Friday, March 27, 2009

APPLE TODAY Two months ago iLife 09 was released. You may have read my earlier comments about this. In two months two updates went out that were supposed to have fixed 'minor issues'. Well, that may or may not be so, fact is that iWeb is still bugged and working with it is an abomination. Make one small change or addition to one of your iWeb sites and during upload all your other pages, literally everything, turns red instead of blue, which means something was changed and all your sites must be republished completely. Large sites can take more than an hour to upload. If you have several sites it's a one day job. However, that's not the end of it. If you managed to upload (and this is not always possible!) one site, then all other sites turn red, so there you go again. But if you then try to upload one of these other sites, the site you just uploaded turns red again. So it's a never ending game. The user is always the loser. So in fact continuing blogging or developing your sites is still a disaster. The strange thing is that somehow this change is controlled by the Apple servers. I first thought it was caused by the latest update of iLife, but it wasn't. During the connection with the Apple servers these break into your iWeb and change the colour and status of all your sites to red/unpublished. Follow this discussion here. It seems Homer Simpson is in control over there. If you're interested you can follow more bug discussions on the Apple user forum. You see, Mac users have to find their own solutions and fixes. The MobileMe spokespersons blame iWeb, and AppleCare doesn't know what's happening. Not a word from Apple about all this. They still think that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Everyone knows how Apple is dodging exchange rates by charging Europeans 100 Euro for a product that costs $100. On the other hand there is a lot of undermining of the Apple company by unscrupulous stock manipulators. But it seems Apple is now smashing its own windows; well, Apple is becoming as wacky as Microsoft. One step further than this and Apple is as arrogant as Microsoft. TechRadar: "Apple's website creation tool, iWeb, made a big splash when it debuted in iLife '06 but has since been neglected, which is a shame because the application, in theory, is very attractive. In contrast to other iLife components, iWeb '09 continues to practically discourage individual creativity. Basic editing tools and controls mean working outside the boundaries of included themes can be frustrating and just two new themes have been added in the new version." And then they haven't even mentioned the numerous bugs in iLife 09. Comments are becoming acerbic. The recent additions to iLife are bling and iCandy. The same with the beta browser Safari4. Safari4 was supposed to be faster, but for many sites, strangely enough many Apple sites, it is much slower; it can't even load some sites. The latest version of iTunes is bugged too. Macsimum: "Apple has apologized for breaking Perl with its latest Mac OS X security update, saying it will distribute a solution to the problem with a future update." Apple is breaking software at a tremendous rate. Some users are even changing the code of apps to get them to work properly. This shows that Apple can no longer boast to be the most userfriendly computer environment. Computerworld: "For the first time, Apple Inc. dropped out of the top spot in the computer-reliability ranking of Rescuecom Corp., a Syracuse, N.Y.-based chain of service shops, and ended in third place behind a pair of Asian computer makers that specialize in laptops." In Holland you get a free iPod when you take up a funeral insurance policy. Their slogan is 'a secure arrangement'. 10:30:25 PM

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