Category Archives: Apple

Apple

an example of why I hate the Apple Store

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A few weeks ago, I found myself in the Apple Store in downtown Palo Alto.  My mother-in-law wanted an iPod Shuffle.  Now, I usually order my Apple gear online because I hate the Apple Store, but she wanted instant gratification, so we headed into the store.

In the store, she spent a few minutes deciding which color she wanted.  When she selected the green one, we went to one of the info-iPads to get one brought to us.  The system kept on returning errors, so we still had to find an unoccupied employee to get it.  It took a few minutes to get someone’s attention.  Once I told him what we wanted, he said that it would take “a few minutes”.  While we were waiting, someone else approached that employee to get an iPhone accessory that wasn’t available on the store floor either.

About ten minutes later, my iPod Shuffle and the other person’s item came at the same time.  The employee said to the other person, “do you mind if I ring her [indicating me] up first?”  The other person said that yes, she did mind.  I was unhappy since I had been waiting longer, but acquiesced because I knew that my transaction would take longer than usual1.  Regardless, it’s bad customer service on the part of the employee to ignore the order in which we had placed our orders with him.

In all, what should have been a 10-minute transaction (including deciding on the color) ended up taking nearly 45 minutes.  This is exactly why I hate the Apple Store: a quick transaction is never quick.  I should’ve just gone to Target or Best Buy instead.  While I would have forfeited the small discount I get on Apple hardware, I would have saved a lot of time.

  1. As a VMware employee, I get a small discount on Apple hardware, which would take a little bit of time for them to verify that I qualify for it and look up the code to use. ↩
Mac, software

giving up on Safari

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I’ve been using Safari since its introduction in 2003.  Upon the death of Internet Explorer for Mac, I switched to Safari exclusively.  When other web browsers have come out, I’ve given them all a go, but I’ve always returned to Safari.  Until now: Safari 5.1 has forced me to switch to Chrome as my browser of choice.

Safari 5.1 now behaves more like Safari on iOS.  When Safari decides that you haven’t interacted with a page recently enough, it unloads that page to save memory.  This doesn’t match up with my usage of Safari in any way.  I often have several tabs open.  Those tabs represent a to-do list of sorts.  Some of the open are items that I simply want to read.  Others represent an action that I need to take: fill out a form, write a new blog post, write my weekly status report.

Forced reloading breaks every single one of these to-dos.  In the best-case scenario, the webpage that I’m reading hasn’t changed between when I started reading it and when Safari forces a reload of its content, so I haven’t necessarily lost anything other than my place on the page.  Even so, I lose the context of what I was reading, and I also lose the time necessary for the page to reload.  Occasionally, I lose the content of the page, if I’m offline when I’m trying to read the page but a forced reload has occurred.

In the cast of an action to take, the forced reload is even more irritating.  I lose my work: the partially-filled-out form, the incomplete blog post, the status report that I forgot to commit to the wiki.  At minimum, I lose the time that I invested in my half-finished work.  Recreating that work is always a losing proposition.

I tried to live with Safari 5.1 for a few weeks.  Slowly, I found myself trying out other browsers again.  I tried Firefox again, but its inability to respect my system proxy settings1 and its incorrect handling of keyboard shortcuts like option-arrow2 have made me move to Chrome.  I’m not sure if I really like Chrome yet, but it doesn’t break my workflows, and I don’t have the constant concern of losing my to-dos.

If a future update to Safari changes this behavior, I might try it again.  But Safari has really broken my trust with 5.1, and I don’t think that I’ll come rushing back.

  1. My wired access in my office is via proxy, but wifi has no proxy.  I switch between the two several times during the day: wired when I’m working in my office, wifi when I’m in a conference room. ↩
  2. When editing text, option-arrow moves you to the beginning or end of the line.  Except in Firefox, where option-leftarrow is “back one page”. ↩
Apple, Nadyne

I hate the Apple Store

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The Apple Store is now 10 years old.  As I’ve been reading all of the articles in the tech press about it, I realized that I’m not sure when I last set foot in an Apple Store.  I think it was about a year ago, when my first iPhone 4 died.

I’ve come to hate the Apple Store experience.  I seem to be one of the few.  They’re still the most profitable retail store per square foot.  I only go into the Apple Store if I absolutely have to, which is to say when I’ve done enough troubleshooting on a piece of Apple hardware to know that it’s a hardware issue and they’re likely going to replace it.

I used to go into the Apple Store to browse, to check out the latest hardware, accessories, and software.  I played with the in-store hardware and chatted with the employees.  My husband and I would joke that we couldn’t go in there just to browse because bad things would happen to our chequebook.  That concern is gone.

The Genius Bar is an awesome idea, and I used to love it.  Here’s how it’s described in a 2007 Fortune article about the Apple retail experience:

“When we launched retail, I got this group together, people from a variety of walks of life,” says [Apple’s Ron] Johnson. “As an icebreaker, we said, ‘Tell us about the best service experience you’ve ever had.'” Of the 18 people, 16 said it was in a hotel. This was unexpected. But of course: The concierge desk at a hotel isn’t selling anything; it’s there to help. “We said, ‘Well, how do we create a store that has the friendliness of a Four Seasons Hotel?'” The answer: “Let’s put a bar in our stores. But instead of dispensing alcohol, we dispense advice.”

I think that the Genius Bar has little in common with either a bar or a good hotel concierge any longer.  They don’t really dispense advice now.  You’ve got to make an appointment if you actually want to talk to a Genius.  You can try to talk to someone if you happen to drop in, but there’s a huge wait.  There’s often a long wait even if you do have an appointment.

The bar aspect is gone.  You usually can’t wait at the bar for your appointment, but just hang around hopefully.  There’s no opportunity to be social or informal.  They’re too busy to do anything other than give a cursory glance and try to get you out of the way as soon as possible.

I’ve observed that the way that they’re most likely to take care of a problem is simply to give the user a replacement piece of hardware.  This, of course, results in a delighted user: their problem has disappeared, and it’s been replaced with a shiny new thing that (presumably) doesn’t have the issue.  There’s usually not a lot of troubleshooting or attempt to actually fix the problem.  I’ve certainly been quite pleased to have my old and busted iPhone replaced with a new and shiny one.  Conceptually, though, I find it amusing that their response to something that isn’t working really isn’t all that different from the old “have you turned it off and back on?” tech support solution.

I don’t go to the Geniuses for software issues.  I’ve too often heard them give entirely incorrect information.  I once sorted out someone’s MobileMe syncing problem in under five minutes, after a Genius had spent more than an hour on it.  I lost count of the number of times I’ve heard them give incorrect information about Office.  I even corrected a Genius who told someone that Mail couldn’t work with Gmail.

A few years ago, Apple removed cash registers from their stores.  This drives me absolutely batty.  I walk in, I want to buy something, and now I’ve got to find someone who can actually do it.  I can’t do it at the Genius Bar because they’re always way overbooked.  I have to try to find an available employee, and that’s difficult in a packed store.  Without a cash register, there’s no way for me to indicate that I want to purchase something without flagging down a passing employee.  There’s no queue, and I’ve often been frustrated when someone who has just walked into the store gets the service that I’ve been desperately trying to get for several minutes.

Last week, I came across an essay from the director of a creative agency titled “Your Agency on PCs” in which he has a reasoned discussion about Windows versus Mac.  He says this about the Apple Store:

If Apple cared about user experience, they’d build a store with a fucking cash register. I’d rather stab myself in the eye than have to walk past all those glassy-eyed zombies to talk to a “genius.” If I go to the London Drugs down the street, a real person will address my problem, without booking an appointment a week in advance. That’s for any product they sell, and there’s little likelihood of anyone there calling me “dude.”

Yeah, that.  That paragraph pretty well encapsulates why I hate the Apple Store.  It makes me feel better to know that I’m not the only one.

Mac, Nadyne

LTFS wins NAB Pick Hit award

IBM Linear Tape File System (LTFS), which my husband Michael Richmond architected, won a Pick Hit award at the National Association of Broadcasters conference last week.

In short, LTFS puts a file system on top of magnetic tape.  This overcomes many of the disadvantages of tape, such as the long access time due to the linear nature of tape.  It also keeps the advantages of tape, such as the inexpensive cost per terabyte and its longevity.  It’s a big deal for media and entertainment companies who create and consume many terabytes of data per day, and who want to store it less expensively and more reliably than they can on hard drive.

I know that this isn’t quite one of my usual topics of user experience, VMware, or Macs, but I think it’s worthwhile.  Of course, LTFS does support Macs (obviously important for media and entertainment companies!), so maybe it’s not too far outside my usual topics.

iPad, vSphere

VMware vSphere Client for iPad available now!

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Did I mention that we’ve got more coming for the iPad? Oh, yes, I did!

We’ve now released the VMware vSphere Client for iPad. It joins our VMware View for iPad release earlier this month. Both apps are free.1 The vSphere Client for iPad allows you to monitor your vSphere hosts and VMs, as well as do some management tasks. Srinivas Krishnamurti, our Senior Director for Mobile Solutions, has written a blog post for its release: VMware vSphere Client for iPad has left the building. Also, as with our previous iPad app release, boche.net has a detailed write-up of it.

As ever, a demo is worth a thousand words, so check out part one:

And part two:

It’s available in the App Store today.  Go forth and download!  After you’ve downloaded it, check out our community for VMware vSphere Client for iPad if you’d like to discuss this app or let us know what you think about it.

  1. And, as of this writing, both are doing very well in the list of most-downloaded business apps. ↩
iPad

why the “wife says no” story is apocryphal

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I keep on seeing a link to the “wife says no” story.  I’m appalled that anyone could be gullible enough to believe it.  This just doesn’t pass the smell test.  Here’s the story, as quoted by MacRumors:

[Apple’s] focus this week has been to troubleshoot all the iPad 2s that customers are returning to the stores. One iPad came back with a post it note on it that said “Wife said no.” It was escalated as something funny, and two of the VPs got wind of it. They sent the guy an iPad 2 with a note on it that said “Apple said yes.”

Apple’s return policy states the following:

[I]f you are not satisfied with your Apple purchase, return it with the original receipt and original packaging within fourteen (14) calendar days of the date of purchase. If the item is returned unopened, in the original box, we will exchange it or offer a refund based only on the original payment method.

For an unopened iPad, it would go straight back onto the shelves (or, more accurately, it would get sold within approximately four seconds after its return), and thus no-one beyond the staff at the particular Apple Store would know the guy’s reason for returning it.

Even if you argue that the Apple Store stretched its return policies to accept an opened iPad (and there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that they do), there’s still no reason for them to ship the iPad anywhere outside the store. They can simply verify that it’s in new condition and shrink-wrap it again. This probably increases the time until it gets resold from 4 seconds to 20 seconds.

If the iPad was returned, wasn’t in new condition (and thus couldn’t be put back on the store shelves immediately), and was still accepted for a return, then it does get shipped somewhere. Returned devices are returned to the factory to be refurbished. Barring repeated reports of physical issues, it’s likely that the only people who touch a returned iPad are the Apple Store employee who accepts the return, the person who boxes it up for return to a central facility, and the person at the central facility who then returns them to the factory.

If the original owner returned it, why would he put a sticky note on it to explain his reason for returning it? He has to know that he’s going to have to talk to someone at the Apple Store to complete the return, so attaching a sticky note will do nothing to help him. The manager of the Apple Store is going to talk to the guy (assuming that it’s an open-box return; otherwise, it’s just the employee at the Apple Store who talks to him), not just look at a sticky note and accept the return wordlessly. If it’s unopened, the guy might have a laugh with the employee who’s taking the return, but there’s still no sticky note.

I suppose it’s possible that it’s someone at the Apple Store who put the sticky note on it, but then it makes no sense for Apple to send the guy a new iPad with the note “Apple says yes” on it. The other alternative for the “wife says no” notation is that the Apple Store employee entered that into the “why is this being returned?” field in their return form. In either case, the “wife says no” notation didn’t originate from the owner, so he’s not going to understand the returned “Apple says yes” sticky note. I trust that Apple VPs are smart enough to realise that.

Finally, the story comes from MacRumors. Not just MacRumors, but their Page 2 list, which makes the story much less believable. I actually like MacRumors quite a lot, and have spent a fair amount of time on their forums, but their stories are often inaccurate. This is doubly true for their Page 2 stories. It must be noted that a story about some guy getting a free iPad with a funny note on it is a great way to drive traffic.

I understand why the story has caught people’s imagination. It’s funny, and it matches up with what we want to believe about Apple.  Mails from Steve Jobs always grab headlines in the Mac geek blogosphere, even though the vast majority of these emails are unconfirmed.  Anyone can claim that they’ve received email from sjobs@apple, and I have only rarely seen anyone try to verify the headers of one of these reported emails.  Stories about about Apple going above and beyond in making a customer happy, albeit again without much in the way of verification.

I get why we want to believe the story, but let’s apply some judicious thought to it before we take it as fact and forward it around indiscriminately. Doing so is no better than forwarding around the rumour that asparagus cures cancer.

iPad, View, VMware

VMware View for iPad available now!

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Today’s a great day for VMware.  We’ve launched View Client for iPad today, and it’s available in iTunes right now.  This app allows you to connect to your View desktop quickly over either wifi or 3G.  Engadget has a nice write-up which mentions my favourite feature: the virtual trackpad.  Boche.net has a great discussion of it too, which goes into a fair number of features (as well as some roadmap questions, such as Android versions).

But don’t just read about it, check out the demo:

And while you’re checking things out, you can see how the Children’s Hospital of Central California has been using it:

If you want to let us know what you think and discuss this cool new app, check out our community for VMware View for iPad.

Stay tuned, because there’s more iOS goodness coming soon …

MWSF

upstairs, downstairs: thoughts on Macworld Expo

I checked out Macworld Expo this year.  I’ve gone every year since 20061, and I’ve always had a great time. But, speaking as someone who only got to check out the Expo and not the Conference, I just didn’t find Macworld to be a great event.  I was predisposed to loving it, and I couldn’t this year.  Based on some of the other articles I’ve read and conversations that I’ve had with others who attended this year, I think it’s an upstairs/downstairs issue.

Looking at the session list for the Conference portion of Macworld, it was awesome.  The Conference is broken into several tracks.  The Users Conference has fantastic sessions.  There were 6 Mac tracks and 2 iOS tracks.  The Mac part includes sessions, both beginner and advanced, across productivity, photography, and business.  The MacIT track is my favourite, but then I’m a geek.  That part of Macworld 2011 looked like it was just as great as it’s always been.

The Conference is, both literally and figuratively, upstairs.  This year, it was held on the second and third floors of Moscone West.  By all accounts, it was spacious and comfortable.  There was plenty of seating for the all-important hallway discussions.  Contrast that to the downstairs of the Expo.

The Expo is totally different now that Apple has left the building.  There are fewer companies represented there.  While some people have been joking for several years that the Expo had just been about iPod/iPhone cases, there were still lots of Mac developers there.  Even better, the booths were usually staffed by their technical team, so spending time in their booth was very productive.  As someone from an application team working in a booth myself, I really appreciated the opportunity to talk to the users of my applications, get feedback from them, and help them out with problems.  As a Mac user myself, I loved being able to talk to the developers of some of my favourite applications.  Sometimes this was giving them feedback, sometimes it was to request a feature, and sometimes it was simply to tell them that I love their apps.

With Apple being gone and many of the big players deciding to sit this one out, it left room for a lot of small players.  And a lot of these small players were in iOS development and accessories.  It was weird to see Thinkpads and Vaios on the show floor.  I’m an iPhone and iPad user too, but it’s still called Macworld.  I wanted much more Mac and much less iOS.

There were lots of tiny booths.  This meant that it was a good opportunity to meet some of the smaller vendors (albeit with the caveat that many of them were iOS vendors that I wasn’t as interested in), but it created a traffic jam in the aisles.  Moving through the aisles was bloody well nearly impossible.  Since the vast majority of booths were very small booths, no-one other than the booth workers could actually be in the booth.  To stop and see what was going on in a booth required that you stop in the aisle, which blocked everyone else from moving past.  This was even worse in the teensy four-sided kiosks that took up one corner of the show floor.  There were things in there that I wanted to check out, but the teeming crowds in that section made it too much of a hassle to go in and talk to developers.

Adding to the problems on the show floor was that there wasn’t anywhere to hang out with friends for those of us who were only downstairs.  A large part of Macworld, for me, is the networking aspect of it — that so-called hallway track.  At previous Macworlds, I got to see lots of my existing Macworld friends and make more of them.  This year, there were only a handful of tables at the back of the hall, which were generally taken up by people eating.  With the aisles full, there was no place to move to the side and talk.  The lobby only had a few chairs near the coffee cart.  There was no place to hang out, and no place to stand within a booth.  As a result, I lost most of the serendipity of meeting someone new.  I also didn’t run into old friends unless I had arranged something ahead of time, which further cut the networking aspect of it.

This year as someone who only got to spend time on the Expo floor, Macworld just felt like a non-event to me.  I know that part of it is that I didn’t get to spend as much time there as I have in the past2, but I also think that part of it is how the show evolved this year.

There’s a disconnect between the Expo and the Conference.  The Conference upstairs still is Macworld.  Having some iOS tracks in there makes sense, but the focus is on the Mac.  The Expo downstairs isn’t Macworld any longer.  The Expo is Appleworld — and I’m only calling it Appleworld because iOSworld sounds pretty lame.  There were still a few Mac developers on the floor, but even most of those were often showing off their latest iOS applications in addition to their Mac offerings.  The rest is all about iOS.

I can see why most of the Mac developers chose not to get floor space this year3  With an Expo that has become increasingly focused on iOS in previous years, taking part in the Expo is a big cost that has a questionable payoff.  There’s the cost associated with the booth: renting the floor space on the show floor, as well as putting together the booth.  These things are Not Cheap, especially for a big professional booth.  More importantly, there’s the cost to the engineering team.  As I mentioned above, most developers sent members of their technical team.  As a result, those developers lost a week of productivity.  This is worthwhile if there’s a benefit to the developer as well as to the community.  But without a critical mass of Mac users who are interested in discussing Mac software, there’s a much smaller benefit to the development team, not to mention only a small benefit to the Mac community.

I think that the disconnect between the Conference and the Expo has to be addressed.  I’m not sure what the best way is to accomplish this.  I hope that it can be done.

  1. Which makes me a relative noob, I know. ↩
  2. Such as for the Office 2008 launch, where I got a hotel room at the W for the entire week instead of making the long trek home to Mountain View every night ↩
  3. It must be said that I have no inside knowledge of why either my current or my former employer didn’t have a booth at Macworld this year.  This is only my opinion, not a representation of anyone’s decision-making process. ↩
iPhone, Mac

iTunes wishlist

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I think it’s safe to say that I put iTunes through its paces more than most people do.  As of this writing, I have more than 27,000 tracks in iTunes.  That’s not a complete representation of my music collection.  I’ve got another 40 or so CDs that I’ve acquired in the past month which will get ripped, and I’m in the process of re-ripping my existing CD collection to ensure that everything’s in ALAC.  I mostly like iTunes, but there are some things that I wish would change.

Over-the-air podcasts

Once I have listened to an episode of a podcast on my iPhone, I’d like to be able to update that podcast to get the next podcast in the queue.  I feel this pain most acutely on the weekends, when I’ve run out of podcasts on my iPhone but I can’t update since I sync my iPhone with my work Mac.  I know that there are apps like Podcaster, but they require that I only listen to podcasts on my iPhone.

Device-independent podcasts

Related to the previous point, the only reason that I sync my iPhone to my work Mac is podcasts.  I have some podcasts that I like listening to on my Mac while I’m working, such as the All Songs Considered live concert podcast.  I shouldn’t have to think about where I’m going to listen to a podcast and decide which of my Macs/iPhones/iPods will be with me when I am going to be there.

Better auto-complete

Since I have a massive iTunes library, there’s a lot for auto-complete to draw from.  But auto-complete also gets in the way.

This is most noticeable when capitalisation between what it’s trying to auto-complete and what I’m actually typing differ.  Once I get past the point where iTunes gives up on auto-complete because my new entry isn’t in its database, it keeps the capitalisation that it already had.  For example, I was entering the band name ALO today.  I typed A, and it came up with Al Franken.  Then I typed L, so it kept Mr Franken, but changed my upper-case L to a lower-case l.  And then I typed O, but it still had the lower-case l there.  In other words, I entered that information, don’t lose it.

Another potential improvement for auto-complete would be to match the composers field with the artist field.  If I’m in the composers field and start to type the first letter of the artist’s name, don’t give me the first entry that matches that alphabetically.  Give me that artist; if I keep on typing more, then maybe the song’s composer isn’t the artist.  But it usually is, so save me a little bit of typing.

Improved ability to update an album

As I mentioned earlier, I’m going through my CD collection.  Since I’ve been using digital music for years and years, my music is in a variety of formats.  As I re-rip my discs, I delete the old version.  I’d love to be able to select the old version and tell iTunes that I’m updating this album, and thus keep its tags and metadata.  I know that I can do this if I’ve kept all of its tags the same as what’s in the CDDB, but I correct the tags on my files when there’s incorrect or incomplete information in them.  I don’t want to lose the metadata because the CDDB is wrong.

Better handling of the “composers” field

Today, the composers field is just treated as a single text-entry box.  But modern music usually has multiple composers.  I’d like them to implement some kind of delineator (slash or semicolon would work well).  Then I could have auto-complete work on the individual composers of a song, instead of the whole list of composers of a song.  For example, Michael Stipe’s sister Lynda has writing credits on a song on Fables of the Reconstruction, so I’d love to be able to type “Bill Berry; Peter Buck; Mike Mills; Lynda Stipe; Michael Stipe” for that song and save myself a little bit of typing since everyone but Ms Stipe is a composer on another song in my library.

Carriage returns in comments

I love the comments field.  It makes my geeky little heart sing with joy.  I’d love to keep more information in the comments field, but it’s hard to do so because I can’t use a carriage return to provide visual separation.  I don’t want to write a novel in the comments field.  For example, I have a smart playlist for “covers”, which looks through the comments field for that string.  I also use the comment field for live songs, to note when and where they were recorded.  Without a carriage return, a song which has both of these pieces of information is messy.  It’s keeping me from using the comments field for other smart playlists, too.

What improvements would you like to see in iTunes?