Category Archives: Macintosh

Presenteeism

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For a very long time I’ve noticed something very peculiar about my job. I like to call it the “Cardboard Standee Effect”. When my clients run into trouble using their technology they do their level best to resolve the issue before contacting me, as is what anyone would usually do, but then they give up. They contact me and ask me to either control their workstation or come out to visit them. I walk in, make my greeting and ask what the trouble is and then have them do the very exact thing they did before, which didn’t work for them, and then it works and they are utterly flummoxed.

I’ve mused in the past that the office is populated with invisible naughty gremlins that love to cause mischief. For some reason, in this imaginary framework, I like to think that I scare them off. All I have to do is walk in and arguably, that’s enough for all the technology to suddenly start working like it’s designed to.

On a more serious note, it occurs to me that each one of us has a unique perception of the world. Some males are colorblind while I am not. This sort of example may be a part of what this is all about. Perhaps my presence, my observation of the situation causes a change somehow in how things turn out. There is a lot of deep explorations one could take involving things like a Schrödinger wave collapse which might also contribute to the explanation of this. That my presence, my observation of the situation is really all that is needed to pin down the randomness in these kinds of situations.

Depending on my mood I switch between these two senses, the fantastical and the scientific. I think the world is rich enough to hold both at the same time without any trouble and it certainly does make for some easy laughs – at least for me. My coworkers may feel otherwise, but so far nobody has tried to clasp me in manacles and pin me to one place – yet. 🙂

Workflow with Pocket

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I have recently fallen into a peculiar workflow arrangement between various social networking applications and Read It Later’s Pocket application. When I am following the flow of status updates from my Twitter stream I prefer to stay in-the-moment with the stream and select interesting-looking tweets that have links attached to them, but instead of actually following them in a browser, I send them to Pocket. My preferred Twitter application, TweetBot makes this as easy as tap and select “Send to Pocket” with a happy little sound confirming that my action worked. This really works well for me and doing this has spread beyond the confines of Twitter out to Facebook – however there is no convenient interface between Facebook status posts and Pocket so the workflow is a little more convoluted. I command-click on perhaps-interesting Facebook posts and this opens them up in tabs. Then I switch to the tab, click the Pocket extension, send the link to Pocket and close the tab. I don’t really want to see the links right now, I’d rather send them all off to Pocket and then queue them up that way.

Another really neat web tool that I’ve fallen in love with is IFTTT.com. This site allows you to connect a huge collection of services to their site and then construct “If This Then That” rules. This has actually simplified the Twitter-to-Pocket interface, in so far that if I like a Tweet then that is plucked by IFTTT and sent off to my Pocket automatically. This particular bit does muddy the waters between TweetBot and Twitter itself, but it’s not really a problem, just a build-up of near-miss convenience. IFTTT in this arrangement shines when it comes to Google Reader. I have subscribed to quite a lot of RSS and ATOM feeds from various sites and manage them all in Google Reader. If I “star” something in Google Reader, then IFTTT notices and copies that entry to my Pocket for later reading. As I am quite fond of having my cake and eating it too I’m always on the lookout for multi-product synergy and convenience. I really do not like Google Reader’s web interface, in fact, I really don’t like many “Web Interfaces” for products and would prefer the gilded cage of specialized client software instead. So there is a nice synergy between Reeder on my Mac computers which presents my Google Reader contents in a visually appealing way as well as Flipboard, which is the preferred way to view Google Reader on my iPad. By using IFTTT as the middleman-behind-the-scenes I can funnel all the stories that catch my interest and collect them right into Pocket.

All of these things can also be done with Instapaper and I was an ardent fan of Instapaper for a very long while, but I’ve switched over to Pocket. I still regard Marco Arment and his product to be very good, but for me personally I found that Instapaper on my 1st Generation iPad would jettison too much for my liking. It wasn’t as much a problem with Instapaper as it was the iPad itself. Embarrassingly outclassed by the applications that I was trying to force on it. I’d be able to stand by this, but Instapaper on my 3rd Generation iPad also jettisoned. I didn’t really want to bother the author with the yackety-schmackety bug reports and Pocket edged out Instapaper when it came to displaying video and audio media. The core functions between the two are quite similar and the only other small feature that pushed me over to Pocket was the ability to search on my Pocket list and perform actions on multiple items. I have no doubt that Instapaper will catch up and may already have caught up. The money I spent on Instapaper was money well-spent and I would suggest that people look at both apps before deciding for themselves.

So back to the workflow, this is how I naturally started navigating my social network stream of information. In a way, I follow sources which curate the noise of Reddit and other news aggregators into categories that I find most interesting and then I self-curate the longer pieces into Pocket for later consumption. As I used this workflow it occurred to me that what was happening was an emergent stratification of curation. Living generates a noisy foam of information, which crashes on the coral reefs of StumbleUpon, Reddit, Engadget, HuffPo and the like. Information seagulls, like @geekami (for example) fly over these coral reefs of information and pluck out the shiniest bits, linking them to tweets and shipping them out. Then I come along and refine that for things I really find interesting and all of this ends up crashing into Pocket. Arguably, Pocket is the terminal for all this curation, but it doesn’t have to be. I could (but I don’t) cross-link Pocket and Buffer using IFTTT and regenerating a curated flow of information turning me into an information seagull. I suppose I don’t follow that path because I already have enough to do as it is, reading, comics, FOMO, work, gym… the list goes on and on.

For all the apps and people I mentioned in this blog entry, I really do recommend that you Google them and see if any of this fits in your life as it did mine. If It works for you, or you found a better way of managing this flow of information foam, please comment with your workflow description. Just more curation. Lexicographers and Encyclopedists eat your heart out. 😉

Confusing Worthless Passbook

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Apple has stepped in it quite badly when it comes to their Passbook app. It comes down to which metaphor they’d like to use and please, stick to whichever it is. I write specifically after updating my Starbucks app on my iPhone and the app asked if I wanted to add a card to my Passbook. So far my understanding of Passbook was that there was a stump-app which led you to the App Store to “buy” apps for different companies, so Target, Walgreens, that sort of thing and that those “Apps” were to be eventually organized in a Passbook folder.

So I start the Starbucks app, and it prompts me to add a Passbook card, so I figure there will be another app icon called “Starbucks” that I can put in the folder with all the other unused “Passbook” apps that I don’t use. And there is nothing. Huh. So I looked at the app for a while and couldn’t find where it put my Passbook “App” icon. I figured it must have been broken. That the download was buggy or broken. I completely ignored the Passbook app itself, because it was just a stump, why the hell would I use it again? It led to the App Store and that was how you entered the App Store if you wanted to waste time screwing around with Passbook bullshit. So I tapped on the app expecting to see the lame text and the link to the App Store, and there was my Starbucks Passbook card. As an added bit of huh, the link to the App Store is gone. So, okay. No more Passbook apps then for me, which I guess is fine.

It’s this really loopy “It’s an app” versus “it’s a card” metaphor that I’m griping at. It could have been more elegant, as for usefulness, eh. I don’t think of my phone when it comes to buying things. Phones don’t do that sort of thing, except now they do.

When it comes to Starbucks, we have a host of other problems that are going to pop up. I can’t use my Starbucks card at Barnes & Noble because it’s not a true Starbucks store, it’s B&N’s Cafe that serves Starbucks products. How many people will try to use their Starbucks card or this Passbook app? They’ll get irritated and be disinclined to use Passbook again. I know that feeling because I tried to use my Starbucks app at a Starbucks shop in McCormick Place in Chicago and was told they only accept cash or credit cards. That was the last time I used my Starbucks app except for just this morning to engage with this whole Passbook bullshit. So, even if you walk into a store that sells Starbucks, is a Starbucks, they may or may not use what you have. So having your phone out and ready to go and make things speedy utterly fails and you walk away without what you wanted, angry at the embarrassment. Then what are you supposed to do about some of those Starbucks that have drive-thru service? Do you honestly think people will hand their iPhones to a clerk for scanning? How stupid do you have to be to hand your expensive iPhone to anyone else? What if a compromising text pops up while they are scanning your iPhone? What then? I know why Apple would like Passbook to be useful and I’m all for new ways of addressing old problems, but there has to be a better way to do it. I suppose this really would only work well if you walked up to a Starbucks store, and there was some icon stating that the Passbook card would be accepted for purchases on the premises, then maybe then. But at that point how irritated would you be that you had to go hunting and searching for it? Then would you really even be interested in buying anything or just skipping it altogether?

So, the worthless Target and Walgreens apps, the weird App/Card thing with Starbucks, and how you can’t even be sure that any of it would work leads me to think that this is all just so much DOA technology. You aren’t going to use it because it’s too much bother. I can’t wait until some airline thinks they can stuff a boarding pass into this thing. Do you seriously think that a thieving TSA drone will give you back your iPhone? They’ll hand you back your Photo ID and pocket your phone. But that touches on the criminals that work for the TSA, but it’s still a REALLY BAD IDEA. Perhaps there will be something eventually that makes Passbook worth anyones time and trouble. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Barnes & Noble's Nook HD+ Is Clever

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Barnes & Noble just sent an email out announcing their two new tablets: The Nook HD and Nook HD+.

Previously to this release I was discussing with my partner, who works for Barnes & Noble ways that B&N could compete with Amazon and Apple in the tablet space. There was a concern that B&N had lost traction and that the company was going to spiral out of control and crash, eventually. These tablets have just eliminated a good portion of that worry.

For full disclosure, I came across a rather pleasant and unexpected windfall in regards to money and I’ve been kvetching about the poor performance of my 1st edition iPad and in a way, Apple has sent a clear message that they regard the device as dead because they are no longer writing software updates for it. I went ahead and purchased an iPad 3 and I’ve been enjoying it quite a lot.

This news from B&N is very interesting to me as this new device has several key areas that put up more bang-for-less-money. The first surprise is the processing speed of the Nook HD+ in comparison with the iPad 3. 1.5GHz dual-core versus 1GHz dual-core. Ever since 2003 when the world pretty much stopped worrying and loved the bomb that is processor speed ratings this distinction isn’t as compelling as it appears on paper. The two units have different core technologies, the iPad has an A5X processor and the Nook HD+ has an OMAP 4470 processor. We have seen from manufacturers like HTC and Samsung that even when you pour huge muscular processors into devices to compete, that if the experience of the user isn’t done correctly then all the computing horsepower in the world means very little. It’s not about the muscles, it’s about the refinement of the motor cortex. It isn’t how strong you are, it’s your dexterity – at least in the phone and tablet space. I do hand it to B&N when it comes to pumping numbers and keeping costs suppressed – that’s a win in their column.

The second surprise, and I’ve been half expecting someone to notice this glaring deficit in tablet OS design comes down to what I believe to be Barnes & Noble’s knife-held-confidently-behind-its-back killer feature. Barnes & Noble is going to bring profile control to the tablet space. This casts a huge pall over both Amazon and Apple devices and redefines a tablet to be a multiuser device. It is exceptionally clever for Barnes & Noble to do this because it draws a clear bead of connection from everyone’s computer experience (where you have an account and profile) off to your device. When it comes to Apple, they rejected this model and regard a device to be a one-person-only deal, which has been a weakness in the iOS OS design. Apple may be too far along to make such a fundamental change to iOS so we may see the creation of a new track of tablet technology. Is a tablet multiuser or single-user? By being multi-user, and if B&N does it elegantly, it can cast B&N in a family friendly light, more than an Amazon or Apple product because one relatively inexpensive device can serve an entire family. Instead of the onerous cost of a Kindle or iPad for each person, because each device is single-user, one Nook HD+ can be used by different members of a family without having to worry about security, privacy, preference or profile leakages between people. It’s a failure of the Apple iOS OS and here is why: When I come across another persons iOS device, I am utterly lost – I don’t know their preferences, their security settings, where they have placed icons, and I find myself having to relegate to the search screen to even find where they put the ubiquitous “Settings” icon. If B&N does profiles elegantly, this will be a non-issue. Rendered moot because each person has their own settings that they are used to, making the confusion evaporate.

I think that B&N will pursue a marketing strategy that elevates the personal touch and the family friendliness of their Nook HD and Nook HD+ devices. That will be key, with profiles, the ability to use LendMe to share books, and their admittedly well-done “Parent recording storybooks for their children” technology they will position themselves to be “The Booksellers who care about you and your family” and they will occupy a third niche in this space. The first niche is the deep-discount one, that’s occupied by Amazon. The second niche is the elegance-at-all-costs one, which is occupied by Apple – and then last but certainly not least, the third niche which is the Friends-Family-Kids one, which is going to be Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

This niche may be the best hope for Barnes & Noble to retain their 21st century relevance.  They should maintain their “Brick and Mortar” presence and cater their stores to being a place where you feel welcome, with friendly staff and a coffeehouse/library atmosphere. The elevator sales-pitch is that B&N is more personable and immediate than Amazon could ever hope of being – you don’t know Jack at Amazon, but you know Jack at B&N. B&N’s approach to kids and family with their very deep roots set throughout America means they have already beat Apple to the market in terms of the personal touch. Yes, Apple has the Genius Bar and yes they are friendly geeks, but you don’t go to a Genius Bar to find out about Apps and Woodworking! You can only do that at a Barnes & Noble!

The real competition isn’t between B&N and Apple anyhow, since Apple touches B&N only in this one market-space. The real competition here is between Amazon and B&N. It’ll be an interesting evolution to say the least – which do people prefer more? The cold, impersonal, sterile deep-discount algorithms of Amazon or the instant-gratification, warm, personal, and direct approach of Barnes & Noble Booksellers? It may simply come down to how people refer to these two competitors. You USE Amazon and you VISIT Barnes & Noble Booksellers. That right there is something that Jeff Bezos can never buy himself into, but B&N already exists to cater to. Which do you value, the impersonal or the personal?

Barnes & Noble Booksellers may have just secured their direct relevancy in the market for the next decade with these two new devices. The proof is in the pudding of course, these devices, once in the stores, will be the final arbiter on the survivability of B&N in the tablet market space.

 

Out of Place

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So when I walked into the local asian food market I definitely felt a sense of being a stranger in a strange land. I was clearly the tallest person in the market, as I walked around I realized that I couldn’t recognize a single thing on any of the packages. I was after ramen noodles and I didn’t think they would be too hard to find. After 15 minutes of wandering around the store I eventually did discover where the noodles were. What I found in the market that surprised me was that everything came in very strange sizes, initially it was all 11.3 ounces, so I originally thought that the issue was that they came in different metric values that made sense. After looking at the products I discovered that the metric values weren’t correct either, they were just very strange.

What added to my awkward feelings were that the market pleasantly requested that customers only purchase in cash. I did not have a problem with this, however I had to visit the bank first to get out $20, then make my purchase, then return to the bank and deposit cash. It wasn’t unpleasant as the bank was just around the corner from the market however it was a little funny.

As I drove off I realized that I could have just gone to Meijers markets instead and got what I was after all along. Now I don’t have any problem with patronizing the asian market however it would’ve been more convenient to visit Meijers and I could’ve saved the run around back and forth to the bank.

The next time I need a very special ingredient, of course I will go to the Asian food market for this purchase. For regular stuff I’ll just go to Meijers.

Special Note: This blog entry was 99% dictated using Apple’s newest OSX, Mountain Lion. I think it did a pretty good job. The only thing it didn’t get was special terms like “Meijers”.

First Look at Mountain Lion OSX for Macintosh

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I purchased and downloaded the newest version of Macintosh OSX codenamed Mountain Lion. The download took a brief amount of time and once established I didn’t have a problem handling it. The first step was creating an independent system installer using a USB memory stick. I found some instructions that I remembered from when I did this with OSX Lion and the instructions worked well, up to a point. I was able to find the InstallESD.dmg file and I set up my 16GB memory stick with the proper format settings, specifically Mac HFS File System with Journaling and GUID partition map. The first issue I ran into was a strange memory error, that while restoring the dmg file to the USB memory stick, after the Mac was done really, in the verification step it failed with this odd arcane “cannot allocate memory” error. I went immediately to Google to look and found that if I mount the InstallESD.dmg file first, that *that* is the magic bullet. Turns out, it was.

Now that I have Mountain Lion on a USB memory stick I got a stock 24” iMac out of storage and set it up. Plugged the USB memory stick in, then the mouse and keyboard, main power, and while holding down the option key, turned it on. Everything worked as I expected it to! So far so good.

Once the system was up and running and in setup it prompted me to connect to a Wifi system, which was not a problem since I share Wifi from my primary work iMac (long story for another day) and it seemed satisfied. Then I ran into my first problem with Mountain Lion. During initial system setup I could not successfully log into any Apple ID. My personal one, or the one for work, either one didn’t work. The system allows you to continue without it and so that’s exactly what I did. Once I moved on to setting the time zone, this also failed, but I suspect it has everything to do with my shared Wifi coming from my Snow Leopard iMac and not something endemic to Mountain Lion. Instead of Mountain Lion successfully setting the time zone by it’s location I set it by hand. Not really a problem.

Once I got the system up and running, idle at the desktop everything was as it should be. My next step was to try to connect my test iMac up to my Apple ID. So logically I went first for System Preferences, then to Accounts, and there set my Apple ID. I was half hoping that setting it there would have had a chain reaction and set it everywhere else, but that didn’t happen. I noticed that iCloud wasn’t set up properly, so I found it in System Preferences, it wasn’t a problem, just a very weak annoyance. Then I tried the Mac App Store, had to do it again, same for iTunes. The only real irk that upset me was fiddling around with “Back To My Mac” feature which asked me to turn on sharing with a button that lead to the sharing panel. I was lost in there (no, not really, but I was in the headspace of an end-user) and it took me a while to notice that Apple did tell you where to go to set things up, so my one tweet about this being a problem is wrong, I was just hasty. I must say that much of this I will pin on me being in the “end user headspace” and not as an Admin, which I would have been much more careful and slow with in my approach to Mountain Lion. If you read and aren’t hasty, this isn’t a problem.

Every app that I’ve used worked well, some needed Java to be installed but the OS prompted to fetch it and install it for me without a problem so that was fine. Of the apps that work that I’ve tested, at least in that they open up are:

* Aqua Data Studio 11.0
* Dropbox
* iSquint
* KompoZer
* MarsEdit
* Miro Video Converter
* MPlayerX
* Music Manager (Google Cloud)
* OpenOffice.org
* Photo Wrangler 2.1
* Picasa (needed update)
* Postbox
* Seashore
* Spotify (needed update)
* The Unarchiver
* Transmission
* VLC
* What’s Keeping Me?
* XTabulator
* Zipeg

Of course, all the apps from the Mac App Store I assume work well. Dropbox was a non-issue, 1Password was smooth-as-glass, as I expected. But what really surprised me was Postbox. I recently fled Sparrow as an email client when they announced that Google was acquiring them. Postbox was my alternative. When I copied over Postbox and started it for the first time it offered to collect the settings form Mail.app which I didn’t think anything of and let it go ahead. Postbox seamlessly captured my iCloud email account and after I typed in my Apple ID password, I was up and running! For some strange reason, that really pleased me.

So, what is next? So far everything seems to test fine in Mountain Lion. There are some goobers from Lion that I still need to work out – such as secondary monitors in full screen mode being stupid, that sort of thing, and also to see if VirtualBox will work, but for the most part I’m satisfied that this new OS is exactly as Apple bills it, and they have done a very good job. There are some small irky bits and on my Twitter I’m sure it came across as being ranting-and-raving, but actually it’s quite good.

Next steps at work are tallying up all the people interested in Mountain Lion and figuring out how we’re to pay Apple for the licenses, then helping everyone set up Apple ID’s on their own. There is going to be a headache with all these new very independent and unmanaged Apple ID’s floating around in space, but if you want the Bright and Shiny you have to swallow a seed or two.

He Who Integrates, Wins!

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Google has done it. They have released Google Chrome for iOS and updated Google Chrome for Mac OSX. I have downloaded Chrome onto my iPhone, which of course pushed an identical copy onto my iPad. Then I started Google Chrome on my Macbook and updated that as well, to revision 20.

Google Chrome is faster than Safari when browsing my SupportPress site, that’s a really neat feeling to see it zoom along. So, did I switch? Yes. All my devices synchronized for tabs and bookmarks and passwords? You bet your sweet bippy! I’m a capricious user, Firefox often times pisses me off, Safari sometimes does, and even Chrome pisses me off from time to time. But I’m willing to take my lumps if I can have a synchronized centralized clouded infrastructure tying all my devices together. Safari isn’t it, but Google may win because their technology wins.

So far, Google Chrome on iOS and Google Chrome on my MacBook Pro may win my personal and professional recommendation. But if you are using browsers of your choice, don’t switch yet. These Google technologies are still a little raw, especially on iOS. Only time will tell, like most things.

Losing Social Context

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I’m an avid user of social networking, picking up stories from Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. These services all have certain ways to mark some sort of favorite status, liking, favorite’ing a tweet, +1’ing a G+ entry, that sort of thing. On its own it’s effective for those services however I’ve found that it just really isn’t enough for me.

To bridge the gap, between seeing something that piques my interest and remembering it for later used to be served by browser bookmarks, but these are inconvenient because they languish on only one machine and can’t be accessible on every device that I own. I was for a time a user of Delicious, but since it was bought out by Yahoo and then imperiled by Yahoo in a mystery state somewhere between being alive and dead I’ve given up on that as well. Another bookmarking service that I use is Marco Arment’s Instapaper which satisfies a lot of the needs that I have – it works on every device I use and it’s ubiquitous enough to become the tool of choice for me when it comes to a bookmarking service.

There is a problem with Instapaper however. It comes down to context. When I’m on Twitter I see a link from @gadgetfreaks, for example, and I send the link to Instapaper so I can read it later. I prefer the information flow from Twitter to be regular and smooth, dancing from item to item I never really stop to actually browse any of the links presented to me on Twitter unless they are in my “core” group of people who I follow on Twitter. On Twitter it’s really a quick browse with small dwells to retweet, send links to Instapaper, or very rarely browse right from Twitter off a link shared by someone I follow. So, after a while of browsing the stream from Twitter my Instapaper queue becomes weighty and I then use the Instapaper site, the Instapaper app, or “ReadNow” app on my MacBook to go back to the links that I’ve sent to Instapaper to read later, or, read now.

While I’m browsing my Instapaper queue I then run into a crisis, sometimes, and this crisis is one of context. I have an entry in my Instapaper but I have no idea what it is in reference to and there isn’t any convenient way that I can think of to chew backwards through the Twitter stream to rescue the flavor text that was near the link to rescue some semblance of a context. So these links in my Instapaper, without context, are on at least some small way at least browsable, but without the surrounding context the links are more chaff than wheat. So I browse the links, I don’t get why I saved it, and then just dump the link out of Instapaper.

Is it a problem? No, not in any appreciable way. But it would be an interesting expansion on the Instapaper design to have the functionality that sends the link to Instapaper also grab the nearby text from Twitter and have a foldaway area  where you can unpack the context and regain it, so the article you saved in Instapaper makes sense.

Dell Exec: The iPad Is Too ‘Shiny’ For Business | Cult of Mac

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Dell Exec: The iPad Is Too ‘Shiny’ For Business | Cult of Mac.

I read this article and found myself agreeing wholeheartedly. Here where I work we’ve got many iOS devices and they are all working quite well. That Dell has the temerity to criticize iOS devices in the enterprise setting really strikes me as sour grapes that their stupid Streak tablet failed to catch hold. Then again, it was trying to use Windows on a tablet, which I can pretty much guarantee is going to flame out before it even gets going.

The article states that the fellow from Dell Australia went so far as to claim that it would put a burden on the IT infrastructure. I call bullshit on that. I’ve been working with a gaggle of iPhones and iPads and frankly, I’ve never had one person come to me seeking support for their iPads, mostly because the devices are built that well. Now perhaps they are all quietly suffering in silence, but I think it has more to do with how well the devices are constructed and how integrated the entire experience is. The hardware and the OS work so tightly with each other that there is little room for bugs to rear their ugly heads.

SupportPress

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I just rolled SupportPress out to the rank and file at work. Or at least I thought I did. My day was going so well, so smoothly. I got my introduction email with graphics sent out (or so I thought) and I got all the invites shipped out as well. Everything was going just peachy – until I looked at the sent mail and noticed that when I sent the message by copying all the discrete addresses that only the first address took. So I didn’t send out any message at all!

To really get a grasp on how irritating this was, I couldn’t send a message to the LDAP alias that expands out to all the people I work with, the address is dar-staff@wmich.edu. The SMTP server at WMU was rejecting it out of hand. Turns out I figured out why – it was the screenshot graphics. That system they have rejects mail with pictures. So I had no choice but to copy down all the addresses from our Wiki and do it manually. Turns out when you copy that kind of information into Sparrow, it only looks at the first address and ignores everything else. It was my thinking that it would see the commas and figure out I was copying in 48 addresses. No, just one really long address.

When I noticed this, all I had was my iPhone and I was having lunch with Scott. I was cursing Webmail Plus and the LDAP directory for placing artificial limits on email and so I figured I could get the list of addresses and paste them into my iPhone and use the Mail app in my iPhone to do the heavy lifting. Turns out it suffered the same mental block, treating the addresses I pasted in as one giant address. So after lunch was over I was in my car trying to tap and copy one address at a time in. This is another bad idea because if you tap and don’t hold the iPhone thinks you want to email to just that one person and so dumps the draft you were working on and starts a new draft with an empty email. The forwarded bit with all the text and graphics? Lost. Three times lost. I was successful in the end, shipping my intro email out to all my coworkers despite all the technology surrounding me meant to make things easier.

Alls well that ends well, so we’re up online with SupportPress and I have to say that I am very happily surprised with what I see. Clients see a very simple version of the site and it’s compatible with every browser, every computer, including iPhone and iPad to boot! Now that I’ve let the genie out of the bottle it will be very interesting to see how it is received. There has been lots to say on that topic before, and in another post, a more private one, I’ll go further into the nitty gritty details.

So despite technological hurdles, I was able to get my automated help desk system off the ground and show it off to people. Monday is going to be a rip-roaring day, indeed!