Meetup - A group administrator review

Meetup is ancient history in the world of the social net; it was founded in 2001. It's free to join, but running a group costs money.

I've administered a Meetup group on behalf of the Minnesota Inline Skate Club for the past six weeks or so, enough to share a bit about what I learned.

The first thing to note is that Meetup fails test #1 of Gordon's Laws for software and service use ...

1. Is it obvious how to delete your account and all services?

No, it's not obvious how to delete a group. It's not in the online help, and the Google references date to 2007. This is not a good sign. The miniscule wikipedia page is another not so good sighn

Except for this deletion Fail, the site has a reasonable set of services for running an organization including basic financial services. It's designed to be an outsourcing solution, not a complement to an existing club or organization web site. The communications focus is very email centric, but many list items do have feeds. I was able to subscribe to to the event calendar in Google Calendar, and to further share it from there. Updates propagated reasonably quickly to Google.

Our second biggest problem with the site was the location feature. We needed a simple Google Calendar style location description, but Meetup has an over-engineered location approach that's probably designed for a Meetup business case.

Our biggest problem with the site was that it didn't work. We got several inquiries, but no new attendees. Most of the inquiries we received were from people who'd skated long ago, and were half-heartedly considering resuming. It didn't feel like a very dynamic audience.

Although Meetup didn't work out as a way for our club to recruit new members, I could see it working well as an outsourced web solution for an active club that was recruiting elsewhere. Of course given the violation of a cardinal rule of Gordon's Laws for Software Services, I wouldn't spend my own money on Meetup.

Update 8/5/10:

Although I still don't see how to delete a group, this is what I did:

1. Went to my personal account page and canceled my subscription. Turns out when you pay for six months of service you're actually subscribing with regular renewal. Sneaky. This won't cancel the service though, it just stops the renewal.
2. I tried canceling a repeating meeting. This isn't easy, I ran into several issues then a server error. Turns out you cancel one instance, then you get the opportunity to cancel all following.
3. I closed the group to new members
4. I sent all members a notice that we'd closed the group and I changed the intro page to say that.

I assume it will go away when our next payment is due.

Update 1/27/11: This is interesting. A good reason, by itself, to avoid Meetup.

As noted previously Meetup doesn't provide any way to delete a group. I thought the group would go away. Instead it was assumed by a former member, who started a new group with a different name -- and acquired all the prior members. That's intriguing!

In this case the person who's running the new group is well intentioned; I'm not in a rush to leave the group. This must all come as a bit of a surprise to the former members however.

This policy is reason enough to avoid Meetup.

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Migrating Notes from ToodleDo to ResophNotes and the Simplenote ecosystem

[Shortly after I first wrote this, C.Y. released ResophNotes 1.0.5. Among other things, such as the ability to store notes as indexable .txt files, it has direct support for importing ToodleDo’s CSV file. He’d told me the release was coming soon, I did it my way just for geek fun. I’ve therefore moved the details of what I did to a footnote. BTW, turns out C.Y., like me, migrated to Simplenote from Toodledo/Appigo!]

Once I'd rescued my memory fragments from Outlook 2007 my next goal was to unify them from the former Palm Memos I'd (painfully) migrated to ToodleDo and thus Appigo's Notebook.app.

I've been reasonably happy with the combination of ToodleDo and Appigo, but notes are very much a 2nd class citizen on ToodleDo (they're all about tasks) and their search tools are pretty weak. I also wanted to be able to access and work with my notes from my desktop on Windows and the Mac, to be able to back them up, to have them be exposed to Spotlight search on OS X, to integrate my old corporate Outlook Notes with my old personal former Palm Memos and to have at least one open source repository in the mix. I needed the notes to live in a standard file format (UTF-8 text or RTF) free of all data lock.

Sounds like a lot, but the combination of ResophNotes (XP and higher - free but do donate), Simplenote (Cloud, ad-supported or $9/year - I paid - see documentation), Simplenote.app (iPhone and iPad app, free) and Notational Velocity (open source, OS X - documentation) gave me everything I wanted -- plus Chrome extensions for editing.

There was only one thing standing in my way. How could I get my ToodleDo notes into Simplenote?

I knew that ResophNotes (Win) would import Outlook's peculiar CSV files (embedded paragraphs!), but the developer, C.Y. I still days away from releasing a more general CSV import feature. I was impatient, so this is what I did. (see footnote [1])

During my early import experiments, because I used a Mac for part of the process, I ran into character encoding problems. Since ResophNotes doesn't yet have note multiselect and delete [2] I had to find its database and delete it.

ResophNotes exports and imports .RSN files (yay! backup!), but that's not how it works with notes. I found them in "C:\Documents and Settings\jfaughnan" in a .ResophNotes folder (hidden). To delete them and start over you have to quit ResophNotes, then find the instance in Task Manager Processes and kill it, then you can delete the files.

That let me start over again.

BTW, here's how the notes look in Notational Velocity's "Notational Notes" store:

Yes, each note a separate Rich Text file (I may convert to safer plain text) -- all Spotlight indexed.

Just in time for my birthday.

Nerdvana.

[1] Now that ResophNotes has direct ToodleDo import, I’ll include this as a reference for how one might support CSV variants other than ToodleDo or Outlook. My procedure was especially weird because I happened to have a Mac at hand…

1. Use ToodleDo's Notes CSV export to my Mac.
2. Import into FileMaker and use Calculation field to merge the ToodleDo Title and Notes into an Outlook style "Note Body". I next renamed the ToodleDo "Folder" column to Category.
3. Created FileMaker columns to match Outlook's names, and exported as CSV. I had to paste this string in as the first row: "Note Body","Categories","Note Color","Priority","Sensitivity". I left all values except Note Body and Category null. In retrospect I should have appended "Categories" as a string to the end of "Note Body" to facilitate search.
4. I used TextWrangler to clean up some character encoding CR/LF issues. This was only necessary because I got a Mac in the mix. Curse that ancient CR/LF screwup. It seems to have survived into the world of UTF-8 encoding.
5. I fired up my Fusion VM (way better than it first was on 10.6) and my old XP image and moved the file over. I opened it in Word and saved as UTF-8 to remove any residual character encoding issues.
6. I imported into ResophNotes. When I was sure all was well, I synchronized ResophNotes with Simplenotes and all my notes merged into one lovely repository. I fired up Notational Velocity in another window and confirmed all was fine there as well.

[2] Since the latest version can store as .txt files, I assume one could just delete all the .txt files! I haven’t tried this tough.

Retrospect 8 - now at Roxio with a user guide

When Dantz owned Retrospect it was a quirky but reliable SOHO to enterprise cross-platform backup product with a vigorous and demanding customer base. I used the Mac and Windows versions for years.

When the Mac was dying (pre- OS X) Retrospect floundered. No surprise. It was sold to EMC where the Mac version was ignored and the Windows version was improved. EMC tried to do a new version, but it was very buggy. Happily they were never able to produce a user guide even a year or so after release.

I say happily, because the lack of a user guide was a perfect market of product failure. Only the young would buy a backup product without documentation.

Now Roxio owns Retrospect. They've done a new version. The dantz.com user forums are back and there's Product Documentation. It's not yet sold on Amazon however.

It's hard to believe Retrospect can be resurrected after such a rough ride, but I'm interested. I'll give it a few months but if it survives I'll test it out. I'd love to have something complementary to Time Machine -- I just don't trust that sucker.

--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

The multi-iPhone family - two approaches

What's the best way to manage multiple iPhones in a single family?

There are at least two broad approaches, and combinations of them. We've tried 'em all. At the moment we manage 3 iPhones (parents and one child) and 1 iTouch as well as several iPods.

I'll share our experiences here.

Apple's preference is for every family member to have at least a separate OS X user account, if not a separate computer. Each person should have a companion MobileMe that manages synchronization across multiple machines. Apple would probably prefer that each family member have their own iTunes (.mac) account for media purchases, so DRMd material would only play on one device.

This approach does have advantages, but there are obvious disadvantages. It's an expensive and complex approach with a lot of management needs and there are issues with sharing apps and movies.

We've used a variant of the "Apple approach" with two user accounts on one machine, and all purchases through a single iTunes account (mine). One account owns iTunes and apps, the second subscribes to App updates through "family sharing" [1]. This does enable each account to have its own Address Book and it aligns well with using MobileMe on phone and multiple OS X machines.

This "classic" multi-user approach blows up completely when you add Parental Controls. Among other problems, MobileMe is violently incompatible with Parental Controls. I wasted hours trying to make it work before I retreated to a much simpler Google approach.

The Google Approach [2] is relatively painless. I use it with my son's iPhone. I sync it in my user account for media access and app installation, but I use Google Sync (Exchange server/ActiveSync) against his account on our family Google Apps domain for the phone's email, contacts and calendar. He could access the Google Calendar and Mail through a Parental Controlled account using OS Mail and iCal but in practice he just uses his phone [3].

There are some downsides since iTunes is designed for a single user with a single set of "last played" values and ratings, but in practice the confusion is modest and the pain reduction is immense. It's also much cheaper than the "Apple approach".

So, going forward, we're making less use of the OS X desktop, more use of Google (alternative is MobileMe) cloud services. This gets around the sharing/identity problems of iPhone synchronization.
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[1] We go through some geeky maneuvers so that my wife can have full access to all media from her user account without replicating files. See links below for tips. In short; set iTunes to not import, then media library into client iTunes. Incredibly iTunes creates links to media.

[2] You can do this with MobileMe on the iPhone and the MobileMe web interface, but without the Parental Controls-incompatible desktop you lose a lot of the value of MM. For various reasons we've gone the Google approach.

[3] Google web browser access is (yet again) OS X Parental Control hell. You can't enable web access to a Google Apps domain without enabling access to Google search.

See also:

• The flaw in iTunes: 2 users, 2 iPods - and our brain locked future (2005, introducing BrainLock with Palladium Inside, aka the RetinaChip)
• iTunes 9 home sharing is mediocre (2009)
• The ultimate AirTunes, iPhone Remote, iTunes setup
• Working around iTunes lack of multi-user support
• Sync iTunes Libraries Between Two Macs

Gordon’s idiosyncratic revenue-free iPhone 4 and iOS 4 review

For geeks like you and I, the iPhone 4 is annoying. We’d have been much happier with an enhanced 3GS with more memory, more processing efficiency, a better display, iOS4, better antenna design, less case cracking and built-in bumpers.

Alas, Apple gave us a pretty phone.

The antenna problem is an annoyance, but even without a case it’s not bad if I minimize skin contact and hold the top of the phone. If I’m ever able to find a case, I doubt I’ll give it another thought. I haven’t yet run into problems with the facial sensor – I guess my face and the way I hold the phone fits Apple’s design.

The real problem is the damned phone is too fragile. It feels fragile, it looks fragile, and half the geeks I read are showing broken screens. It doesn’t need a case, it needs a nursing home. If it were possible to find a case I’d have one now. Do not buy an iPhone until you can buy it with a case.

In fact, if you don't need an iPhone right now, wait until October. By then iOS 4.1 will be out and many of the worst bugs will be resolved.

In fast-to-read-and-write bullet form, here are the rest of my impressions.

Updating

I took the very conservative root of treating my iPhone 4 as a completely new device and gradually moving things over. This minimizes bug problems, but at a minimum you will lose:

• all application specific data and configuration
• all saved account credentials
• all phone Favorites
• SMS/MMS messages
• Notes (may be available on desktop if sync)
• 1Password and like files

If I were to do it again I'd probably do the standard update from the existing phone.

I ran into some glitches with

• 3G data service access was initially missing. I had to shutdown, restart and wait a while.
• Voice mail wanted my voicemail password (PIN really).

Phone (hardware)

• The SIM card removal tool is not included in the US (it is in the UK)
• Facetime: I don’t have time to play with it. It will only be interesting when/if there’s a desktop client.
• Battery: I’m not big changes over my old 3G. I suspect Push sync is a huge battery killer, and I’m currently synchronizing Calendar and Contacts with a corporate ActiveSync server, Google’s ActiveSync server, and Apple’s MobileMe services.
• Face sensor: It works for me but I usually use the headphones so I might not notice a big problem.
• Antenna: If I touch the "dead zone" I drop the call. Elsewhere it's ok. Apple should stop pretending other phones have this problem. It's a genuine design flaw. I'm going to duct tape my phone until I get a case.
• Retina display: It hasn’t changed my life. Text is easier to read, which is good news for geezer geeks like me but it's not a big deal.
• Camera/video: Nice. Good improvement. I love being able to take a low light snapshot of printed text from a few inches away and get a very readable image. For example (click for full image, the image is from a pending post on AT&T’s latest scam):

• Performance: I was using a 3G. I’m seeing performance comparable to my wife’s 3GS. For me, this is a huge improvement but a 3GS users wouldn’t notice much.

iOS4

• I think Apple did some keyboard layout consolidation. That’s a relief! I don’t see as much context-specific keyboard reconfiguration. That was a good idea in theory, but in practice it was a pain in the buttocks.
• I’ve been waiting for multiple ActiveSync servers for ages. I do wonder if the battery drain is worse than CalDAV but this is a meaningful improvement.
• Calendar is still very weak. The options for scheduling alerts still max out at 2 days ahead -- I need 3-4 weeks. You can only have one alert per item. Recurrence is very weak; you still can't schedule 2nd Tuesday of each month or the 2nd Tuesday of August each year. People over 77 don't exist and color assignments are per server, not per phone. All old bugs and design mistakes, none fixed.
• Contacts can now be "linked". In the UI this shows as "Linked Cards" and "Link Contact", and in the documentation it's "Unfiied Contacts". This nomenclature confusion is a strong indicator that this feature was released prematurely. Do not use it. The iPhone manual says it's intended to support "contact unification". Contact unification sounds insane -- people with the same first and last names are grouped together in the iPhone UI. You can force this "linking" or break it. This sounds awful.
• You still can't change group membership in the iPhone. If you select a group when you create a contact it will be assigned to that (single) group.
• I'm not getting anything out of the multitasking. The apps I use haven't been updated to use it yet. I miss the ability to get to phone Favorites by clicking the Home button twice (now goes to multi-task).
• The unified email boxes are a nice convenience, but I'd much rather Apple had fixed the damned calendar.
• You still can't easily delete all images and videos from the iPhone camera roll. You need to use Image Capture on OS X to delete them. Image importing on OS X is as kludgy as ever (it's better on Windows).
• I think Apple has fixed the bug with deleting a single instance of an Exchange server recurring meeting. It no longer deletes every instance. Wrong. They just changed it to a different bug.
• The biggest iOS advantage for me is the ability to use ActiveSync with both Google and with my corporate Exchange server.
• The OS has been stable for me. No crashes.
• I like that I can turn off Cellular data from the Network setting.
• Pairing with an external keyboard can be tricky.
• The ancient text truncation bug in calendar memos has not been fixed.

Overall

• iPhone 4 is an improvement over my iPhone 3, but it's only a mild improvement over the iPhone 3GS (better display, better camera, but more fragile). Certainly nobody with a working 3GS should spend a lot for an iPhone 4. If you have an iPhone 3, and are not in love with AT&T, you might want to buy a used 3GS out of contract and wait and see how the market evolves.
• The biggest plus is the camera and support for multiple Exchange servers.
• The biggest minus is that an already fragile phone is now more fragile and the Calendar remains pathetic.

See also

• iPhone 4 Fix It repair manual

Update 7/31/10: I've had no reception on my phone while my wife's 3GS had "four bars" (More bars in more places, fake of course since she's on OS 3.) I restarted my phone and had "three bars". I bet that problem is software related and fixable.

Apple's Parental Controls: Never more broken than with Apple's MobileMe

You haven't really felt the full pain of OS X's busted parental controls until you try to enable MobileMe access on a restricted account.

I've tried and failed repeatedly with both MobileMe synchronization and me.com web access. To enable them I had to disable all application and all web content restrictions.

I'd previously run into the Google Parental Controls problem. You can't enable access to a Google Apps domain without also enabling access to Google search. I thought MobileMe would be more parent friendly. I was "oh so wrong", if anything it's a bigger Fail than Google.

If only I could lock Steve Jobs into a room until he got this working. Apple's Parental Controls would be a quite different experience.

I give up. Time to try something different.

Getting the iPhone user guide into the iBook application

The iPad user guide is available in the iBookstore, but the iPhone user guide is not.

It's available as a web page in the iPhone or as a PDF. I tried mailing a link it to myself per Apple's advice:

Apple - iPhone - Tips and Tricks

... From a Mail message or a web page, touch and hold the PDF icon or link, then select “Open in iBooks.”...

The email touch and hold didn't work -- so Apple's documentation is wrong for iOS 4.01. Instead I tapped the link and in Safari I saw an Open in iBooks button.

So now I have the PDF manual in my bookshelf. It's not bad, but not clear that there's an advantage over using the web version.