Apple
iPhone 2.0 App Trouble Theory
I have a theory about why there are so many apps crashing or not working on the latest version of the iPhone software. I believe that due to the nature of the iPhone’s handling of applications with no background processes, the installation of an app that you downloaded directly from the mobile version of the App Store or the direct deletion of an app right from your iPhone, the installer app (both install and delete) is killed when you try to open another application.
For example, I tried to delete 3 apps from my iPhone that I knew I wasn’t going to use anymore. I clicked the X on each app and I was asked if I really wanted to delete the app and I said ‘delete.’ At that point, the app disappears from the iPhone screen and it seems to be deleted. But what I think is going on is that it is actually being uninstalled in the background. So when I click 3 in a row like I did, it was uninstalling each one individually. As soon as I click another application, like Settings, the iPhone kills the delete process to try and open Settings. But instead of getting the Settings I get a white background where the Settings should be and then Settings crashes. At that point I can’t open any applications and frustration ensues. And there’s a half-deleted application that is still half-on/half-off of my iPhone. When I try to sync with iTunes there’s a noticeable lag in iTunes recognizing the iPhone and then I get an error about syncing the apps I was just trying to delete. This also happens when the iPhone is attempting to install a new app you just downloaded. If you don’t wait until it’s all the way done installing before opening another app, you’ll get a crash.
The kicker is that there’s no way to tell how long to wait when deleting an application. You just have to wait a while and kind of guess when it has actually been fully removed from your phone. The install process has a progress bar and a notification pop-up when it’s finished.
How Humiliating
I suppose I won’t be taking any monetary advice from Brett Arends. In his piece for the Wall Street Journal titled “When It Comes to the iPhone, Waiting Was Golden” he makes the case that only fools went out and bought the first generation iPhone. From the article:
So much for all those who stood in line a year ago. They paid $599 (again, plus cellular contract) for a model with eight gigabytes of memory, and those models only ran on slower EDGE networks.
How humiliating is that? Owning one of these is like being the PC guy in a Mac commercial.
Clearly, Mr. Arends hasn’t done any actual math on this subject. He simply says that an early adopter paid $599 for an 8GB model and someone who waited will pay $199 for an 8GB model with 3G and GPS. That certainly seems cut and dry. But we’re talking R.O.I. here, right? That’s the lead on this story, in fact it’s part of the page title. And if we’re talking R.O.I. then we must talk about total cost of ownership. And in the end, you will pay more for an iPhone 3G than I did for my iPhone 2G. Here’s how it breaks down:
I stood in line on June 27, 2007 for the first generation iPhone.
- $599 for 8GB iPhone
- $480 for 24 months @ $20/month Unlimited Data Plan (including 200 SMS)
- $1200 for 24 months @ $50/month voice plan
- -$100 credit when Apple dropped the price to $399
- TOTAL $2179 for 24 months of ownership
The new iPhone 3G will be released on July 11, 2008 with new data plans
- $199 for 8GB iPhone (with 3G and GPS, $299 for 16GB)
- $720 for 24 months @ $30/month Unlimited Data Plan
- $119.76 for 24 months @ $4.99/month 200 SMS Plan
- $1200 for 24 months @ $50/month voice plan
- TOTAL $2238.76 for 24 months of ownership
Note: I include the $4.99 for SMS because that’s what iPhone 2G users get included with their data plan at $20 a month. You could choose to pay 10 cents per message sent or received for SMS but that would not be a true comparison of features. Also, this does not take into account taxes and regulatory fees which increase with your total bill.
Humiliating indeed. The way I see this is that I enjoyed a superior product for a year before the “waiters” are going to get a chance to experience the same product. They’ll pay $60 more than me to experience the product but they’ll get 3G and GPS. Every other new feature is in the software and I get that as a free upgrade. I don’t think there’s anything humiliating about enjoying the world’s best phone for a year and paying less than other people are about to.
The true winners here are people who just bought an iPhone in the last month or two. They only paid $399 for their iPhone and they enjoy the same contract as the day-one iPhone buyers. But their contract gets to stretch into 2010. They’ll enjoy a much better R.O.I.
The Mac in Corporate America
I use a corporate-supplied MacBook Pro in an environment that is almost exclusively Windows. It’s a challenge, to say the least. This isn’t the first time I’ve worked on a Mac in an all-Windows corporate environment and you quickly learn how to troubleshoot your own machine since many IT people do not have the slightest clue how to help you if a problem occurs. Luckily for me the lines between Mac and PC have blurred considerably since the old OS 9 days and working in a PC environment isn’t as difficult as it used to be. Most people I interact with who don’t know the computer I’m using will probably never know the computer I’m using. They assume I’m on a PC just like them.
If you’re ever concerned about moving to a Mac because you fear that the software will be different or you won’t be able to share files with PC users, I’m here to put that fear to rest. Here’s a list of software I use that keeps me working with PC users:
- Microsoft Office 2008 - Written specifically for the Mac and is completely interoperable with Microsoft Office for the PC. It has Entourage instead of Outlook but they are pretty much the same applications. I am on an exchange server, my calendar is in sync, I have access to the corporate directory, etc.
- Keynote 08 - This gem just kicks Powerpoint’s booty and there’s no sense in using Powerpoint. I do my own presentations anyway so I don’t need to share my files with someone else. On the rare occasion I do need to share my presentation with another person I just export my Keynote file as a .ppt file. I usually lose some of the nifty animations but the presentation is still better than anything you can produce with Powerpoint.
- Omnigraffle Pro 5 - Superior to Microsoft Visio 2007 in almost every way. The beauty of it is that I get to use such a great program for all of my diagrams and PC users never know the difference because I can open and save in the Visio format. I’ve shown other IA’s Omnigraffle and how you can quickly create a site map using the outline mode and they’re always blown away.
- OmniPlan 1.5 - I’ve never used Microsoft Project so I can’t make a direct comparison but OmniPlan does the job nicely and no one has any problems opening and viewing my files. The Omni Group is on the ball. They just make killer software with real-world business uses. I also use OmniOutliner (which is never closed) and OmniFocus to help me keep my thoughts and tasks in order.
- Adobe Creative Suite - No one outside of myself has any need to open a Photoshop document or Illustrator document but they could if they had the software. Just like Microsoft Office, Adobe created their software to be completely interoperable between Macs and PCs. Just don’t use PostScript fonts and you should be fine.
- Parallels - When push comes to shove and I have to use a PC because some business application requires Active X or I’m working with Sharepoint I can open Windows XP and work with Windows applications just like they were installed on my Mac. The move to Intel was one of the smartest moves Apple has made and the architecture allows me to use Windows at almost native speed in a virtual world. It works so much better than Virtual PC ever did.
In addition to these titles that allow me to work with PC users I also use Mac-only software that I couldn’t imagine living without. Programs like 1Password, Coda, CSSedit, Delicious Library, MarsEdit, Skitch, TextMate, and VisualHub. I use .Mac to keep my Address Book, Calendar, Bookmarks, Mail Accounts, and FTP sites in sync but that service has finally gotten a Windows counterpart with Microsoft’s announcement of the Live Mesh service. Even though .Mac has it’s problems (and it does) I still find it incredibly useful, especially the online disk space.
One of the biggest myths is that you don’t get good software on the Mac. There may not be as many applications produced for the Mac but the software that is produced is almost always superior to anything you can find on Windows. I’m trying to say that without sounding like a fanboy but I know I come across that way. I just think the Mac software developers take a lot of pride in their work and it shows.
The Mac is definitely making a comeback and it’ll be showing up in more and more businesses. There’s no reason it should be excluded anymore. I work on a Mac every day and I’m able to access our network, use Cisco VPN to log in remotely, share files, and open and save PC documents. It’s truly a business machine.
UPDATE: My friend Pat Charles pointed me to this article on InfoWorld that has real-world data to support my claim that Macs will be showing up in more and more businesses.
UPDATE 2: It looks like this is a timely blog post as there are many more articles coming out about this very subject. Check out Business Week’s The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit.
UPDATE 3: This will be my last update on this post but this has never happened to me before. Clearly I was on to something. Please check out MacUser’s “Macs in business: Making the case” for their perspective.
Design Approach for Desktop and iPhone Applications
It takes several months of actual iPhone development before you eventually realize that the iPhone requires a completely different mindset. Until that happens, you’ll make assumptions based on desktop experience, and that in turn will lead to a lot of bad designs.
This sounds a lot like what I just wrote about the move from print to web design. People know what they know and until they experience something different, they’ll try to shoe-horn what they know into something else, even though it doesn’t work. I think a few developers will nail their applications for the iPhone. But I also think there will be more useless applications for the iPhone when the App Store launches. It’ll probably be a while before it’s full of really useful, iPhone-only applications. Anyone that trys to simply “port” their application to the iPhone will probably fail.
It Just Worked
What can I say about Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”? I can say a lot of wonderful things as has been noted in the blogosphere. But it’s what’s not being said that is irritating me. I have been using Macs regularly since 1996 and I have been a champion of the platform since 2000. Apple has had their share of misses in the software category but the distance between the usability and dependability of the Mac operating system and Windows was gigantic. I may have had my frustrations in the past but the alternative (using Windows) wasn’t really an alternative so I just worked my way through the bugs. The thing is, the bugs were never really that bad. And some of them weren’t even really bugs, I just didn’t like the way Apple chose to implement a feature in it’s operating system or other software. But I wasn’t going to switch to Windows and Linux just never had enough of the mainstream software to ever be viable.
The same is true today. Switching to Windows Vista is simply out of the question. And the distance between the usability of Leopard and Vista is just as wide as it’s ever been. But my problem is that the distance between the two operating systems may be just as wide but both operating systems have retracted in usability and dependability. Yuck. Since upgrading to Leopard I’ve had more problems with my machine than I ever did with Mac OS X 10.1 through 10.4 combined. I’ve been a member of the Apple Support Forums since 2002 and in that time I have 13 total posts. And of those 13, 8 are due to my trouble with Leopard. 8! In 5 years I only posted 5 times and some of those were in response to other people’s issues, not my own. But now I’ve posted 8 new issues because I’m at a total loss for a fix.
My latest drama is that ever since I updated to 10.5.2, my all-Apple WiFi network is now failing me. My iMac intermittently drops it’s WiFi connection from my Airport Extreme base station with no rhyme or reason. In fact, my connection dropped while writing this blog post. To say I’m disappointed with Apple is an understatement. I feel like what I’m experiencing is the result of too many things going on at Apple, not enough engineers working on any one project, and products being rushed out the door. This just hasn’t been my experience with Apple and I find it frustrating. Someone switching from Windows might not see a problem since the gap in usability is so heavily in Apple’s favor. To them it might seem light years ahead of where they were. But to someone who has used Macs for so long and has come to expect products to “just work,” this change comes like a blow to the gut.
My hope is that it’ll get better, but a small pessimistic voice inside my head thinks that this may be a problem that’s here to stay. Their market share is increasing and their footprint in consumer electronics is getting larger. Letting bugs slip through the cracks must be a lot easier these days.
Update: Looks like someone may have found the culprit behind the intermittent WiFi drops in Leopard (automatic broadcast channel). I’ve set my channel away from my neighbors and we’ll see if that does anything. I’m pretty sick of these drops though.