Apple Reporter

Dear Apple,

We love your products. Some of us get our paychecks writing because of you and your products. The amount of care you put into your products is visible, sometimes, but other times it just feels like you build the products that we so graciously buy half-heartedly.

I myself have had numerous problems with my Apple purchases. I received my Macbook Pro January of this year, and from day one I had a problem. I realized that it would not play DVDs. I promptly sent it in to AppleCare, and within two weeks I had it back. Since then, I have not experienced much problems with it, until recently, when a slew of problems have all shown up instantly.

The Macbook Pro, since its creation and release in early-2006, has experienced numerous issues, and I myself have fell victim to a few of them. About 4 months after I purchased the Macbook Pro, the fan began to act up. After the installing of a third-party application to detect the fans’ speed and temperature, and it was then that I discovered that one of my fans was completely unresponsive, and that the entire computer was relying on only one fan.

The next issue I can’t blame on Apple entirely. In the Northwest during the Fall, we are victim to strong winds and along with that, power outages. As I left for school in the morning, I left my Pro plugged in to the Magsafe adapter, while it was asleep. Throughout a series of power outages, my Pro stayed charged, but asleep. When I used it on a Friday night, in my bed while it was unplugged, I shut it off. The next morning, I realized my Macbook Pro was completely inoperable unless plugged in. I, for the second time, called AppleCare and began the lengthy process of sending my Mac in for repair. I’m not blaming this issue on you, however, this event spawned a new set of problems.

My grandmother, who is quite tech-savvy, let me borrow her white Macbook while my Macbook Pro was in repair. I have had it for roughly 10 days, and already there has been a problem. I have treated it excellently, almost exclusively keeping it in a case when it was not sitting on my desk. But the plastic trim at the end of the Macbook, near the trackpad, is slowly coming off, leaving a disfigured area near the trackpad.

Around the same time, I also noticed that the Magsafe adapter that came with the Pro, which as you will remember I have had less than a year, is beginning to malfunction. I have discovered that I am not the first to experience problems with it. The wiring around the Magsafe end of the power brick is now exposed, and is only functional around 33% of the time.

Note, as I mentioned earlier, that people receive their paychecks from writing about you and your products. I am one of those people. I blog about exclusively Apple news at applereporter.com. But my experiences with Apple products have been less than satisfactory, to say the least. My next item on my Wish List, which I am vigorously saving up for, is an iPhone. But will I be subject to the same problems on the iPhone as I have been with my Macbook Pro? I hope not, because both are beautiful and quite functional products, but based on my previous and current experiences, I’m not sure I can safely trust that my iPhone would be durable enough to last even past a few months.

I urge you Apple, please take the time to actually work on your products. Do not be so eager to ship things out quickly, think back to the original Macintosh, which Apple spent years on creating before they released it. I am not saying that the products right now are horrible, on the contrary, I believe them to be some of the most useful and aesthetically pleasing products I have ever seen in my life, but instead, I ask that you think about the quality of your products and how, with a little bit of time, your consumer model could change from the generic fanboy who will buy your products, regardless of the quality of the products themselves, to the regular computer user, who should not have to be afraid of bad quality.

Sincerely,
Kristian Freeman
http://www.applereporter.com

Open source project ies4osx allows IE to be run on a Mac, using Wine emulation. Conveniently, the program comes bundled with Darwine, the port of Wine libraries to OS X. For those of you who have been wondering from the beginning, “Why in the world would I use IE on my Mac?”, IE, being the most commonly used browser worldwide, is infamous for ruining web design templates and CSS style sheets. So for the web designers out there, this download is worthwhile so your web pages, which work fine in Safari and Firefox, can also be tweaked to work on IE. Ies4osx also allows you to install multiple versions of IE, from IE 5 to IE 7. Overall for web designers, it’s not a bad idea to grab ies4osx.

Microsoft’s long in the making Office 2008 suite has been previewed a little bit more on the Microsoft site, and there are some new features that have not yet been seen. One of these is iPod and iPhone integration with Powerpoint, for easy sharing of presentations using the photo viewer. Also announced is compatibility with the Apple Remote, and other features, all of which can be viewed here.

Aspyr, primary porter of popular PC games to the Mac, has announced that the ported version of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock will be coming to the Mac December 10th. No word on system requirements yet, though I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the best features are Leopard only.

The game will come with a USB-operated guitar controller, similar to the ones used for other systems. The price has not yet been announced either. Is anyone planning on purchasing it?

Update: The article has hit the front page of the Apple section of Digg, and along with that a lot of new information from assorted people has come in.

Digg, the popular social news website, is full of good Apple stories that are just waiting to be covered. Some of them are informational, but others, like this one, are just funny.

Billy at An Error Occurred While Processing This Directive had the interesting experience of wandering into his local Apple Store in NYC at 3 A.M. Of course, at 3 in the morning, there’s bound to be some strange people wandering about (speculation - Windows users dissatisfied with Vista).

Read the full story here: Link

The Digital Lifestyle, a “24-hour video coverage site of Apple News, Rumors, and lifestyle”, as it is described on the site, is a purported online channel that is exclusively Apple-related.

So far, I’m not impressed with the video quality. When I first “tuned” into it, as they would say on the website, I was treated to a mock iPod commercial of Steve Ballmer dancing around with his Zune. Note, this was during a segment of “funny examples of Mac commercials being made fun of”, but still, I was expecting something more useful, such as the Quick Look tutorial later shown during the hour. Apparently, according to the website, they only have two actual shows, those being “Gary’s Garage”, a show about vintage technology, and “root access”, a show featuring an former Apple Genius. The site also has links to popular podcasts such as Webb Alert, featuring Morgan Webb, and CommandN, featuring a variety of hosts.

TDL has the potential to be something great, but for now, I’m not entirely impressed. If anything, it could have the potential to at least be a repository of Jobs’ keynotes.

Panic, the company behind brilliant apps such as Transmit, Coda, and Unison, have updated their popular icon organization and customization tool CandyBar to version 3.0. With the new update, there are many added features that make CandyBar an amazing and fun experience to use. First off, CandyBar 3.0 is compatible with 10.5 Leopard, so for those who don’t like the new icons for Leopard, you can customize them as well as the Dock, just as you did with Tiger. CandyBar also has a new UI, making it easier to browse through the icons you’ve downloaded. Along the same lines, iContainers, the standard for icon sets, can now be used with Quick Look, for simple icon viewing. All the icons are now 512×512 also.

CandyBar 3 is shareware, and is limited to 15 days and 250 icons. It can be purchased for $30 a copy, or $19-$24 for an upgrade (see page.

For those of us who follow Mac news religiously, you may have seem the various reports of ways to change your Dock (in Leopard, to be exact). Most of these require going into the App’s file contents and using Terminal to change things, and overall it’s just complicated. But for those of you who want to be able to change their Dock, a new app by Whimsically Plucky Software called DockChanger offers the ability to change your Dock theme instantly, without any file managing or Terminal config. It also comes with 90 themes built-in, and the option to download a new set of themes each month. DockChanger is this week’s App of the Week at Apple Reporter.

DockChanger is shareware, 10 Dock changes for free then $10 for no restrictions.

Inquisitor, the popular search enhancement tool for Safari, has been updated to version 3.0, build 50, and is now usable on Leopard. Because earlier versions of Inquisitor made use of the InputManager folder which is no longer available in Leopard, it has taken some time for it to be updated.

Inquisitor, as previously mentioned, enhances your search bar on Safari and auto-completes the phrases and offers suggestions. This is useful in many different ways, as you can imagine, and follows the same lines as Quicksilver in terms of time reduction and increase of productivity.

Download is available here (download will start upon opening link)

Apple has posted their Black Friday deals for this year up on the Apple Store. While there are no extravagant deals on the expensive items, there are many small price cuts that are sure to appeal to a variety of shoppers.

Here’s a list of some of the most important cuts (note: these are not all of them):

• Macbook, save up to $101, now from $1048
• iMac, save up to $101, now from $1148
• Apple Bluetooth Headset, save up to $21, now from $108
• iPod Nano, save $11, now from $138
• iPod Shuffle, save $11, now from $68
• iPod Classic, save $31, now from $228
• $100 off Office 2004 with mail-in rebate, and with purchase, only a $6.95 upgrade fee to Office 2008

For all the great deals, either visit the Apple Store today, or download this simple image containing all the deals below.

Maclife has a great post showing three art designers’ sample ideas for iLife ‘09 packaging. While these are all speculation, they are similar to the Apple design and aesthetic appeal. Check out the post on Maclife for more info, but pics are below.

A common theme in all of these packaging ideas is that they are environmentally friendly. Hopefully this will become a common idea throughout Apple and other companies’ products.

After a series of power outages in the Northwest, my Macbook Pro was left a little messed up. By messed up, I mean that it wouldn’t turn on unless it was plugged in via Magsafe adapter. Realizing that this, combined with the broken fan that had been ailing my Macbook for the 10 months I’ve owned it, probably warranted a call to Apple support, I promptly began my phone call into 1-800-MYA-PPLE. The first thing I noticed was that instead of using the standard “Press 1 for etc., two for etc.,) I was told to say the name of my product. “Macbook Pro” elicited the “Sorry, what did you say?” response. Obviously, they aren’t using the same speech recognition as their operating systems. After about 5 minutes of navigating their automated systems, I was put on hold, with an estimated 15 minutes of wait time. After 25 minutes of horrible waiting music (think Nickelback and fake Oasis), I was connected to an Apple Customer support technician.

Being a 14-year old kid, mostly on customer service lines I am treated like an idiot. I was used to this, even though it infuriates me. For the first time I can remember, I was treated like I should be: like any other Apple customer. The two problems with my MBP were promptly addressed, and he promised a package for me to return my Macbook Pro back to them with in less than two days. The box came today, almost 48 hours since I hung up with them. This is how customer service should be, I have now decided. Kudos to Apple for their amazing customer support, and kudos for helping a broke teenager repair his Macbook Pro for absolutely free. Anyone else have any other Tech Support experience they want to share?

As every Mac user has probably realized, the Dock is probably the most used part of your Desktop during your daily computer use. Everyone has different docks, some with apps that I’ve probably never even heard of. But I thought I would post my dock, and I would hope that everyone else would do the same. If it’s really cool, maybe I can add it to the post so other people can see it too.

Apps in order: Finder, Safari, Mail, iTunes, iPhoto, Adium, iChat, Colloquy, Address Book, Coda, Pages, Photoshop, Netnewswire Lite, Marsedit, Final Cut Express HD, and then my stacks: Downloads, and my Home folder, and then of course, the Trash.

Don’t just look at this and say, oh that’s cool looking. Use this as a forum to share your favorite Mac apps with other people, maybe even something that will save someone an hour of their time everyday. The choice is yours, whether to participate or not.

The Online Apple Store for Mexico has now been added to the Apple website. For those in Mexico who want to get their iPod or Mac fix, it’s now easier than ever. Apparently they are also offering prizes for potential shoppers, specifically a Macbook everyday and an iPod Nano each hour. Any Spanish-speaking readers want to translate?

Here at Apple Reporter, we’re going to start a new segment called App of the Week. Each week, I’m going to outline a new application that you should check out for yourself. Whether it’s cool looking, convenient, or something you never thought you could do with your Mac, there are many apps out there that everyone could use on their Mac. The first of these is called Adium.

Adium is a chat program that was first developed in 2001 by college student Adam Iser. Since then, it has had a long and confusing developing cycle, involving name changes and version number mix-ups. As of this writing, Adium is at version 1.1.4, and is currently the most popular IM solution for Mac OS X. While there is virtually nothing wrong with it, one frequently requested feature is A/V chat, which is being worked on as I write this. Adium offers almost complete customization, from message styles to contact list windows, dock icons to sound sets. It is also open source, and completely free. Is there anything wrong with it?

Adium is available for download here.

This is what Adium looks like on my computer.