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.
Continue reading »

Tags: App Store, Apple, authors, developers, iPhone, iPod touch, iTunes, MOD Database, MOD Team, phpBB, problems, Software, suggestions

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

Well, I’m fresh back from my trip to Macworld Expo, courtesy of the tech group at my high school that I’m an “honorary member” of. (The “honorary” part means that I don’t actually do anything with them due to my busy schedule.) But yep, we got to go to Macworld as a field trip, meaning we got to legally miss all of our classes today to do so. Oh, I can just feel your jealousy rising.

The general consensus among us was that there was too much stuff for the three and half hours that we were there. (We finished getting all registered by 10:40 AM, and had to leave at 2:15 PM.) It didn’t help that there were two exhibit halls in separate buildings, a block apart from each other. Obviously not the ideal setup, but Moscone North was hosting the United Motorcoach Association of America or something like that. Wow. So, my schedule pretty much involved registering at Moscone West at about 10:20, then going through the West Exhibit Hall at 10:40-12:15, then getting lunch nearby until about 12:45, and then spending 12:45-2:15 in Moscone South. Unfortunately, I only got to see about half of Moscone South’s exhibit hall, which is very, very big.

However, this year, I spent most of my time talking with the smaller developers, which took up the majority of the West Hall and most of whom were together in the Developer Pavillion (aka “Tiny Town”) in South Hall, behind Apple’s humongous booth. I actually really enjoyed that, because in general, the smaller developers are much more approachable than these huge companies with the humongous booths, and they’re much more interesting. I actually got exposed to quite a few new apps that I’m going to have to check out (look at wallet, here comes the fire…). So although I obviously didn’t get to see everything I had hoped (the MacHeist, Micromat, and Microsoft booths were all on my to-do list which I didn’t get to), I still had a good time, a much less stressful time, and came back with some great goodies.

Included in my goodies was the official Macworld San Francisco T-shirt, this time a black T-shirt with blue and white lettering. I also got a WireTap Studio T-shirt from Ambrosia Software. WireTap Studio just looks so cool, so I’m really going to have to try it out. One of the companies actually was interested in doing a promotion with PreviewCast, and gave me his card, so there may be some interesting news coming from that soon.

Oh, and I got OmniFocus, the totally-awesome GTD application from the Omni Group for only $30. The regular list price is $80, and I got more than half off through a Macworld discount and a student discount. I’ll definitely be spending some time trying out OmniFocus and you can expect a detailed review here soon.

Don’t worry, you haven’t heard the last of my Macworld experiences yet, but I thought that I’d share just some of what I did at the exhibit hall today. One of these days, maybe I’ll actually be able to spend a full week at the conference.

P.S.: Sorry, but I didn’t get any pictures there this time. But I did get something else just as good! Hint hint…

Tags: Apple, developers, exhibits, Macs, Macworld, Moscone, Omni Group, OmniFocus, PreviewCast, recap, San Francisco, School, trip, WireTap Studio

If there’s one way to summarize one of my biggest questions about what was announced at Steve Jobs’ keynote on Tuesday, this has to be the best way. Overall, this year, I was never really excited about this year’s keynote, and there’s not much there to excite me. Time Capsule definitely looks interesting, and (when I can afford it) may actually improve my recent 1.5 Larry-head rating on Time Machine, although I’m not in a position to get it for the time being. I have a number of qualms about the MacBook Air, and as for the Apple TV, iTunes rentals, and iPod touch/iPhone updates, I’m maintaining a solidly neutral stance on those.

Now, hold on Douglas, you’re thinking, why aren’t you coming out and either praising or bashing Apple the way you normally do? Well, for most of these, I can see pros and cons on both sides, so for me, the jury’s still out on my opinions of these. I’m holding off until I get a chance to play around with things before I start to come to conclusions, and I will be sharing these conclusions on this weekend’s “Macworld in review” episode of PreviewCast, and later elaborating here on my blog.

As for trying them out, that’s what I’m going to be doing tomorrow! Indeed, tomorrow, I’ll be going with the Aragon group (about six of us in total, plus chaperones) to Macworld to tour the exhibit hall for the day. This will be my third consecutive excursion to Macworld’s Expo floor, and according to what all the websites are saying, we’ll actually be able to play around with the new stuff, rather than just looking at a rotating object in a bullet-proof* glass case. Which actually sounds exciting.
* I have no idea if the case was bullet-proof or not, and am just making this up.

However, this year, I hope to spend some more time talking to the people whom I really think should be the stars of the show: all of the little developers. (Merlin Mann likes to call the “little devs” section of the show floor Tiny Town.) It’s THEM that make the show possible, because it’s their contributions of their applications that helps the Mac platform succeed. So, I’m hoping to spend more time there this year.

I have one class tomorrow–Calculus, my first period class. After that, the group of us are carpooling up to the Millbrae BART station and taking BART to Powell Street, a block away from Moscone Center (and right next to the SF Apple Store). Last year, we tried to drive to Macworld and had the worst nightmare with parking. We’ll get there shortly after the 10 AM exhibit hall opening, get all checked in, and then have just under four hours to do stuff to our heart’s content. We’ll gather up around 2:15 to head back to BART and catch a 2:30 train back to Millbrae, and then we’ll drive back to school and get back there around 3:30.

I have not yet exactly decided what I’m going to do there. (Well, actually, I have, but I want to save some stuff to talk about in an “after Macworld” blog post!) However, I definitely intend to visit a number of booths. I plan to definitely check out Office 2008; after all, I don’t feel right truly making fun of something until I’ve had the chance to play around with it with my own hands, and I also want to find out, in plain English, what “Special Media Edition” means. I also want to find out if the Omni Group is offering any nice discounts on their new OmniFocus, which sounds like a really exciting app (and did you hear that it won a Best of Show award), and of course come home stuffed with a Macworld 2008 shirt. (I outgrew my Macworld 2006 shirt. As for my Macworld 2007 shirt, in February, it got a huge red stain after an alcohol thermometer broke in Chemistry class and splattered all over my shirt. Yeah, Macworld 2007 was just NOT a good one for me.) Oh, and I intend to gather up as many freebies and handouts as possible! There was some great stuff last year, so I wonder what I can scrounge up this year.

There’s also been lots of other things happening in my life recently, which I’ll try to catch up on in other blog posts, as it is time for me to hit the hay.

However, I will close by mentioning that this is my 300th blog post since I resalvaged this blog back in October 2006. My blog has had a number of incarnations before that, but I’ve never been able to keep a blog steady enough to keep going continuously for 300 full blog posts, which have been put together in 15 months. (You math whizzes can figure out that I’ve averaged out at 20 posts per month, or about 2 posts every 3 days. It’s not quite at one-post-per-day, blog365ers, but it’s pretty doggone close.) Thanks to the many of you who have been subscribing and sticking with my various ramblings. I do this blog mostly for myself, but it’s great to be able to bring you along for the ride and be able to share things that may interest or entertain you.

Tags: Apple, Aragon, BART, blog, exhibit hall, expo, itinerary, Keynote, Mac, MacBook Air, Macworld, News, opinion, plans, School, Time Capsule, Webmacster87.info

Well, most of you will probably be doing Christmas dinner or things like that with your families, but for those of you in need of something to do tonight, you can catch me live as one of the guests on System Showdown, one of the shows on the Tech Podcast Network. Their show description describes me as an Apple Enthusiast, so they may be surprised that I’m a little bit more of a curmudgeon when it comes to Apple. Either way, I’ll be talking about PreviewCast and phpBB Weekly and some other tech stuff as well. They stream live via Ustream, which you can watch via the link I provided.

The show begins tonight (December 25th) at 8:00-9:30 PM EST (5:00-6:30 PM PST). My guest appearance will be during the second half hour. A link to the podcasted edition will be provided as soon as they make it available.

Tags: appearance, Apple, guest, holiday, live, Mac, phpBB Weekly, Podcasts, PreviewCast, System Showdown, Tech Podcast Network, Ustream

As of today, it has now been a full five weeks since I installed Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook. It is no secret that I gave much more focus to Leopard than I gave to the iPhone during its late-June release, and that is because I am a Mac user and the first new OS X release in two and a half years is much more important to me. That’s why, during the week of the Leopard launch, I counted down to the Leopard release in my own way with my Tiger-to-Leopard series, which attempted to put the time difference between Tiger and Leopard into perspective. Then, for the 30 days of November, I wrote my Leopard Feature Presentation series, which selected one new feature per day from Mac OS X Leopard and reviewed it based on my experiences with that feature. Not only has it given me the chance to express my opinions about what I think of Leopard, doing the Leopard Feature Presentation has forced me to discover some of the other new features in Leopard that I might otherwise have overlooked.

So now that I have dedicated a full 45 (now 46) posts on my blog to covering Mac OS X Leopard, and have been using Leopard earnestly for the past 35 days, I will now make my final review of Mac OS X Leopard and do a final recap of the Leopard Feature Presentations during the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.
Continue reading »

Tags: Apple, features, innovations, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, operating system, recap, release, review

This is one of those new features in Leopard which I have been most unsure of whether or not I wanted to do a Leopard Feature Presentation on. I mean, what can you say about an application called Dictionary? It’s an application that lets you look words up in the dictionary. Like, wow. But, Apple has made a few changes to Dictionary.app which probably are good enough to point out.
Continue reading »

Tags: Apple, Dictionary, features, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, reference, review, Wikipedia

Well, my Leopard Feature Presentation didn’t get off to a positive start yesterday when I blasted Leopard’s so-called New Desktop. But today, I’m going to take things to a more positive note by looking at one of the new Leopard features that I’m very happy to see: the new Help menu and Help Viewer.
Continue reading »

Tags: accessiblity, Apple, features, Help, Help Viewer, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, Macs, menu, review, search, switchers

When I said that I would be devoting this week on Webmacster87.info to coverage of the Mac OS X Leopard release, I wasn’t kidding. Just to help you keep whetting up your appetites excitement for that tasty shiny new cat, here’s a few stories on Leopard that I’ve found via Digg.

Mac OS X Leopard 9A581’s Dock Visual Tweaks
Remember all those people who were complaining about the “3-D” Dock looking really weird on the left/right sides? The latest build of Leopard apparently has a brand new, unique 2-D Dock that still has a Leopard refresh, but doesn’t look as geeky. Personally, I didn’t have that big of a problem with the 3-D Docks on either side, I thought that they looked okay. I’d still like to know how well the new Dock works with hiding on…

16 Coolest New Features In Mac OS X 10.5 That You Didn’t Know About
Well, if you’d read 300 New Features thoroughly, you’d know about these, but these are some cool Leopard features that didn’t get the prominent placement on the Leopard site or in the guided tour.

Apple Answers Leopard Questions
This Apple interview that Gizmodo did doesn’t reveal very much new stuff, but is still a bit of an interesting read.

Now I’m off to find out if iLife ‘06 will be Leopard-compatible and to dream about roast Leopard with barbecue sauce and a side of deep-fried pickle hearts…

Tags: Apple, design, Digg, Dock, features, Gizmodo, interview, Mac OS X Leopard, MacRumors, sidebar, stories