I noticed the antenna issue right away and the day that most people were lining up to get theirs I was on day #2 of ownership of my new iPhone 4. I made a video and posted it on youtube showing my issue with the antenna before they really came out with a “solution”.

When I got wind of the fact that I needed a case to avoid these reception issues, I was irate. I got wind that the law firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff out in Sacramento, CA was filing a class action lawsuit against Apple for the antenna issues. I sent this letter off to Jennifer Wilkinson at the firm, describing my issues.

Hello, I’ve been a fan of Apple products for years and I have owned an iPhone 3G before I pre-ordered the iPhone 4. I was surprised, frustrated, and angry at what I went through when I received my new Apple product. I pre-ordered and got my phone a day ahead and immediately noticed the reception issue when I would hold my iPhone 4 normally.

I’ve tweeted a lot about my issues here: http://twitter.com/ky

• http://twitter.com/ky/status/16926597287
• http://twitter.com/ky/status/16953142685
• http://twitter.com/ky/status/16953197427
• http://twitter.com/ky/status/17008883081
• http://twitter.com/ky/status/17335661331

At one point to show some of my friends I created a Youtube video showing the issue.

Please keep me update on the status of this lawsuit. I am aggravated by this whole issue. To spend the amount of money I did, get the pre-ordered phone then have to go back into the store (on launch day no less) just to prevent calls from being dropped made me irate. The fact that I had to spend $30 on the Apple Bumper case just to get dependable behavior from my cellphone was the icing on the cake.

In my opinion, Apple has gone beyond what is reasonable for a company selling a consumer product. In their effort to make “pretty” and “beautiful” products I believe they have created a defective one. The mere fact that they created their own case for this current model shows that they knew of the issues and were positioned to capitalize on the very consumer problems they were creating. The phone does not work as advertised and I feel that they’ve taken advantage of me and my wallet. They’ve definitely lost my trust with this latest episode.

Sincerely,
Kyle Bradshaw

Of course after the fact there were all of these articles coming out saying “it’s not that bad”, “every cellphone does it”, etc etc. At the end of the day, in my opinion, they would not have created their own cases unless they knew this would have been an issue. I felt like I was taken advantage of, and that’s not cool.

Hopefully being a part of this class action lawsuit will in the least pay for my $30 Bumper, which probably should have been free in the first place. Btw, have you seen the Bumper? It probably cost $3 to make. Between the required Bumper and vents about iPhone docks – What the dock?, it looks like Apple is all about driving up costs on accessories to pour on the profits.

For the first time in my Apple love-affair, I feel like an iChump.

UPDATE Obviously as you well know now from the public outcry and backlash, Apple has offered FREE Bumpers and cases to all iPhone 4 owners. I have to say, this is what I wanted the whole time (and previously wrote about). Now why they just didn’t do that to begin with we’ll never know. I wonder if their brand will take a hit. I certainly lost confidence in their ability to handle “imperfection”.

Until next time.

When my aunt, father and I decided that my grandfather – affectionately known as HAPPY – needed a new computer I immediately knew the Mini would be another great gift.

The first time around when Ashley unboxed her Mini I was a bit unprepared her reaction. This time I was more than ready to capture the hilarity that ensued.

I’ve been with Sprint since 2005, before that I had Nextel (which was later bought by Sprint). We got the phones for a now extinct development company I ran with my buddy Dan.

On 7/11/08 during the iPhone craziness I logged onto my Sprint account and saw you could check your end date. I’ve been lusting for an iPhone for quite some time and the 3G release broke the metaphorical camel’s back. Here’s a transcript of my session with Sprint on 7/11 for your entertainment.

If you read that transcript you would think that the issue was resolved and they rolled back my service so I wasn’t required to keep my contract until 12/23/2008 right? You’d be mistaken.

Today I had a followup conversation, just to validate my success getting my plan rolled back. What I learned was this: THEY CANCELED MY ACCOUNT effective 8/1/2008. Hole in one Sprint.

I’m very frustrated I lost the text conversation from today because I tried to view the frame source and Sprint knocked me out. I was speaking to a friendly fellow named "Oliver". Note: a text based online support allows for easy outsourcing. There were some good quotes like:

Oliver:

you line is cancelled. did you pay the $200 cancellation fee?

Me:

I NEVER SAID TO CANCEL MY ACCOUNT

And when I said "hell no" I got this prompt reply:

To ensure that we have a productive chat session, I ask that you please refrain from using profane/vulgar language during our chat. Thank you in advance.

You’d think I said something like "Suck My Ass Sprint" which upon reflection, might not have been such a bad idea.

Needless to say my tenure as a Sprint Customer is coming to a close. Unfortunately Sprint-Really-Sucks.com was already taken. I might’ve been able to capitalize on Sprints cesspool service for profit, maybe I still will!

Maybe I should look into this lawsuit.

I’ll change my strategy and try again, this time following this great advice.

UPDATE 7/20

I was so livid with Sprint on Friday (7/18) that I got an iPhone that very day, it’s badass. I used this service to check availability. The whole process of buying the phone (16GB Black), transferring my number, and taking calls took a total of 15 minutes. A far cry of the trials and frustrations I heard from people who waited in line and got it on 7/11. This phone kicks ass. I’m still figuring out my way around it, but as of right now I’m very happy I jumped ship.

IN OTHER NEWS

My old phone is up on eBay the sale of which should put a good dent in my cancellation fee from Sprint. Send the link to someone you hate that has Sprint.

UPDATE 7/28

My HTC Mogul sold on eBay Saturday. The final price was $183.90 + $15.95 shipping = $199.85. Total shipping costs were $12.10 to ship via USPS which leaves me with $187.75 total for resale of my HTC Mogul phone.

The Sprint cancellation fee is $200. So it essentially cost me $12.25 to up and leave Sprint. For all the headaches and stress they caused they should be paying me to leave **them** in my opinion.

Another thing that made it so much easier on the wallet was that my company is paying for my new iPhone. I love my job. All is well that ends well.

SQL Server 2000 by MICRO$OFT is the best SQL application I have ever used.

Select query text -> run (ctrl+enter) -> results. nothing out there does this simple behavior.

For everything I love about OSX I do miss a couple of apps since I jumped ship in June of ’06. A decent SQL application is right up there at the top.

The Candidates

Navicat

 I use Navicat on a daily basis but it drives me IN SANE. All I want is a simple application for running queries that’s easy to navigate and has plenty of hotkeys baked in so I can bounce around with ease and speed. Navicat fails miserably at this. I end up with 5 windows open just to do simple stuff, there’s not enough distinction between the behavior of browsing tables or writing queries. It’s a painful, verbose, hassle. Today I was so pumped I found a couple hotkeys that would save me a lot of time only to find out they were useless because they didn’t put focus on a textarea that would be painfully obvious to anyone actually using the program. Multiple queries require multiple windows and it all ends up being a CF in the end. I’m looking to replace Navicat pronto.

Query Browser

Query Browser could be awesome, but it comes up short. Again a lack of hot keys and cursor focus make using it a pain. Frequent crashes don’t help (it crashed on me twice while writing this). My biggest peeve by far is how Query Browser deals with errors. You end up getting this tiny sliver of an area dedicated to errors. If you get a couple in a row they all stack and become unreadable and you can’t even resize the errors window space OR clear them out. I do like how Query Browser makes use of tabs for multiple queries instead of creating a new window each time (take note Navicat).

phpMyAdmin

I know other mac users who just use phpMyAdmin for all their SQL needs. I hate the lag of a web interface for something that is screaming for an application interface. Again, phpMyAdmin is sans hotkeys. That’s a deal breaker.

Dismay

If anyone can enlightened me please speak up. I’ve looked near and far and this is the only list of apps I have found and I assume it’s pretty comprehensive. I tried a couple of these applications out and found that I was already using the best available out there.

I’m very close to just retreating back to the basics.

<img class=”right” src=”http://somedirection.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/goog.png” alt=”goog.png” border=”0″ width’em”157″ height=”58″ />

It’s funny because as much as I love Apple software, at the end of the day I know the future of software in the broadest sense belongs to Google. The computer of the future will be the network and cloud computing. I honestly think when we’re wired enough and fiber optics (or something better) is woven into our very being, we’ll be utilizing thin clients – probably 10th generation iPhones. Down the line (ridiculously far down the line) their lead in hardware is what really sets them apart. Even Google can’t catch up, it’s just not in their DNA. Both of these tech companies are already poised to transform our relationship with “computers”. Google on the OS, Apple on the hardware. You can take that to the bank. Hell I’m already most of the way there. I’m a Google Apps junkie who lives on his MacBook and wants a 3G iPhone like you read about.

What do you think the future holds for computing?

ReadWriteWeb Why Apple Will Dominate Next Gen Computing

As a backstory, I wanted a PSP when they first game out, but I waited until it was hacked. What I really wanted to do was play old school Nintendo games on my PSP and I knew with the device it was a possibility. Then it got hacked, then someone created an emulator, and only then could I justify buying a PSP (which I’ve since sold).

With Apple’s recent release of an iPhone API and introduction of the new iphone developer program I’m about to climb onboard the iPhone gravy train. I was undoubtedly impressed seeing what the phone is capable of while viewing the keynote.

So far, I’d say most people may have bought iPhones for lust or they’re early adopter crazies of Apple products with plenty of disposable income. Only now will pragmatic people (such as myself) buy them for their software capabilities as well. The game demo’s shown in the keynote were amazing. The single point of distribution with Apple’s own App Store application to be included with the 2.0 update is incredible integration. The iPhone is going to become a candy store of applications for users that I can no longer ignore.

I was hoping to stave off the forgone conclusion of iPhone ownership until Version 2 (The second version of Apple products are always exponentially better), but then I had a realization this morning. Apple is in bed with AT&T for 5 years and they are hoping to sell 10 MILLION iPhones by the end of 2008. Why would they release a second better version of the phone to upset 10 Million users before hitting sales targets? And you know the backlash of consumers who feel they’ve been cheated is severe. Besides Apple will take care of you anyway. More so, are millions of users really going to be locked into a shitty EDGE data network indefinitely? That is, aside from those that jailbreak their phones to use on other GSM networks… Apple has a master plan, and there are a lot of intelligent, crafty people out there that will all be in the same situation and won’t be happy with their crappy EDGE data plans if there’s an alternative.

To steal a page from Malcolm Gladwell, I’ve reached my tipping point with Apple’s iPhone. I must have one, now.

With Microsoft Exchange Server support with the 2.0 firmware update not even the Crackberry crowd of business lemmings will be able to resist. The naysayers have officially been trumped.

Reactions around the Interweb

• 37 signals
• Daring Fireball
• Apple iPhone 2.0 ‘Bigger than the Personal Computer’
• That’s how you launch a platform

Update

Rumors of 3G

I’m going to wait a couple months before jumping the gun after reading this article. It does add up and some of my conversations with current iPhone owners lead me to believe that patience will be a virtue when it comes to my iPhone purchase.

From Seeking Alpha<br/>

And then, of course, despite the lack of any announcement, the iPhone v2 (3G) would be coming out soon. In my mind, this development is more definitive than speculative. I think the only reason Apple did not announce the iPhone v2 is because such an announcement would halt the sales of the current generation of iPhones.

When I used Firefox I’d use the faviconize plugin which helped somewhat, but now I only use Firefox when I develop so I have the same issues with Camino.

But just recently, Scott showed me he found something better.. Fluid is an OS X application that will let you create custom Site Specific Browsers (SSBs).

Fluid utilizes Safari’s WebKit rendering engine and is a native Cocoa OS X application. Essentially you can think of it as a site-specific custom Safari browser.

One thing I immediately wanted to do was separate my Google Apps into 1 SSB with Fluid. But, by default every new instance does not have tabbing enabled, but you can easily enable tabs via the application’s Preferences. Now all the Google Apps I use daily – gmail, calendar, reader, docs, and analytics are separated out and saves me from tab-salad-hell.

Another good use for Fluid is to create applications for 37signals products. I spend a lot of time daily in Campfire and Basecamp. It was only a logical move I should create an app for each. 37signals went so far as to provide icons just for this use so your dock can stay pretty.

Previously I used Pyro which was a less-than-stable wrapper for Campfire around the same idea. The jury is out as to which is better, but since it’s essentially just a Safari browser tab – I’m pretty certain Pyro has seen its day on my desktop.

Fluid even handles notifications from the various apps. Check out the Fluid icons Flickr group to keep that dock sexy.

I was pretty impressed, and I’m glad I run a Mac so I can enjoy all the goodness Fluid has to offer. Bye bye tab-salad, this is the end of web browsers as we know them.

Update (a couple days later)

So I’ve been using Fluid based SSB’s for Basecamp, Campfire, and Gmail for the last couple days and wanted to air out a few annoyances.

• I’m back on Pyro. Growl notifications for Campfire are just too important and are not available in the Campfire Fluid-based SSB. I found myself checking Campfire for no reason frequently because I got no notification like I used to. I didn’t realize how reliant I was on them.
• Basecamp as an SSB is good enough for me right now – I’ll probably stick with it.
• Gmail & Google Apps work okay, not great. Camino is my browser by default, and usually if you open a link from Gmail it will fire that url in another tab – however with Gmail as a Fluid-based SSB a blank window (not a tab) is created, and then the link is opened in Camino in a new tab (if it’s open). This is a pretty big annoyance, although I’m trying to stick it out, but when I remember to avoid the blank window from opening I find that I’m copy and pasting the link itself into Camino which is pretty lame.

That’s it. I’ve only had it a couple days and already an update was pushed out to me, hopefully these minor annoyances will get fixed promptly and I can continue the SSB goodness!

Update 3/30/08

2+ months out I’m now ONLY using Fluid for Basecamp.The other services (like gmail) were just odd to work with and felt like a pain more than anything. I’ve since installed the Google Notifier so I can be alerted there’s a queue of email backup before I even bother to check. This method seems to be working best.

I used to use the Super Remove Dead Tracks v2.0 applescript to cure these ailments, but with iTunes 7.5 the applescript breaks and it hasn’t been updated since April 2007 so for all intents and purposes it is dead.

With some research I found Paul Mayne’s solution which involved a mashup of smart and static playlists and removing the remainder, but this didn’t work for me either because the process that should have filtered out the missing tracks just didn’t happen, but it did grease the wheels.

So I put my thinking cap on and found this ghetto-savvy way of doing it.

1. Go to your full library and select all of your tracks.
2. Get Info – CMD I
3. Set all of your files to have an obscure ID3 tag that you never use – say BPM to an arbitrary number.
4. Wait for all the tags to process – this may take a while depending on the size of your library.
5. Go to Library > Music
6. Sort by BPM (or your chosen arbitrary ID3 tag) – Change view options to add that (BPM) column if it is not showing: CMD J
7. Select Tracks with no BPM set
8. Remove them from your library.

This is a pain in the ass I know, but like I said it’s a ghetto solution. Hopefully Doug will update his Super Remove Dead Tracks script for 7.5 – but if you ask me this is something that Apple should handle on their own.

Does anyone have a better way of cleaning out the junk?

UPDATE Looks like Doug has updated Super Dead Tracks to ver 2.1. Grab it – it’s the best method.

Leopard recognized it right away and I was on my way, then I ran into issues..

The main issue here was HP and Apple didn’t join forces to make sure that the OS and printer played nice. If you assumed that Apple would make sure that their “bundled” printers would work flawlessly with their operating system, you would have assumed incorrectly.

Drivers for the C4200 were in Leopard, but the packaged CD that came with the printer was pretty much useless. See this a printer that also scans, but you wouldn’t know it by the software that HP bundled with it.

GRIPE #1 – I’m lucky I could even use it right out of the gate because it didn’t come w/ a USB cable – was this why I got it for free? If I dropped $99 on it I wouldn’t be happy.

GRIPE #2 – I could print, but I could not scan and Photoshop had no TWAIN support for the printer thus rendering 1/2 of it’s functionality useless. I was sans-scanner before I did some sleuthing.

Luckily there was some action on the Apple Forums with people as bullshit as I was with the driver situation. The HP Beta Drivers: Scanning Galore Thread on Apple Forums (seems to be someone who works at HP) provides some Beta Drivers for download. These drivers finally gave me the software I needed to make some scans and also added TWAIN support for Photoshop. Supposedly the drivers when finalized will be packaged with a system software update from Apple when the time comes but there are a lot of other people out there whose HP printers still do not work with Leopard.

Now all I need is for this “USB not connected” message to go away. Yes HP my USB cable is not connected even though I am printing off reams of paper and scanning whatever my heart desires… sure.

This is why I avoid printers. They kill trees, the ink is a rip-off, and they take up too much desk space.

Here’s a quick tip for Leopard Users out there that want to save some disk space: Wipe out all the files in

/Library/Printers

Sometimes when they’re pushing the design envelop they’re off the mark and their products end up making better fish tanks than computers.

In their effort to always push the envelope of industrial design they sometimes fail, but they always seem to do so gracefully. You can’t succeed without failing every once in a while and Apple is no stranger to flops. No one can argue their designs don’t have aesthetic appeal, but sometimes it seems practicality bears the burden.

So recently when a friend and coworker was foiled by Apple design I realized that Apple’s stellar design team wasn’t as flawless as we all sometimes think.

The situation occurred when Bill and I were talking about developing .Net applications on our Mac’s. Bill does a lot of work with .Net and I wondered why he still worked mostly on his PC at work when he could have all the Mac-goodness and develop .Net in his Parallels installation. This discussion lead to grievances about his lack of right clicking ability making the whole idea too much of a pain than it was worth. Bill has a mighty mouse and has had one for quite some time and was never aware that it indeed was a two button mouse. How could this happen? Seems that his macbook was defaulted to this (one button config) configuration unbeknown to him. So why didn’t he ever realize that his mighty mouse was a two button mouse? I think it’s pretty simple, Apple’s industrial design team did nothing to tell you “Hey this is a two button mouse because it looks like a two button mouse”. In fact, the only difference between Apple’s One-Button Mouse and their Mighty Mouse is the little scroll wheel (known as the nipple pictured below).

One-Button Mouse

Mighty Mouse

Don’t two-button mice look like this?

Any recent switcher would loathe the one-button mouse (I know I did), it’s just not what they’re used to and if you ask me, it’s always been a past problem with Macs. Two-button mice are the way to go and should always be set that way by default with each new shiny Mighty Mouse that ships. Move forward with your new-found user base and rejoice!

So to avoid future confusion I’m creating my own version of what a mighty mouse should look like using Photoshop wizardry. I call it the Mighty Kyle. I love my mighty mouse – it’s the best mouse I’ve ever had, but it sure doesn’t look like a two-button mouse, I think the Mighty Kyle sure does.

I can still hear the echoes of Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign, I say a better slogan would read “Think Different, For The Sake Of Being Different”.