How come this hasn't been talked about here?

David Moyer wrote:
> "Carl" <crothman@NOSPAMoptonline.net> wrote:
>
>> I'm discouraged. I've already spent well over 7 or 8 hours trying to
>> get something to work from a company which promotes itself as having
>> the most successful work-out-of-the-box success. It has not been my
>> experience so far.
>
> the near perfect "work-out-of-the-box success" is based on you having
> a normal mac, but when you start to venture into the problematic
> windows world, all bets are off. microsoft is well known for breaking
> competitors software, so much of your experience is based on that.
>
> don't fight the rising tide, just get a mac and you'll be much
> happier.
>
> http://www.apple.com/mac/
>
Actually, I noticed a review yesterday for four miniature, dedicated video
cameras, all by independent manufacturers. It was in yesterday's (Monday,
7/21) Newsday, Pt II, I believe. You can read it for yourself. The review
warns Mac owners to be cautious because the vendors of THREE of the four
don't supply software for Macs, only for Windows PCs.

That's not the world I choose to live in, where choices are limited by the
closed-architecture mentality of a Steve Jobs.

Look, i think Apple products are generally great, own an iPod mini and a
Touch. Wouldn't live without the iPod anyway (you can read about my travails
with the Touch). But your rah-rah-sis-boom-bah mentality about Apple and its
products is a little over the top, don't ya think?

Larry wrote:
> "Carl" <crothman@NOSPAMoptonline.net> wrote in
> news:4885d752$0$7319$607ed4bc@cv.net:
>
>> And I wouldn't mind all of that (I actually did it all), if it
>> actually worked. But it didn't. It would be nice if Apple actually
>> openly acknowledged the problem and came up with a patch for its
>> iTunes 7.7. Or at least educated its in-store technicians (Geniuses)
>> about it. None of them know in the store I go to.
>>
>>
>
> I like the part where stupid Apple tells you to uninstall all your
> USABLE plug ins....just to get their shitware to sync.
>
> How stupid!
>
And that is another point. I didn't even want to get into that, but you did.
It's arrogant of them: "If you want to use our device, you must stop using
everybody elses".

That's just what I want to do: screw around with all my other working
devices just to see if I can get this damn thing to work! And there's no
guarantee that following their instructions will actually work anyway. As a
matter of fact, in my experience, all of their suggestions were ueseless.

On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Carl posted:
> David Moyer wrote:
>> there is no modern mac that cannot update any ipod / iphone. as long
>> as that mac is running the minimum required software version, ANY mac
>> will update ANY apple device without issue.
> How do you KNOW this? Have you personally checked all "modern macs" David?
> And, by the way, what is a "modern mac"?

My Mac was purchased new from Apple in May 2005. It is incapable of
updating an iPhone or iPod Touch, although it is capable of updating an
iPod Nano or iPod Shuffle.

Apple acknowledges the bug, and acknowledges that it is unfixed.

Apple also acknowledges bugs in synchronization with Outlook, including
the iToy's failure to show any calendar/contacts after synchronization
even though the data demonstrably made it to the iToy.

These are bugs. It is not remarkable that Apple has bugs. What is
remarkable is how rabid fanboys deny that there are any bugs.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

At 22 Jul 2008 09:03:19 -0400 Carl wrote:
> > Now copy a few items back into your normal default calendar folder a
> > few at at a time, syncing after each few- evenually you should find
> > the items that stubbornly refuse syncing. Simply retyping the item
> > and deleting the original fixes the stubborn ones, unless you see a
> > pattern (like no end
> > date on recurring items, or unsupported files attached, etc.) you can
> > correct.
>
> >
> Hey thanks for some reasonably sound advice.

Don't mention it- it's practice. I've got to throw a couple of intelligent-
sounding troubleshooting posts around the WinMogroups from ime to time to
maintain my Mobile Device MVP "street cred."

> I actually got started on part
> of your suggestion yesterday (I created another calendar in Archives) but
I
> didn't have the rest of your suggestions to go along with the move. I'll
> give them a try, but I don't know that I can (or want) to devote another
7
> or 8 hours to getting this thing to work.

As you've said, you almost don't mind going through the BS if it actally
works- it's when it doesn't it p*sses you off!

Copying the calendar out of the way and bringing just a few items back to
sync should only take a few minutes- if the iPhone doesn't respond, you can
give up on my suggestion with little time lost.

> You're correct about certain items causing syncing problems. When I
> initially synced my BB, a few items were replicated on the device. But
they
> were clever enough to have color-coded them for me so that I could find
them
> easily, delete the red ones, and re-sync. And, generally speaking the
BB's
> syncing program (Desktop Manager) warns you of potential problems (as
does
> the Dell Axim's Activesync program) and gives you options about how to
> handle the discrepancies during the syncing process.
>
> Those are serious syncing devices with serious syncing software. I would
say
> that if Apple wants to be in the synced-device business, it needs to
develop
> better syncing software.


Or convince the other 94% of the market to buy Macs, at least based on
Oxford's advice. ;-)

In message <4885d33c$0$5021$607ed4bc@cv.net> "Carl"
<crothman@NOSPAMoptonline.net> wrote:

>A note to David and other unshakable fans of The Big Apple: this appears to
>be how many people handle technical issues with their Apple devices. They
>tend not to be vocal about them, but they just shut down the functions that
>don't work and move along. Thus the question posed by me in my OP: why
>hasn't this been talked about before? Believe me, there are a lot of
>closet, less-than-satisfied Apple owners out there. Posts like mine will
>bring them out. The Apple store was full of them yesterday.

In my particular case, I was more interested in how well it worked (or
didn't), then in actually using it.

I believe very heavily in a structured synchronization methodology with
a central "primary" source of information rather then chaining one
storage to another to another to keep all of my toys in sync.

In my case, I have chosen SyncML as my primary synchronization protocol.
Despite having helped develop SyncML and being involved right from day
one, and despite nearly every other mobile phone on the market having a
SyncML client, Apple doesn't seem to have managed to get SyncML working
on any of their own products.

Funambol isn't too bad, although it has much of Funambol's typical
quirkiness in terms of the GUI, and it's Contacts-only, not Calendar
support (Apple didn't bother to create an API), nor Tasks (Apple didn't
bother to create a database)

I've found half a dozen quirks/bugs in the iPod Touch/iPhone, and took
the time to bring up a couple via their forums, receiving responses of
"well, just don't do that" to a couple repeatable crashes (notable ones
being in Safari accessing only Apple.com, and in attempting to add songs
to the "On-the-go" playlist in iPod mode -- Not what I'd normally
consider niche features, given the device's marketing. The Safari bugs
are still reproducible in 2.0, I haven't tested building a playlist yet)

Since I'm relatively certain that Apple does have an internal QA team,
there is no feedback from Apple when issues are mentioned, and since the
reported issues don't get fixed, I make doing their QA work for them a
priority relative to the QA cheques that Apple sends me. I have other
companies that do pay for my QA services, and oddly enough, they do get
my time.

When it comes to my own time, I tend to report far more to smaller
vendors, larger vendors like Microsoft and Apple make it harder to get
information to them, so that is reflected in my interest in documenting
bugs anywhere outside of usenet, blogs, and other discussion groups.

In article <alpine.OSX.1.10.0807220828010.10623@pangtzu.panda .com>,
Mark Crispin <mrc@Panda.COM> wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Carl posted:
> > David Moyer wrote:
> >> there is no modern mac that cannot update any ipod / iphone. as long
> >> as that mac is running the minimum required software version, ANY mac
> >> will update ANY apple device without issue.
> > How do you KNOW this? Have you personally checked all "modern macs" David?
> > And, by the way, what is a "modern mac"?
>
> My Mac was purchased new from Apple in May 2005. It is incapable of
> updating an iPhone or iPod Touch, although it is capable of updating an
> iPod Nano or iPod Shuffle.

apple sold various macs in 2005. which one and what configuration?

> Apple acknowledges the bug, and acknowledges that it is unfixed.

where did they acknowledge it and what exactly did they say? and why
is this the only report that i've ever heard of it?

i'm very skeptical.

In article <4885f1d6$0$20920$607ed4bc@cv.net>, Carl
<crothman@NOSPAMoptonline.net> wrote:

> Actually, I noticed a review yesterday for four miniature, dedicated video
> cameras, all by independent manufacturers. It was in yesterday's (Monday,
> 7/21) Newsday, Pt II, I believe. You can read it for yourself. The review
> warns Mac owners to be cautious because the vendors of THREE of the four
> don't supply software for Macs, only for Windows PCs.

which cameras? drivers for a number of them are already built into os
x, and 'just work.'

> That's not the world I choose to live in, where choices are limited by the
> closed-architecture mentality of a Steve Jobs.

it's steve jobs' fault that a third party developer chose to not write
software??

At 23 Jul 2008 08:51:10 -0400 nospam wrote:

> > That's not the world I choose to live in, where choices are limited by
the
> > closed-architecture mentality of a Steve Jobs.
>
> it's steve jobs' fault that a third party developer chose to not write
> software??


Sort of- since OS X is only sold as a "value add" to Mac hardware, despite
actually being compatible with virtually any "Wintel" box on the market,
Apple has limited OS X market share to it's current 6% (or whatever) of the
market.

If you're a small off-brand manufacturer of hardware, with limited
software/driver development resourses, which platform do you market to?
The one with 90% market share, or one of the others?


Since Apple is really in the hardware business, (where 6% is a good number)
rather than the software business, Mac OS is relegated to being a niche
product.

On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Carl posted:
> That's just what I want to do: screw around with all my other working
> devices just to see if I can get this damn thing to work! And there's no
> guarantee that following their instructions will actually work anyway. As a
> matter of fact, in my experience, all of their suggestions were ueseless.

That's a common problem in the Apple world.

There is very little actual expertise within the "experts" at the Apple
store, much less within the fanboy community. They know the interior of
the walled garden well enough, but not much of what is beyond it. Nor do
they have much of a clue as to what to do when some portion of the garden
or its supporting wall fails.

My favorite fanboy quote is "nobody needs to do that". I collect those.
That is marketing data worth gold to Apple's competitors.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, DevilsPGD posted:
> I believe very heavily in a structured synchronization methodology with
> a central "primary" source of information rather then chaining one
> storage to another to another to keep all of my toys in sync.

I agree. In my family, I need to sync a Macintosh, two Windows systems
with Outlook, two iPod Touchs, an iPod Nano, a Windows Mobile phone, a
Nokia N800 tablet, and five ordinary phones. There's a couple of other
devices too, but as they are more or less retired they are less important.

Chaining is a nightmare. Not only doesn't it cover everything, but I have
to have two chains that I must manually sync (as in my typing in updates
from one to the other) since there is no way to attach the two chains.

A primary source is the only sane way out.

The problem is that I want to run that primary source rather than
outsourcing it to the cloud. I shudder at the thought of running an
Exchange server (or even OpenExchange); yet that seems to be the only
viable choice. Even if I bite that bullet, Exchange won't cover
everything.

> In my case, I have chosen SyncML as my primary synchronization protocol.
> Despite having helped develop SyncML and being involved right from day
> one, and despite nearly every other mobile phone on the market having a
> SyncML client, Apple doesn't seem to have managed to get SyncML working
> on any of their own products.

I have followed SyncML on and off for quite a while. I was planning to
jump into active SyncML development work last year, but that project got
killed.

Sadly, as you noticed, SyncML doesn't solve the Apple problem.

Since the Mac is the current always-on desktop computer, it would be nice
if the primary source ran on the Mac. The problem is that the Mac doesn't
have all the needed facilities, or doesn't have a good enough
implementation of them.

Part of the above-mentioned killed project was the idea of an Exchange
Server Lite, which would be designed to be a glue that would look enough
like Exchange that an Exchange-capable mobile device would sync with it,
but would actually just proxy as a client to something else. That's how
it would have differed from OpenExchange; the idea is (among other things)
to get iCal on the Mac to peer with Outlook. That way, the primary source
is established by user convention, and the primary can easily be
redesignation as one of the current secondaries.

SyncML does a lot (but not all) of this.

> I've found half a dozen quirks/bugs in the iPod Touch/iPhone, and took
> the time to bring up a couple via their forums, receiving responses of
> "well, just don't do that"

Yup, this is normal for the Apple forums. The forums are useless as a
source of information for a power user.

Amazingly, iToy 2.0 still has the same crippling limitation with recurring
events. You need to use iCal to enter anything beyond the most basic
recurrance rules. The iToy can display them; it just can't enter them.

> Since I'm relatively certain that Apple does have an internal QA team,
> there is no feedback from Apple when issues are mentioned, and since the
> reported issues don't get fixed, I make doing their QA work for them a
> priority relative to the QA cheques that Apple sends me. I have other
> companies that do pay for my QA services, and oddly enough, they do get
> my time.

Yup. I've experienced all of that.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.