FoxBoom!

Since I’m just about to send my fourth support e-mail to the MobileMe team, I figured I’d keep track of them here.

First, I can’t find the option to use UK date formatting instead of US date formatting. Then I noticed my inbox wasn’t even in date order at all. Then I noticed the message count isn’t right. And just now, I realised the column resize grippers don’t do anything.

This is .Mac sucking cheese all over again.

What’s a guy to do?

Back in the old days, I kept my personal calendar in iCal, and published it to .Mac so I could view it in Outlook at work.

This was great until .Mac went off line for a month and chewed through my e-mail and wouldn’t give me my calendar backups back (bitter, moi?), so I moved over to Google Calendar, which was brilliant, apart from losing the beautiful iCal interface and the automatic “birthdays” calendar generated from the Address Book.

But now, I have the iPhone calendar application. Google Calendar’s iPhone interface is almost as good, but not over GPRS.

So I figured it was time to go back to iCal so I can sync with the iPhone, but to see if I can publish my calendar somewhere outside of .Mac. I noticed iCal has a “publish to private server” option, but it seems to be WebDAV rather than FTP, and as great as my hosts are, they don’t support WebDAV.

I did a spot of research, and found a couple of free WebDAV hosts, but before I could sign up for any of them… I found out that iCal actually can publish through FTP after all.

Awesome!

Apple couldn’t fix my .Mac Sync problem, so I had to manually copy/paste all my contacts off the web and back into my local address book. I’m fucking majorly pissed off, but that’s the way things roll at Apple Support. I hope I never have to phone those bastards again.

But anyway! The web address book doesn’t expose my contacts’ birthdays, which means I’ve lost all of them. If you don’t get a card off me next year, I’m sorry. If you want to get a card next year, you’ve got to fill in the blank for me.

Dudes, .Mac has eaten my address book and calendars, and is currently chomping through my incoming e-mail.

My new e-mail address is jon@foxboom.com, which points at GMail. I’ve shifted my appointments and reminders to Google Calendar, and I already keep my bookmarks on del.icio.us.

I’m pretty pissed at spending £69/$140 a year to backup my Really Important Stuff, to then have it totally fail. I’m even MORE pissed that my support tickets have been totally ignored.

The main point of all this is that my e-mail address has changed to jon@foxboom.com. Rar.

I don’t like my library getting all shuffled up and having random tracks plucked out, but these lyrics from Squidbillies sung out to me today and were too beautiful to keep to myself…

My dreams are all dead and buried,
Sometimes I wish the sun would just explode,
When God comes and calls me to His kingdom,
I’ll take all you sons of bitches when I go.

I’ve also totally caved, and will probably pick up an iPhone next month after I get paid. I’ll make it my little birthday/Christmas gift to myself, AND NOW IT’S JUSTIFIED SO I CAN’T GO BACK.

I’m also totally pissed off that .Mac Sync hasn’t worked at all since I upgraded to Leopard. I’ve raised two tickets a couple of days ago with the support team, but I haven’t heard anything back. Y’know, Apple make some great hardware and some brilliant software, but their customer support really stinks.

I promised I’d write something about Leopard, but honestly… it’s just like 10.4, except:

• It’s faster.
• Some bits look nicer.
• Some bits look worse.

The “faster” bit is great, and was totally worth paying for the upgrade. Finder is a hundred(-ish) times faster, Spotlight is a billion (-ish) times faster, Dashboard is a gazillion (-ish) times faster. Everything opens faster. Quick Look is fast. Spaces is fast.

If you’ll forgive me for being blunt, it’s fast.

And on the whole, it looks nicer too. It’s nice that all the classic/stainless steel/whatever window styles have been consolidated into just one style. Stacks look great. The big new help search pointer… thing… looks great. The new Finder sidebar is so much more usable than the old one.

Some bits, though, do look awful. The new Dock looks cheap (though is easily fixed). The new window titlebar buttons are too garish, and the new folder icons… just don’t look right.

But hey, these are minor things. The only killers for me right now are:

• .Mac sync is currently fucked.
• Drop-down controls in Firefox are fucked.

In a nutshell, it’s a superb upgrade. And some guy I said hi to on Gaydar just clicked the “I don’t like you” button, which has nothing at all to do with Leopard but has killed my mood.