I am well aware that often times I am a power user and I understand operating systems and networking very well. The goal is to find a solution that is easy to use that I don’t have to manage.

The questions and challenges I was having do not seem to be that far off the beaten path from a typical use case in my opinion. First a little background on the hardware, operating systems, and services involved with the issue. Using my frequent traveller reward points I recently purchased two iPod Touches, my wife has an iMac, I have a MacBook Pro, and we are using an Airport Extreme to connect all this together at home. While I am traveling I often use iChat to talk with the wife. She had a MobileMe/mac.com paid single user account and I had a complimentary mac.com account for use with iChat. She also uses the iDisk and backup tools included with MobileMe. We tried sharing documents using the iDisk but configuring it for a secure connection was not as easy as hoped. So we changed to the free version of Dropbox (I get a referral reward of more storage if you use it; even the free version) to allow for easier sharing.

I did not think anything of this decision to use Dropbox, then came our iPod purchases. The iPod Touch feature set had some things that we thought would make our lives easier. It appeared that MobileMe was going to be the service that was going to make all these things work. The goal was to be able to do the following:

1. Share calendars
   As alluded I travel quite a bit for work, so being able to keep my comings and goings straight can get to be tricky
2. Share files
   Already handled via Dropbox but if we could integrate it with MobileMe and make it easier, even better
3. Share contacts
4. Continue to use iChat
5. I also had additional uses:
   1. Ability to read and write personal email from the iPod
   2. Keep the contacts and calendars on the iPod synchronized
   3. Have some basic files on there as well
      Once again previously done with Dropbox but looking for easier integration
   4. The fun feature was to be able to have palindromic email addresses
      I am not going to publish the e-mail addresses here for fear of spambots, but my more astute readers can probably figure them out. My domain is bradfordbenn.com, the domain for MobileMe is me.com. Get it?

So far after a week of “use” the following the results have not been as hoped for. Perhaps my expectations were too high but for being the “easier” solution in terms of marketing positioning, it does not meet my expectations. However before I go into the entire diatribe, I do want to give Apple credit and kudos for their technical support, when I have hit a problem contacting support has been quick and easy.

The first sign of trouble came when trying to register under the wife’s account after expanding it, and paying more, for a family account. This process took over 40 minutes with Technical Support. I know this time is correct as the transcript contains time date stamps. I wanted to transfer my complimentary account name to the paid account, the online help indicated that it would be possible. So I went ahead and tried to register it, rejected, “invalid username or password”. Maybe I “misremembered” my information, but being that my username is my name, and was active as a complimentary account, I did not think that was possible. I checked the Keychain application on my MacBook Pro and verified that I had the proper password. The combination of username and password still did not function. I thought, okay maybe I was confused as to how to register. My complimentary account was under mac.com and MobileMe uses me.com, so maybe it wasn’t adding an existing account, perhaps it was create a new one. The directions said “use the button” so I was using the button, but things can be wrong or unclear. So I tried again with the creation of a new account; sorry that account name is active.

Time to contact Technical Support via their online chat. I follow the directions and connect and write the question, the queue system says it will be eight minutes waiting. A reasonable amount of time given the wait times on other Tech Support contacts. The agent came on after about a minute. I explained the problem I was having. The chat starts off reasonably enough with the standard exposition, I did not feel as if I was being talked at except for when the webpage address of help was sent back to me. I was following the directions on the help file and by the user agent. I was able to recover the password for the complimentary account through the self serve web application. I then took that and went to the page Set Up Family Member Account > Convert existing> and type into the Member Name “BradfordBenn” and the password into password and it responds “Unable to convert account This is an invalid membername or password”. The agent indicates that the username “is not a valid mobileme account. You should be able to add it as a sub account. You will choose to create anew account.”

So then I tried that again, and it still comes as the username as “unavailable” Hmmm the two results seem opposed to each other. The agent agreed, but I could tell he was a little incredulous of the problems I was having. He suggested creating a test account, so I used our dog’s name. That was the first sign that there was something odd going on. When I set it up with Proper Case, the MobileMe system response was username “is unavailable but the suggested member names are …” with one of them being the exact same name however all lower case. I then tried the username I wanted all lower case, that worked. However at no point in the documentation of the user creation process or the first 35 minutes of the chat was this mentioned. I do not think the agent knew the fact either. When I send an e-mail to the new account it is case INsensitive, so the case sensitivity does not seem to be through the entire system. We all know that there are tools that can convert a mixed case phrase to a single case, so that could have been handled behind the scenes more elegantly.

That was an inconvenience but we got it straightened out, and I was signed up. All should be working now, right? Wrong. But you already know that or else I wouldn’t be writing this post.

I wanted to share my calendar with my wife. Now by share I should actually say collaborate with my wife as that is more correct. So I created a calendar using iCal 4.0, I clicked the Publish button and got the resultant link which iCal queued up for me so that all I needed to do was select her e-mail address for Address Book using Mail. I figured that would allow her to make and add things to the calendar as well. After all the page http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/ said “Add an event on your iPhone and it appears in the Calendar application on me.com in seconds, then syncs to your computers. You can even manage multiple calendars. So you’ll never miss a lunch date, soccer game, or important meeting again.” In fairness it does not indicate that multiple people would be able to collaborate with each other, I took that from “manage multiple calendars” coupled with the fact that the free Google calendar allows for the sharing of calendars. I figured that MobileMe as a pay service would offer that feature, it did not.

I figured it was operator error and I was doing something wrong, so off I went to the online documentation again. The MobileMe help page only has documentation up to iCal 3.0; however the documentation that is there (for iCal 2.0) indicates: “With MobileMe Calendars, you can view your iCal or Outlook calendars online and make changes online at any time.”

You do not need to share your account use name and password for others to see your calendar data.  Instead, you can publish and share your MobileMe Calendar as read-only.” In my opinion the verbiage implies one should be able to share it as read only or allow a user to make changes online. So I continue digging going to the article it references for more help that one is about iCal 3.0. So once again I go to online Chat Support.

I ask how to setup the iCal share so that it is not just view but has the ability for authorized users to make edits to it. This feature is supported in the MobileMe Address Book integration. The support agent informs me that I “won’t be able to do that unfortunately unless she just uses your account on her phone and computer.” So I ask a few more questions “When I publish through MobileMe is my calendar public or can I restrict who can see it?”

Support Agent “no you can’t restrict who can see it however the person would have to know the exact address of the  ico feed just to even gain access to it”

I do some more thinking and ask about placing on secure network sites such as DropBox or JungleDisk. I can export to it, if I figure enough I might be able to publish to it. However they would still not be able to make changes.

So I am now thinking about this some more and realizing that MobileMe is not really a good value for the performance given what one gets for it. It really isn’t even secure with sharing your information. The calendars are wide open, one would just have to run a directory search or guess at some of the names. I am sure that there are plenty of people with the default name of “untitled calendar” or “My Calendar” selected.

Now to their defence, there is a feedback page http://www.apple.com/feedback/, But I figure I would overflow the pages.

After thinking about this situation more, I can share a calendar using Google but I have not figured out how to do contacts yet. I can purchase hosted Exchange services that will allow for the sharing of the calendar and contacts, while not free; neither is MobileMe it is $150 a year for a family, $99 for an individual. Is it really the best solution for the money?

MobileMe does integrate fairly well into the Mac environment, but it does not seem to have all the features completed.

My next rant will be about the software functionality of Apple’s offerings… but that is the next one. Part of it was posted here

The comment came in response to the post “Offline Writing“, I have gotten a comment or two from people I do not know, but this one looked a little too generic to be a real response. The response was

“Well, the post is actually the greatest on this worthy topic. I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your upcoming updates. Saying thanks will not just be adequate, for the exceptional clarity in your writing. I will directly grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Gratifying work and much success in your business endeavors!”

The e-mail was from Gmail, the author’s IP address was from France and the URL for their website is from Czech and about money transfers and advances. So I think it is spam, and marked it as such. The reason that is seems to be spam to me is, They commented in December saying they were looking forward to my upcoming updates, from a post in March that I have already made follow up comments on. That plus the fact that the last sentence does not apply to a personal website. The approach is unique and a new way to get the website links up. Just something to be aware of. for those of you out there.

After getting this spam, I decided it was time to update my purging of my Twitter spam followers. I then thought about it, do I want to have it still be public of should I make it private. The main concern is the privacy and security for the physical world by people knowing where and when I am, but then I shoot a big hole in it by having a website with a blog on it. I guess I could simply make my blog password protected, and only have invited people know about it. The thought spoils the aim I had in starting it in the first place, to share ideas, thoughts, events… etc. Then I thought about making it so that one has to register and then once registered the blog is open. I think anyone who has administered anything with a password knows that there will be an additional effort as people constantly lose them. The logic starts to wrap itself up pretty well in a circular form. What to do? I started thinking about perhaps having some blog posts protected, and others not. I wanted to look to see if WordPress can do that, however I am in a place with no internet access as I alluded to previously. (see, a little vague as to where I am; eh?)

I am still trying to figure an easy way to virtualize a LAMP server so I can travel with it and run it as a virtual machine under VMWare Fusion. I do this for the Windows OS I still use for a few applications that don’t work under Mac. I do not want to become an expert at installing and configuring a LAMP server, I want to be able to have a testing server that can travel with me. I do not want to simply turn on the server in the Mac, as there may be some idiosyncrasies between the Mac OS and the LAMP server. It has not been easy to find a simple solution for this one yet, but I have not given up yet. I am going to wander over to the VMWare forums and see if anyone has a solution.

I have both Parallels and Fusion to allow me to virtualize an OS for my Mac, and have found that the VMWare forums have better signal to noise most of the time, however I like the way that Parallels has decided to handle USB Human Interface Drivers a little better. I also do like that when I called Parallels about a work issue I was troubleshooting, Parallels connected me with a real program that worked through the use case process with me and called me back with answers and contact information if I hit the issue again. Then again, I have not had to call VMWare yet. So you may ask, which is better? I can’t tell you, I can tell you to try both and decide for yourself. Mine came down to the fact that VMWare ran a little faster and I knew more people who use it if I get stumped.

These type of questions come up very often and there is often no one answer that applies to everyone. An example I use is a question that came up a few days ago on the Digital Grin Forum, which is better for running Adobe Creative Suite; Mac or Windows? The answer is that of course it varies on your needs and other things to consider, but people often expect there to be a definitive answer. I wonder if people are looking for reassurance or an answer when they post some of these questions.

The Adobe Creative Suite issue is still causing me heartburn, as the speed at which they ran from supporting a product is disappointing. From a technical standpoint, I understand how they decided to not update previous versions of Creative Suite (anything before CS4) to support Mac OS X 10.6; a.k.a Snow Leopard. But the fact that when CS3 was the current version they had some challenges when one updated the Mac OS X to 10.5, a.k.a Leopard. I was patient and waited for them to fix the issue. I was disappointed but understand how it can happen. Under Snow Leopard, I cannot use Adobe Acrobat Distiller, basically the printer emulator, at all. (Acrobat was the package that had trouble under Leopard.) This coupled Couple this with the fact that the “Updater” that Adobe launches each time the application is launched, it is extremely frustrating. Luckily Mac OS X has the ability to create a PDF built in.

I did the searches to try and figure out how to turn off the “Updater” under Mac OS X; as there is not a simple preferences box to check or uncheck; one has to create a custom file and place it in the proper location. The directions are less than helpful. The directions are as follows:

1. Using a text editor or plist editor, create a new file named “com.adobe.AdobeUpdater.Admin.plist” in the folder /Library/Preferences
2. In this new .plist file, create a child at the root named “Disable.Update”
3. Set the Class of this new child to Boolean with a value of “Yes”

I was stumped, so I asked a programmer friend of mine, HanClinto, who is actually doing development of a gaming tool on his Mac. He was stumped as well. even once we got it figured out, it was to functioning, so I once again asked at DGrin and they suggested another location.

What truly irks me about this situation, is it is not an inexpensive software suite. I have been a customer with them since Aldus Pagemaker, Macromedia Freehand, and Adobe Type Manager – early 1990’s. I have tried to keep up when I can afford to. However I have not seen any real reason for going up to CS4 and a very steep upgrade price. Couple this with the fact that in my opinion Mac OS X going from 10.5 to 10.6 is not a major revision, that would be going from 10.5 to 11. This is akin  to a service pack in my mind. One should not expect this to be such a faster turn over rate nor so expensive. I believe that Adobe, as is many other software developers, to a subscription approach, keep updating the software to keep the revenue coming in. That is understandable; however the pricing structure is not. It is more expensive for me to upgrade my existing package (Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium) to the current version of it, than it is to purchase the Complete Package (Adobe Designer Premium) as a student.  So I am very much stuck. Being that I don’t use these tools professionally (I do use them at work under Windows XP SP 3 and a different license) I have a hard time paying as high a fee for an upgrade. The reason I got the suite is that I want to work in the same software environment at work as I do at home. It is advantageous in both directions, I hone my skills and can apply what I learn in my personal time at work. Our official graphics artists and I have even been trading tips and tricks, so it does work.

I will say that I do like how similar the environments are in both OS’s for Adobe’s products. Microsoft among others could learn a lot from them. I have stopped using Microsoft Office for Mac as it is so different from the Windows version. I am still disappointed with iWork under Mac, there are some features (pivot tables for example) that just aren’t there. I even tried to do the trial of the updated version iWork 09; however I could not see if it addressed just the basic thing of working with Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows better as I am some what of a power user in there. However that even failed. It can open an Office 2007 format document, but it can not save into one – you have to export it. If I do the same thing in Microsoft  Office 2007 opening a 2004 document, it allows me to save it in the older format and tells me what the problems will be, it allows me to work with it just fine.It also does not support many features I use often. So I can’t really interchange my work easily with others from Mac and once again, a different environment. Good thing I got Appzapper, time to get rid of iWork ‘09.

It seems cranky, I know, but these are the things that have been kind of irksome over the last few weeks to me. Aren’t computers supposed to make things easier? I have no problem with people making a profit, I have a problem with people gouging. I have no problem with wanting things to be a little different and unique between application, but if you advertise that one can exchange files with other applications, do not have some many problems; make it transparent to the user.

Let me explain a little. I was thinking of posting a humorous post about the magnet that was distributed during the health screening at work. I understand that they are trying to have some fun and to make sure that we have all the pertinent numbers. I wanted to scan the fun part of it. I placed it on the scanner section of my Canon MP600, and pressed the buttons on the control panel as, nothing happened. I tried a few different things; nothing worked. I figured I had Windows XP SP 3 running under VMWare Fusion already, I will try it in there. Connected the printer/scanner to the Windows OS and it popped up asking if I wanted to install the new driver; it did that three times: printer, scanner, and card reader. After that was complete I simply clicked on the scanner in Explorer and started scanning. It cropped to the proper area, asked me where to save the scan and that was it.

I still wanted to get the drivers installed into Snow Leopard, I figured that perhaps I did not update the drivers when I did the installation. Sure enough when I went to the Canon website I found that the drivers I had installed were out of date. Wait, I had to manually go there and look, Windows prompted and asked me about drivers. Then the Canon website navigation approach was more complex than needed. One could see on the download page that there were four things to download; they were not available as one download. When one clicked on the link, it actually spawned a new window via Java so that one could accept the user agreement, then download it. However it also navigated you aware from the page, so I had to keep going back to it. Not very fast, not an Apple issue, a Canon issue.

After that I figured I would read through the documentation for the things I downloaded to see what I needed and what was superfluous. So I opened up the read me files. The one for Easy-PhotoPrint EX was not very helpful or even worth including. Here it is in its entirety:

*******************************************************************
Canon Utilities
Easy-PhotoPrint EX Version 3.0.5 for Mac OS Instructions
Copyright CANON INC. 2007-2009
*******************************************************************
——————————————————————————
CONTENTS

Before You Get Started
Introduction
About Trademarks
Product Contents

*******************************************************************
Before You Get Started
*******************************************************************

Introduction —————————————————————

Thank you for using Canon Utilities Easy-PhotoPrint EX.
This product is a handy application program that allows you to create and print your own album, calendar, and stickers using the images you recorded with your digital camera. And furthermore, you can easily print borderless photos and so on.

About Trademarks ——————————————————–

- Macintosh and Mac are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in
the U.S. and other countries.
- All brand names and product names mentioned in this document are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Product Contents ———————————————————

This product includes the following items.

- Canon Utilities Easy-PhotoPrint EX
(hereafter called Easy-PhotoPrint EX)
Easy-PhotoPrint EX is an application program that allows you to create and print your own album or calendar, etc. using photos and other images.

- ReadMe
This file. It provides important information about Easy-PhotoPrint EX.

I am still looking for the important information. I also had to do two restarts of the Mac as part of the process of installing the Canon drivers. Did I mention yet that doing it under the Windows XP environment under VMWare Fusion it simply connected and worked? The buttons still don’t function under either OS, but I can now scan under both environments. To make things even more fun, the auto cropping and color is different between the two.

Macintosh Scan (Click for full size):

Macintosh Scan - Click for Larger

Windows Scan (Click for full size):

Windows Scan - Click for larger

• I downloaded (very small installers) and installed the client on both my Windows and Mac computers
• On my Windows machine I copied over four PDFs for my trip to AES this weekend (I am sitting on a panel and a technical council)
• They appeared within about 30 seconds on my Mac machine
• On my Mac machine I renamed the files
• The updates appeared in about 15 seconds on the Windows machine
• I did not have to do a forced sync or anything, it just occurred in the background and worked great.

It was so easy I am thinking of using a bigger size that has a subscription fee and using it for more stuff. The interface is very easy, it was a very simple setup, it was done right. I am going to try the sharing next (even though I have my own FTP server I figure this could be faster and easier at times)

I also found that I could share the directory Dropbox on my Mac to the VMWare Fusion instance of Windows, copy the files I needed over, and voila they got synced. So now when I need my copy of Star*Explorer for uploading photos to SmugMug while I travel, it is easily available.

So this week at work we did an update on the website using some new approaches for us. Not new technology, just new for our work flow. Today (Thursday August 20, 2009) I figured I should check the site on a Windows Vista machine. After I checked it on Vista using Internet Explorer 7, I then thought, I should check it on Internet Explorer 8 on the Vista machine. So I figured I would use the link (http://browserforthebetter.com/) I talked about when I mentioned Microsoft was doing something good; however when I tried to use it on the Vista machine it did not work. So I figured it was maybe a configuration issue since I use that machine mainly for software testing, so I tried my Windows XP Pro machine using Internet Explorer 7, it did not work either. So then just to check one final time, I tried Firefox 3.5 on my Windows XP machine; it worked perfectly. It took me a while to stop laughing; so of course I made a video of it.

(Click to start playing if it doesn’t auto start)

However when I caught wind of the Browser for the Better campaign, I had to give them props and share the link. Doing something as simple as downloading a software package and installing it seems to me to be the least I can do to help those who are less fortunate. I was even able to download it on my Mac.

The basic premise is that for every download of Internet Explorer 8, from the http://browserforthebetter.com/ site, Microsoft will donate eight (8) meals to Feeding America.

Time to go download it on other machines as well…

However I do not want any really advanced animation on most slides, just a simple appear animation. So that when I press the button, the next section of text appears. No fades, no wipes, no fly in, just simply appear. The options I have in Power Point 2007 under the animate drop down are:

• No Animation
• Fade
  • All At Once
  • By 1st Level Paragraph
• Wipe
  • All At Once
  • By 1st Level Paragraph
• Fly In
  • All At Once
  • By 1st Level Paragraph
• Custom

I looked in the help file to see how to define for reuse a custom animation. Nope not in there. Then I looked at how to record a Macro like one used to be able to do in Office 2003. Nope, that is not supported any more, I would have to write a Visual Basic script. So what I end up doing was the following, after exposing the Custom Animation panel:

1. Selected the content box
2. Selected Fade – By 1st Level Paragraph
3. Mouse over to the Custom Animation panel
4. Select all the lines of text in the panel
5. Click the Change Effect button and select Appear
6. If I wanted to remove the animation from the first item on the page (which I often did):
   • Select the first item
   • Click Remove

So as you can see, it was fairly manual and repetitive. I thought computers were supposed to make things easier and faster for just these type of tasks.

Don’t even get me started on trying to sequence 16 tables directly over one another and having to
individually set the entrance and exit animation for each one.

87 “Critical” Updates. Did I mention that I purchased the Install CD three weeks ago?

So now to see how it really works out. I am definitely going to be doing some exploring and tweaks. Some things have me stumped such as how to access a thumb drive through VMWare Fusion.