|
|
It’s official! Apple has announced that Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will go on sale on October 26. It is available for pre-order on Apple’s online store for $129. But Amazon has a much better deal at $109 with free shipping and no sales tax in most states. I have already pre-ordered my copy.
Here’s our affiliate link to Leopard on Amazon
We are very excited to see FolderBrander selected by Dan Frakes of Macworld magazine for this month’s Gems Grab Bag. Hopefully this means it will show up in Macworld magazine’s Mac Gem column soon.
When FileChute appeared on Mac Gems in the September 2006 issue, it instantly became a household name. Ok, not quite household, but it definitely pushed it to the next level. We hope it will do the same for FolderBrander!
FolderBrander fans, please visit the Gems Grab Bag page and post your comments.
I purchased iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08 at full retail price plus sales tax. Had I waited, I could have gotten them on Amazon for quite a bit less. Prices on Amazon change, but as of today, iLife ‘08 is 14% off list and iWork is 5% off. Free shipping and no sales tax make this an even better deal. Here are our affiliate links to Amazon:
If you rather not go through our affiliate links, just visit www.amazon.com and search for “iLife”.
I picked up an iPhone on Friday and 66 frustrating hours later, it’s finally working. There is no shortage of iPhone activation horror stories on the internet, but here’s mine.
Completed the activation process in iTunes at around 10 pm on Friday. Waited till 1:30 am. Still nothing. Went to bed. Woke up the next day and found the “Activation Complete” email.
The phone is now unlocked and iTunes thinks it’s activated. I could sync it and use it over wifi, but no phone service. And my old AT&T phone that I’m trying to replace still works. So something is definitely not right.
Since I could now play with the phone’s other features, I thought I’d just let AT&T sort this out on its own.
Monday morning - iPhone still not fully functional and old phone still works. So I finally called AT&T. To my surprise, I reached a human being in under a minute. I explained to him the situation; he put me on hold for about 5 minutes and then told me I have a “very old account” on a “different billing system”. So I have to go to an AT&T Store to upgrade my old phone. As bizarre as that sounded, I went down to the closest store with my two phones.
I arrived at the store and told the guy my ordeal so far. He said, “We don’t activate the iPhone here. You need to call 1-800-MY-IPHONE”. WTF!!! I repeated the story to the supervisor and he told the guy, “Oh, you need to upgrade him.” Ok, whatever. So he proceeded to make some changes to my plan and swapped out the SIM card on the old phone. How this is going to help get my iPhone to work, I had no idea. He then told me I had to reset the phone and finish the activation on iTunes. I very much doubted these two bozos knew what they were talking about. But I also didn’t see the point of wasting another minute with Dumb and Dumber.
Got home and of course, the phone still didn’t work. Called AT&T again and reached a rep after waiting 10 or so minutes. She looked at my account and told me it didn’t show that I have an iPhone. She said it is “mystifying” that I had received the “Activation Complete” email. She then put me on hold to talk to someone at Apple (how Apple can help me with a problem that is clearly AT&T’s is beyond me).
After more waiting, I reached an Apple rep. He sounded quite confident and told me to check a few things. Then he reassuringly told me he could help me and put me on hold while he talked to AT&T. So here I was, on hold again. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, someone picked up and went, “Thank you for calling AT&T. How may I help you?”. Arrrrgh! I had to start over from scratch?!
I had to calm myself down so I don’t yell at this poor lady who knew nothing of my conversation with her coworkers. I literally started from scratch and gave her my phone number. Just when I was seriously considering returning the damn phone and permanently severing all ties with AT&T, she figured out what was wrong. With two pieces from information from the iPhone box (ICCID and IMEI numbers), she fixed the problem within 5 minutes!
This is insane. It was such an easy fix for someone with a clue. This nice lady was in effect doing the work for all her clueless coworkers. They would’ve continued bouncing me around until I got to her or someone like her.
Anyway, there you have it. My version of AT&T Customer Service Hell.
WriteRoom is an interesting text editor from Hog Bay Software. Launch it and it goes into full-screen mode with green text on black background, just like the good old VT100.
I was browsing the Hog Bay Blog today when I came across this post on Hog Bay’s future. Near the end of the blog entry is instructions for how to “buy” WriteRoom for free. I followed the instructions and got my copy. The process looks like a normal checkout with no indication that your credit card isn’t actually charged. But hey, I trust Jesse, the guy behind Hog Bay.
If you’re one of the lucky 457 users to download TapDex between roughly 8 am and 3:30 pm today, you get a very special version of TapDex with a “Secret Feature”.
You are probably wondering what the “Secret Feature” checkbox does. Go on, enable it and see for yourself. If you can’t figure out what it does, that is because there is no secret feature. I put that in there for debugging purpose and had forgotten to remove it.
The checkbox does absolutely nothing and is therefore harmless. But if it bothers you, please download a new copy from the TapDex product page. Sorry for the inconvenience!
EasyBatchPhoto 2.1.4 is out. It now supports the Growl notification system. In case you haven’t heard of Growl, it is a very cool system-wide, customizable notification system. The list of apps that support Growl is growing and EasyBatchPhoto is the latest addition to that list. If you don’t have Growl installed, EasyBatchPhoto is able to install it for you automatically if you choose.
SnapNDrag 2.3 gains a couple of options to control Quit and Window Close behaviors.
Finally! I’ve found a workaround to the crashing caused by QuickTime 7.1.5 on Mac OS X 10.3.9. I will do some more testing and release an update to SizzlingKeys tomorrow morning.
I still believe this is an Apple bug. As I pointed out in an earlier post, QuickTime 7.1.5 causes problems for many other apps. One of them is Apple’s own Safari. On my test machine running Mac OS X 10.3.9 with QuickTime 7.1.5, opening the following link in Safari causes it to crash:
That TV is for sale, by the way. 
Email me if you’re interested.
The issue caused by QuickTime 7.1.5 on Mac OS X 10.3.9 persists. The only workaround I have found to date is to downgrade QuickTime back to version 7.1.3. There is a thread on Apple’s discussion board that describes how to do this.
Although this procedure appears on Apple’s discussion board, it is not necessarily something Apple (or Yellow Mug!) endorses. So if you choose to downgrade, please back up your hard drive first and do so at your own risks.
I recently received several reports that SizzlingKeys stopped working after upgrading iTunes to 7.1. After some researching and testing, I’m now pretty sure the problem is caused by QuickTime 7.1.5 and not by iTunes. And the problem affects Mac OS X 10.3.9 only. Everything works fine on OS X 10.4.9 Tiger.
The problem seems to be that QuickTime is calling a missing symbol (_JVTDecoOpen). SizzlingKeys is not the only victim. Several other apps, including TurboTax, VLC and WoW (World of Warcraft), are affected by this.
I hope to find a workaround soon. In the meantime, if you’re running SizzlingKeys on Panther with an older version of QuickTime, do not upgrade to QT 7.1.5 just yet.
