Apple: has a consolidated feedback page

There are several ways to get feedback to Apple:

1. Developers can report defects through the developer account. This is the most effective way to report a defect. You need a development account with Apple.
2. Apple forums: these are not officially monitored but word filters out.
3. Macintouch: Apple reads this. Items that are published by Macintouch reach many eyes.
4. Apple - Feedback: I used to think this was worthless, but they've now created a cross-product feedback page. I suspect it's at best "read" by a pattern-recognition text mining software, but Apple is at least investing in it. (Though they may simply use it a pacification ploy, in much the same way that offices include thermostats that aren't connected to anything.)

If you want to reach Apple, you probably need to inject the same meme by multiple messages, as well as get it on a widely read blog.

Mindjet (MindManager): operational problems -> maybe improving

[see update for how this turned out, below]

I wonder if this company outsourced all of its sales operations. I'm used to incompetent support, but it's rare to get incompetent sales!

Mindjet sells MindManager, an expensive "mind mapping" product that, alas, is a bit of a standard where I work. It has the unique advantage of very attractive and corporate-compatible graphics and it's reliable, so it's worth my employer's money.

Except, they won't take it! Here's the sequence:

1. July 3rd: Try to place order by web site. Web site is crashing, probably due to a problem with a partial update to their pricing.
2. Phone in to see what happened to my order. They quote me a price that's increased by 50%, turns out the price on the website was a "special" (though it's not labeled that way). I send them a pre-crash screenshot and they promise to call back once the advertised price is updated.
3. They don't call back.
4. About a week later I call again. The person can't locate my order. I suspect person #1 simply tossed it in the garbage rather than try to figure out their internal problems. Rep #2 promises to email and call back. Neither happens.
5. July 13th: Now onto 11 days, I call again. Get voice mail, they are on pacific time for their sales.

It's not my money, so I'll probably enter another order on the web site for whatever price they want and if I get two copies I'll deal with it then.

I won't, however, buy the copy I was planning to get for my personal use...

Update 7/24/07: I received a phone call from a MindJet sales executive and they've posted in comments that they're working on their operational problems. I wonder if the pricing problem I ran into is due to an odd $70 or so "support package" -- perhaps their sales organization was over-incented to up-sell that package and "forgot" that it's optional. In any case they are working on the problem, so I hope things will improve. I've edited the above to reflect my current thoughts.

Not incidentally, I now have more experience with the update and it's a very nice improvement on the prior version -- but they still share the same file format. The OS X version, which I've yet to purchase, lacks some of the Pro features but has some special OS X features -- like AppleScript support. In other words, it's a genuine OS X application, not a partial port. They've implemented bi-drectional synchronization between the XP version and Outlook, though they need to do something about the default display of task attributes.

Coding Horror builds a pc

Build a PC, CH style. Once upon a time people sold books on how to do this. Now there are blog posts that do a better job.

Changing times.

I'll probably never build another PC, but the example and parts list are good references in case I change my mind.

PS. CH has about 3,000 bloglines subscriptions. Wow, to think I knew him when he was starting out... (This blog has 2 subscriptions, and at least one of those is mine.)

Update 7/11: Part II. I liked the comment about drivers that come with the mb - toss 'em.

Update 7/24/07: CH has a cumulative summary and a set of suggested configurations.

Don't use Safari 3 with Blogger

Apple - Safari 3.02 Public Beta scatters div tags everywhere if you use it with Blogger. Messes up editing and formatting. Don't use it yet!

Blogger: what the %$! happened to the title field?

This is truly bizarre, but I've validated it on Safari and Camino on OS X, and I think, on Firefox XP. I have more than one blogspot account, and it's the same on all of them. It occurs at home and at work.

I can't click into the "Title" field in either the BlogThis! post submission widget or in the blogger editing environment. The cursor won't move into the field. I have to tab into the field, then use the arrow keys to move a cursor around.

This has been going on for a week for me. I figured it was so outrageous Google would fix it by now, but now I wonder if it's simply the universe conspiring against me.

I think I need to stop reading books about probability wave collapse; the world is just getting too peculiar.

Update: Ok, it's a bug. Phew. Why the $#!$#$ doesn't Google/blogger announce this in their !#!$%$! status page?!

Update: It's not just the title field. A lot of the controls on the BlotThis! widget no longer respond to mouse clicks. Grrrrrrrrrr.

BTW, you can vent your spleen here ...

Nisus Pro has been released

Nisus Writer Pro is a $45 upgrade for Express users. Express is my favorite wordprocessor. I'll be looking at an upgrade for me, not sure if I'll do the family pack though -- I'm the one who likes the advanced stuff.

More after I try it for a while. Good news!

Google Reader vs. Bloglines: the winner is ...

Bloglines. Much to my surprise since, I'd assumed Reader was much better than Google Reader. Recently though I've been using Reader for a research project. Somethings work well, but it's suprisingly buggy for a product that Google's been pushing for months. (It's still a "Lab" rather than beta project.)

Tags, for example, weren't working on posts today, and they don't seem to work at all for feeds. You can share individual articles if you like, but you can't share your entire subscription collection the way(s) you an with Bloglines.

On balance Bloglines still has the edge, with one big caveat that some of my subscriptions seem to update erratically; quiet for a week then fifty articles all at once.

Update 7/13/07: I came across a more extensive comparison with a similar, but more detailed, conclusion. Neither will create a feed from multiple feeds, but I think Yahoo Pipes may do that. I should experiment with named Pipes...