When the App Store first launched almost a month ago, I must say, I thought that it would be a great thing. Not only were iPhones and iPod touches opened up to have third-party apps available on them, but they would be available in one centralized location to make it easy for users to get these apps, and the fact that handle was handling distribution in its own store meant that little, smaller developers could have just as much of an entry into the iPhone app market as the big boys.

But now, it appears that the latter part of that belief was not true, as the more I’ve been reading about the developers’ side of the App Store, the more I’ve not been liking it.
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Tags: App Store, Apple, authors, developers, iPhone, iPod touch, iTunes, MOD Database, MOD Team, phpBB, problems, Software, suggestions

About a month ago, Lorelle VanFossen issued a blogging challenge to bloggers to describe their computer setup, from the past to the present. (I know, I’m a bit slow.) But, I thought, why not, I’ll go back and describe my family’s various computers from 1995 (when we got our first Mac) to today. A lot of the details in this post is thanks in part to Mactracker..
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Tags: blogging challenge, computers, iBook, Lorelle VanFossen, Mac mini, MacBook, Macs, Performa, PowerMac G4, setup

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 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

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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

Well, the iPhone 3G release is just days away now, yet for some reason, the hype doesn’t seem as awe-inspiring as last year’s did. Which is quite surprising, given that right after I watched Steve Jobs’ keynote last month, my thought on the new iPhone and the 50% price reduction was, “At last, Apple finally got the iPhone right.” And that’s a big statement coming from me, as someone fully certified as being immune to Uncle Steve’s Reality Distortion Field. But yet, in the past month, many revelations have come out to smash Apple’s party, and most of them from the cell carriers, the gatekeepers needed to allow the iPhone to function.

In the post I made yesterday on MacFocus Magazine I ranted about cell phone carriers and how they hinder the iPhone, which has been more than clear in the past month. Even ignoring how other cell carriers are screwing would-be iPhone customers (I’m looking at you, Rogers), the iPhone 3G comes with plenty more strings attached. I could start with the basic craziness of charging an extra $10/month for the 3G service for the iPhone, which not only eliminates the iPhone’s $200 price drop, it actually makes the total cost of the iPhone more expensive. I could then go to the unexplained reason for the iPhone no longer being activated in iTunes. Not only does it take one of my favorite attributes of the old iPhone and throw it out the signature-free window, but it’s going to make the already ridiculously-crowded Apple Stores much worse and cause people the hassle of having to go through all the usual cell phone heck. (Plus, not having an online option is going to mess it up for the people who don’t live near an Apple or AT&T Store; are people going to have to make iPhone pilgrimages now?)

Oh, and it’s nice that AT&T will finally offer an contract-free option (note how AT&T didn’t say “unlocked” anywhere) for the iPhone, but putting it at a $400 surcharge, plus tax, is ridiculous! It would be smarter to buy the iPhone for $200 or $300 (instead of $600 or $700), sign the contract, pay for one month of service, then cancel and pay the $175 early termination fee on the contract. By my math, that would save you over $150 over the contract-free option. And why exactly can’t the iPhone be activated with GoPhone pay-as-you-go yet?

That’s why I’m still not interested in an iPhone. The phone itself is nice, and finally is something I would desire except for it having to go through AT&T under a two-year contract at a substantial monthly fee. No thanks, I’m not that desperate to go mobile.

The alternative would be the iPod touch, which thanks to its imminent App Store upgrade will finally become the best non-cell phone PDA out there. (Palm originally beat it in my opinion by having open access to applications that actually did things, but now the iPod touch has that too, and with far better quality.) The only main differences now between the iPhone 3G and the iPod touch are the phone part, the lack of GPS (though the iPod touch still has the somewhat-less-accurate Skyhook function, but even the original iPhone didn’t have that), and–oh yeah, the ability to be online without access to a wifi hotspot.

See, that’s my one remaining issue here. Yes, the iPhone has the ability to be online wherever there is a good cell connection, while the iPod touch is restricted to just wifi networks. At that point, wouldn’t it just be smarter to rely on my laptop instead, since it also can only connect to the internet at wifi hotspots? Besides that, at present, the iPod touch (which clearly has less functionality) is $100 more than the iPhone. Granted, the iPod touch doesn’t have to be hindered by a service plan, but it does make one wonder if Apple isn’t planning to up the specs on the iPod touch this fall.

I have never been interested in an iPod because I’ve always said that I’m satisfied with listening to iTunes on my computer, and don’t really need my music elsewhere in most cases (except maybe a 12 hour flight, which I don’t do very often). I’m not strongly interested in an iPod touch, because it pretty much has the same, if not less, functionality of my MacBook, albeit in a smaller form factor and a different interface. I might be interested in the iPhone, since it does have a few tricks that my computer doesn’t, except for it being connected to AT&T and therefore being far more expensive than I could ever hope to afford in my current position thanks to that darned service plan crap.

What exactly is the place of these pocket-sized devices in my life? They may be more attractive to me than they were a few years ago, but Steve Jobs is going to have to full just a few more tricks out of his hat before I’m in the mood for one of these iDevices.

Tags: activation, AT&T, carriers, devices, dilemma, iPhone, iPod touch, laptop, rant, rate plans, services

Today I had another opportunity to take advantage of one of my favorite Leopard tips, but interestingly enough, it’s one that isn’t very well known out there. You may have heard of this tip, you may have not, but I thought that it might be interesting on this Fourth of July to take a break from my usual string of blog posts to share this tip from Mac OS X Leopard.

Have you ever used an application that had a menu item that you said, “Boy, why didn’t the developer think to give that menu item a keyboard shortcut?” I sure have. For example, in the new Safari 3, I use that “Merge All Windows” feature from the Window menu quite frequently, but it doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut at all. Well, Leopard gives you a way to assign keyboard shortcuts easily.

Open System Preferences and go to Keyboard & Mouse, then choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Not only does this tab let you see the various system-wide keyboard shortcuts available to you, including some you may not have known about (did you know that you could show the Help menu with Shift-Command-/ by default or look things up with Control-Command-D by default?). To add a new shortcut, however, just click on the + button underneath the list, which will bring down a new sheet. If you’re adding a shortcut for a menu item in a specific application, choose it in the pop-up menu. If you’re adding a shortcut for a system-wide menu item, like a service or an Apple menu item or something like that, leave it to All Applications. In the box that says “Menu Title,” enter the exact name of the menu item you’re editing. Capitalization counts here, and if the menu item includes an ellipsis (…) at the end, include that as well. Don’t worry about what menu or submenu the item is in. Finally, in the last box, enter the keyboard shortcut you want, being sure that it doesn’t duplicate an existing one in the application or in the system. Then, click Add, and restart the affected application.

If you entered it correctly, you’ll find that the menu item should now display its keyboard shortcut, and for most applications (definitely Cocoa applications), the shortcut will be functional. Incidentally, this trick also works in Mac OS X Tiger, except that the shortcut won’t display itself in the menu item. This doesn’t work everywhere (Firefox wouldn’t go with it), but in Safari, it’s sure a lot easier to merge all windows into tabs with a Shift-Command-M than it is to have to go into the Window menu manually.

Tags: keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, Leopard, Mac, Mac OS X, menu items, menus, tip

The short answer: Because I don’t refer people to things that I don’t think are worthwhile.

Yes, I have liked some of the things that MacHeist has done before, but this seems stupid. As if they didn’t have enough to play around with from their December 2006 and January 2008 bundles, they’ve now decided that they have to throw another bundle out the window once again. I mean, how many times do they expect us to throw $49 away? I know that these are large savings on totally random I-never-even-intended-to-purchase-this-otherwise selections of shareware, but it’s not like money grows on trees.

But now, apparently, they’ve decided to step up a notch and sell this as a retail package, but not before offering the same thing for sale online first. While I personally think that one defeats the purpose of the other, who am I to think things through logically?

But what’s crazy about this bundle is that NOTHING IS NEW. A few of the applications are from the original December 2006 bundle, but the majority of these are from the January 2008 bundle that was less than three months ago. I mean, who do they think they are kidding?

Well, they’re not entirely insane, in that they’re admitting this themselves. In an e-mail that they sent out to all of us longtime MacHeist members (I’ve been there since the beginning thanks to an invite that Larry sent me back in October 2006), they acknowledged this glaring fact:

“As an already registered member, we know you may own a lot of these apps, so in an effort to keep you interested, and involved in the world of Mac software, we’ve been hard at work putting together a truly awesome referral program. It’s time to call up those old friends… because this time around, we will be unveiling multiple tiers of software prizes, each crammed with several options.”

Well first of all, for the first part of that sentence, let’s correct “own a lot of these apps” by indicating that I own all of them courtesy of these geniuses. And so what they’ve decided to do is instead turn all of us into pawns in order to annoy our friends and family and website visitors to urge them to spend $50 on software that most of them don’t need, and on stuff that the majority of the concerned internet already has anyway. I seem to recall the January bundle having sold tens of thousands of copies, enough to raise $500,000 for charities in that go-around. So what makes this bundle worth it? No, they want to make us pawns to try to urge people not only to buy this software, but to use our referral links rather than someone else’s.

Well, I’m not going to play that game. I’m not going to try to refer people to something just for the sake of getting benefited for the referral, and I’m certainly not going to try to refer people to something that I think is completely pointless myself. That’s not the way I roll. I don’t know where MacHeist thinks they’re getting this idea from, but I don’t expect to see them getting anywhere close the the amount of participation that they’ve had in their last two bundles, because I think most people (except the people greedy for those referral apps) recognize that this is a pretty lame offering. Therefore, I’m not going to post a referral link for you to go get the bundle–consider this a “deferral” for the bundle. And if you decide that you still want to purchase it, go find someone else’s referral link and use theirs.

P.S.: I do think that MacHeist’s little “trailer” for the retail bundle is pretty cool though, kudos to them on that.

Tags: bundle, MacHeist, referral, retail, sale, shareware, Software, stupid

Contrary to my usual habits, I was very excited to get my hands on Mac OS X Leopard, to the point where I went ahead and pre-ordered it, thus officially deeming myself an “early adopter.” I then spent the month of November on Webmacster87.info with my so-called Leopard Feature Presentation. However, Leopard had a few disappointing attributes, which I summed up best in the following quote that I wrote on December 1st:

Leopard does have a share of downsides, and does suffer a bit from an “Apple knows best” syndrome in the fact that a number of features don’t come with preferences to allow the user to choose what he/she wants in his/her user experience, and probably the best example of this concerns Apple’s new desktop, translucent menu bar, and 3D Dock.
From Review and Final Recap: Mac OS X Leopard

Well, at long last, these downsides have been corrected. Three and a half months after Leopard was released, 10.5.2 was published, an 180 MB update that among making many, many bug fixes, also reverses some of the “Apple knows best” attributes.

For one thing, the translucent menu bar is no longer as translucent, but even better, they’ve added an option to turn off the opaque menu bar completely! What’s now there is a greyish gradient menu bar, which is actually fairly reminiscent of the rest of Leopard’s interface (and easier on the eyes than the white translucent menu bar type I was using before).

Also, I have finally fallen in love with Stacks. Apple has now made it possible for you to set the folder icon as the representative icon for the stack (instead of a “stack” of the top three files), and the pre-Leopard list view has returned–even better because you no longer need to right-click to get to it. While I’m going to keep using Fan mode for the Downloads folder, I love the list view so much more for Applications and Documents stacks.

As for the 3D Dock, the Mac developer community is so awesome that there are a large number of freeware tools available that let you switch to the 2D Dock style if you prefer, so I think that the complaints over the 3D Dock have died down (not that I ever had problems with it).

All in all, I’d say that now with 10.5.2, Leopard is finally truly an undisputed worthwhile package that I highly recommend everyone upgrade to. Apple may have taken three and a half months to catch up, but Vista has been out for 13 months now, and Microsoft still hasn’t fixed that!

Anyway, I’m very glad to see 10.5.2, and feel so much happier using my computer thanks to it. Now let’s see if perhaps it has the power to fix random shutdowns…

Tags: Dock, features, Mac OS X Leopard, menu bar, Stacks, update

Well, MacHeist has just sweetened their 2008 bundle for the last time. They’re trying to get $300,000 raised for charity through bundle sales within the next three days. I must say, over the last two weeks their bundle has certainly improved in its impressiveness factor, and so I’m probably planning to buy it and do my part.

However, there are three applications in the bundle which I will not be taking advantage of. I already have a license for 1Password, which is an awesome password managing tool for Mac OS X. I know that a lot of people really like Snapz Pro X, but personally I’ve never figured it out, and I have a license for iShowU, another app which does the same thing. And as for Wingnuts 2, I’m not particularly planning to play that kind of game. (However I’ll be keeping my hands on the mini golf game because it seems interesting, and even if I don’t like it, I’m sure my younger brother would.)

But anyway, I will be giving away a license each to 1Password, Snapz Pro X, and Wingnuts 2 from the bundle. MacHeist allows me to specially designate these licenses to you when I do the check out for the bundle, so these will be licenses especially for you with your name on them. If you weren’t planning to get yourself the full MacHeist bundle but are interested in one (or more) of these three apps, this is a great opportunity to get them free!

How does it work? Post a comment to this post on Webmacster87.info telling me which app(s) you would be interested in getting for free and why you want it/them. The deadline to make your comment is 7:00 AM Eastern time (4:00 AM Pacific time) on Tuesday morning, January 22nd–this essentially gives you 38 hours. I will announce the selected winners Tuesday morning, and will purchase the bundle Tuesday afternoon (the licenses for these three apps will go out to the winners at that time, and the licenses for the remaining 11 apps will come to me for my own personal use). Please be sure that when you post your comment you enter your Name and E-mail Address exactly as you want it to appear in the license for the app(s) you’re interested in. If no one is interested in a particular app, then I’ll just keep the license and file it away somewhere.

Also, do you plan to purchase the MacHeist Bundle, but haven’t yet? PLEASE use this referral link to buy the bundle! I really really would like to get a free license for LaunchBar, and if you buy the bundle through that referral link, I get LaunchBar for free! (If you use my referral link to give me LaunchBar before Tuesday afternoon, I’m willing to use your referral link as well to return the favor.)

Again, thanks to MacHeist for putting on such a great event, and doing it for a good cause. And, thanks to all the developers who are throwing their apps into the ring for this excellent cause as well!

Tags: 1Password, applications, bundle, contest, LaunchBar, licenses, MacHeist, referral, Software