So, MobileMe is now working for me. As of around 4AM this morning, when the kid woke us up and I fired up my iPod Touch to check the weather forecast. I was idling thumbing through e-mail and, all of a sudden, my .Mac account (which was dead since July 6th) popped up a new message count.

I checked it, and sure enough, there was some recent mail (from around 3:30 GMT time), plus a gaping ten-day-wide hole between those messages and the next most recent ones. Over a week of e-mail, gone bouncing off into limbo – fortunately all my folders and stored messages seem to be in place, although I’ve already backed up the cached copies on my laptop.

The day went by uneventfully, until around 7PM when I got this e-mail:

…emphasis mine. Not bad, considering that “maintenance” took around ten days and that Mail was listed on the system status page as available every time I visited it for the first five days.

Two hours later, at 9PM, I finally get the follow-up from Tier 2 support (about, oh, four to six days late) saying that my account should be working by now and that I not only qualify for the 30-day Extension Eligibility but I also have twice the storage space.

Which, considering what I think about iDisk (and no, I haven’t yet had time to do packet sniffing, but I’ll wager it’s still just as insecure as the rest of MobileMe), is quite ironic.

Oh well.

Anyway, I just filed #6084474 pertaining to iPhone auto-correct with the Portuguese keyboard (it is nearly impossible to write single-letter words without auto-correct getting in the way for some reason).

Which quite easily a lot more interesting than MobileMe right now.

I hereby declare MobileMe completely and utterly broken in terms of support processes.

Not only have I not received any acknowledgement of my issues since last Thursday the 10th, support chat is gone, e-mail support quotes a 48h response time, and I have not even received the acknowledgment e-mail this page mentions.

(And since I use Google mail, I can check my spam folder just fine, and guess what, it ain’t there. Not tonight, not yesterday, etc.)

If anyone knows how to get hold of an actual live human being on the phone, drop me a line by e-mail. Or tip off Steve for me.

Or (even better) make me an offer I can’t refuse regarding switching to a better overall solution, before I feel tempted to build (or help build) one myself (and yeah, I just might).

While I wait for Apple to sort out the ungodly mess the MobileMe launch turned out to be (yes, I am still without e-mail, for one full week now), I’ve been fooling around with the 2.0 firmware on both my iPhone and my iPod Touch.

More on the latter, really, since I am trying to pin down exactly what are the major factors for battery drain on the iPhone 3G and figure out how the hell am I going to actually use it considering that it has apparently performed the awesome feat of delivering a worse battery life than the original Nokia N95 – but I’ll get to that later.

And besides my earlier comments regarding the App Store, I could probably write a whole series of posts on the apps I’ve tried so far, but life’s too short and just about everyone out there is ranting on the overall topic, so I’ll just give a couple of examples and explain precisely why they suck and why I don’t think developers get what writing for a mobile platform entails.

Let’s start with one I had the highest expectations for: NetNewsWire, the mobile version of the well-known RSS reader.

Although it works on my iPod, it plain doesn’t work for me on the iPhone for some reason. I have no clue as to why.

Furthermore, it the overall experience is much slower than the Google Reader optimized web UI on the iPod. My guess is that the sync protocol slows things down a lot, and I’m very disappointed that one of the big prospective advantages of having a native app – having a local cache and a decent offline mode – has been utterly wasted.

Why am I saying this? Well, because I actually test things. The app simply does not work if I switch off Wi-Fi after syncing. It freezes to the point where you can’t even scroll for a while, and then stutters along as if in agony.

This wanton abuse of network connectivity seems to be a mainstay of most apps, a good deal of which seem to be nothing more than glorified browsers, or even include their own variation of a mini-browser, maddeningly different from all the others.

Which I blame squarely on Apple’s decision to avoid doing proper multitasking and take us all back to the pre-MultiFinder days. App developers have little choice but to take the mini-browser shortcut instead of saving their state, invoking Safari and reverting to the point you were at when returning to the app – because, after all, the user would have to exit Safari, find their app icon again and launch it, which would be a pain.

It may be early days, but I would expect developers to be a bit smarter than this by now. Yes, the iPhone and iPod Touch are ways to access the Internet, but every mobile device has two states: online and offline. And you either take offline into account, or you’re forgetting 50% of the possible use cases.

Next up is Twitterrific. It works OK, but it takes so long to render avatar images that I get the scary feeling that it is actually fetching them individually over the 3G connection instead of doing the obvious thing and using a local cache plus off-screen drawing.

It’s just plain odd. Also, it is an example of how not to do progress indicators – spinners are fine for quick operations, but just for a lark I switched off 3G and tried posting a photo using Twitterrific atop a GPRS connection (EDGE is pretty rare in European networks, especially in places like Portugal where 3G was deployed with carpet-bombing thoroughness).

It was amazingly… boring. It actually took less than a minute, but there was absolutely no clue whatsoever about what the app was doing and how long it would take (oh, and no idea as to the actual bytes transferred, either).

Then come the cool and original apps, some of which are let down by minor flaws. Comic Touch is a blast, but it has a few UI bugs – for instance, I cannot e-mail comics directly to my contact list for some reason – clicking the plus sign on its message composer doesn’t work for me.

So yeah, it’s early days. But I have a feeling this kind of stuff is going to be with us for a while yet.

Yep, last evening (at midnight) was the big launch. I was home nursing a cold, but spent an entertaining day getting up to speed on my new corporate (re)org, planning for another big thing we’re doing tonight, and following the news, so I have a few personal notes on the whole thing.

1. The iPhone 3G

I am going to leave my (fortunately small) involvement in the iPhone 3G launch for my (hitherto unwritten) memoirs, but there are a few things I can share publicly and a few opinions that are eminently personal.

First off, I actually went and bought one – an 8GB – with my own money. Just so you know.

Even with it not supporting MMS messages¹, and the likelihood of it being obsoleted (or considerably cheaper) by Xmas. I think of it as a way to reset the Karmic balance of my having access to pretty much any device I want and not having bought a single phone (for myself) for nearly ten years now.

Plus I’ve been wanting a personal phone (i.e., something I could call my own and not have to give back after a couple of weeks) where I could have both decent e-mail and a decent browser, and right now it is the best compromise between both requirements (there are vastly better e-mail clients, but no browser that can even begin to compete).

Whether the device will be a mobile history milestone or a lodestone, however, is not yet completely clear to me.

For starters, battery life is dismal when compared to a Blackberry or an E71. I have a feeling I will have to completely disable push services if I want to get through a complete working day (i.e., 12h) without re-charging the thing, even if I only use the browser during my daily commutes².

Next, it is full of irritating little pauses when I try to access my contact list, my calendar, etc. I have a feeling that it’s actually trying to check for server updates before rendering the content, which is less than ideal.

Still, it managed to sync my Exchange contact photos, which was a nice touch (the Nokia still can’t, for whatever daft reason).

And finally, it is the first Apple mobile device that feels cheap. The plastics make it lighter, sure, but the E71 and iPod Touch’s metal backs give them a sturdy, reliable feeling.

Oh, and the white model looks like a kitchen appliance (there, I’ve said it).

2. The iPod Touch Upgrade

Right now, this link goes nowehere for me (iTunes launches, but that’s it). Which is a shame, because I would not only like to upgrade my iPod Touch to fool around with the nifty iTunes remote app but also figure out if the iPhone 3G feels slower than my iPod due to the new firmware features or to more aggressive power management.

I guess I’ll know by Sunday or so.

3. The App Store

More than 500 apps, right? Just like Palm sites of old, there are plenty of apps but there are entirely too many redundant ones. I’m already seeing ad-ridden iPhone app review sites sprouting left and right, but what irks me the most is that the in-store buying experience (both on iTunes and inside the on-device store) is still confusing.

Plus, buying applications isn’t quite the same as buying content – most often you’ve already heard or seen portions of the content, but applications are a different thing. Of course you can always put up a “free” (or ad-sponsored, bandwidth-sucking) version for folk to try out, but that feels somewhat like a kludge.

And what’s with all the applications that do very little besides wrapping a web site inside them? I mean, can’t people code decent web sites or something? Or do they think that monetizing HTML wrappers will get them far in this new business?

4. MobileMe

In case you’ve been paying attention, I don’t have .Mac / MobileMe e-mail since last Sunday, and have pretty much given up on even trying to reach a live human being at Apple support for the time being.

(Last time I tried, they had finally escalated it past tier 2 support to Engineering, and it’s now been well over 24h by my reckoning and still no word.)

I have already lost a bunch of e-mail, cannot retrieve my password for at least one site (fortunately nothing too critical, but extremely annoying) and have vowed not to give out my me.com e-mail address anywhere that I might really need to get feedback from.

But that’s not important right now. What is relevant is that I am completely underwhelmed by MobileMe so far (yes, I can access pretty much all of it except webmail, despite the site’s tendency to emulate that 60s favorite, the Yo-Yo).

Yes, it is beautiful. But beauty without brains is a major turn-off, and there are a number of things that make the “upgrade” completely irrelevant for me.

First off, iDisk still does not support SSL (you can try diddling with the URL, but you’ll hit an Akamai SSL listener and get redirected to an error page).

I will be updating my usual article on this soon, once Mac OS X is updated on all my machines and the .Mac moniker vanishes from the UI – lest Apple have added some kind of advanced user preference somewhere.

Second, iDisk performance is dismal. Absolutely dismal. I’m not talking about the overall site performance – a file upload or download (i.e., a single HTTP transfer, the bit performed after clicking on a download or submitting an upload) is still amazingly slow.

Clueless critics will jump in at this point and complain that the whole thing is slow right now due to curiosity and demand, and I’ll just say this – if you’re designing a web-based storage system, your filers’ performance should never, ever be influenced by the front-end’s (i.e., the thing should have been architected in such a way that HTTP file access was cleanly separated from all the fluffiness).

Contacts also does not use SSL. So accessing your contacts on a Wi-Fi hotspot is great for anyone who does identity theft for a living and happens to have the basic skill sets required for sniffing packets (i.e., pushing the right button on the right app). Plus you can only pick between US, French, German and Japanese address formats, which is… Daft³.

Galleries look pretty much the same. The only improvement is the new browser-based management, and I look forward to the opportunity of getting completely rid of integration with iPhoto, since it hung for minutes every single time it tried to access .Mac to publish the simplest subset of my photos (i.e., one).

But, alas, Apple has failed to implement password protection management for galleries, so not even that is really useful to me.

And Calendar is also somewhat pointless for me (I use Exchange, thank you very much), so I won’t mention it further.

5. The Engineering Angle

I won’t go on about the ongoing breakage, so I’ll sum it up to this: Apple has massively underestimated the infra-structure boost required for supporting the launch of both MobileMe and the 3G device, which is odd considering what happened when the first iPhone came out.

Maybe Eric Schmidt ought to get the Google guys in for a consult or something – but hey, I’m not their advisor.

—

¹ Which I still find unforgivable in a phone sold in Portugal and within my social circle. Your mileage (or social requirements) may vary – there is nothing that can sustain a rich media “conversation” in the same way for me and my friends and family.

² For the record, the Blackberry Bold and the E71 both have a battery life of two to two and a half days for my usual workday usage pattern.”

³ Fortunately, you can switch off automatic formatting mangling of phone numbers, since all the formats provided are dangerous for anyone who likes to manage their address book in international format.

So, my .Mac mail account has been unavailable for, oh, I’d say around 18 hours three days now. I can log in via the web, but:

• Webmail is unavailable.
• I get an “Your information could not be displayed. Click here to try again.” notice on the .Mac mail section in the main sidebar. Clicking, of course, has no effect.
• Mail.app either times out or gives the following error message:

The server error encountered was: Operation could not be completed. (MFMessageErrorDomain error 1030.)

And, of course, I have 2GB of mail there (backed up, most of it), and I was expecting a couple of important personal messages last Monday.

Update 1:

So, I have been trying to get .Mac support to help me, but the system still seems to be specifically designed to prevent that.

First off, props to Aaron, who is (out of the three support contacts I got during the various chat sessions) the only one that was genuinely helpful.

Unfortunately, I got better results filling out the support form. I input my Connection Doctor data, waited longer than 24h (a delay which, I’m told, is due to the MobileMe launch), and got a reply from Apple with a series of boilerplate troubleshooting steps.

I followed those, replied within the hour, and now, 18 hours later, I fire up the support chat window to ask about case #51006366, and I’m told that they never got my e-mail.

Amazing, especially considering that I sent it from my Google Apps account, which (despite the other issues that plagued Google Apps earlier in the week) has been working flawlessly.

I keep getting half my mailing-list traffic there, and e-mails I sent from it around the same time arrived at their destinations, so that particular e-mail being lost just doesn’t feel right.

So I now have to wait up to 24 hours before someone actually checks what’s happening, and without any resolution target.

Way to go, guys. Reminds me of last time.

Update 2:

I’m getting a very strong feeling of deja vu here, since the reply to my e-mail just came through, and the whole thing is redolent of my previous engagement with their second tier support: “Clarke” seems to have spent around zero time actually reading my e-mail (especially the bit where I explained that I had done everything they requested) and just asked me to do the same steps again.

And, of course, since they have a 24-hour SLA, I am now looking at the very likely scenario of MobileMe being rolled out before my problems get fixed (possibly causing me still another set of issues).

My educated guess is that their migration is floundering, since .Mac mail was supposed to remain available during the MobileMe launch, and my e-mail obviously isn’t (and may even have been taken offline due to some pre-migration step).

The whole thing is both tremendously ironic (for reasons I can’t disclose, but which won’t be immediately obvious even if you think you know what they are) and irritating enough for me to cancel my account tout de suite, as soon as I am sure that there aren’t any dangling subscriptions, web site accounts or newsletters that use my mac.com e-mail address.

Because US$99 a year doesn’t even begin to cover the aggravation (and I am positive I have lost incoming e-mail, since stuff I forwarded on to .Mac bounced back, and a number of people have complained of the same).

So, anyone out there still using .Mac and having the same kind of troubles?

Yes, it helps to be a H2G2 fan to get the title.

Things have been a bit quiet here for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I’m again facing the One Decision that every middle-aged professional comes across at least once in their lifetime.

Basically, it boils down to:

• Keep doing the sort of things I do in the way I usually do them and carry the label of “one man show” forever, relinquishing my chances of making meaningful decisions inside the company.
• Get completely and utterly out of technology altogether and do management stuff. You know, pointy-haired boss stuff.

In my case, the utterly irritating and frustrating aspect is that despite my having joined the company to be in Marketing, I kept getting involved in pretty much everything we’ve done since 1999 in both technical and product development/design aspects. Which means I’m (perhaps irrevocably) seen as being too tied to technology (or technology strategy) to be bumped “up”¹.

Which, I’m told, is a compliment², since upper management sees me as having “valuable insights” and want me available for the next big thing.

But there’s a problem – I’m not that sure I want to be in “the next big thing”. I get a “next big thing” every six months to a year, and I would really like to do something longer for a change. Preferably something that allowed me to flex other mental muscles.

After all, the reason I took a management course four years ago was that I wanted to do something different – and yet, the deluge of new, trendy tech like IMS soon put a stop to that.

But now that I had spent a year and a half involved in a bunch of fixed data initiatives on the Marketing side (despite the odd “hey, you’re the only one that gets this” technically-minded project), I was looking forward to some continuity. Maybe some more formal responsibility (instead of the recurring feeling I’m herding cats across several concurrent project teams), a bit more control over my time, and maybe, just maybe, feeling a little less like Dilbert.

And bang, there comes another “big thing”. And I’ve been sorely pissed off during most of the past couple of weeks, wondering what to do.

Not that I’m complaining (much) about what I’m doing now³. In a way, it’s rewarding. People know me, they know they can rely on me, and they know they can ask for help pretty much anytime (although it does get in the way), and I do get to do amazingly interesting stuff.

The thing is, what I’m doing now and what I wish I could do (let alone how I wanted to do it) has pretty much zero to do with “the next big thing” I have been invited to do, about which I also happen to have some deep (and thoroughly mixed) feelings⁴.

Besides, I’m having a hard time with loss of control here. The absolutely worse thing anyone can do to me is to limit my ability to shape the people and environment I’m working in (which requires me to have more than the usual measure of control over things), and I’m not exactly happy right now.

Still, even though I keep wondering if there is a company (short, say, of Google and some portions of Microsoft) that “gets” the transition from worker bee to management, I can’t say I’m thoroughly unhappy.

Just very, very annoyed at the way I keep getting into “the next big thing” and not allowed to sharpen other skills. Or, at least, to make different mistakes.

Oh well.

—

¹ Up here being a relative term. I’m told that my net worth to the company has been an embarrassment to some of the people who were formally my superiors in the past, even though I bring home less than old schoolmates who had the stamina to stay on the consulting field.

² It’s like the Peter Principle in reverse, actually. Although I prefer to use the Dilbert principle myself.

³ Actually, there is one particular thing I’m doing that was foisted upon me due to my ISP background that I personally consider a complete and utter waste of my time and abilities (in truth, a loathsome quagmire), and which I have been trying to do the best I can while trying to get rid of it as soon as I can, and which I keep telling people (in a decreasingly jocular manner) will be the reason I leave Marketing and go back to Engineering. But I can’t tell you what it is.

⁴ My first impression was that I’m supposed to jump off the plane blind, carrying a needle, some thread, and a bunch of hideously expensive silk sheets to ensure I land on my feet (given enough effort and creativity, of course). The second (once I realized the similarities to a bunch of things I’ve been doing repeatedly over the past few years) was very much like what the bowl of petunias felt, and that’s what stuck with me.

I’ve been on the ‘net for a good while (even before it was called the Internet), so I’m pretty used to technology taking a while to sort itself out.

Nevertheless, considering all the hoopla regarding (for instance) Firefox 3, whatever-is-the-working-version of IE and Safari (or should I say Webbed Squirrel Fish Kit?), I am astounded that it’s 2008 already and nobody has fixed (and by “fixed” I mean really fixed) these five things:

File uploads

The utterly idiotic, asinine and counter-intuitive file browse field/button combo ought to have been replaced by a multi-file drop target years ago.

We have the technology to do that in every major operating system, and yet people keep having to reinvent the wheel and use funky Flash uploaders and whatnot.

Guess what, none of those are the right solution. The right solution, as far as I’m concerned, would have been for the HTML5 committee to get off their collective arse and deliver something better than RFC 1867 (dated 1995) now instead of doing stupid things like writing a specific codec name in their spec, whether it’s a free one or not (yes, Ogg zealots, I’m looking at you).

And yes, I know about this. It isn’t done yet. And it’s only half a solution.

WYSIWYG editing

This, too, ought to be standard by now, and yet there are a bazillion workarounds – none of which can cope with inserted images or cut & paste from desktop applications properly.

All I ever wanted was a textarea replacement that POSTed a MIME multipart with the images and text I insert, and by the looks of current efforts, I’m going to be lucky if I get rich text with re-usable CSS styles, let alone something that can deal with images.

Again, this should be an integral part of every browser. I am utterly fed up with ActiveX editors for corporate intranet apps (which handle cut & paste from Office beautifully, but generate hideous markup and opaque data blobs) and dinky JavaScript editors that sort of do WYSIWYG HTML until you try to add an image or paste something from a desktop app – at which point they become slightly more useless than your typical X application circa 1991 (i.e., cut & paste sucks).

Saving entire web pages

Everyone does it differently: some save MIME multiparts (as they should), others sets of files inside a folder, and others serialize their internal browser data structures.

Shock, horror, Microsoft is the one doing it properly!

Yes, you read that right – .mht files are (gasp) more standards compliant than Safari .webarchive files.

If you have a Mac, go see for yourself – I’ve mentioned before that there is code to convert between .mht and .webarchive files, by dint of unpacking the MIME structure and loading it into a browser context.

I fervently hope that one of these days my hard disk will stop getting littered with folders entitled random page_files every time I save a page in, say, Firefox (that stalwart of web standards).

Proper vector graphics

I don’t want to care about VML, SVG or canvas – I want something that just works across browsers, and wish people would stop faffing about with plugins and reinventing the wheel.

And yes, I know that some JavaScript libraries are trying to fix that. I think I’ve listed them all in this Wiki, and despite the technical brilliance of most of them, they’re all doing the wrong thing – fixing something that ought to be common across browsers.

It kind of reminds me of the GIF wars, except that the SVG spec has become a political quagmire rather than a troll patent gate.

Standard “widget” definitions

Again, I couldn’t care less about Dashboard, Opera widgets, Widsets or the current hysteria surrounding desktop widget engines, personalized start pages, and (of all things) postage-stamp-sized widgets for mobile phones.

And yes, “widgets” have been around for a while. Even before Microsoft tried to get Digital Dashboard (and its quaintly named “nuggets”) off the ground¹, there were a bunch of people trying to build HTML snippets with a life of their own.

And we’ve been at it on the desktop since Konfabulator (which was the first serious cross-platform effort), and it hasn’t really taken off or turned into a business model for anyone.

I just want it all to stop. It’s pointless, it’s a waste of time and energy, and it doesn’t improve any kind of experience for anybody. If we must have widgets, then please let’s have some kind of agreement as to exactly how sucky they will be regardless of platform.

Someone needs to sit down and define a DTD (or equivalent) for an HTML widget and exactly what it’s DOM can (and can’t, ever) do and pick a decent packaging and deployment method to end all this misery of umpteen incompatible widget platforms, pronto.

And that’s it, really.

Oh, and I’d just like to take this opportunity to say, to all of you out there raving and foaming at the mouth about web applications and storage APIs that I don’t want browser-side storage. That means turning the browser into a fat stateful client, and down that path lies madness – and the negation of what brought the browser into being in the first place.

But I guess that some people will push on regardless, since they clearly cannot remember the past.

—

¹ I’m not going to mention the unmitigated disaster that Active Desktop turned out to be and focus on ways to define widgets, OK?