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.

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.

I like when people try to trick me online. I like seeing what methods they employ and what they try to get me to do. Tonight I got a Facebook Marketplace inquiry from Jared Lerum. He was inquiring about a leather chair I posted on FB Marketplace a while ago.

It’s a good chair but it has damage, I don’t use it, and it takes up too much space in my apt so I tossed it up there fully expecting nothing to come of it. Well at least it was worth a laugh. “Jared Lerum” wanted to pay me with a Cashiers Check for a $55 used chair with fire damage. Pretty pathetic. So I took 5 min to humor myself at Jared’s expense and figured I’d share with my homies.

The Proposal

Scammers Profile

The Prize

I always knew the power of Facebook’s Social Graph. Mapping the relationship of all of your users gives these types of spammers no where to hide. Your connections become your reputability. It’s cool to see it in action.

I work on Yumdrop.com, a popular lingerie site. Often I’m out there looking to see what the competition is doing to see how we stack up and also evaluate how well we’re pushing the envelope in our particular niche. Victoria’s Secret is by far the leader in this industry as far as market share, but their website could’ve been built in 2002.

When I peeled back Giselle’s onion I was flabbergasted. I haven’t seen egregious CSS like this in a long time. As developers have embraced web standards over the years (something I have done from the start) and standards based practices have been understood and adopted, people have just gotten a better understanding of how it all comes together. You don’t see blatant misuse of CSS like this anymore. Even basic knowledge of CSS inheritance could let them avoid this debacle.

On http://www2.victoriassecret.com/html/includes/globalstyles_normal.css for example:

.blacktext {color:#000000; font-family:Arial, Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:10px; }
.blacktext2 {color:#000000; font-family:Arial, Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:11px; font-weight:bold }
.blacktext3 {color:#000000; font-family:Arial, Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:11px; }
.text2 {color:#333333; font-family:Arial, Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:11px; text-decoration: none;}
.text3 {color:#333333; font : 10px/14px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-decoration: none;}
.textPink {color:#FF76A4; font-family:Arial, Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:10px; }
.textPink11px {color:#FF76A4; font-family:Arial, Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:11px; }
.textPinkBold {color:#FF76A4; font-family:Arial, Helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight:bold;font-size:11px; }

It goes on and on and makes me quite agitated

Turn off Javascript. They use it to write OUT their styling.

No Javascript, No Styling, NO degradation. You end up with something like THIS ». The complete header with site navigation and footer don’t even render, making the site pretty useless to navigate or use.

And as laughable as all this it keeps getting better!

The site navigation is 1 large image map! This is just not done in practice. How can screen readers access the content? How do visually impaired users shop?

Never mind degradation here, there are so many better ways to construct such navigation. Each time you visit a different department you must create a whole new image map image. What a waste of time. If your navigation changes, you have to recreate all of the active department images all over again. With modern development techniques this just makes no sense.

There’s just too much to point out so I’ll just list the rest I briefly spotted in the 5 minutes I looked..

• They’re using a centered div w/ css to center the containing wrapper, but they use tables for layout.
• Extraneous use of classes all over the markup because they don’t understand inheritance.
• Validate much? Of course not, are you even surprised though?

As a web developer, you think that “doing things the right way” is part of building a successful web presence, but as time goes on I’m beginning to realize that it really doesn’t matter as much as we often think. I wonder if Victoria’s Secret developers know that it is not developed with the best practices, I wonder if they care. I wonder if they have an internal team or whether they just outsourced it to a very misguided web shop.

If anyone at VS wants me to scramble their onion, contact me. You deserve better.

I don’t know what to think about Facebook now. There’s always someone looking for an exploit to make a quick buck. I hope FB puts the kaibosh on this quickly, but it’s always going to be an uphill battle. Unsolicited annoyances like this completely turned me off to Myspace and let me make the jump to Facebook w/ confidence, but today that confidence has waned a bit. Facebook is spamtaculous.

Chart From Hitwise

I have a MySpace and Facebook profile but I never go on MySpace anymore since FB opened up their network to 3rd party applications. Plus being a web developer I can just tell that FB was built right – as opposed to Myspace which is a giant CF.

So I looked down the list:

1. Myspace – check, I have a profile
2. Facebook – check check, I go there constantly
3. Bebo – Popular in Britain, ok I’m familiar with it
4. BlackPlanet – ???

So I figured I’d check it out. Then I was greeted with THIS Bitch Slapped!!!

Como? Huh? They don’t support the latest version of Camino?

It’s pretty funny that they want you to upgrade to Firefox 2 when Firefox and Camino are both open source projects of the Mozilla Foundation and share exactly the same Gecko rendering engine.

These days with standards based development processes we don’t have to “browser sniff” any longer. If BlackPlanet didn’t get the memo,the right way to go about it is “feature sniffing” with locked down degradation. You should really look into Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting and perhaps read A List Apart from time to time. It really pisses me off when I run across this type of neglect on the Internet…

Ongoing List of Neglect

As I find these offenders the list will grow.

• 02/26/08 MakesParties.com
• 03/05/08 Comcast.net

Most of my interaction with my development/designer colleagues has been face to face when I attend SXSW, but that interaction quickly dies off shortly after my visit to Austin every year. The problem is entirely my own fault – I’m just bad at keeping in touch – something I need to work on. But I’m not attending SXSW in ’08 for the first time in 3 years, my only option is to put myself “out there”.

I’ve been lurking my whole career and I need a change. I want to increase the readership of somedirection and the only way to do that is to crawl out of this little cave I’ve built for myself on the Internet. One of the first places I’m starting this “coming out party” is in the successful 9rules community run by a pair of my SXSW friends Mike Rundle and Paul Scrivens. There’s a lot of things I’m excited about in 2008 and the wheels are in motion for this to be a great year.

So I welcome my readers, speak up! Quit hiding! Become involved. Let’s get a salad of comments going here!

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

Lately, it seems Google isn’t satisfied with just indexing the worlds information, but owning it as well (email, documents, analytics, social networks, online advertising, videos, etc etc ad nauseum).

I can see the discussion amongst Google engineers that sparked Google Knol.

Engineer #1: I’m tired of sending so much of our traffic to Wikipedia, they should come to us instead! Engineer #2: OWN IT!

Google Knol is designed to be a Squidoo, Mahalo, Wikipedia killer – Google Knol is in closed beta presently, but they’re hoping that it does better than Brazilian social network Orkut.

As if the whole internet doesn’t suck off Google’s teet enough already. They’re going after the only major untarnished Interweb destination that’s left: Wikipedia.org.

Is anyone scared yet?

Why did I get flashbacks of Dr. Edward Nygma aka the Riddler from Batman Forever, hooked up to his mind draining super crazy device pilfering all of the knowledge from unsuspecting Gothamites?

Google Knols All

What happens when “Don’t be evil” gets boring? Far in the future when Sergey and Larry are no longer the moral leaders of a powerful company, who becomes Google’s conciousness? What will be the next position posted on the Google job board when that happens, Chief Ethicist?

This Google is super ambitious and I love that – they raise the bar for the rest of us, but no one is safe from the Google machine. If they think they can do something better than you (and often they can), be afraid, be very afraid.

Sidenote: When Google gains it’s own consciousness we are so screwed.