Dylan Schiemann

I love the promise of Apple computers, but time and time again I am disappointed by the quality of the product they deliver.

After repeated problems with my PowerBooks that I have outlined previously, I bought a MacBook Pro. I would not be blogging today if it were not for the poorly designed MacBook Pro battery, and the way Apple treats its customers.

As a power user, I of course bought an extra battery. The battery life so far has actually been a pretty solid 3.5 hours if I dim the screen. On my way to SXSW, I placed my spare battery in my bag as I normally would. I’ve used the spare battery a grand total of one time.

I arrive in Texas and find that the non-rounded edge of my battery is defective, with the plastic and metal adhesive both turned up about 1cm. Given that I have used the spare battery once, to charge it, I go to the Apple store in Austin, TX, where I am told that they have never seen this problem and believe that I was negligent. Of course, they have never even seen this battery in person before, so they don’t really know if this is a real problem or just me.

However, I can say with certainty that the new battery design appears much less durable than the PowerBook battery design, which I have never had a problem with in the years of owning other frequently defective PowerBooks. So basically I see this situation as much like the problem Apple had with the Nanos… they are selling a product without letting the user know that it is more fragile than previous releases. I cannot use the spare battery now because I would scrape the table whenever I use my laptop. So I have received 3 hours of battery use total out of this battery. This is a great deal considering the many many thousands of dollars I have paid to Apple over the years in purchasing many of Apple’s products.

Apple and others offer no protective cases for the MacBook pro batteries, and as such the consumer does not know that the batteries are not at all durable.

But I am tired of being Apple’s beta tester. The only reason I bought this machine was because the PowerBook was too freaking slow. But the nightmarish experience I’ve had in migrating applications and building unix apps on the MacBook Pro has so far been a significant time sink, something I would not wish on anyone.

So why do I stay? Because Windows isn’t unix/linux and it’s UI sucks. Because KDE and Gnome don’t do it for me. Because I do not have good luck with computers. One of my co-workers jokes that I killed a baby computer in a previous life. Maybe he’s right.

So in the end I’m out a lot of time, and a little bit of money, for a system that still does only 50% of what I expect it to do. I would pay more for a portable laptop that just freaking worked. But such a product does not seem to exist, which really sucks.

After years of hating the quality of flowers delivered through 1800flowers.com, for Valentine’s Day this year I decided to order a dozen roses for that special lady in my life. Being the procrastinator that I am, I waited until February 13th to place the order.

On February 14th, I see that my credit card has been charged for the flowers, but then I realize at around 7pm that no flowers have arrived. I call their customer (dis)service number, hear a recording that informs me that due to high holiday volume, no delivery confirmations are available, that deliveries can happen as late as 9pm, and the phone wait time to talk with someone is 45 minutes. So I hang up, and no flowers arrive, and I look like a jerk for not buying flowers, so I send an email to the ftd.com support department.

February 15th, still no flowers. I call their support number, the same recording is still active, and I am immediately disconnected. February 16th is a repeat of February 15th. And no response to their email.

February 17th I finally get through, and receive the following response: “At your request, your FTD.COM order has been canceled and a refund in the amount of $94.98 has been posted to your credit card. We hope you’ll give us the opportunity to assist you in the future. It is a lot easier to guarantee delivery when we have more notice. Thank you for shopping with FTD.COM. Sincerely, ASHLEY”

What I fail to understand is… Valentine’s Day is not exactly a new holiday that sneaks up on florists. There is a reason roses cost $100 on February 14th, but $20-40 the rest of the year… it is called peak pricing. They seemed to have no difficulty in charging my credit card ontime. No attempt was made to contact us regarding the delivery on the 14th, or the 15th, or the 16th. Ashley, (and who signs their name in all-caps anyway? Is that even your real name?), I didn’t “shop” with FTD.com because nothing was ever actually received. And I will not be shopping with FTD.com in the future. Your note seems like the an insincere attempt at customer support, instead trying to blame me, the customer, for trying to purchase product from you that you contracted to deliver by charging my credit card.

I guess I will now have to actually find a decent local florist.

Today we launch Dojo 0.2. Recently we added some fun new features to Renkoo. And the San Jose Mercury News had an article about When 2.0 recently that mentions Renkoo.

Today should be the launch of Dojo 0.1. Earlier this month was the initial alpha launch of our startup. This has been a really fun month, even with the back surgery.

After my earlier hard drive failure and ensuing debacle in replacing it, my PowerBook is now crashing pretty regularly, in what looks like a memory issue:

Command: WindowServer
Path:    /System/Library/Frameworks/
          ApplicationServices.framework/
          Frameworks/CoreGraphics.
          framework/Resources/WindowServer
Version: ??? (???)
PID:     223
Thread:  0

Exception:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes:      KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS (0x0001) at 0x3f800008

Unfortunately, Apple Care is worthless. I brought my laptop into the Apple Store and was told that there was a four hour wait to talk with someone in the so-called genius bar. It really sucks that Apple’s support program is so much less useful than IBM. IBM will send someone out to your business to repair your machine the next day. If your hard drive fails, they will send you a new one and trust you to put it in yourself. Apple refuses to let you fix anything yourself, and requires you to bring the computer to them. My productivity is so much better with the Mac than it was with Linux or Windows. It is really unfortunate that their service does not come anywhere close to the user experience that their operating system offers.

In hearing that the next version of Java will have JavaScript built-in, I was reminded of the old evolution of man t-shirts promoting soccer. For those unfamiliar, the shirt started with a football player crouched down on the left side, progressing to various apes/monkeys standing more and more upright, finally evolving to a fully upright soccer player.

So what does that have to do with Java and JavaScript? I make this comparison to Java, because Java seems to be having a similar, unexpected evolution to JavaScript. In the beginning Java started out as a rigourous language with very strict rules for typing and syntax. It allowed a lot of great things to be built, but it was overly verbose. Then came things like beans, and numerous other libraries and revisions which tried to simplify the verbosity. Then came the IDE argument, which said that Java is complex, so just use an IDE to hide away all of the details. Then came the XML evolution, which recommended putting as many details as possible in XML configuration files, so that you again don’t have to write any actual code. The problem is, XML is verbose, and describing programmatic behavior through XML is not easy. Alas, there are now plans to bolt JavaScript into the next version of Java. So now you’ll be able to use a freeer scripting language so that you do not have to write as much XML or Java code. The irony is that the evolution of the Java developer, who just a few years ago scorned the once lowly JavaScript developer, is now clamoring to evolve into a JavaScript developer.

If Atlas shrugged, would anyone care?

While attending Evan Williams’s BayChi talk, an audience member asked why Odeo is focusing on audio and not video. I started thinking about this, and came up with some thoughts about content that I doubt are original or profound, but worth mentioning.

Video content is most useful for something that is best seen with real animated footage. For example, news is really only useful as video if you have footage to show. Audio content is useful for when you have to watch something else, but want to listen to something to keep your mind engaged, or to learn something different than what you are watching. For example, in the car, in a waiting room, on an airplane, while working, etc. The web is best for when you want the fastest way to digest text, or customize an interface, or find a bit of information about something.

So I guess my thought is, that while video blogging will probably become popular, the video medium itself is inherently bad for digesting lots of text information quickly, and is better as a supplement for things that are hard to visualize, whether that be the structure of a large biochemical enzyme, or video footage of a baby’s first steps. And of course it is also very useful for people with short attention spans.

Not that I did not know this already, but QuickBooks is amazingly bad. And amazingly it is even worse for the Mac than it was for Windows.

I wanted to upgrade our old Windows version to the new Mac Pro version. So I bought and installed it. As usual on the Mac, the installation process itself was easy. And then the fun began.

First of all, I tried to import our old QuickBooks company data from a Windows version into the Mac version. This apparently, according to the fine print, is only possible if your copy of QuickBooks is from 2004 or newer.

The option of spending another $200 to buy an upgrade for the Windows version did not seem viable just for the need to import data from their own app into this app. So we found a less than legit version of a newer version of QuickBooks for Windows, installed it on a quarantined virtual machine instance in Virtual PC, imported the data, and then re-exported the data. This worked, allowing us to import QuickBooks data into the Mac version of QuickBooks.

At this point, things looked great and I thought the pain had subsided. But the fun had just begun. I then proceeded to try and enter a payroll item. It seem that the Mac version of QuickBooks does not come with integrated payroll, also found in another fine print item. Instead they bundle it with this really crappy app called Aatrix Top Play. The version that was installed automatically was a demo version, presumably part of the lame QuickBooks demo that comes with the PowerBook.

I find and install a separate version of this payroll app that appparently the QuickBooks installer is not intelligent enough to include automatically. Then I try to launch it. I get an error message. I go to their lame web site and find out that you have to disable File Vault in order to use their application. Their instructions imply that this is normal and acceptable. WTF? This is not a reasonable requirement to installing any app, much less one that I now do not trust. What a horrible piece of coding to not be able to work with one of the more important feature of Mac OS X. Of the more than 200 Mac apps I have installed, this is the first one to fail in this manner.

So my solution… create another user on the machine and install this awful app as that user. What a waste of time and effort. And not really a very cool solution at all. And companies wonder why Open Source software is getting such solid market traction. I thought I was paying to not have problems like this?

I shake my head in disbelief when I see an article with a topic that interests me ( JavaScript and errors ), only to stop reading when the author, Joshua Gitlin, insults the target audience in the first paragraph with pedantic disrespect to a large developer community of which I am a proud member: “Now, some might shudder at the notion of allowing client-side developers who might be more used to validating forms and animating rollover images to suddenly be responsible for traversing XML documents and negotiating HTTP headers, but without risk, there is no reward.” Perhaps Joshua should go read Prestige lags opportunity before he writes his next article. Or realize that the world has changed. That is, if he wants me to finish reading his next piece.