When Apple announced MobileMe back in June and announced that it would be replacing .Mac with a far superior service, I for one was excited. At last, .Mac/MobileMe was actually worth something. (I still think $99/year is a bit pricey, but I’m willing to live with that here.) In fact, if I wasn’t doing all of my stuff from one single computer, if I had one of Apple’s handheld devices, and if I actually had money to spend, I would have purchased MobileMe the very first day.

Boy, am I glad that I’m dirt poor right now.

As completely strange as it might seem, it appears that Apple has flubbed up MobileMe in every conceivable way these past few weeks. Take first the fact that it took about three times as long for the .Mac-to-MobileMe transition to take place (leaving many many .Mac users without any access to vital .Mac services that they needed for a few days), then throw in the whole ongoing fiasco with the so-called “1%” who lost use of their e-mail and actually lost a few days worth of their e-mail in the process. Many of these people weren’t even people who signed up for MobileMe, they signed up for .Mac, and were not expecting MobileMe to happen or for them to have to go through this. I mean, I can see something like this happening to a free service, but when Apple is getting $99/year from these people, that’s pretty ridiculous. Plus the fact that Apple was completely tight-lipped about this for nearly a week says some pretty bad things about how Apple handles its services and its customers.

Now, today, it turns up that Apple is limiting support to those people who were part of that 1%, and only people whom Apple thinks was on that 1%, according to TUAW. I mean, for the love of Pete, has Apple considered that other people may have other problems with MobileMe too? Just this morning, my friend Daniel Brusilovsky was trying to get support through one of those online live support things. After just saying “hi” to the support representative before even having a chance to type his question, the support guy said “Sorry, I can’t help you with this issue, I can only help with MobileMe Mail,” and closed the chat connection. What gives?

Apple, I know that you’re all big and successful now with all of the Macs, iPods, and (now) iPhones you’re selling, but it appears you’re starting to let that go to your head. If you want to be able to rebuild the already-ruined reputation that MobileMe has garnered, you’re going to have to do a lot more things correctly, and you’re going to have to start with the way you treat your paying customers. Otherwise, I’m not giving you a single blood-red penny.

Tags: Apple, e-mail, Mac, MobileMe, outage, reputation, ripoff, support

I’m sure that most people who have been reading my blog or listening to my various podcasts for awhile are aware of my ever-changing attitude towards web browsers. Ever since Safari was first released by Apple back in 2003, I have never used a particular web browser continuously for more than a year at a time. I ditched Internet Explorer back when Safari came out in 2003, and since then have utilized Safari, Mozilla (later replaced to be Seamonkey), Firefox, Camino, and OmniWeb (and I’ve promised myself that I’ll give Flock a try one of these days) over various times, even switching back and forth between them a few times. Two years ago (summer 2006), I went with Firefox 2 beta for a few months, liking it more and more as it went mature, but then shortly after it went mature (and Camino later went 1.0), I switched over to Camino for a good while. Then, last October, when Leopard came out, I gave Safari another go, and found myself loving how it had been improved in Leopard.

Well, about a month and a half ago, Firefox 3 went final. Regardless of your choice of web browser, you have probably heard about Firefox 3’s release and how it successfully set (perhaps even inaugurated) a Guinness World Record for most copies of a software application downloaded in a 24-hour time period, with over 8 million downloads. And, just to show that I was part of the fun, I downloaded Firefox 3 that day too, and I even have a certificate to prove it. However, once I opened up Firefox, I found, lo and behold, that the browser feels so much nicer, smoother, faster, and more Mac-like than Firefox 2 did, and since then, I’ve been using Firefox now for the past six weeks, evaluating it and getting a feel for it, and so now it’s time for me to review it.
Continue reading »

Tags: Firefox, Mozilla, review, update, web browser, world record

Whew! I’m really excited to announce that I’ve finally completed this project. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to do all summer, and I finally got it done in stages this past weekend.

So what exactly did I do that warranted the “Please pardon the dust” warning to be posted on top of my blog all weekend? Well, for awhile now, I have been somewhat unsatisfied with my blog’s categories, which have remained relatively unchanged since the last time I relaunched this blog back in October 2006. Back then, the scope of my blog was much more limited, and so was the scope of my categories. I didn’t know I’d be frequently posting videos here from YouTube or Comedy Central, or that I’d occasionally be writing reviews of things or blogging about non-techy stuff, or things like that. The concept of “tags” hadn’t made its way to WordPress yet, and I didn’t even start using tags on my blog until about a year ago.

So for this project, I went back through all of my blog posts, deleted the 25 posts that preceded January 2007 (they weren’t that good anyway, very out of date, and there were very few of them), and then set about making changes to my categories to better reflect my blog content, and to differentiate them from tags. For the most part, tags will be more topical, while categories will be more, well, categorical. (Which is the whole point of “categories” vs. “tags” in the first place, for any blog.) Then, I went through every single one of my 359 posts and manually edited the categories for them to fit into the new structure, since I still value most of my older content on this blog.

You can now see my refurbished set of categories on the left. You’ll notice one thing that I’ve done is I’ve organized some related topics into subcategories. There are also a few new categories on here. The “Going to College” category is going to be focusing on my efforts through the next school year to apply to and get into college–anything major that I do to enter college (or any tips that I discover along the way) will be blogged about this year and appearing in that category. I’m also hoping to feature more guest bloggers on Webmacster87.info from time to time, and the new “Guest Bloggers” category will help those stand out. The “In My Opinion” category will be for the longer blog posts that I make from time to time in which I express opinions about various things, and Tips ‘n Tricks will be for posts where I give tips about a particular subject. Since I found that I do blog a bit about issues that affect my state/country/the world, there’s a new “National/World Issues” category for those posts. Videos that I post now finally have their own subcategory under “On The Internets” (a clearer and more satirical name than “On The Intarweb”) along with a few other new subcategories. And under the Personal category, there’s a new “My Travels” category to cover my itineraries and recaps of my various expeditions, and a new “Feedback Requested” category for posts where I ask for feedback, assistance, or advice from you, my readers for various reasons.

So I’m glad that I’ve finally accomplished this tedious task and can cross yet another item off of my summertime to-do list!

Tags: categories, project, Webmacster87.info

This weekend (actually, starting in less than an hour), Successful and Outstanding Blogger Liz Strauss (well, okay, she just runs a blog about successful and outstanding bloggers, though that doesn’t mean she can’t be one to) is doing a “Blog-to Show,” which she describes as being kind of like an auto show for blogs. Bloggers who applied this past week (including myself) are going to get the chance to be promoted on her blog for readers to go and check out. This is a great chance for people to discover many new blogs they may not have noticed before, so I highly recommend that you check it out.

For those of you coming to my blog from Liz’s showcase, welcome! Please pardon the dust from the reorganization I currently am doing on this site (I’m working on redoing and improving my blog’s categories to better reflect my blog’s content), I hope to be finished with it later today. I hope you enjoy my blog and will consider subscribing.

Thanks to Liz for putting together this great blogging event, and of course, a tip of the hat to Lorelle VanFossen for bringing this event to my attention!

Tags: Blogging, event, expo, Liz Strauss, Lorelle VanFossen, showcase

In a future blog post, I’ll be reviewing Firefox 3 (which I’ve been playing around with for awhile) and the various Firefox extensions that I’ve been using with it. I’d like to ask of the other Firefox users out there if they have any Firefox extensions that they really like and would recommend that I try out. Head on down to the Comments section and share your suggestions (and help me get even more out of Firefox)!

Tags: addons, extensions, Firefox, web browser

I’m currently writing this blog post on an iPod touch at my local Apple Store, thanks to the WordPress App for the iPhone/iPod touch. Writing on this onscreen keyboard is still a little bit clunky, but I’m certainly doing it faster now than I was doing when I first picked up an iPhone here a year ago.

As i’m sure many of my readers are aware, I’ve been a very longtime holdout when it comes to iPods and iPhones. In fact, as I described in a recent blog post (boy, I wish this thing had a way to let me copy and paste links), my opinion of the iPods (including the touch) has been that they pretty much didn’t do anything that I couldn’t already do on my laptop. True, these things ate more mobile, but just how many of the mobile features that these things offered did I really need to have with me when my laptop was not handy?

But now this darned thing called the App Store is out. Not only has it wowed certain influential tech reviewers like David Pogue (if you haven’t seen his latest video about the App Store, you’re missing out on something GREAT), but it’s even making me take another look at these pocket-sized wonders.

Twitterriffic is certainly one of those Mac apps that has ported over very nicely to the iPhone/iPod touch, but it actually extends the ability of Twitter to reflect what you are actually doing. After all, most if us certainly don’t spend every moment of the day doing things just in the computer, so for Twitter to realize its full potential, it has to be the kind of service that can go mobile. I’ve had the chance to try Twitterrific on the iPod touch, and it has really felt like a nice transformation from its beautifully-simplistic interface on the Mac to an equally beautiful and simplistic interface on the touch. I could easily see it making me 50% more active on Twitter.

WordPress, the app that I am using right now to write this blog post, is also a very interesting examplenof what’s possible. After downloading this app onto here, all I had to do was enter the URL of my blog along with the username and password for my WordPress admin panel and boom, I was in my admin via the app with the ability to edit my past posts or write a new one, like I’m doing now. I could totally see using this to write a brief blog post from somewhere, although maybe not a really long one like I’m doing now.

1Password has not yet gotten their iPhone version out yet, but after seeing the preview that they posted on their blog, it’s another app I’m quite interested in. One of it’s abilities is supposed to be allowing you to generate super-tough and super-safe passwords, but I’ve been a bit slow at getting many of my passwords safe because I wouldn’t remember them if I needed to login from somewhere else and didn’t have 1Password there to autofill the info for me. Between having 1Password on the iPhone/iPod touch and the my1Password service, however, both of which are coming up soon, I could really have a nice solution for keeping track of my passwords and keeping them secure.

OmniFocus for the iPhone/iPod touch, however, has GOT to be the deal-clincher for me. Since I bought the Mac version at Macworld in January, I’ve been working on adopting OmniFocus and getting used to using it to help me organize the various tasks surrounding my life (and try to reduce stress as well). The problem, however, is that it lives on my computer, which I don’t have with me at places like school and other places where I really need to have it handy to add actions to (as well as reminding me of what actions I need to get done). OmniFocus for iPhone/iPod touch, however, would eliminate that problem by letting me have my OmniFocus lists with me to get to, and let me sync them with the ones on my computer. Add in those awesome mobile-only features like location-aware contexts, and it’s about time to put the “Slippery With Drool” signs out.

While I’m still not interested in the iPhone (unless someone wants to donate the $70/month AT&T plan to me, since I doubt I’ll ever be able to afford that and don’t like AT&T anyway), I’m starting to show a bit of interest in the iPod touch for the first time. It may have just been a touchscreen wifi media player when it first came out, but now, thanks to the App Store, I’m convinced that it’s the best PDA out there, and one that I’m really getting interested in. However, I’ll keep waliting until Apple releases their next line of iPods (likely this fall) until I start saving.

P.S. Do yourself a favor to maintain your sanity. Don’t write a post as long as this on an iPhone or iPod touch. It takes too much patience.

Tags: 1Password, App Store, Apple, applications, iPhone, iPod touch, OmniFocus, Twitter, Twitterriffic, WordPress

Hello folks,

This summer, one of my goals is to get organized and find useful tools that can help me better organize my life, both in the real world and in the online world. Therefore, I’d like to know if you have any suggestions of Web 2.0 sites that I’m not currently using but that I should consider checking out.

Also, if anyone out there actually knows how to use Facebook for useful purposes, I could sure use some help figuring that site out!

Please hie thee hence to the comments section and offer your suggestions. Thanks!

Tags: comments, Facebook, Help, social networking, suggestions, Web 2.0

Don’t ask me why the guys at JibJab are so awesome, but they are, and the latest proof comes in the form of their latest video: “Time For Some Campaignin’,” which beautifully sums up the entire 2008 election in two minutes. This is simply awesome.

Tags: Barack Obama, campaign, election, George Bush, Hillary Clinton, JibJab, John McCain, Video, YouTube

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Yes, I don’t care if Mac OS X Leopard finally makes it such that iCal’s Dock icon dynamically updates to reflect the correct date. Today, July 17th, 2008, marks six years since iCal was first announced at Steve Jobs’ last keynote at Macworld Expo New York in 2002, and it is a day worth remembering, especially since everyone using Leopard no longer has a Dock icon that can remind you.

And so, Happy Birthday, iCal! And Happy iCal Day to everyone out there on the internets.

Tags: iCal Day, Mac OS X Leopard, Macworld

Today I’m at the Social Media Camp taking place at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. Admission here is free, so if you’re attending or want to drop by, feel free to do so! (Those of you that are here can feel free to say hi in the comments section.) My friend Daniel Brusilovsky will be giving a presentation here later today, which I’m here to see, and I’m also going to be taking notes on social media/social networking and how a certain non-profit organization that I volunteer for can take advantage of it.

Anyway, for the readers on my blog, expect a report on my experience here in the next day or so. And for everyone at Social Media Camp who have heeded my shameless plug(s), hello and thanks for visiting my blog!

Update: I’ll be doing a session on “The Art of Personal Blogging” at around 2:15 PM today in the second room.

Tags: BarCAmp, event, research, San Francisco, Social Media Camp, visitors