“Personally I would like Microsoft to get more involved with HTML 5. They’ve sent very little feedback over the years, far less than the other browser vendors. Even when asking them about their opinion on features they are implementing I rarely get any feedback. It’s very sad.” — Ian Hickson
Tonight I installed the new OS X 10.5.7 update, and it was horrible. First I tried to use the system updater, and it failed to download 4 or 5 times in a row. Then, I manually downloaded the update from their site and installed it. As my computer restarted, it got into a weird state where a blue screen with a spinner would display, and then a lot of noise would show, and then the whole thing would repeat. I let my computer sit about 20 minutes and then powered it off. Then, my computer restarted three times as I tried to power it back on. And, this thread on MacRumors looks like a lot of people had the same experience.
Last year Apple’s rollout of the iPhone 2 software and Mobile Me was horrible. Mobile Me didn’t work for weeks, and the iPhone 2 had to be restarted every week at first. These difficult upgrades are tarnishing the brand that Apple has built of great user experience.
I love Apple, don’t get me wrong. In fact, I’m one of the biggest Apple fans that I know, and I’m sure tomorrow I’ll be defending this update and Apple in general at work. That said, I’d love Apple even more if their updates were a little less painful. I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get things like that working, and I don’t have to jump through hoops if I’m using a Windows machine and I want to update my operating system, it just updates.
So Apple, I’d suggest one of two things. Either stick with the really bizarre upgrade process with multiple restarts and the crazy loop of blue and black screens, but tell me what’s about to happen, or fix the process so it’s a little more painless.
I’ve got to go get some rest so I can defend you in the morning.
For the past couple of years I’ve had a general way that I wrote admin interfaces in a lot of the web apps that I’ve written, and I finally took the time to release that as a project. So, this past Friday I released Control Center 1.0. It’s a base layout and stylesheet for Rails that helps you write admin interfaces amazingly quickly (install the gem, run script/generate control_center, and customize some links). It’s hopefully interesting to some folks, and if not, well, it being a gem makes it tons easier for me to use.
So go check out Control Center on Github.
Bulk Rename Utility sacrifices nothing for the sake of clean design and usability. Literally, nothing.
“There’s this broad consensus that the Virginia Tech murders had something to do with violent video games. When you actually read the coroner’s inquest report, video games are mentioned twice. The first is his mother saying he never wanted to play those video games. The second is his roommate saying, “We always thought he was weird because he never wanted to play video games.” Yet it’s still a truism that violent video games must be responsible for Virginia Tech.” — Cory Doctorow in The Chicago Tribune
I think they probably didn’t intend for this ad to come across the way it does. It says to me “What do people think of Windows Vista? We’re not sure, because when we asked them they started dry heaving.”
Applications I have queued up for when I get my iPhone tomorrow.
“Responding to a question about a survey that shows increased exports to Iran, mainly from cigarettes, McCain said, “Maybe that’s a way of killing them.” — McCain’s Latest Iran Joke - washingtonpost.com
Precipitate is a nice little tool that basically puts your Google docs into your Spotlight index so that you can search your docs on your Mac.
Serious Sans via www.cannesfringe.com
