Doesn't Apple test anything? - "Register iWork from an admin user account"

Register iWork from an admin user account: "Register iWork from an admin user account
To avoid being asked to register again if you switch user accounts, be sure to install and register iWork using an admin user account instead of a standard user (non-admin user) account. You'll only be asked to register once if you register from an admin user account."

Sigh. Don't they do ANY testing?

Using credit card warrantees in place of unreliable AppleCare

MacInTouch Home Page

Credit card warrantees are a better deal than most vendor extended warrantee plans. Given the recent issues with the quality of AppleCare service I'll likely go this route in future. VISA seems particularly good, but I've had excellent service from AMEX with broken or defective goods.

[Nicolas Martin] Thanks to Doug McLean for noting that Visa's extended warranties are much cheaper than AppleCare for purchases made with eligible cards. The Visa web site lists the costs of those warranties, which extend up to 5 years: [Visa Signature Benefits]

Visa confirms that its warranties are transferable for $10, and a pro-rated refund can be obtained if the warranty is cancelled.

This seems like an good deal, and neither AMEX nor MasterCard offer anything comparable. But to look at it another way, the Visa extended warranties, like Apple's, are in force from the date of purchase. If you have a credit card that offers an additional year of no-charge coverage on a product that has a one year warranty - like a Mac - then a 'three-year' warranty only really buys you one additional year of coverage.

You can almost buy a Mac Mini for what Apple charges for AppleCare on some Macs, so it is a good idea to use a credit card with the 'free' year of extra coverage.

iPhoto 5 is worrisome

Apple - Discussions - iPhoto 5 Strips Color Profiles!

This doesn't look pretty.

1. Not suited to use on a G3 machine. Too slow to tolerate, several editing tools unavailable.
2. Strips out color profiles when editing, seems to ignore system ColorSync settings.
3. Reports of unuseable Libraries after upgrading from earlier versions.
4. Various problems with book editing.

Software QA is my primary concern with Apple. What are they doing?

Delete iTunes store account information

macosxhints - Manually delete iTunes store account information

A comment on software quality: OS X and iPhoto 5

Apple - Discussions - DO NOT USE IPHOTO 5... FOR NOW

I posted this as a part of the above thread. It may be deleted, Apple's policy allows them to delete commentary of this sort.

... Thanks for the warning! I've also read that iPhoto 5 does not work fully on older machines (G3 iBooks) -- many of the new editing features require a G4 (or perhaps use a newer GPU?)

You will receive many replies to your post essentially "blaming the user" for not running UNIX maintenance scripts, not running one disk repair utility or another, not repairing permissions (that's largely superstition by the way), not deleting caches, not forcing iPhoto database restores, etc. Some of these posts are somewhat accurate, but all are irrelevant to the main point -- OS X is marketed as a consumer OS, not a geek platform. (Ironically, some versions of classic had more problems than most OS X releases -- so it's not the 'UNIX' underpinnings that cause issues.)

I believe Apple doesn't do enough beta testing. They ought to have released iPhoto 5 in a public beta, as Google does with their apps (Gmail, etc). Of course this is contrary to Jobs passion for secrecy and big bang product launches. Jobs is a genius, but his interests are not the same as ours.

The RAW support in iPhoto is weak. They shouldn't have gone this route -- the manufacturers simply aren't willing to cooperate. Adobe has spent a fortune reverse engineering RAW file formats, that's why they're championing a "generic" RAW-like file format.

As to the import problems you ran into, similar experiences were seen with iPhoto 2 to iPhoto 4. At that time it seems iPhoto 2 had some severe bugs (they may have been in OS X, we don't know) that led to corruption of the iPhoto 2 database; this corruption was often invisible to the user. The initial release of iPhoto 4 responded to the problem badly. Later iPhoto 4 releases seem to have managed iPhoto 2 database corruption better.

It may also be that you have a hardware issue. Do you use an external drive? External firewire drives have often been problematic with OS X, especially with suboptimal cables. The iPhoto 5 update is a severe stressor on drive i/o, it might precipitate i/o errors and lead to database corruption -- even on a journaled file system. (This might be especially true if you had your iPhoto Library on an external firewire drive that was not journaled.)

Finally, I do want to affirm that I (at least) agree with you that consumer software is far, far from what it should be. Apple is not alone, I do most of my work on XP and Microsoft is at least as guilty. (Apple has very demanding customers, that helps. Microsoft customers have largely learned helplessness.) Perhaps the newer NetApps from Google will take us down a better path. In the meantime, backup relentlessly (yes, backup is FAR more costly, difficult and less reliable than it should be) and, above all, don't install anything until it's been on the market for at least 2 months. Sad advice indeed, but true.

iLife -- not for G3 machines

Apple - iLife

Many of the editing tools in iPhoto 5 are not available on a G3. Rumor has it displaying images on a G3 is very slow. This is a time honored way to force upgrades, one that Apple has practiced for many years.

I suspect there are similar stories for iDVD and iMovie HD, but I don't follow them closely. Bottom line -- don't go for iLife 5 if you're on a G3. (I still have iMovie 2 on my iBook!)

Testing Picasa and Blogger/Hello

I'm a dedicated iPhoto user, but I also have an XP Box with a large volume of photos on it. So I downloaded Picasa and gave it a try. Then I tested the Picasa/Blogger integration. Here's the photo I chose, it's of our dog Molly about 15 years ago - in her once-upon-a-time favorite chair.



A few impressions of the combination of Picasa/Blogger and (even) Firefox.

• Picasa is very impressive. Unfortunately for OS X fans, it makes iPhoto look anemic. In particular, Picasa doesn't blink at handling a volume of photos that brings iPhoto to its knees. iPhoto is a spectacularly inefficient piece of software.
• The Picasa/Blogger integration still requires use of "Hello", an addin software that acts like a robotic blogger. It's better than in the days when one had to use Flickr as an intermediate store, but getting it all working is strictly for geeks. When I went to the Hello site for downloading one of their inline images was missing -- not a good sign!
• For geeks though, the Blogger integration works. I posted the above, then edited with the image displayed inline using the Blogger/Firefox "Compose" interface. It has a few bugs, but overall it's pretty impressive.

Points to Google. I hope Apple takes the competition to heart. iPhoto 5 is better than 4, but the performance issues are hard to get over.