MobileMe not mobile for me – update…

As you may know, I’ve recently had a lot, and I mean A LOT, of problems with MobileMe.

In the end the solution was very simple, however the way in which I found out it was simple, was not simple.

Firstly, let me remind you the mac in question is a production machine, therefore I can’t afford to do anything wrong. So I had a plan.

I have a spare G5 (lucky me) so I decided to Carbon Copy Cloner the spare Mac (Mac 1)  to a disk image on an external. I’d do the same to the Mac with the MobileMe problem (Mac 2).

It would then be a simple case of installing Mac 2’s disk image to Mac 1. I could then troubleshoot this Mac as much as I needed until the problem was solved.

Well this bit sounds simple but the cloning took ages; a day and a bit later I was set.

So I ran Onyx to clear all caches. After a restart – problem remained.

So I reinstalled the 10.4.11 update – and this solved the problem.

A short while later the production Mac is MobileMe’ing happily.

Why did MobileMe die? – Who knows?

Am I now happy? – Not really. When something goes wrong with a Mac I expect the answer to be a logical progression of testing and narrowing down the problem.

In this case, nothing made sense. The problem didn’t seem to have a logical solution, and the only thing that worked was overwriting some files with a combo updater.

This isn’t very Mac-like – and it’s that aspect of this that worries me a great deal.

Safari 4 beta

Apple surprised everyone recently by announcing Safari 4.0. It’s released as a beta, put don’t let that put you off, it’s every bit as stable as the previous version.

Opinion is divided on some of the new features, with some people hating the fact that the tabs have moved to the top (as Chrome), the ‘Top Sites’ feature not being particularly useful, and the intrusion of ‘Cover Flow’ into bookmark & history browsing.

Other people love these features, but I think it’s a mixed bag. The feature that wowed me first was the ‘Top Sites’ feature, however this enthusiasm has faded as I realised I cannot seem to find it useful. Time will tell.

The feature that I hated at first was the ‘Cover Flow’ intrusion. I don’t like Cover Flow, I don’t use it in the OS, or iTunes, however it seemed to make more sense in Safari, because it’s better than what it replaces, and I’m warming to it.

The traditional way, by earching your history by looking at hundreds of similar named bits of text, is not user-friendly at all, however quickly skimming through thumbnails of those pages is much more intuitive.

Thurrott is having a bad time in finding anything to like in Safari 4 beta. This isn’t surprising, but he seems to blow lukewarm to cold on Apple, depending on whether he needs to up his site visits. I’m purposefully not linking to his article.

Everyone seems not to mention the speed. The stats seem incredible, and although they seem to be true and not exaggerated, (they have been independently tested and confirmed), the average surfer won’t see much difference.

The question for me remains, is why are Apple introducing more (albeit useful) eye-candy into Safari? It’s a browser, and shouldn’t it be lean, fast & mean?

It comes down to pushing the hardware. I do most of my personal surfing on a little iBook G4 and it’s beginning to show the strain. Apple need to keep selling their hardware, so they keep pushing the specs, to make you upgrade.

I’ve held off, because, like most I can’t afford to upgrade my hardware every time Apple releases new Mac’s.

I put it off for as long as possible, and I’m planning to purchase a MacBook when Snow Leopard is released.

It seems that Apple are heading towards Snow Leopard as the pinnacle of what they can achieve, after they threw away OS9 all those years ago.

Snow Leopard seems to be everything that Steve Jobs has been aiming for – a lean, mean OS, with no legacy code. A good foundation to build upon.

I predict that after Snow Leopard has been released, together with the hardware that’s designed to take full advantage of it, Steve Jobs will announce his retirement, with the knowledge that his job is done.

However it will be sad when SJ retires. To most new Mac users he has significant, but not irreplaceable influence.

When he does go, I’m sure that Apple will carry on, and be better off in the long run, but the Apple that I have grown up with (since System 6) – my Apple – will never be the same again.

Safari is all part of this, and it’s apparent that Apple are slowly putting the pieces together to make the Mac best tech-experience, bar none.

MobileMe isn’t particularly mobile, at least for me…

This is a difficult post to write.

More often than not, the content of this blog is pro-Apple. I make no apologies for this, and although I do critcise Apple from time to time, I also cut them some slack.

Recently I purchased MobileMe. Now, despite a hiccup in purchasing, which wasn’t Apple’s fault, but the resellers, things went smoothly.

At first, things went smoothly. I have an iBook running Leopard, an iPod Touch and a G5 Tower running Tiger, all syncing to the cloud.

This worked fine for a little while. I kept getting a lot of contact an calendar updates on the G5, which was a bit suspicious, but things worked OK.

That was until last week.

The G5 at work was syncing OK, no problems, the iBook & Touch worked flawlessly. Just to check a configuration, I clicked the .Mac Preference Pane on the G5 (it’s running Tiger remember).

It wouldn’t open. It beachballed and then gave me a ‘Could not open .Mac because of an error.”

I’m a seasoned troubleshooter, so I logged into another account – same result. OK, that points to a system-wide pref file that’s corrupted.

So I moved all the .plist files I could find and restarted.

Oh dear. This time the G5 stalled at the desktop. It couldn’t load the .Mac menubar item. So I did a bit of system-voodoo and removed that menubar item so it wouldn’t have to load.

Restarted.

The system now started ok (sans the menu bar item), but upon launching System Preferences, the .Mac Preference Pane wasn’t there.

Ouch. Never seen that before. At this point I thought about cache corruption. The preference pane was in the system (I checked) but it wasn’t loading.

So I cleaned the local caches and restarted. Now my Keyboard & Mouse Preference Pane is in Chinese. I kid you not.

Anyway, this G5 is a production machine, so I left it there, so I could do some more research.

This research has given me a few pointers, which I will try soon. There’s a couple of files I haven’t trashed yet, so we’ll try that.

If that doesn’t work, then I’ll clean all caches, including system.

If that doesn’t work, I’ll try reinstalling the combo updater.

If that doesn’t work, it’s a install of a new system.

How is it possible that enabling a product on your system can cause so many problems? I have over 20 years Mac experience and I’m grasping for solutions.

How is it possible that a product can simply stop working for no reason?

And, let’s not forget, this is an additional service I’VE PAID FOR.

Which is why this article is difficult to write. 

MOBILEME IS NOT READY – AT ALL.

It works for lots of people, but not all. I certainly could not run a business on this. Even the little web-design service I do in my spare time.

I don’t expect this from Apple, I really don’t. 

Are we seeing here the limits to what Apple can do reliably? Are we seeing the edges of their competence? Were all those Windows users right in saying that Apple just doesn’t do certain things as good as Microsoft?

Now that Steve’s away, I hope that Tim asks some serious question of MobileMe. It’s damaging the brand severely and they need the courage to fix it properly, or pull it off the market, trash it and partner with Google, rebrand their offerings and give us a service that we can all be proud of.

Will I be renewing in a years time? At this moment, I’d say no.

Microsoft’s retail stab in the dark…

Upon thinking about Microsoft entry into the retail space, a few thoughts occur.

Microsoft have a really deep seated envy of everything that Apple does. Now, they’ve always had this from the very first meeting about Windows 1.0, and in the past they could get away with it.

After all, despite all Apple’s efforts, they were not a mainstream company. Microsoft and their partners dominated and no-one outside Apple’s niche had ever heard of them.

All the great unwashed saw was ever greater ‘innovation’ coming from Redmond. They did not know that this innovation was a photocopied, me-too agenda based upon what Apple did.

This approach works fine, as long as Apple remains a niche.

Can you really say that Apple Inc. is at this current moment ‘a niche player’?

Group together everything that Apple does, the Mac, iPod, iPhone etc, and their approaching 10% market share (and even greater mind-share), I think not.

Why does this make a difference? Well, Microsoft can keep up the pretense of being an ‘innovator’ as long as no-one (or at least the majority) knows that Apple exists.

This is all the more difficult, and one very good reason this is getting harder, is because of those pesky Apple Retail Stores.

People used to listen to their ‘geeky friend’ on what computer to purchase, which was usually, if not always Windows.

That’s not the case now, they see an Apple Store, go in, and more often than not, purchase. I don’t know what their footfall conversion rate is (the % of customer who enter a store and either do or do not purchase something), but according to Apple 50% of those purchases are to Windows users.

So what is Microsoft to do? Well there’s only one thing to do, fight fire with fire.

But Microsoft has a problem, and it’s a problem that cannot be got around. The PC model is proprietary OS on open hardware. Apple’s model is open OS (sort, parts of etc), on proprietary hardware.

Now I don’t care what people say, Apple’s model gives us more reliable computers, Microsoft’s model gives problems – lot of them, with more chances to go wrong.

Apple’s model is naturally fits the retail environment. People enter Apple Stores for an experience. Yes, they take their computers in to be fixed, and Apple manages that quite well, as their model keeps those fixes down to an acceptable level.

Microsoft? Their model invites problems, how the hell are they going to manage all those PC users with viruses, spam, malware and faulty hardware because their ‘geeky friend’ made their computer?

This should be interesting to watch…