FoxBoom!

Every month, the top two search phrases that people hit this blog with are “foxboom” and “westward bound”. I have no idea why people would be searching for the first, but I guess the second is down to kinky little buggers.

Another big one is a barrel of variants on “payment processing is temporarily unavailable”. which is thanks to Apple sucking at web services and having to take their credit card services offline for 23 hours out of the day and leaving us poor suckers to plead for help online. In fact, I even got two hits from “apple support sucks” last month. And “google calendar sucks on iphone” and “mobile me is down”, and “mobile me contacts disappeared” and “mobileme resize problem” and “fuck apple”… man, all this MobileMe hating!

Wow… I’m even the fifth result on Google for “fuck apple”.

And some things are just totally unpredictable. Like being on the first page of results for “norm abram icon”. Or being the top match for “orona fursuit”.

God, I love you guys!

MobileMe webmail is broken again. I still haven’t had the 30 day credit applied to my account. The support team are impossible to get hold of.

Fuck you, Apple. Fuck you for getting us all excited and not giving a damn. Fuck you for charging $100 a year for a service Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are all giving away for free, and goddamn you for not getting it even close to right.

Ever since MobileMe was announced, I’ve been evangelising it to everyone. You’ve made me look like a real world-class idiot. I am FUCKING sour. I am TIRED of the jokes. For the first time in my life, I’m embarassed to be associated with you.

I’m moving back to Google Apps, and we’ll never talk about this again.

I know I keep complaining about it, but I really don’t have anywhere else to go.

Really. $100/year doesn’t actually seem to buy any kind of customer support at all.

MobileMe has wiped all my phone’s contact details. All the support agents have gone home (don’t we outside the US pay for support too?), they don’t accept phone or e-mail support anymore, and the discussion boards are offline.

Seriously, who at Apple thinks this is acceptable?

MobileMe has deleted my iPhone’s contact details again.

The support team don’t accept e-mail requests any more, and all the live chat agents are busy.

MOBILEME REALLY FUCKING SUCKS, OKAY?

Apple have got a brand new service status blog for MobileMe!

Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe, and I’m working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date. [MobileMe Status]

This is seriously the best thing Apple could’ve done to get my confidence back. I said earlier that I didn’t know if any managers at Apple knew or cared about the problems, and this status blog really proves they do. And I’ve been reading snippets and rumours around the web about the MobileMe development and support teams taking the outage personally, and the blog really backs that up.

This is a leap in the right direction, and I’m really grateful that Apple are making it easier for me to be passionate about a product I want to see succeed.

Since last night, MobileMe’s been pretty speedy. Could this be the end of the troubles? Am I terribly naive? When do I get my 30 day free credit?

Also, I’m posting this from the iPhone Wordpress app. This is a neat little interface!

Happy Friday everyone!

It’s official. MobileMe is Apple’s Vista.

Mail’s down. The website’s down. Everything’s fucking down. You can’t e-mail the support team anymore; you have to live chat, and…

MobileMe chat is available daily from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. central time (U.S.), except on holidays.

I don’t even know if any managers at Apple know or care.

Oh, goddamnit.

At the moment, I read Spirit’s calendar through BusySync, and he reads mine through iCal publishing to ical.me.com… and goddamnit again, I just realised he’ll only see my calendar changes if I launch iCal and let it sync.

This is all just one massive problem.

I was hoping to convince Spirit to sign up for MobileMe. With MobileMe being “Exchange for the rest of us”, I’d assumed calendar sharing would be built right in…

It isn’t.

And I’m all like, OMFG, no push calendar subscriptions?

So I just left some more feedback.

On my way home from work this afternoon, I was flicking through my contacts on my iPhone, when I noticed the little push spinner get to work in the title bar, and then…

All my contacts disappeared!

I figured I’d give the MobileMe servers a couple of minutes to sort themselves out. And, well…

…I’ve got names and birthdays, but no phone numbers or addresses.

HOLY FUCKING CRAP APPLE JUST REMOTE WIPED MY ADDRESS BOOK AND THIS IS AN AWESOME USER EXPERIENCE.

Selecting Automatic in Mac OS X allows your computer to immediately sync and update when there are any changes on the MobileMe servers. Those changes can come from your iPhone, iPod touch, the MobileMe website, or another computer. Changes made on your computer will be synced to the MobileMe “cloud” once every 15 minutes (or every hour in Mac OS X 10.4.11). [Apple KB article TS1155]

So yeah, don’t go editing any contacts or events right before you shut down your PC, because that change might not get pushed for a maximum of 15 minutes. The best bet seems to be to make changes through the MobileMe web apps or the iPhone.

So I went to the support site to send an e-mail about resizing the mail columns in MobileMe, but this time there was an option to chat with a support agent instead.

So I did.

And man, it was by far the most positive support experience I’ve ever had out of Apple. Sarah might just be an anomoly, but I’m hoping she’s part of a whole new culture. Y’know, one that listens and understands and cares. Good God, please don’t let her be an anomoly.

But yeah, it turns out you can’t resize the columns. But I did get a link to the feedback form to see if I can get it fixed.

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.