Apple have tightened up their dead pixel policy

Well that was a colossal waste of time.

I’ve been a bit sad in the last couple of days that I would have to hand in my shiny new iPhone over a couple of dead pixels, but the Optus employee encouraged me over the phone to bring it in as soon as possible. Google didn’t turn up any real information about Apple’s iPhone DP policy so I just assumed it was good.

Deciding to keep my data safe, last night I used the erase all data option (turns out this is a secure wipe taking two hours) and headed into the store this morning. After I pointed out my problem, the lady behind the counter took the phone out back - only to return mumbling something about how I would get a refurbished phone, not a brand new one and then put me on the phone to the Optus service centre.

After 15 minutes on hold (still standing in the store, mind you) it was finally revealed that the Apple policy is phones with an “acceptable” number of dead pixels will not be fixed under warranty, you have to pay for it. And the guy on the phone was fairly sure 2 is an acceptable number. Needless to say I ain’t paying what could be an expensive repair bill for 2 pixels.

Apparently they had another call this morning about the same issue, so hopefully it’s a serious enough flaw that more pixels die and I can actually get it fixed (that’s a pretty strange wish to have, I admit, but Apple are being bastards about this).

As annoying as dead pixels are, I can understand why 2 doesn’t qualify; I really just wish Optus had their story straight from the start. As I said in my last post, I wasn’t even going to bother until the second pixel died. Two in a week indicates a potentially serious issue, and I had already been told there was no problems getting it replaced. The staff in store even said it would be fine and were as surprised as I was when I told them the news.

Oh well, the restore worked (although it took forever despite not syncing any music). So technically all I lost was half a day and a few of the flash memory’s write cycles. It could’ve been worse.

 

It’s not all fun and games

After a week of use, there are plenty of good things about the iPhone 3G but they are covered in who knows how many places. And the downsides I’ve seen in various reviews don’t mention my little issues with it, so that’s what I want to cover.

I’ll start with the only one that I think they’ll fix - the application upgrade process. I upgraded my first app tonight through the on-phone store application, and instead of actually upgrading it deleted the old one. This meant that it was at the end of my app list as if it were a fresh install, and I had to move it back to where I wanted it on my screen. I can see this becoming annoying as I add more applications.

Anyway if you’re considering an iPhone or iPod touch, there a couple of niggly little things to keep in mind with the iPod functions. As far as I can tell the iPod interface hasn’t changed with the v2.0 software; I guess these things don’t matter as much for the average listener. However, as someone who has used regular iPods for almost 4 years they make listening to long tracks (ie podcasts) more of a hassle than the clickwheel iPods.

The first, and most obvious, is seeking. The extremely accurate wheel motion has been dumped for a seek bar - it’s not even the full width in portrait mode, and it doesn’t exist in the landscape / coverflow view. Using it to seek requires a steady hand and plenty of luck, on a decent length show I find the smallest twitch still seeks 30 seconds at a time.

The hidden seek option - seeking via holding down the next or previous button - is bizarre. After a three second wait for slow tappers, it simply alters the speed of the speech; it takes another few seconds before it switches up to proper seek. This one catches me out all the time, I have muscle memory for the exact length of time to hold for a 5 or 10 second seek and I now need to relearn the time required as well as get used to a confusing garble when seek begins.

The other silly restriction on the iPod interface is a complete Inability to view podcast shownotes. Considering that it was specifically added to the iPod firmwares when Apple decided to get behind podcasting, this is a very strange omission. All you can view is the lyrics, and only one of the podcasts I listen to bothers to make use of that field. Why not allow shownotes to be viewed via the same interface?

And finally, the ringtones. This has been well documented since they were released for iPhone v1, but the ringtones are a rip off. The good news is that if you’re like me and use MP3 for everything, creating a ringtone is an easy two step process:

• Use Garageband to create a small loop from the mp3 (click the circular arrow button in with the playback controls)
• Drag the resulting AAC into MakeiPhoneRingtone

Oh and the big kicker for me is that my phone has developed two dead pixels already. With stock probably out for a while I was hesitant to get a single pixel replaced under warranty, but the second appeared last night and now I just want it over and done with as soon as possible. I haven’t quite made it an irreplaceable part of my life, so I need to hand it over before that happens

Ah well, hopefully by the time a replacement arrives my invisibleSHIELD will have shipped. At least I won’t be worrying about scratches while I don’t have the phone!

 

iPhone adventures

I now have a shiny white iPhone :D

I’m enjoying it quite a bit, aside from a fear of scratching it. I wanted to post about my experience buying one, on a day where it sold out world wide I got extremely lucky.

I had already decided to go with the Optus $39/month plan. About the same price as my existing plan, with 500mb of data per month; AJ convinced me that I didn’t even need the 700mb I had originally planned for. As I mentioned in my last post, with 9gb of music and plenty of podcasts I needed a 16gb model and had since decided on a white one to hide fingerprints on the back.

What I hadn’t decided was if I would get one on launch day or not.

So I woke up at 6am, intending to head to one of the 7am launch openings. However, it was really fricken cold and having skipped the pre-order I figured that my chances of actually getting one were so low that it wasn’t worth freezing my arse off.

In spite of that, once I was at work I called a nearby Optus store to see if they had any. They didn’t answer the phones all morning, but at 11am I got through - and they had two white ones left! How’s that for luck!

After I explained that I wanted a contract and could be there in 15 minutes, a phone was set aside for me and I took an early lunch. I still can’t believe they were willing to hold one, it’s not like they would have had any problems selling it.

It wasn’t completely smooth of course - the activation process was already overloaded by midday Australian time, so I went back to work phoneless. Having now heard about the problems around the world I think the Optus employees did a very good job to activate the phones they did - the big store in Brisbane apparently sold so many phones that later purchases wouldn’t be activated until the next morning. As it was, I made it back to my store at 4:45pm just as they were starting my activation and it took 45 minutes before I had the phone in my hands.

I did, however, walk out without paying a cent. I love Optus post-paid plans

The only other glitch in the whole process was that in the activation rush my 2G to 3G sim upgrade hadn’t actually been processed, but I went back to the store today and it was all fixed in about 5 minutes.

The battery life seems ok so far, particularly considering the playing-with-new-toy factor. I have always synced my iPod nightly to update the podcasts so I don’t mind if the iPhone needs charging every night

Speaking of which, I have no idea what I’m going to do with my old 60g iPod. I hadn’t planned to replace it this soon, which is a bad sign - I totally fell for the launch day hype. Oh well.

I do find it amusing though, that it’s been barely more than two years since I bought the old iPod. I usually make my technology last far longer than the stereotypical two year upgrade cycle (my old phone is from 2001), but I’ve been breaking my own rules recently. Even more amusing is my comments at the time about the then-rumored video iPod. I can still see a few of those issues in the phone, but the video iPod interface has turned out to be quite nice (mostly, I’ll blog about that later).

 

Australia’s iPhone plans are bad, but not horrible

I’ve been thinking long and hard about the iPhone, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up because I knew the data plans would suck in Australia. There have been a lot of complaints floating around that the iPhone 3G is expensive, and plan prices outside of the US are utterly crap. Well, as I suspected, you can add Australia’s iPhone plans to that list.

The first out was Telstra - it looks like they’re following the US model of data packs attached to your mobile plans. I won’t bother listing the phone or voice prices, because their data prices are fracking outrageous.

A couple of days ago, Optus joined in with their announcement. A little bit better, but notice a trend here? No unlimited data, just like the home internet plans in this country. Optus give you unlimited data for the first month if you sign up in August, but I can see that leading to a mountain of customer complaints when the September bills skyrocket.

So here’s my comparison. According to gizmodo, the cheapest iPhone TCO is $1975. At the current exchange rate that’s $2050. There are a wide range of TCO options on Optus, but the plan I’m considering is the $59/month regular Optus plan (not the cap plan, look further down) because it has the best balance of data vs price. The 24-month TCO to is $1464 (or $1584 for 16gb).

There are arguments that can be made both ways on if this is a good deal or not. Let’s look at the differences.

• No up front cost on the Australian plan. This is actually pretty normal for phone deals over here, and is nice. On a 24 month contract, the handset repayments only total $168 on the 16gb phone!
• Australian plans bundle voice and SMS together. However, text costs 25c a pop.
• 450 minutes on the American plan, if you send zero texts and use the right plan bonus the $60 Australian plan will come out to around 100-150 minutes at 2 calls a day (we pay a 25c flagfall just for the privilege of calling someone).
• 700mb Data. WTF?

I can’t find anywhere that gives a good indication of average monthly data usage on an iPhone, but it seems to me that an iPhone without an unlimited data plan isn’t much better than an iPod touch.

The one good point in all this is the “relatively” low 35c per MB data overcharge. To any normal person this is expensive, but most Australian providers (including Optus on prepaid) charge you 2.2c per kilobyte, so this is an amazing deal by comparison.

We still have the third iPhone provider, Vodafone, to announce their prices - but considering it will cost me $55 if I cancel the Optus contract I’m on, it would have to be an outstanding deal to tempt me.

I think that either way, I’m almost certainly going to cave and get a 16gb. I have less than 9gb of music and only add ~250mb a month; even with the 3gb of podcasts I have queued up there would still be plenty of headroom. In theory my data requirements dictate I should wait for an eventual 32gb model announcement, but waiting for hardware updates only leads to pain and frustration (WTB mac mini update!)

 

Apple vs Microsoft OS behaviours

I mentioned when I first switched that I’ve been a closet Apple fanboy for years, I was just waiting for a good enough excuse to buy a mac. All that time I was never able to put a finger on why I enjoyed macs so much, but after four months full time I think I’ve worked it out.

I still use XP on my windows box regularly for games, but last week had to boot up the Vista partition. As I tried for countless minutes to achieve something useful while the system had a mild heart attack doing whatever it is that Vista does, I finally realised what was wrong.

The difference between Apple and Microsoft is that when you’re using an Apple OS, the user comes first. No ifs, no buts, if the user wants something it uses all the available resources to serve that request. Everything feels snappy even in low memory environments (and even on a phone!). Applications, particularly Apple applications, are designed to be secondary and subservient to the user.

Microsoft on the other hand make operating systems where it, along with the applications, rule. You can only guide them. Vista, and to a lesser extent XP, cares only about itself. Sure it might put on a pretty face and try to make you feel like you’re in control, but under the hood it doesn’t care one iota what you want. It’s so busy trying to anticipate and pre-cache your next action, index your documents, swap out that application you just minimised even though you might need it in 2 minutes, and countless other background tasks, that the user winds up with a sluggish experience and a frustrating lack of control over the system.

Having used windows for over 10 years, I can look back and see that this “system > user” philosophy has always been hiding under the surface. You just never really notice unless you’re looking for it or the OS requirements jump higher than the average computer power at the time. Microsoft have really painted themselves into a corner with all of the enterprise requirements and backwards compatibility weighing them down.

Apple, on the other hand, have years of user-centric development behind them. Even though they’re starting to pander to enterprise customers, if the iPhone 2.0 demos are anything to go by the addition of enterprise features in 10.6 won’t compromise the end user experience.

Maybe Microsoft will pull something out of their hat, but it’s going to take even more to make me switch back now that my eyes are open.

 

Finding myself some office software

I’ve held out for a while, but last month reached the point where I need some kind of word processor & spreadsheet software. I use MS Office at work, but have always considered it too expensive for use at home as I don’t need much.

On my Windows box, I had been forcing myself to use Open Office. It worked, but that was about all; I hate the interface, it doesn’t hold a candle to MS Office. It was actually one of the first things I tried when I started using this Mac - and it was an utter mess, barely even able to load.

Office for Mac 2008 didn’t fare much better. I’ve had some exposure to it from the mac users at work, and what I’ve seen is not only yet another Microsoft interface that I would have to puzzle my way around, the memory it used on a decent machine indicated it would absolutely kill this poor little 512mb laptop.

The A$650 price, and reviews like this one from MacInTouch (particularly the memory usage section), sealed that deal.

I decided to put up with nothing, but that didn’t last long. When the need hit last month, a few searches lead me to iWork 08. I’d never looked into it beyond the initial reviews, but thankfully it has a 30 day trial.

I’m now hooked

It has taken me a few weeks, but my needs at home are so basic that I’ve quickly adapted to the iWork interface. The only thing that gave me grief is border styling in Numbers, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.

It’s a different and far more basic approach to Office application design, but one that focuses on making document creation easy rather than cramming itself full of features. Fairly typical of Apple software, really

The biggest win, in my eyes, is the memory usage. I still haven’t lost the amazement of running Safari, iTunes and Mail at the same time on 512mb ram without any noticable system lag. Apple have taken the same philosophy with their Office apps, and I couldn’t be happier.

The only time it starts lagging is when I leave Safari + Mail open and run both Pages and Numbers with large documents. Even so, it wasn’t until I upgraded to 2gb ram that my Windows box was happy with that much running.

I just… I’m sold. All this for around 15% of the cost of MS Office.

 

That’s enough essays for a while

I think 3 huge posts in the space of a week is enough. It’s not that I had them built up from a month of silence, I’ve just had a lot to say about topics that came up recently

And just because I don’t want to make a new post about it, some fun news.

I noticed as I wrote my Awaken post last night that the MacHeist front page had changed to “coming soon”, and this morning I woke up to two new software keys sitting in my inbox! It turns out that the fantastic MacHeist bundle I picked up in April has been re-released with three new apps, and because it’s the same price they managed to extend the deal for existing bundle purchasers. The new apps make it even more of a steal:

• VectorDesigner (woot I don’t own any OSX graphic tools)
• TextExpander (read about this on DaringFireball, didn’t want to pay full price)
• SoundStudio (if it gets unlocked)

The bundle is packed full of useful stuff, particularly for new OS X users. I haven’t tried the new apps yet but out of the others I use them all except for:

• The games (they’re old and obviously released into the bundle as advertising, Enigmo was one of the games ported to iPhone for the WWDC 08 keynote)
• iClip (it’s sluggish on 512mb ram)
• DEVONthink (I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it though)

So by the time I buy a new mac, I’ll be using every app except the games. Even if you’re not a new mac user, for my money there are some very handy tools (CoverSutra, Awaken, XSlimmer, WriteRoom) that don’t have any good free equivalent and would cost more than the $50 bundle price just by themselves. VictorDesigner and SoundStudio are both worth more than the bundle price alone, so if you can make use of either one it becomes a no-brainer.

And to top it all off $12 of your money will go to charity. Pick it up now to help guarantee SoundStudio for everyone

 

Using Awaken to solve SuperDuper sleepiness

I’ve written before about how I’m doing nightly SuperDuper! backups as part of my backup strategy. It’s a great piece of software, but in order to maintain backwards compatibility the developers are still using cron instead of launchd. This caused me no end of headaches setting up a rotating backup system, but there is one huge drawback I wasn’t able to work around - the inability to force the machine to wake from sleep (cron won’t run tasks while the mac is asleep).

For a while I just told my Mac to stop sleeping, but that’s a waste when on weekdays it sits idle for 2/3 of the day. I finally settled on a 2 hour sleep timer, but with the recent Age of Conan release the Mac has managed to be asleep at backup time more often than not.

It was on the way home today that the solution to SuperDuper’s narcolepsy finally hit me. I picked up Awaken back in April as part of a MacHeist bundle, and after a few teething problems with Growl I’ve been going to sleep and waking up to my music. Awaken makes full use of launchd and will happily wake the system up, so all I had to do was set an alarm a couple of minutes before the backup that didn’t play music

It was while setting this up that another flash of brilliance hit me. Awaken’s silent alarm requires a task to launch, it can’t be empty. So I figured, what better task than a script to quit Awaken since it was only loading to wake the mac from sleep :D

After playing with Automator and discovering that by default launching a workflow will edit it instead of run it (seems pretty stupid to me, but hey I’m a windows user at heart) I finally figured out how to make it work.

Awaken isn’t free, but if you do own it I present to you the final list of instructions:

In Automator:

• Create a new custom Automator workflow
• Under Utilities, drag Quit Application across to the workflow
• Pick Awaken from the Application list, and untick Ask to save changes
• Save the workflow somewhere useful

In Finder:

• Locate the workflow you just saved
• Click on it and type cmd+i (or file -> get info)
• Under Open With, change it to Automator Runner (don’t hit change all)

You now have an Automator workflow file that when opened, will quit Awaken instead of bringing up the Automator edit view. To edit it later, you either have to manually load it into Automator or right click -> open with -> Automator.

Then, in Awaken:

• In general preferences, ensure Wake Mac from sleep is checked (if it isn’t, you need to let your mac sleep. It gets tired, you know.)
• Create a new alarm, give it a title, set occurrence and time to a minute or so before your backup
• Set type to task
• Drag your workflow into the Launch Item section

I’m really happy with this setup. It would be better if SuperDuper! supported this out of the box, but now that I’ve realised I can use Awaken as my own personal interface to launchd a whole world of possibilities are coming to mind

 

Your sound card works perfectly

You’ll have to be an old school gamer to get that one.

The SuperDuper backup worked as advertised, but I’m an idiot; if you don’t want boring details you can skip the rest of the post because what happened is I killed my Time Machine partition.

---

So, why am I an idiot. I decided that instead of simply restoring, I’d bring the laptop to work and attempt to fix it; mount it on the spare mac we use for testing and either delete cache files or reinstall the security update. Both failed, so I copied SuperDuper to the mac and proceeded to restore.

Everything booted and I was really really happy… until I looked at the cables and realised I was completely screwed.

You see, my external hard drive has 2 firewire ports (I’m sure you can see where this is going) presumably so you can daisy-chain devices. That’s what I was doing because the mac only had one FireWire port, but I forgot to unmount the drive from the mac that did the restore before booting the laptop - which dutifully mounted the drive it found on the firewire cable.

None of which would be a problem if I’d gone with the original restore method of booting the Leopard DVD and using Disk Utility to restore the backup.

My bootable backup partition survived, but Time Machine wanted to play with it’s partition that had just come back online; I stopped everything an unmounted as quick as I could (in hindsight unmounting on both machines was my mistake, I should’ve just yanked the cables), but it was too late. It started with Invalid Sibling Links (which was actually quite easy to fix, I’m not afraid of a little fsck) but after the rebuild I’m getting incorrect number of thread records which is unfortunately fatal.

What’s a geek to do? I could just wipe the drive, all it had was my Time Machine data and a few other files that I have copies of on both my second backup drive and my network storage server. But after John Gruber mentioned DiskWarrior the other day, I figured it was a useful investment to make even if it didn’t work. On a side note, I ordered it online because with the Australian dollar over 92c US the 50% markup Australians pay (not just at the Apple store, but that’s the only link I can find atm) is absolutelybeyond fathomable. Even after international shipping I’m saving $30 by ordering from Alsoft directly.

Naturally, DiskWarrior worked and the drive is back. So technically it could be thought of as a $120 mistake, but truth be told DW will probably safe my life again and at the end of the day I’m just glad I made this mistake on non-critical data. Now I know what to watch out for and it’ll never happen again.

 

I should’ve guessed Apple would cause my first need for backups

So I installed the software updates this morning, it wanted to reboot but I was leaving for work. I decided to give the machine a rest, shut down and unplugged everything - forgetting that the battery has been taken out of the laptop (I figure why kill a perfectly good battery by leaving it in when it’s never used).

Booted it up this afternoon, and it took an unusually long time to apply the update but I didn’t think much of it… until the system finished booting and the Dock was constantly going away and reopening. Dock crash reporting is actually a fairly slow process on an iBook G4, so at least I could still use Finder - and eventually managed to open the Console.

I saw some strange errors involving service versions - making me suspect that applying updates without the time set is a bad idea - and what appeared to be requests for quicklook indexing a video file right before the crash. I had video files in my download folder (showing up on the dock thanks to stacks) so I moved them to my desktop - and while the video thumbnail appeared, finder crashed. bingo.

Unfortunately removing Perian didn’t seem to help, so I rebooted. And nothing happened (you have no idea how hard it is to diagnose problems when the laptop’s monitor doesn’t work). I eventually managed to read the bootup text in verbose mode, and apparently the kernel does starts to load, gets past netboot and up to the hard drive… and then stops. I didn’t think Perian installed a kext but something killed the kernel.

 

Luckily for me, I do the superduper backup thing at 11pm every night and nothing significant happened between then and the update. Having heard about issues with Apple Software Updates before, I’m really not surprised (but I am really dissapointed) that one has caused my first ever need to restore from the backup.

I just wish there was a better way to know what happened, and what the cause was so I can avoid it next time. My impressions of quicklook have been very bad so far (there’s no obvious way to turn video thumbnails off, it seriously chews up bandwidth on network drives, and apparently it can send the Dock into an infinite crash cycle). Chalk up a point for “things that would never happen or are recoverable without formatting your HDD on Windows”.

I’ve never tested the SuperDuper backup because this old G4 doesn’t want to boot from my FireWire drive… wish me luck