Just a few weeks ago I bought iWork08. It would cost me another $100 to get the recent iWork09. That ‘Numbers’ is pointless I already realized. I hear keynote is alright, have not used it. I just tried to use Pages. Again. Making something as fancy as a ‘table’. Oh, boy! Annoying and stupid. But then I wanted to enter “99.999%”. The INTERDUBS uptime. Leaving the input focus of that field “Pages” decided to change that it to “100%”. No, really. Kid you not. Had to do it thrice to believe it. I am sure there might be some preference somewhere. But Pages has wasted enough of my time already. Amazon is shipping Mac office any day now. I can wait for that. Waiting happily to use a Microsoft software. What has the world come too!!
Category: Apple
When a program crashes under OS X then it displays a dialog asking if the info should be sent to Apple. If you never do that then you can disable this dialog by typing:
defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType Server
in a terminal shell. So says the C’t.
I am an casual office software user. I write things in vi or text edit. And yes, that’s how they sound. I never was that big in to spread sheets. But graphing solutions I need. I had written my own things for SGI, but even though OS X is OpenGL as well, it is just too much work to maintain.
Since my kids now start using office software I thought I’d get them iWork. Big mistake. Pages is ok (compared to vi and text edit). Numbers however is just outright lame. I hate the fact that Apple is able to pretend that this pile of junk is software that you can make an attempt to sell. Trying to graph anything in this turd of a bloatware reveals how 0.5 ass this thing is. The problem is that crappy software is worth negative money: It took me hours to figure out that it was actual this ‘spreadsheet application’ that was just unable to do even simple tasks.
“Numbers” has no understanding of time. I will download now Mac Office 2008. Which is even reasonably priced these days. Looking forward to use Microsoft software. How weird is that!
Apple makes awesome products. Since years I spend most of my waking hours on their respective recent laptops. That part works so well. The iPhone is alright. I had better phones that worked much better as a phone. But that might be AT&Ts issue. And it kinda works.
Apples online user management is ridicolous though. I keep lots of passwords to lots of sites. And nowhere do I have the amount of trouble that Apple gives me. It never is clear if their different services share the same credentials. Changing / retrieving it is a nightmare. The whole user experience is just broken. I think that happens if you have one part of your business doing really well: You can afford to be sloppy in another. And I am sure that Steve never has to reset his password. And many people are having trouble managing their passwords. So they will not blame Apple for their broken system. I can, since things work on all other major sites and system for me. But not in Apple Land.
I never was intrigued by .mac and so I skipped looking at MobileMe. Which turned out to be a good thing. I wonder if Apple will be able to turn this around. But looking at their websites and it’s vast collection of broken links and outdated developer documentation I have serious doubts that this will be ever better.
No wonder the introduction of “mobileMe” was such a disaster. I, like most people, have registrations with many websites. From pointless things to online banking. Even though there is no official or firm standard for registration on websites certain practises emerged. And overall things work.
With one exception:
Apple.
Their web site registration mechanism for developers is broken. Not by one main outage or problem. More in the million paper cuts kind of way.
* passwords expire
* passwords have odd ‘security’ restrictions. Of course you have to try a password to see that the system complains about something
* loging in to one part of the system does NOT mean that you have access to another, or that you just changed password would be working there.
Apples own website is pretty dismal overall, once you go beyond the home and apple store pages: Broken links clutter the whole thing. Links that go nowhere are an inherent problem of the internet. But having them within a company website is just lame. A million paper cuts. Not fun to repeat each one of them. But the mobileMe disaster did not come not as a surprise.
Other areas of Apple are vastly ahead of the game and the competition. The internet is certainly not one of them.
For the longest time I ran Firefox 1.5. 2.0 had nothing to offer and from what I heard was a real dog. Finally I switched my main browser over to 3.0 and it has been a nice experience. I love those little things. Like asking if you like to save a password AFTER you entered it (and therefor know if it worked or not). While FF3 seems to be worth it I have serious doubts about Safari 3.0. So many things behave now somewhat different. Quirkier. Surprisingly FF3 plays for instance much nicer with Quicktime than Safari 3 in many cases. One would expect the opposite. It might just be that Apple engineers test all sites that they know their boss will visit. Outside of that the importance probably falls off pretty quickly. I am sure that His Steveness thinks that the thing ‘scrolls like butter’. It probably does. For him. I wonder if his switch to MobileMe went well …
Got refurb iPod nanos from Apple for the kids. $99. Tooble is a somewhat buggy but overal working application that will get youtube videos and put them into iTunes and therefor the nanos. Handbrake takes care of DVDs and works actually much better. Overall it is pretty impressive with how little effort, config and engineering I was able to give my kids all the music videos that I thought would be interesting. Quality is dismal, but I heard no complaints.
By far the worst online user management is done by apple. I felt I could use an Airport Express. But I did not feel dealing with Apple’s broken password management yet again. iTunes kinda works most of the time. But their developer connection and online stores are plain pathetic. I am sure it works for Apple employees, and Apple devotees maybe get even a kick out of the interaction with their beloved brand. But I have better things to do. Like buying stuff on Amazon.
June 29th 2007: Apple releases the iPhone
August 8th 2007: INTERDUBS supports the iPhone
June 17th 2008: Beam.TV launches mode to support the iPhone.
As for all others companies in the space: Nothing. Yet.
With a MacBook you pay around 50 extra to get it in black. Now with the iPhone 3G there will be a white version. But that will only be available for the larger 16GB version. I never ever have filled up the 4GB I had. So you have two choices now with the iPhone 3G: pay too much because you can and don’t show people (get the black one) or let people know that you don’t need to care about the extra 100. The new price of 199 is pretty low, compared to last years launch. But I would guess that the 20$ a month extra for 24 months rule is still in place. You pay AT&T or whomever, but you pay. That’s 480 dollars extra that any iPhone will cost you. So the price started out at 1079 for the 8GB / 979 for the 4GB and now has arrived at 879 / 779 respectively.
Turns out that the data plan is now $30 and not $20 any longer. So the total price for an iPhone2 is $1019 / $919.