Autor: Christian Tillmanns

This is a completely private problem.
My monster number one got a camcorder for Christmas. Nothing special there, but she needs a possibility to cut her movies. She knows by now iMovie for iOS pretty well and would like to transfer her movies to my old iPad 2 and cut them there (which isn’t a very good idea, I admit, but I don’t want her to borrow my Mac all the time either, neither does my wife). And we have the connection kit for the SD card.
The video standard is:

AVCHD standard
Video: MPEG-4 AVC/H.264

That is something the iPad does not recognise and will not import it when connected to the SD card.
There was once an app that did it called Splice, but that does not work any longer.
Does anybody of you know an app that lets me import videos in the above format directly from a SD card to the iPad? A converter or something like that?
I know that this can be done by various apps on the mac. I only look for a solution, that does work on the iPad alone.

An idea anyone? Otherwise there will be a lot of tears, shouting and general misbehaviour around me in the next few years.

PS: The stuff she does with an iPod alone is pretty amazing….

I can’t change electronic devices like my underpants. I always wait till things really break and then I change. My iPhone 4 still does the trick. This blog still runs on Lotus Foundations and my Mac Book Pro is a mid 2009. I had a hard disk crash lately but with Time Machine changing the disk is painless … provided one has all the passwords ready on paper and not only in the Key Chain (hint hint). By the way, an SSD does wonders to an old Mac. The speed gain is amazing.
A week ago my iPad 2 gave up the ghost. Suddenly the screen was black and that was it. I was able to make a backup, therefore I suspected the screen was done. Happily I went and bought a shiny new iPad Air 2. No, not the gold one (yuck). Space grey.
With the backup, the setup was almost painless. Apart from a few orphaned apps and some not so nice apps, which wanted money, for stuff I had already bought.
Just a thing. If possible restrict all the purchases on your iPad to one Apple ID. Makes life a lot easier, because somehow it accepts for a certain time – 90 days? – only one Apple ID per device. I was a bit confused with all these pop ups about the Apple ID.

The old iPad then started to collect dust and I went with my ex girlfriend – I am married to her now – to Lyon. Nice, very nice. I like it much better than Paris. Food is in general way better than any other place I have been in France. Even for Swiss standards, it is a very clean town (much less dog poo than Paris). I like the stone they used to build the town and the public transport system is extremely good.
Actually we went there, because I had something to tick of on my bucket list. I always wanted to learn how to drive a rally car. Sideways that is. On gravel or snow. Therefore I booked a one day course for me and my wife with Team Pilotage 42 about 50 minutes west of Lyon. Luck wanted it, that we were only 3 students. One young man, my wife and me. The guys father has been a rally driver, therefore we suspected, he would drive circles around us. Damien, our instructor, holds an official diploma as a racing instructor from the department of sports of france. I love France for things like that. In a time where political correctness almost forbids to like driving cars fast, France is still proud of its long tradition of racing and shows it.
After a bit of theory we went out to the tarmac track for a first training session. It was all about how to sit and hold and turn the steering wheel. It is pretty hard to unlearn something one did wrong for so many years. Years ago during another safety training with BMW, they showed me an other technique which does not work on a track apparently. At least my seating position was right and I got the first point against my wife who mentioned once in a while for the last twenty years, that I am sitting to close to the steering wheel. I don’t.
Next thing, the foot rest. That is not what it is called, it is the „call pieds“, which keeps you firmly in your seat and holding that with force isn’t restful at all. But it works. The morning was spent almost entirely driving around the track and unlearning stuff. How to hold and turn the steering wheel, where to look, where to start your turn, where to hit the apex and so on.
Lunch was again a reminder, why one should take life not so serious. In Switzerland we would have had some sandwiches or other „light“ (speak „cheap“) stuff. In France one gets fed with a mille feuille au saumon and some kind of boeuf bourguignon. All inclusive. No wine though. But a dessert.
The afternoon was spent on the dirt. Now things got serious. Finally driving sideways. The Citroen C2 isn’t a powerful car. Especially not the diesel version with 90 bhp. But it is plenty, if you know what to do. Now the funny bit. My wife, who never drove anything fast around a track before, was a second faster than the boys. Which isn’t so hard for me, because I am used to it. My mother was faster than me 25 years ago, when we drove slalom races for fun (still hurts a bit). It wasn’t so easy for our young friend who pushed hard to beat my wife, which was exactly the wrong thing to do. It is all about finesse, not power and a heavy feet on the throttle. It really looked damn good when my wife came screaming around the corner sliding sideways through the apex almost perfectly. Unfortunately she broke two cars within 5 minutes and that was it for the day. Just punctures. Happens all the time on this track. And it was anyway at the end of the course. No harm done, but a good story to tell.
After a few more days sightseeing in Lyon without the monsters, we picked them up and drove home. One of the first things daughter no. 2 did when she came home, was trying the old iPad. Lo and behold the damn thing showed on the screen, who wouldn’t budge a week ago, that the battery was almost empty. The darn thing repaired itself while we were away. That isn’t the first time it happened. A year ago our Casio (do not buy) piano had one key that lost all its dynamic and sounded awful. We sent it away but the service center said that they could not find anything. It had mended itself while en route. We must have some really good feng shui for electronic devices here. I almost start to believe in higher powers. There is certainly a perfectly natural explanation, but that does not make a good story. A house haunted by an ancient computer expert who has to fix things before getting eternal live, is much more interesting. Actually, I know a few people, who when they die, should roam the earth in search of equipment they fixed badly during their live and do them correctly until they are allowed to IT paradise: a place full of Exchange servers with strange error messages, active directories with corrupted databases, Fortran and Visual Basic programs with syntax errors one can not find. Or is this rather hell?

For me at least, the bucket list is one item shorter. Wait, probably half an item. Have to do that rally driving stuff again. Next time when something breaks here, we just go and do something fun and political incorrect and that should do it for fixing anything electronic here at home. Can’t wait.

They are back. It isn’t Microsoft obviously. Unfortunately I wasn’t prepared for a really funny session this time. When the idiot asked for the windows key, I insulted him a bit and hung up. To bad. Had more fun with them in the past.

I think most of you have done the same thing. We just abandoned ibmverse.com.
Once in a while, I have a look: Anything new? „First Steps“ is still entirely in English. Way better than the Polish, Swedish and I don’t know what mix at the beginning, but still not in German. Help is, but that isn’t the point for showing of to prospective customers, or is it?

New features? Not that I have seen anything. Still as crippled as in the beginning. After my first review – which I did not publish for several reasons – I thought, things would change with time. Nope.

No new mails. Not even news about Verse or IBM in general. That I find rather strange. Wouldn’t that be the channel of choice of the Verse-Team to provide us with news fresh from the press or even some insider things?

I wondered how many users are in the ibmverse.com directory. A search through the alphabet revealed 26’849. Everybody shows up twice and tags are found, too. Let’s say there are about 12’000 individuals. Wouldn’t that make up quite a big fraction of IBM partners and customers that still have IBM Notes in the portfolio? Alright, a lot of IBMers are probably in there, too. Still, could be worse.

So, what’s the purpose of ibmverse.com?
It is too limited to be a sensible marketing tool for prospective customers.
It is too limited to be an alternative for any free mail tool.
It isn’t used as a marketing tool for IBM Partners.
It does not look like the latest screen shots anymore.
The term „preview“ had been dropped, just because an outcry of all those waiting for a real free version, made IBM a bit nervous. But that was just a coat of paint. Most limitations remained. For any practical purposes it is still a preview but serves the only to of showing of the fancy web design.
No „taking on Google“.
Not even close to half a million users.
I tried the „Sign up now“ link on the IBM Verse page: TIMEOUT!
I tried a „Try and buy“ from twitter: TIMEOUT!
I scrolled through #NewWayToWork for a while. It is just me or is it the same stuff retweeted over and over again? I tried several links for a white paper. It was always the same. By far most of the tweeters are IBMers anyway. It almost looks like an IBM internal twitter feed. Talk about inbreeding.
Then I found this link, where you can sign up for the Verse Beta Trial. Err, what? Beta Trial?
Dutifully I tried it immediately. I want to see where this leads. Let’s see how long it will take to either get a message, that I am already a user, get a new shiny Verse account with hopefully all the bells and whistles or a beta account with questionable usefullness. Or nothing at all.
IBM either thinks that ibmverse.com is a bad thing and should be left rotting in an abandoned server rack or it was renamed to Beta Trial. We will see.

It does make sense to buy good stuff. I am too poor to buy crap.
My daughter No. 2 had a Nikon Coolpix 2700 for about not even two years. As it happens with kids, she dropped it. Boing. No more pictures. Big tears.
I am not going to buy another one, just to keep her happy. Nope, but who knows, it would be probably repairable. Therefore I contacted the Nikon service center here in Switzerland and told them my problem. They said, that for this model and the problem I described, the price of the repair would be about 70% to 80% of a new model. See above, no new camera for the brat. I believe, if something is repairable, let’s fix it. Should also be a lesson for the offspring. No new things, just because she broke it, even by accident. Most things don’t grow on trees and I hate this trend in society to throw things away, just because it isn’t the latest and greatest.
I dutifully went to the Nikon website and registered the camera for repair. You get an address sticker (I had to provide the glue) and the postage is free. First surprise. There is even the possibility to include the maximum amount for the repair. In that case a quote would still cost 45 CHF, but I can live with that. Two days after I sent it, Nikon confirmed the arrival at the service center and then nothing happened until today.
A packaged arrived, containing a new Coolpix 2700 (luckily same color and not pink – my kids don’t like pink, which often leads to long faces when gifts arrive that were chosen by women). Price of the new camera: ZERO.
Even though I told Nikon, that she dropped it, they replaced it for free, claiming it was warranty.
Nikon certainly still had a few of the older Coolpix in stock and since they can not sell them anymore, they use it as good marketing tools to make people happy. Hence the blog post.
Therefore: A big round of applause for Nikon who:
… has a useful and easy to navigate service website… for free shipping
… very short turnaround time of about one week
… a good sense for customer relationship
… and the new camera
It posed a bit of a problem to explain to daughter No. 2, why she got a new camera and not the old one back. My whole pedagogical approach is down the tube. But this is normally as it goes.
Next camera will probably be a Nikon again.

***** Using Nikon for almost 40 years now *****

PS: If you are waiting for a Verse Basic review, I can’t make up my mind. Tested a lot, but….

Now I got my account and I am playing around with it.
First impressions:

• It does look better than iNotes, or not? I am not sure.
• I can’t figure out, how to add a sender to my address book?
• Does anybody know, how to change the initials in the circles?
• When I compose an email and start typing the address, it get’s ugly. Way too slow.

I really want to get into it and see how it works. If you are game, would you send me please emails to christian.tillmanns (at) ibmverse.com? I will not respond to you, if you don’t include your consent in your mail. Therefore you can send me whatever you want without fear, that I will be a troll in your inbox. A few connections would still be nice.
I want to see, how that concept holds up.
I have two dummy projects: „One To One“ and „One To Many“ (Yes, I might lack a bit of imagination here). If you want you can include them in the mail.
Chat connections would be nice, too.

 

What do we have today? Since ConnectED a lot of things have happened, but for me it all started at the Connect 2015 in Zürich. As every year, I did a long blog post about it. I took 14 pages of notes and still managed to get it somehow wrong. Or did I really?
The thing that made me „famous“ was, that I said, that Scott said, that Jeff said IBM wants half a billion IBM Verse users. That was on 9 of march. On the 17th Volker Weber had a meeting with Jeff, who said, that somebody (me) got it all wrong. It was half a million. I am not deaf (yet) and I was sitting in the second row. Jeff said before, that IBM wants to take on Google with Verse. If IBM plans half a million free mail users, would anybody mention that? Remember, at that moment everybody – including Scott – thought we get a real free thing. Let’s leave it at that.
A week later the much-anticipated Verse Preview version … wait, Preview? On Scotts slide in Zürich was written „Free“ and there was the word that it would not be crippled (for a given value of crippled). Within a week IBM got cold feet about the free version. Something they bragged about for month. No wait. Got it wrong again. After a week of … I would not say shit storm, rather a collective frustration of the yellow bubble, in the aforementioned meeting Jeff said … or hinted … that there will be a real free version. They just did not like the word freemium. But did I read wrong? In the support forum IBM stated, that the preview version will replace the free version (3-24-15). Now we have apparently turned 180 degrees. It might be possible, that for the first time, IBM actually listened. Jeff told Volker Weber, that the limitations will be much higher. Happy days … we thought.
A week later came this infamous video, which I will not share here in the hope, that it will just disappear, if we ignore it. I resist the urge to give you a link to Vowe’s post with all the comments. Youtube has just three comments and they are not favorable either. I just want to look at one comment from Vowe’s post:

in 2015 no piece of video can be limited just to it’s „target audience“

From a marketing perspective, this is two-fold. While you can not limit the audience that watches (you never could really, not even in 1950), you still have to target a specific audience. No matter what you do, videos, pictures, texts, anything to carry your message, at the receiving end is your target audience … hopefully. The people you want to buy your things. You can not please everybody. Budweiser ads are made for beer drinkers. Everybody else either does not care about beer in general or does not buy Budweiser as a matter of principle. It is just that part of the audience that a) likes beer and b) would try a(nother) Budweiser, that is the target. Forget about the rest, but some in that rest will still like the ad anyway and talk about it. In our case unfortunately, the potential Verse drinkers a) did not get what is was all about or b) just hated the ad. The rest was sitting there with their mouth open, believing they were in the wrong universe. I am sure, that there is a target audience for this video, I just could not get the address.

After that our always thoughtful and clever Ben came up with three questions.

#1 is the most interesting: Do those of us in the IBM Partner community believe in Verse and want it to succeed?

Accidentally, Luis Richardson asked us in Zürich almost the same question. Do we as partners want to be part of it? He sees it almost as the time, when partners did all these incredible applications for Notes and Domino. I do have my own questions a) What is in there for me? b) is it about selling Verse or Verse apps?
Looking back, I see the Notes Designer. An almost elegant developement environment. Easy to learn languages. A simple and stable database system. Something that made starting developing a joy, because you were able to do so much with so little knowledge. XPages are not in the same category, even though, IBM tries hard to make it as easy as possible. Will Verse give us the same possibilities as we had with Notes to repeat the success we had? Forget it. The technology behind it is much more complicated and in recent years IBM wasn’t the poster child for great documentation for developers. IBM would have to create a shop for the cloud version, where customers would be able to try and buy things from partners. Well others can do things like that, but I doubt that IBM is willing to let us build „plugins“ or whatever it is called today („Extensions“ anyone?).

Next step. On April first the final version should have been there. Some people  got it few days later and were disappointed. The promised new limitations just were not there. Instead there is now a Verse Basic, which is exactly like Verse Preview, but one can send 100 mails a day, instead of 25. Wow. But at least one can see all the other Verse Basic users, which disqualifies it as an alternative to any other web mail service.
Now let us do a little list:

• The idea of Mail Next got us all excited for over a year now.
• They called it Verse
• We were promised a free version and we hoped, that would be something we could actually use and IBM wants to take on Google with it.
• What we first got was a free version that was called a preview version that was so crippled it wasn’t even good enough for testing the most important features.
• The preview version was killed for a promised new free version with much higher limitations. That never saw the light of the day.
• The new version is called Verse Basic version and is in fact the Verse Preview. It isn’t intended to be used as a production mail client.
• It isn’t even finished (for a given value of finished).

IBM could have kept the „Preview“ in the Name. At least it describes correctly what it is. From a basic product I expect at least that I can use it.

I am still waiting for my Verse Preview/Basic account, but I am not the least motivated to do any sensible testing anymore.
But I get emails about Verse webcasts where they say that they missed me. The kind of webcast were everybody is always „so excited“. Apparently tomorrow is the next one. I got the confirmation about registering for it. Don’t remember.

 

Just found some fine print in the Verse support forum:

• If you have trouble registering, having an account created for you, or if you’ve forgotten your password, please send an email to WebMaster@ibmverse.com

I am going to wait, even though Vowe thinks, that I have broken the waiting list by registering several times. Serves me right.

I try to register for Verse.
No success.
For the umpteenth time.
With several email addresses.
Since last summer.
Not that I need it, it just about going to the cloud with IBM or not?
I would at least like to test it.