, and download the dmg image.

Copy the CrossOver application folder to your Application folder, and launch the program.

The first thing it will do is ask you to insert you Mac OS X Install Disc 1. This is so that it can install the quartz-wm package. This is so that CrossOver can make the Windows apps look like OS X apps.

Once this is complete, you're ready to install the application!

2) Notes Client Installation

From the CrossOver application menu, select install software.



Click the Install Unsupported Software



Ignore the warning about your computer spontaneously exploding.



Select the Choose Installer File... option, and click Install...
Watch in amazement as the Notes install launches. On my MacBook 2.0Ghz (2GB RAM) it launched in less than 20 seconds.



Go through the normal Notes install process.






Once the Notes Client has finished installing, CrossOver will simulate a Windows reboot to finalise the configuration.



Moment of truth!

You'll now be presented with a folder, with all your Notes icons in.



3) First Launch

Now, I have to say at this point that trying to go through the normal client setup crashed. So, I copied my existing files (notes.ini, user.id, desktop*.nsf) to

~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/win2000/drive_c/Program Files/Lotus/Notes/data

When I relaunched Notes, it prompted me for my password, straight away!



Can you spot the problem?



There may be a fix, but I haven't look yet.

Of course, the real reason for trying this was to bring the Notes Development client to the Mac. Here's what I got.



Yep, that's the form designer, showing the Account Form of the Personal Address Book!

I still spend most of day in LotusScript, so I was more interested in how the agent code would appear.



Even the InfoBox works!



All in all, a very impressive first step!

SnTT | show-n-tell thursday | Lotus Domino | Lotus Notes |