Analogism

I was browsing the App Store for a neat alarm clock app the other day, trying to decide what functionality I was after. You see, not only did I wish to eliminate the annoyance of lifting my arm, I was also looking for a nifty alarm feature as well as a function to dim the screen.

I ended up purchasing the Flip Clock (Pic above) and the Night Stand (pic below) app. But the first thing I noticed was that the dimmer function wasn’t actually a dimmer function. What it does instead is just to make the graphics opaque letting more black background through. The screen is still just as bright. Black isn’t black. So it’s still too bright, very annoying. Also, the dimmer function on Night Stand is super buggy. The double tap to dim is very nice — but it doesn’t work. Well, it works once out of a hundred or so tabs.

On the Flip Clock app, the navigation’s all messed up. Muy bugg-o. And the dimmer is not a dimmer, just an opaque-er. And I decided after some usage that having a built in alarm was overkill. I just use the iPhone “repeat daily” alarm. Flip Clock doesn’t have an alarm, Night Stand does. Also, I like the design of Flip Clock better, and it supports the iPhone alarm including snooze, sooo… Flip Clock it is.

All this ranting to come to a completely unrelated point. While reading reviews I come across a comment by some moron saying (in Swedish) “Hey, stop writing comments in English, it only shows up in the Swedish iTunes store!”.

So Mr. Smith moves from Somewhere, CA USA to Sweden because he very much likes to work at the Royal Institute of Technology, he purchases an iPhone, he finds himself an application he likes and feels he wants to contribute with feedback to the nice developers, but oh… oh no!… my god, he doesn’t speak Swedish yet. He was so busy spending 10 years becoming a professor in whatever-ology that he forgot to learn Swedish to please ignorant Swedes!

Or Ms. Mgundu from some obscure country I have yet to learn of seeks refuge from persecution, makes an effort to speak her mind in the only language she masters enough to feel comfortable using making a public comment, and the highly enlightened Swede strikes again.

Ok, all very much not likely, but you get my point. Peoples rush to judgement pisses me off sometimes. Actually, people pisses me off sometimes in general. Stupid people always pisses me off. Obviously, he/she masters the English language enough to understand comments in English. Either that, or he had someone else write up this angry comment for him to post. But that would just be plain stupid. Oh wait, that was my point, he is stupid. He did however follow up with a warm and fuzzy comment and a 4/5 rating. How nice.

English is the second language here, it is beyond “likely” that anyone who owns an iPhone and is browsing the App Store, can understand comments written in English. Maybe he/she wanted to make sure his/her commented was understood by the developers so they can make use of it.

I actually got caught in the whole country catch 22 in the Apple store when I moved back to Sweden from the US. I had a song that the payment didn’t go through for, and when I noticed, I didn’t have the American credit card anymore. Couldn’t pay for it with a Swedish credit card because my account was american, and I couldn’t switch to a Swedish account because I had an unpaid song. Paypal to save the day. See my reasoning? American moves to Sweden + Swedish credit card = Swedish Apple Store riddled with moronic comments.