CS and the City

Earlier this month I celebrated the one year anniversary of the arrival of my very first Apple: my 12″ iBook. Along with it, I received my second iPod, a blue second-generation 4 GB iPod mini.

I was hoping to give comparison battery numbers after a year of ownership. I was blown away by the battery life when I pulled it out of the box so I was quite interested to see how well it would do after a year. Unfortunately, the iPod didn’t last that long.

I started noticing issues in my iPod over the last three or four months. Random shut-offs and weird lock-ups started popping up. Not with any sort of frequency. At least not with enough frequency for me to be without it. In hindsight, putting it off only made it worse. With less than a month left on warrenty, I punched up Apple on the internet and requested a repair.

Unfortunately, Apple’s one-year warrenty policy on my iPod is, well, several shades of bullshit. Really, it’s just a gradual fade out of service possibilities. You get free phone support for the first 90 days. After that, you’re looking at $30 per phone call. If you have trouble with you iPod (as I did) you can send it back for repairs free of charge IF it’s within the first six months of ownership. After that, you’re looking at a $40 fee for shipping and handling. Really too steep considering how much it must ACTUALLY cost to my little iPod back to california. If the guys on eBay can do it for $10, I don’t see why Apple can’t.

Although Apple’s “support” is largely a money grab. I was quite impressed with how timely it was. Shipping a return-for-repairs package to me took two days. Shipping my iPod back, another two. Repairs were done in less than two and as we speak, my replacement iPod is in a DHL sorting facility on its way back to me. The process uses a nice web interfaces for checking the status and e-mails you updates when it is received and on its way back to you. Also DHL seems to do a lot better at keeping their updates on their tracking page relatively real-time. Purolator and Canada Post could take notice.

I also found a quality issue with the touch scroll wheel. It felt as if the wheel itself had spotty reception so the scroll functions were often jerky; I would scroll for some distance with no movement and then the highlight would jump to the item two away. I remember reading that the second generation minis had their scroll wheels optimized for power use so I suspect the feel here was a victim of the optimization as I’ve never come across it in the first generation minis.

On the positive side, I’m still on my original pair of ear buds. I managed to go through three during my year with the first generation mini.

For those interested, here are the accessories I’m using with my mini:

• Griffin iTrip mini
• Apple Firewire + AC Adapter
• Generic AC to USB adapter (charge using the iPod USB cable)
• Generic headsup cellphone holder for car (mounts to air vents)

Note: No case. I don’t feel like I need it and I’m using my iPod every day. You cannot say that about any other iPod except the shuffle. That’s why it will be a while before I upgrade my iPod mini.

Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing Firefox having an increasingly difficult time on heavy AJAX pages like GMail and Flickr. It seemed to get worse with each security fix (1.5.0.4 right now).

I recently tried switching to the G4 optimized version of Firefox lovingly created by Neil Lee at BeatnikPad, after Nicole put me onto his generous creations. Though I saw some benefits on a few sites, it didn’t manage to fix my slow gmail which was almost to the point of making it unusable.

So I switched to Safari.

After suffering through Firefox’s slow performance for so long, the switch to Safari was like night and day. It’s been great to reclaim my GMail account again and it has really brought life to a lot of my casual browsing. My favourite feature flavour of the week is Safari’s integrated PDF handling. I love clicking through a .pdf link and having the file open in my browser instead of having to download it first and then wait for some heavy weight program to load up in the background. Something I end up doing quite a bit during my school terms.

I found a few things I need the Safari guys to patch up for me though:

1. When the PDF loads, it doesn’t immediately gain focus so I need to click on the page before I can use the up/down keys to browse around
2. When the PDF loads, use the “Auto size” feature you’ve got in the menu by default
3. Someone get me a “Home” button. How’d they miss one? How did I not know I would?
4. When the auto-complete list comes up as I’m typing in my URL, why can’t I click on one of the options to select it? I have to use the arrow keys!

There is, however, still room for Firefox on my Dock yet. I don’t know what I would do without the Web Developer extension. But if the next version of Safari gets support for all sorts of neat extensions, it might spell the end for my foxy friend. Then again, Opera just released version 9 and Flock hit beta. Maybe it’s time to go shopping for a home browser.

I've been using source control for a while now, but I've only recently discovered that my little iBook comes pre-installed with a working copy of CVS. In fact, Apple's developer site has a great article on how to set up CVS on OSX.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't take the user beyond using CVS at the command line. Ideally, you'll want to connect to your CVS repository using a much more flexible GUI tool. I forcibly recommend using Eclipse. The integration of CVS directly into an IDE has been a long time coming, but I can't give it up now that it's here.

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Switching is just a matter of willpower and finances (Although the price premium is not as a large as people think). There are all sorts of arguments for and against the switch, all of which have been blogged to death so they won't be covered here. For the sake of this article, I'm going to assume you're come across that fork in the road and chosen the iPath as I did.

Of course, now that you've switched your personal machine, you probably feel motivated to spread the wealth to your friends and family. Alternatively, you're like me and you're sick of having to fix those old PC that belong to your friends and family. Stick with the spread the wealth one, trust me.

Here's how to approach switching all those other computer users in your life. Hell, it might even help make your own hypothetical transition a little more managable.

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