Posts Tagged ‘Mac’

A MobileMe Mistake

Sunday, July 13th, 2008
The MobileMe online login screen.

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.

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Posted in In The News, Rambling | No Comments »

It Really Just Works

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

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?”

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Posted in In Passing, Thoughts | No Comments »