Button It
Mar0
Apple, it seems, have a thing against buttons. For many years the Apple mice were famous for having only one button. The iPhone and iPod Touch have their world-renowned touchscreens. The new MacBooks have no discreet mouse button, opting for a single huge clickable glass trackpad. Rumours abound of a new Apple netbook with a touchscreen.
iPod Shuffle 3G
It should come as no surprise then that Apple’s latest incarnation of music player, the iPod Shuffle 3G, is completely devoid of buttons on the player itself, sporting only a single switch with the positions ‘off’,’shuffle’ and ‘play in order’. To actually drive the thing you need to use the included headphones with in-line remote, which sports three buttons for ‘volume up’, ‘volume down’, and ‘everything else’.
Safari 4
Feb2
Today I got an update through Twitter which piqued my interest.
oooh, Safari 4 is spangley and new!
Safari 4? I must have it! I leap gazelle-like to the Safari page on Apple’s website look at the shiny pictures and download the beta, only to be defeated by PAVCON being slow. 18 minutes later my download is complete, I rev up the installer, only to find that I now need to download a security patch. Software Update looks after this for me, but again I am defeated by PAVCON being slow. However, perseverence and two restarts later drop me into Safari 4 Beta.
My first impression is one of space. Safari 3 was very spacious, but 4 seems to just have oodles more. This is helped by a Chrome-like moving of browser tabs onto the menu bar of the application, tucked neatly out of the way. I’ve got to admit I’ve not been a fan of the way the tab bar slid in and out and altered the window dimensions.
My Top Sites
Next up after the shiny welcome page (All done in HTML 5 and CSS 3) I was dropped into my Top Sites, another Chrome-like display of where Safari thinks I like to browse. It’s mostly right, but I’d appreciate the ability to forcibly add my own top sites. The locking of sites and the ability to reposition them is nice, but not really enough.
The new CoverFlow interface for flicking through bookmarks and history is really, really useful when you can remember what a page looks like but no real content. The new address bar dropdown is nice and helps you find the site you’re after if it’s buried in your favourites somewhere. Likewise the inclusion of Google Suggest and search history in the inbuilt search bar is a much wanted addition.
On the subject of the address bar, however, a change I don’t like. The stop/refresh button has moved all the way to the end of the address bar, replacing the Set SnapBack button (For the curious, SnapBack is now relegated to the History menu, for searches only). I’d much rather have the option to go back to the big, chunky button. This also replaces any semblance of a load progress bar, turning into a not-very-helpful spinner when something is happening.
Speedwise it’s a noticeable improvement in lots of things, except for occasions when (I presume due to its beta nature) it slams into a brick wall of epic slowness for no apparent reason. Whatever happens it’s a major load, causing the beachball of doom to rear its colourful head and bring every other app on my system to a crawl.
I’ll keep you posted on anything interesting, but that’s my initial impression.
My Laptop Has Died (Ongoing)
Jul0
17 July: My laptop is now a year and a day old. No more original warranty, but I have AppleCare for a few more years.
18 July: My screen refuses to turn on, and there’s no output to an external monitor either. OS X boots fine, all my volume keys and VoiceOver work, but no video. Try resetting the PRAM, the NVRAM and the PMU to no avail. I reckon it’s either a video adapter problem or a logic board failure since my status LED stays on.
19 July, 11.45: A phone call to Apple support diagnoses it as a hardware fault as well, after another round of resetting everything. They offer to make me an appointment at my nearest Genius Bar though – nice touch. I decline and make my own later after consulting with the train timetables.
19 July, 17.20: I am called to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Meadowhall, after an hour and a half train journey, where the Genius shares my diagnosis of a fault on the logic board. I give them my laptop to fix, and am told it will probably be done by Monday. Excellent. I look at printers whilst I’m there.
…Ongoing
A MobileMe Mistake
Jul0
The MobileMe online login screen.
I thought it would all be good. The .Mac service wasn’t amazing, and certainly wasn’t worth the money for the yearly subscription unless you had more than one Mac and needed to keep them in sync. iDisk was slow, Sync routinely broke iTunes contacts syncing with my iPhone and so on. Then Apple announced MobileMe at WWDC, which looked absolutely amazing. Instant push updates between my Mac and iPhone – even my Windows installation – of calendars, contacts and any mail sent to my @mac.com (now @me.com) email address.
Trouble is, it doesn’t work and has been an amazing cock-up on Apple’s part, a company normally renowned for their flawless execuation of product launches.
It came alongside the iPhone 3G launch, which was predictably insane with demand far outstripping supply and the inevitable server issues as O2 and iTunes tried to handle thousands of people all activating at once. The iPhone 2.0 software update was good despite a small delay in pushing it to iTunes, but the iPhone and the new iTunes expects the MobileMe infrastructure to be in place.
It isn’t. It’s been up and down and unreliable for around 48 hours now, and I still don’t have the update which enables my Mac to talk to MobileMe, rendering it useless. Apparently there was a 1.1 patch hovering around briefly, but this has been pulled, despite some people still not getting 1.0 (Me included).
Guess it’s back to waiting.
It Really Just Works
Apr0
My iPhone has been playing silly buggers for a few days now, so I decided to bite the bullet and do a restoration on it. Having had some experience of restoring various gadgets to factory settings and the subsequent pain of getting them back how I liked them, this was something I approached with no small amount of trepidation.
Dock iPhone… it shows up in iTunes and predictably throws up an Unknown Sync Error (-39). No worry, I’ve already decided to click the “Restore” button. A single approval window appears, and I confirm my intent.
iTunes goes away and unpacks the new firmware, wipes my phone, re-flashes it and then restarts it without any input from me. I even went and played on Facebook whilst it was getting on with it. Next thing I know, the iTunes icon is merrily bopping away in my Dock and asking me if I would like to set my iPhone up as a whole new device or if it should just restore my backup.
Simply put, I restored my backup and it’s currently got all my settings (As far as I can tell) absolutely as I left them and is busy restoring all my media/contacts/email and so on. Apple wins for easy fixing of mildly broken phone, infinitely easier than fixing most other broken devices, even those with so-called ‘one-click recovery’. Even so, it worries me that people feel the need to put in a big “Fix It” button no matter how easy to use it is. Perhaps a more elegant solution would be an option tucked away in a menu, and a ‘cock-up counter’ which automatically asks you something like “Your device has failed to sync properly the past 10 times you have docked it – would you like to run an automated recovery and restoration of your backup?”