Coffee heat rising

MobileMe

Dear Apple MobileMe team

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An e-mail exchange, in the usual e-mail sequence:

Dear Jeremy–

Thank you for your response. I’m sure your entire team has been endlessly harassed! I appreciate the amount of work the Apple MobileMe team has had to do under stressful circumstances.

The Quicken backup to MobileMe is now working, although I’m also backing up to a flash drive and, as soon as I can afford it, will get an external hard drive and start using the interesting Time Machine feature.

iWeb is also working as well as iWeb works.What would be REALLY nice is if iWeb 09 could gain some of the functionality inherent to programs such as WordPress. In particular:

  • A decent hit-counting system would be really nice. Over the past four days I’ve had a surge in hits on the homepage; I assume someone must have Stumbled or otherwise flagged a post, but I have no way of identifying which post that might have been. It would be useful to know what content works effectively.
  • It would be even more useful to be allowed to install Feedburner. I’ve been afraid to try, after the failures with Technorati, Google, and StumbleUpon.
  • It would be nice if I could get the StumbleUpon widget onto posts and have it work correctly. Ditto all the other widgets out there that would help boost readership.
  • For that matter, it would be good to be allowed to register with Technorati and Google.
  • It would be excellent if “tags” and “category” features existed.
  • It would be good if when you went to enter an internal link, the list of “My Pages” would appear with the most recent first, instead of making you scroll (forever and ever world without end, amen) all the way to the bottom.
  • It would be good if navigation of the published blog resembled that of more standard blogs, so that readers would not complain about navigation issues.
  • It would be mighty fine if the RSS feed button a) were larger and more obvious and b) could appear on every page.
  • An easily accessible “preview” function in Inspector would be hugely appreciated…one that would show how the site will look online, not on PDF pages!!!!
  • And it would be good if the blog did not lose functionality in some versions of Firefox on some platforms.

Can any of these issues be fixed?

–vh
https://www.funny-about-money.com

On Jul 24, 2008, at 6:33 AM, MobileMeSupport@apple.com wrote:

Dear vh,

I’m very sorry for the delay in our reply. As you can imagine, we have been quite busy since the launch of MobileMe in both email and chat support. I will be happy to address your concerns about your website and your Quicken backups.

We did experience some issues with website access and publishing during the transition to MobileMe. All of these should now be resolved. I’m glad to hear your site is functioning as expected again, and I see that you were able to publish the blog entries from July 17 when you wrote in last, and several others since then.

About the Quicken backups… I apologize if the information we provided previously was not entirely accurate. Quicken did backup to .Mac and should continue to backup to MobileMe. I understand you have performed successful backups since the transition.

You can verify that your information appears on the iDisk by visiting your MobileMe iDisk (http://www.me.com/idisk) and viewing the file in this location:

iDisk > Documents > Quicken > Backup Files > yourID.dmg

That disk image (.dmg) should be your Quicken backups.

The previous MobileMe support agent was correct in saying that MobileMe support does not provide assistance with errors related to the Quicken backup to MobileMe. Because it is a feature built into the Quicken software, you will need to contact Quicken if you receive any error messages in the course of backing up your Quicken data.

A quick way to isolate if the issue is with Quicken or something larger affecting your account is to attempt to access your iDisk directly in the Finder (Choose iDisk > My iDisk from the Finder Go menu). This will show if your computer is able to connect to your iDisk. If it can connect directly, the issue is occurring within Quicken.

I hope this information is helpful. Thank you for being a part of MobileMe. Have a great day.

Sincerely,

Jeremy
MobileMe Support
http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme/ww
http://www.me.com/help

2 Comments from iWeb site:

“I assume someone must have Stumbled or otherwise flagged a post, but I have no way of identifying which post that might have been.”

I stumbled your “Open letter to Steve Jobs” on July 14th (10 days ago).It was so sad and funny, I had flashbacks to a defrag debacle.I can’t find any way to search the Stumble database for your other entries. A six day lag before seeing volume seems unlikely to me

Thursday, July 24, 2008 – 06:18 P

Funny about Money

Thanks so much, AMD!

It’s true a lag of that length seems unlikely. At StumbleUpon I could see that someone had stumbled the post about the layoffs at the Arizona Republic [can iWeb read HTML? we soon will see]…but that also was a while back, I think

Maybe it was Steve Jobs himself, and all his minions! An Apple executive actually called me and left word on my voicemail while I was at work this afternoon. This could get more entertaining yet! ;-

Thursday, July 24, 2008 – 09:48 P

An open letter to Steve Jobs

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Okay, Apple has just about won. I’m in tears and I’m ready to give up. Why on earth would you do this to your customers?

When you made your great migration from Mac.com to MobileMe, you trashed my blog, which is something I write to every day and which gets about 1000 hits a month. Some posts get four times that many hits in a day. Not that it’s the end of the world, of course, I mean it’s not an earthquake in China, so I guess we have to keep this in perspective, but it’s still making me cry.

After spending the ENTIRE FLICKING DAY dorking around at the Apple store yesterday, buying an OS upgrade that I didn’t need or want, and waiting OVER EIGHT HOURS for the seven required downloads to happen, I STILL can’t publish through iWeb. Every time I hit publish, I get the “error in publishing” message. It publishes the post I’m trying to put up, but it won’t let anyone post comments. When you click “add a comment,” you get that GD “Welcome to Mobile ME” screen. So my readers get an ad for your new service, not an opportunity to comment on my posts. Thank you so very, very much.

More recent posts don’t even show the “add comment” link.

The internal links are corrupted, especially in the “Archives” section.

I have been run around Robin Hood’s barn by your people. The staff at the Biltmore don’t even bother to answer the phone. I got through to someone at Chandler-it would consume half a tank of $4.30/gallon gasoline for me to drive to Chandler!!!!!!!-and she made an appointment for me at the Biltmore, dropping me into a madhouse of frenzied consumers who feel they can’t live without your latest toy and who must have it right this minute. She also erred in saying that since I wanted my money back for the mac.com subscription I now can’t use (it won’t accept my Quicken backups, either) Apple would upgrade my computer for free. Ohhh nooooo! Not at all! So I got a good gouge at a moment when I am so broke I can barely afford to buy groceries. Your manager gave me a 50% discount, but 50% of “I can’t afford it” is still “I can’t afford it.” Thank you thank you thank you.

You have lots of instructions on your MobileMe site. Most of them are incomprehensible — I haven’t the faintest idea what they’re talking about. After pondering through several pages, I realized that nothing there seemed to apply to the problem. I was told that after I finished jumping through yesterday’s endless flaming hoops, my system would work. Period. “Plug and Play.”

Can you fix my iWeb? If you can’t, will you please be truthful about it? If this can’t be fixed and I have to close my site, I want a refund of the hundred bucks you “automatically” charged to my credit card for Mac.com a month ago.

While my computer will still publish (barely), I’m posting this complaint on my blog. May 7,000 people read it and copy it to their blogs! May StumbleUpon, De.lici.ous, and Digg all pick it up at once!

Kindly tell me, in words that I can understand, what I need to do to get iWeb to publish in your user-unfriendly new environment and how I can get my Quicken to back up to your unreachable new servers.
* * *

To my readers–

Well, my friends, it’s beginning to look very unlikely that my computer will ever regain enough functionality for me to continue this blog. Tomorrow I will try to post the Carnival of Money Stories, and I guess after that it’s good-bye.

It was fun while it lasted. Best wishes to you all!

Back

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It sez here I’m not published, but it sez there I am. Funny is up, though iWeb thinks it’s not. Whatever! This means the Carnival of Money Stories is still on, assuming that by the 15th I can still publish-but-not-publish through Apple’s new servers

Yes! Carnival of Money Stories, No. 68! July 15! Remember to get your stories in by July 14…I’m looking forward to reading them!

MacHeadache

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Well, I’m off the air.

Apple has decided to decommission Mac.com, a service for which I was “automatically” charged another $100 a month ago, and migrate all the data on those servers to a new service, adorably called “MobileMe.

Yech! Steve: spare us the cutesiness.

And spare us the hassle. The reason I bought a Mac specifically was to get around the endless updates and security panics and virus-checker gum-ups and ever-shifting anti-malware programs served up to us daily by Microsoft. For naught: the Mac has been downloading software updates-to Safari, iTunes, and Intel security-for almost two hours and still has a ways to go.

But today’s supreme annoyance is this elaborate migration, which has taken down my Website and may have brought an end to my blog. Turns out you must have the Leopard operating system to operate the new Mac.com, and I only have the Panther system. (ohhh aren’t those names cu-u-u-u-u-t-e?) So how do I get access to the $100 service I just paid for? Shell out some more cash for a new OS.

When I expressed my rage about this to one of Apple’s service folks, she arranged to get me a free upgrade to Leopard (something that thrills me not, since I’m told it gums up the works just as surely as will loading an upgrade from XP to Vista into a PC). She also arranged an appointment with an “Apple Genius” to get the upgrade done and to try to get my blog back online.

That will be next Sunday. I’m told this process will take upwards of an hour and a half. Remains to be seen whether it works.

Not that I don’t appreciate the “free” upgrade, you understand. But today is Thursday. Sunday is the 13th, three days hence. On the 15th—a workday!—I’ve committed to do the Carnival of Money Stories. How, really, am I gunna do that in two days, both of which I’m supposed to spend at a paying job?
Well, if I can access the submissions, I obviously can write them in Word, do some but not all of the formatting in Word, paste into iWeb, and then finish the job after the weekend. We are talking hassle here, major hassle.

This may be even more infuriating than the BS I’ve been through with Microsoft over the years. Maybe. Possibly not, but it’s very, very close. I will say the newer versions of Office are enough to inspire plots of terrorist attacks on Microsoft HQ. But Mac’s versions of Word and Quicken are already so aggravating that if you haven’t blown up MS or Intuit over those, you probably never will.

And how can I describe the love-hate relationship with iWeb?

It is, in short, software for tyros. Blogware for hobbyists. Playware, not real software. It’s fine for displaying a few photos to your extended family, but very weak for daily blogging. SEO? What is that? “Senior Executive Officer”? The iWeb program is hopeless for search-engine optimizing, because unless you are techie to the extreme, you can’t break into the code to add the HTML snippets needed to get yourself registered with outfits like Technorati and Google.

The program does allow you to enter snippets to make buttons, but about 90% of the time they don’t work. I can’t, for example, create a StumbleUpon button. Well, I can, but it looks pretty bizarre, and “functional” is not a term I’d grope for to describe the result. I can’t move the PF Buzz button to a place on the page next to the list of tags—if I do, it stops working. I can’t put an RSS feed button on every page-it resides on the index page and only on the index page. But if you select one of iWeb’s photo templates, on those there’s an RSS feed on every page. Gee, thanks, Steve. And I dare not-oh, I do mean dare not!-subscribe to Feedburner. God only knows what that would do.

I am so angry at being made to jump through these hoops—and with such perfect timing!—I could bite! This is stupid, unnecessary, and a GD nuisance. And I’m disappointed to the stage of fury at the cheesiness of programs billed to be superior to Microsoft programs. They’re not. Not by a long shot.

The next computer is gunna be an $800 PC.

1 Comment left on iWeb site
Pete

It does seem supremely lame that Apple migrated you to MobileMe without being sure you had a system that was compatible. I don’t know if .Mac is (was) technically aware on an ongoing basis what version of Mac OS you use, but it stands to reason, and they could have been smart enough not to migrate anyone who would break without warning. I’m not sure what the alternative would be, but they could at least have given you a chance to migrate elsewhere if you needed to.

But the rest of this stuff? Having a computer is just about the opposite of simplicity and frugality. In fact, to achieve anything resembling computing peace of mind, simplicity and frugality need to go right out the window. Here are a couple of examples:

Broadband would make those system updates download in a reasonable amount of time. Windows wouldn’t be any better in this respect. For that matter, neither would Linux. All the major operating systems are pushing big updates out to the installed base on a regular basis.

Panther is two major versions of the operating system behind. I realize you’re not the sort who gets jollies from a computer for its own sake, and that’s fine, but in general you would experience fewer crises of this magnitude if you were to keep up with the Joneses. Running Panther today is like running Windows 2000.

As far as iWeb goes, well, given that you’re aware of its limitations, I’m not sure why you torture yourself with it when there are so many free blog publishing solutions out there on the web

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 – 12:49 AM