ABC Now

Before tomorrow's show, I've had a play with ABC Now. It's a useful little tool for bringing together all the ABC media streams.

You can download files and podcasts the old way.

It's important to choose the right media player. Personally I prefer Real Player, but it can be a pain with all the pop ups and advertising.

It's easy to change preferences later as the options settings are nice and clean

It worked nicely on my middle of the road test machine.

One warning is that if you are like me you may have a habit of clicking on the heart which adds the item to your favourites list rather than opening it.

It's good to have a TV guide to ABC and ABC2, one improvement there would be to put the details of the programs.

On the radio tab, quite a bit of local programming is missing. One notable exception is Tony Delroy's podcasts.

We also see a lot variations between the stations and programs. For instance, Sydney 702 has nowhere near the variety that Melbourne 774.

A future improvement may be to cross index content between the local ABC stations. For instance, the 774 finance segment would probably be as interesting to listeners of Perth 720.

The predictable criticism is going to be the lack of Mac and Linux support. The Mac version is on its way and the Linux version will be here as soon as possible.

Linux is proving a bit harder, as Nicola the manager of ABC Interactive says,

So Linux dudes, mess with Nicola's developers at your own risk.

All up, it's a fast nicely presented and simple tool that brings together a lot of the favourite streams of ABC tragics.

Driving away customers

I've previously mentioned how I stopped going to my local newsagents because of lousy service.

Recently I started going back to the nearest one (the one that refused me a credit account) simply because it's a nice Saturday morning walk up to the shops and the adjoining bakery does a nice cherry Danish to munch on the way home.

Normally I'd pay cash for two papers and wander off but this morning I splurged on a magazine as well. The total was $12 and being low on cash I handed over my credit card.

"Sorry, minimum $15"

Luckily I had enough cash left over for my Danish or I'd have been a very cranky tech.

Now as an a regular reader of the Newsagent Blog, I accept newsagents operate on tight margins and minimum charges are fair given the fixed costs of accepting EFTPOS and credit cards, but $15 is too high a limit.

From now on, I buy my papers from the supermarket or the servo around the corner.

Incidentally, on the way home I passed a cafe that has a CASH ONLY, NO EFTPOS OR CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED sign out the front.

I've been there and it's been a pain if you haven't the cash, I can imagine some people have been deeply embarrassed by this.

This cafe's been around for a few years so there's obviously nothing like a delay with the bank to be causing this and the cost of accepting cards is actually cheaper than the problems you have dealing with large amounts of cash.

So the only reason I can think of why this cafe only accepts cash is because the owners aren't declaring their full income to the tax office.

Now I don't particularly care what they do with their tax affairs, but as a customer I shouldn't be stuffed around as a consequence.

Businesses need to remember that customer convenience is everything. The harder you make it for a customer to buy from you, the less likely it is that they will.

While I'll probably go to the cafe again, the newsagent won't be seeing me.