DAVID RUDOLF BAKKER

I’ve been working on the $5 iPad Dock (or €4 iPad Stand) project with Martijn Aslander and Simon Blazer for a week now. And so much happend in just one week. I photographed the pre production model and wrote about it on Lifehacking.nl. Just two days later and it was featured on loads of websites like Wired ,TUAW and CrunchGear. Orders started showing up, it’s going somewhere, that is for sure.

Today I posted the instructions on how to DIY the $5 / €4 iPad Stand on Instructables. Make one (or order one) !

Download the DIY-wooden-5-iPad-Dock-Stand .pdf for easy reading/printing/saving.

I think, deep down, that is why I buy Crumpler bags. Yes I like the design, yes I think they are high quality and yes I love the functionality. But they make me feel special. Lugging a Crumpler bag around says something about you. You’re very likely to be in the creative branch and most likely to keep a Mac in there. And I like that.

But a couple of times Crumpler didn’t make me feel special at all, even worse. I walked into a Crumpler stores before with my bright red Crumpler bag. Employees not doing much were hanging around. Not a word. No hello, no nod, no nothing. Strange. I don’t think it was me. Usually the Crumpler employees start talking about your shared passion, those great products. And I usually end up buying something, not this time obviously.

How easily these stores could have made a couple of more bucks. At least acknowledge a customer. And carrying a Crumpler bag into a Crumpler store spells out ‘returning satisfied customer, hello!’.

Hey, it’s no biggie. I’m sure I’ll buy more Crumpler stuff (even though I think they’re quite heavy). I just think they missed the easiest, cheapest opportunity to increase sales; sell more to existing customers. Make them feel special.

How do you make your customers feel special?

Too much stuff on your hard disk will slow down your Mac. And you know those RAW photos take up a huge amount of space. What to do?

Go for a referenced library. This means you can store all your original photos on an external disk, but still have the ability to view the images when you are not connected to the external disk. iPhoto and Aperture will work fine this way. They both store small thumbnails locally on your Mac (enough for viewing), but leave the original, huge files on the external disk.

Another advantage is your photos aren’t locked into iPhoto/Aperture. If you wanted to use Picasa for example, you can just point to your external disk, no problem.

Please remember to backup your original photos, because one external disk is not a backup. My recommendation is a cheap raid-1 NAS. A raid 1 NAS means you have two (or more) disks with the exact same data on it, in one device connected to your home network. Which makes it easy to work with the same photos on different computers.

See an iPhoto referenced library tutorial and an Aperture referenced library tutorial.

(this was also my solution to the inability of Aperture 3 to open a library on a NAS)

Deze post heeft pootjes gekregen en is overgelopen naar Lifehacking.nl!

Moge het hem daar goed gaan. Hij zal zich in ieder geval goed thuis voelen en heeft een warm publiek gevonden.

UPDATE 1: Now also featured on Lifehacker.com! Wow!

UPDATE 2: Now also featured on MakeOnline and BoingBoing! Double wows!

This is a short plea for a TIME feature in the iPhone Voice Command. If you want this feature, Digg it or show your support in another way.

I kinda like Voice Command in the iPhone. You can command your iPhone to play certain music or make calls.  It works quite well, as long as you know how to command it. Personally I would love to have a TIME feature in Voice Command.

Why? Well, it’s cold over here in The Netherlands/Europe. I walk around listening to podcasts and music with my iPhone in my jacket. I don’t wear watches usually (and let’s be frank, who does?), but would like to now the time. Getting the iPhone out on a cold day, just to know the time is a bit time consuming and cold. Especially when traveling by public transport or on the bicycle I would love to ask my iPhone for the time.

A press on the headset button followed by the ‘What’s the time?’ command would result in the nice lady announcing the current time. Surely this must be an easy feature to add? It would make me, and hopefully a lot more people, love their iPhone just that tad bit more.

If you want this feature, Digg it or show your support in another way.

Ever since Google announced the possibility to upload anything to Google Docs and made an API available, the hope for a gdrive is back. But I want something else.

I would love to have Dropbox sync a specific folder with Google Docs. It would make an offline backup of your Google Docs documents. This means you can work offline on your Google Documents, and as soon as you go back online they get synced up in the cloud at Google again. This would seriously be the most useful offline + online work setup I can think of.

Who is with me?