Apple Nag

On episode 188 of This Week in Tech (TWiT), Leo Laporte uttered the most universal tech line I’ve ever heard. At 1:31:52 Leo says, “There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just a piece of crap.”

That can apply to so many products made these days.

He was referring to the Android G1 phone. But I immediately started thinking about many Apple hardware and software products.

There’s nothing wrong with the stuff you make, that’s why we continue to use it. But it really is a piece of crap, meaning we think you can do a lot better.

Thanks, Leo. You made my day.

My niece celebrated her second birthday party yesterday and my venerable Canon PowerShot G2 4.0 megapixel camera was kept busy.

I publish these photos on my iWeb-created site running on my Power Mac G5 server at home. It’s trivial to get the photos from the camera to the family in short order. Or so I thought until I really kept track of the sordid process.
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If H. G. Wells had written his story, The Time Machine, with the star of the book being as reliable as your incarnation of Time Machine, then the book would have died in obscurity.

Do you think you could get around to fixing this bug — sometime? I’m getting this several times a week, and so are many others, sometimes multiple times in a day. Backups should be reliable. Do you agree?

Update: Oh, one other question guys — what am I supposed to do to correct this problem? Your error message is totally useless for troubleshooting.

A couple of articles yesterday and today got me thinking (always dangerous) resulting in that old Beatles tune, Can’t Buy Me Love, wafting through my brain.

I’m glad for that as it got me to write about more important things than the forced restart of OS X I had to do today. How many times is that this week? Hmm.

You can never go wrong beating up Apple, and I’ve certainly got my licks in with you guys on this blog. You deserved it. But these two articles are asking more from you than a company should be expected to give.

Money can buy you love. Just ask Scott Bourne. His giveaways on Twitter are buying him followers. So are his giveaways for linking to his new web site. Does that mean Scott is some sad, pathetic loser that has to buy his love? Hell no. He’s running a business. It’s called marketing. You can’t come down on the guy because he’s spending money to make money. That’s how companies grab attention, which is what you need to get noticed in a highly competitive market. If the product he provides is crap, people will leave, his advertisers will bail, and he’ll be left with debt. It’s called running a company.

What the authors of the articles fail to understand is that you are providing a non-essential service. You’re running a business. You have competitors. You’re trying to win. Why does everyone want to beat up a winner?
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What are you saying to me, iCal? I touch you softly with the cursor and you squeal with joy. Beep, you say. Beep, beep, beep! I can’t understand you dear. Try putting up a warning dialog.

Yup, it’s time to nag you guys again about meaningless beeping and useless error messages. For efficiency, I can understand beeping once, maybe twice. But if I keep doing the same thing because I haven’t a clue why you’re beeping, then maybe it’s time to say something intelligible.
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The ancient Now Contact and Now Up-to-Date are being reborn as a unified Now X. Well, they will if Now X ever gets out of beta. It’s been in beta almost as long as GMail. I’m not kidding!I think I’ll skip the discussion about how meaningless the Now X name is, they’ll find out soon enough when people who don’t know the sordid history behind these products say, “What the hell does Now X do?” There is absolutely no indication in the name as to the function of the product. Fail!

But don’t get smug. iCal and Address Book have far less functionality than Now products had 15 years ago. Shameful.
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Now that I’m using this blog to document all the things about your software and hardware that nag at me, you’re going to see some really old issues show up.

I’m almost embarrassed to talk about your window gum-drops for close, minimize, and whatever the heck that green one is supposed to do. I think you call it the “zoom” button, but it functions more like a random window resizer.

There is no way I’ve been able to predict the size of the window when I click the zoom button. In OS 9, it used to maximize the window to fit on the screen, I think leaving room for the icons along the right side.

In OS X, uh, I have no idea. Let’s check out a few of your own apps …
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Most of the ideas for this blog come from the “aha!” moments when I finally realize what’s bugging me. Depending on the severity of the problem, I can feel the itch building for days, or weeks before it becomes tangible.

Recently, I’ve been thinking that my new mouse (Logitech, never Apple) was giving me problems because the clicks didn’t seem to be registering. I’m often in a rush to do things so it often goes unnoticed. I just click again.

It’s now getting frequent that I can’t bring a window of another application, visible behind the current window, to the foreground. I can click around on other elements so I know the mouse is working. Click on that background window — nada, zip, nothing — it just thumbs it’s invisible nose at me and smirks.

The only way to bring the window to the foreground is to click on the application’s icon in the Dock.

See, this is what I’m getting at. I swear Leopard is getting flakier by the minute as part of a conspiracy by you guys to build demand for Snow Leopard in the hope that anything has got to be better than what we’re using now.

And you know what? I’ll probably pay for an upgrade just so that I don’t go insane. You bastards!

You guys get a lot of flack for your proprietary interfaces, adding chips here and there to extract licensing fees from accessory makers. Oh well, I’m just glad Apple doesn’t make cars.

If anybody knows who owns the copyright on this beauty, please let me know.

The problems I’ve been reporting here, and trying to get you to address in time for Snow Leopard, may not be all your fault. I do have the uncanny ability to break anything I touch. I’ve had this ability for many years.

While working at Bell-Northern Research and later Nortel in Ottawa, Ontario during the late ’80s to the mid-’90s, I honed this talent to be as sharp as shadow-square wire.
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