.Mac iDisk Woes & Warning

I use Apple's .Mac iDisk syncing feature to store some commonly accessed files locally and have them automatically sent to Apple's servers as a backup. Today, on a whim, I decided it was time to change my password and did so through the .Mac web interface. I then tried to access my iDisk in the Finder, and of course, the password was wrong so the access was denied. I opened the .Mac System Preference pane where it showed me an error message stating that my password was invalid, so I clicked the "Sign Out" button and then signed back in with the new password.

A naïve user wouldn't expect this to cause any problems, however signing out appears to have deleted the locally cached copy of my iDisk! It also forced me to reset all of my .Mac settings including which items are synced, and then re-downloaded the entire iDisk contents to the local disk. All I can say, is it's a good thing the iDisk had just finished it's last automatic sync before I changed my password, otherwise I could easily lost a lot of data! It would have been nice to have some sort of a warning when signing out of .Mac that the local iDisk contents would be lost.

So consider this as a warning to others; be careful how you go about changing your password and make sure to sync your iDisk first if you use syncing at all. For those of you that just access your iDisk over the network and don't sync to the local disk, this shouldn't be an issue.

Addendum: Turns out that the previous local iDisk was saved to my desktop as "Previous local iDisk for username.sparsebundle." This removes the previously mentioned concerns about data loss, but it still would have been a hassle to merge the freshly re-downloaded iDisk and the old one had they been different.

Computer Comparisons and Excel Rant

I am the expectant owner of a new MacBook Pro - it's about time considering that I'm still stuck with a PowerBook G4.  While checking out the specifications of the new laptop, I became interested in how quickly the Macs I've used over the years have improved.  I put together some graphs going back to 1984 and the Mac 128K which indicate improvements in RAM, disk, CPU speed (not benchmark, just clock speed which doesn't really mean much), VRAM, and others.  The dates indicated are the Apple release dates to the nearest month.

The first graph shows how quickly the number of pixels available to me has grown.  For computers I've used which weren't laptops, I've just indicated the maximum resolution the computer could output.

More charts will come in a later post when I have more energy to fight with Excel.  It is honestly beyond me how companies can produce software such as Excel which is so phenomenally hard to use that it boggles the imagination.  Certainly it's not that bad for people who have learned all its quirks through everyday use, but for people who only occasionally need to use such software, it's a nightmare.  Aside from the graphs being impossible to select correctly (I'm always selecting the wrong component somehow), simple things like scrolling around with my trackpad don't even work correctly.  I gave up when my attempts to change the maximum range on the y axis failed miserably.  It would appear that this post has become more of a rant on Excel, but that's okay - software like this deserves rants.

Apple's "equivalent" called Numbers (part of the iWork suite) is definitely a breeze to use, but it can't do simple things like creating a chart with one axis based on dates (it spaces them all evenly).  The graph you see above was actually created in Numbers and then exported to Excel to plot the dates correctly.   The real question is why can't either of these companies get it right?  Microsoft's offering is cumbersome but fully featured; Apple's is pleasing to use but missing essential features.  Doh.

iPhone Satisfaction

First of all, yes, I am obsessed with my iPhone, and I'd definitely give it high marks for customer satisfaction  ;-)

Just came across this interesting graphic showing customer satisfaction for various mobile phone vendors.  Surprise, surprise, Apple beats them all.  Unfortunately though, for most people I know who might be interested in getting an iPhone, it's not the phone's cost that's putting them off - it's the cost of the AT&T service plan which comes to about $65 a month after taxes.

iMac RAM

I just upgraded the RAM on an aluminum iMac from 1 GB (Apple factory standard) to 4GB from Other World Computing. The total cost of the upgrade including shipping? $97. Ordering the iMac custom built from Apple with the same 4GB of RAM adds $850 to the price. WHAT? That's more than eight times as expensive! Is Apple just trying to make a killing on RAM upgrades, or is there really something superior about the RAM they use? It seems rather unethical to charge your customers eight times more than competitive (and well known) retailers.

PS: The procedure for installing the RAM in the iMac was the easiest I've ever followed - it literally took me less than five minutes start to finish including searching for a screw driver, so props to Apple for that.

Airy Thoughts

I had another thought about the MacBook Air - Apple is really trying to position this notebook as a completely wireless solution, but what about having wireless internet access on it when you're not in range of a WiFi base station? Without having any expansion slots, is it impossible to hook this device up to a fast 3G cellular network such as Verizon or Sprint? That seems like a big oversight. Perhaps it's possible using bluetooth?