Monthly Archives: September 2007

I Want the Mac Back

I’ve been using an 800MHz G3 iBook with 256mb of memory this weekend and it has been an
epiphany. Don’t get me wrong it’s slow, but it has a sensual dimension that I don’t think I’ve ever felt with a windows PC, and I’ve missed it.

It may be the my aversion to Windows is a conditioned response, but that doesn’y change the fact that I’m dreading the prospect of going back to using a PC, day in, day out. I think I need to buy a mac for my personal machine, and soon. And the truth is, there is very little I need widows for at work.

I only wish Apple hadn’t been dedicating themselves to their odious business partners at the expense of their users so much lately.

Apple’s Automatic iPhone Backups Suck

iTunes is supposed to make a backup of your iPhone settings and data every time you sync, but I’ve already been burned twice by their crappy software.

First time I tried restoring my phone to fix a problem with no sound coming out of the earpiece. It didn’t help (plugging and unplugging the headphones several times did), but I found out that they don’t backup and restore the photos you take on your iPhone. Idiots.

Second time I decided to restore my phone before installing the 1.1.1 update, just to be on the safe side. This time, it started restoring the iPhone while the activation process still seemed to be underway. A few minutes later I get an error message on my computer that there was a problem restoring from backup because their was a timeout. No option to try again. I went ahead and tried syncing my phone. It updated bookmarks and contacts, because those were synced with desktop applications, but my e-mail account settings, my favorite contacts, my calendar, all my notes and pretty much every other setting was gone. I was going to try restoring the phone again, but iTunes only keeps one backup, and from the associated times on the backup, it had gone ahead and created a new backup from my iPhone after all the data went missing.

WTF, Apple? I thought your stuff was supposed to just work.

Maybe you should open the iPhone up to 3rd party developers, because you aren’t doing a very good job on your own.

Update: This post is old. iPhone backups are much better now.

Stop Forcing Your Crippled Mobile Sites onto my iPhone

More and more sites are detecting iPhones and helpfully forcing them to use crippled mobile versions of their sites. In most cases, the inflicted version is a completely crippled version designed to be viewed on crappy mobile phone browsers (hello, Yahoo). In other cases it’s been nicely optimized for the iPhone except that it lacks 90% of the features of the main site (HELLO FACEBOOK).

Please, Please STOP. If you want to do me a favor by helping me find your underdeveloped mobile site at least give me an easy option for using your main site.

I bought an iPhone because I wanted access to the whole web from my phone. Forcing me into your half-assed mobile version is a step backwards and makes me hate you. I’m sure I am not the only one who feels this way.

Apple sucks ass

Apparently Apple has started inserting cryptographic checksums in the DB of music stored on iPods. This breaks 3rd party software for managing your iPod music library, tying the iPod to iTunes.

I’m sure there are a lot of bad reasons for implementing this, like keeping people from creating applications that let people share music directly between WiFi enabled iPod’s and iPhones.

I use iTunes, I own Apple stock, but really, this is complete customer hostile crap. Screw them.