It is with a great sigh of relief that I announce the likely end of my MacBook Pro saga.

As recently as a few weeks ago, I expected that the end of this saga would take the form of finding a buyer on Craigslist to take the thing off my hands, but events turned in a more positive direction as I patiently worked my way through the Apple support system.

Eventually I ended up in the hands of a thoughtful representative with a lot of discretion over how best to handle my situation. The amount of bad luck I had endured really accumulated over the past few months. The defects themselves. The repeated failures to fix them. The bad Apple store rep. The slightly mutilated MBP case. Oh, I might have forgotten to mention that. On my last repair shipment, the techies must have put it back together in a hurry, as they left a gap in the case where it meets the DVD-ROM area. I mentioned this in passing to one rep, where it was apparently added to my record.

Finally, after apparently reviewing the list of everything wrong with the Mac and my experiences so far with Apple, the representative offered to send me a replacement. I was wary, at first. Just go through this all again? I’d rather have somebody good at Apple take an honest look at it and replace the parts that are busted. But then I heard rumors of the new MacBook Pro logic board, and couldn’t help but hope that this meant a happy outcome was in sight. I asked my Apple representative if a replacement would be “fresh off the line.” I didn’t want some replacement from March or April, that happened to be sitting in some Cupertino stockpile (as if). He could only say that they tended to be shipped out as fast as they could be made. So I agreed – let’s spin the wheel.

The new MacBook Pro arrived this morning and what can I say? The thing is dead silent. You can trust me, I know what the freaking pain sounds like. Yes Virginia, there is a quiet MacBook Pro. Impressively, I could not even hear a noticeable sound difference with my ear pressed up to the machine while tweaking the slider on QuietMBP. Actually, after plugging the power in I can hear the slightest “sizzle” if I put my ear to the plug where it’s plugged in. And this might be only while it’s charging. Anyway I don’t think it’s loud enough for me to hear from any normal distance, and I bet this amount of sound is present in almost any laptop, ahem, notebook. So after months of negativity it feels good to return to my initial state of just being impressed with the MacBook Pro. Just about everything is “amazingly right.”

Even the surface temperature is slightly cooler than my old MBP. I’m transferring over from the old one right now, so both machines have been turned on the same length of time, and roughly (I assume) doing the same amount of activity. The old MBP’s “hottest spot” (above the function keys) is still so hot that I cannot leave my fingers there for more than a few seconds. The new one is still hot there, but I can leave my finger there indefinitely. Major improvement, even if ideally they could cool things down even more. To be honest, the heat is still frustrating, especially in the summer, but if it’s just the heat, then I’ll shut my whining mouth for a while.

I know at least some of you have been holding off on a new MacBook Pro because of things I’ve said about them here. I’m happy to have helped you avoid a costly and possibly frustrating mistake. But I don’t want Apple to lose customers, goodwill, or sales. I’m a stock holder, for crying out loud! Now that I can happily endorse this (please, nothing go wrong in the next few days), I say get out your credit card and join us!

Update: I’ve been using the new MBP for several hours and my inital impressions are holding up. It’s quiet as a mouse. I love it! But just to show that I’m not completely devoid of crankiness, I have two minor complaints. First, the space bar makes a slight squeaking noise every time I press it. This is definitely new, but it’s so much nicer than the whine. Maybe I can fix it with a little well-placed graphite or something. Second, the lid closes in a way such that unlatching it is slightly clunky. I have to sort of press the button in extra far to get it to pop open. Overall, very minor inconveniences. How minor? There’s no way in hell I’ll risk ruining the happy state of my MBP right now by bringing it in for these teeny issues.

Over the past several months I have been putting a lot of work into FlexTime, the project I first announced here back in late December.

The product has been massively (and sometimes drastically) improved since that time, and I’m happy to announce that a new public beta is available for your download, critique, and hopefully enjoyment:

Download FlexTime 1.0b5 (expires two weeks from today)

Note: FlexTime requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. FlexTime is a universal app.

What is FlexTime?

FlexTime is a generic timed routine scheduling application. Can you tell it’s hard for me to figure out how to summarize it in one sentence? Basically, it makes it easy for users to program complex time-sensitive scheduled activities, where it’s useful to be reminded at regular intervals that it’s time to “move along” to the next activity.

FlexTime turns your Mac into a hard-assed training coach for whatever it is that you do.

Examples of things you might use FlexTime for:

• Manage the work/play/break ratios for the time you spend at the computer.
• Practice a stretching or martial art regimen such as Yoga or Tai Chi.
• Set up a metronome for rhythmic exercises such as dance or music.
• Arrange for scripts to be run at regular intervals throughout the day.
• Just about anything that follows a schedule!

I’d love to get feedback about all aspects of the application. For the most part the UI is pretty fixed for the 1.0 release, but future enhancements will undoubtedly bring changes.

Most of all I’d love to hear about any uses of FlexTime you come up with that aren’t on my list! I think the success or failure of this product will be in finding specific uses that resonate with the market. It’s possible the market will reject it for its generic-ness. In other words, a customer who might buy “Yoga Stretcher” could just walk right past FlexTime. But I didn’t want to sell a yoga app at the expense of being useful for hundreds or thousands of other people with different interests.

Caveats

This is a beta release and therefore I have a list of caveats. These basically correspond to the “still needs to get done” list in my project. Hopefully mentioning these here will head off criticism of some of these shortcomings:

• Documentation is not written yet. Yeah – it should have been done incrementally. I’m bad!
• Scripting support is not complete. Most of FlexTime’s guts are accessible via AppleScript, but I’ve hit a stumbling block on implementing access to setting the cues via scripting. The difficulties lie in the generic, untyped nature of the cue type. It can be just about anything, depending on the type of cue handler.
• Per-document UI dimensions are not saved with document. This means if you set up a FlexTime routine’s window size and table columns to look just perfect, it will look crappy again when you reopen it.
• Document format still in flux. I’m still tweaking the document format, but I’m leaving in “upgrade” mechanisms for all beta releases. With the public 1.0 release, I will maintain all of those upgrade mechanisms, but afterward they will be stripped out. This is just advance warning that if you use FlexTime now, be sure to open and save any important documents once 1.0 comes out. That will be the “official format” from that point forward.
• Document icon is generic. For 1.0 I will make a “branded” document icon.

The Tough Love of 1.0

In whittling down the feature list of this 1.0 release, I had to make a lot of tough choices. Lots of “would be cool” things are not present, though planned for a future release (assuming anybody likes the product). So perhaps to tease you and perhaps to head off another category of feedback, here is a list of where I see the product going post-1.0:

• Multiple cues at once. I know it’s very frustrating that you can’t, for instance, both display a sound and show a message at the same instance. To some extent this can be “hacked” in 1.0 by using “0 seconds” long activities, but it’s definitely at the top of the list for future improvement. This is mainly blocked now by the disruption to the UI that such a feature would cause.
• Export to iTunes. I’d really like to be able to take FlexTime’s audio (and perhaps visual) cues “on the road,” by sending the output to a media file that iTunes can understand and pop onto your iPod.
• More cue types. FlexTime 1.0 supports a number of very useful cue types, but the possibilities here are endless.
• Growl integration. FlexTime includes a light-weight “show text message” functionality, but I’m sure some users will appreciate a feature that forwards such requests on to Growl.
• Printing support. By printing a pretty view of the entire routine schedule, FlexTime could be useful in scenarios where not everybody being cued has access to the video screen.

One Last Question

Before I leave you to try out the program, and open the floodgates for criticism, let me ask one question: What do you think of the word “cue?” Should it be something else instead, such as “action” or “event?” This word choice is a very tough one for me and I’m very open to feedback (reasoned, preferably!).

Thanks for trying FlexTime!

One of the rumors buzzing around the internet this past week is that Microsoft is working on a tough competitor to the iPod. Oooh! Shiver me timbers! The chances of Microsoft taking Apple down in the portable music arena are so miniscule that even John C. Dvorak thinks it’s impossible.

I heard him say so on today’s episode of This Week in Tech, one of the very best (and most popular) podcasts available. Another purported impossibility had to do with associated rumors that Microsoft was planning some kind of “buyback” plan for iTunes customers. The idea is that as a lure to switch to their service, Microsoft will offer to give you for free Windows Media versions of some number of songs from your existing iTunes library. The consensus seemed to be skepticism that Microsoft could even figure out which songs were the ones you had bought.

What immediately came to mind for me was the AppleScript interface to iTunes which, while pretty weak in some regards, still exposes quite a bit of information about the users’s music library. I was surprised the idea didn’t occur to host Leo Laporte, because I’ve heard him express a fairly high level of knowledge about AppleScript in the past. As a proof of concept, I’ve put together a simple script application. You Own It presents a list of all the purchased music from your library. If you’re at all concerned, or just curious, about what it does, just open it with Script Editor and read the script code yourself.

The crux of this functionality is based on a single iTunes AppleScript request

I’m sure there are some loose ends here, but if Microsoft really wants to do this, it won’t be hard for them to do it right, or at least 95% right. Anyway, if they’re going to be giving out free songs, chances are they don’t really care if the songs are actually ones you bought from iTunes, or not.

Chances are if you’re reading this blog you’ve heard of Technorati, the leading service for “adding up all the links” to the millions of blogs in the world.

There’s a mass joke of referring to the site as “Egorati” which is totally true and totally funny. Basically, it becomes addictive to go look at your own listing on the site and see whether your “rank” has gone up or down. I don’t really need it to see who’s linking to me, because I use Mint and that tends to catch things a lot more thoroughly and quickly than Technorati. But I still want to see my ranking!

The ranking has more than just ego-stimulation purpose. It helps you to get more readers who are looking for what you happen to be blogging about. While my ranking will never put me in the Top 100, there are many categories for which a relatively modest ranking will earn you a top billing for the category. So while I may not make it to the Top 5 Apple Blogs with John Gruber and Merlin Mann, there are other categories where I should be able to stand out a little bit.

Take for example the Top Cocoa Blogs. There are some real recognizable names in there. Brent Simmons and Steven Frank lead the category, but in contrast to the astronomical linkage numbers of Daring Fireball or 43 Folders, their blogs are actually “within my reach,” at least in terms of Technorati ranking. While I am nowhere near as popular or significant as either of those two men, my numbers add up. Even by Technorati’s current measurement, I should come in at third place in the Cocoa rankings, but I don’t show up at all. Why?

My entire Technorati existence has been plagued with bugs from day one.

Take a look again at my page, and you’ll see that Technorati thinks my blog hasn’t been updated in 78 days. This is in spite of repeated attempts to “ping” them with news of my changes. The bugs are deeper than that. Even back when it appeared that they noticed my updates from time to time, they would never “hook me in” to the Blog Finder results. I’ve configured my blog with a bunch of keywords, including Cocoa, but my listing never shows up. My content is also not being indexed. Take a popular recent blog of mine, the “Apple phones home” one. If you type the phrase into Google, you get my page as the first result. Type the same thing into Technorati, and you get a bunch of other blogs talking about my entry, but my entry itself is nowhere to be found.

Because I’m stuck in Technorati bug land. I’ve been there for several months and I can’t get out. So why am I complaining to you, the reading public? Because I’ve tried too many times with Technorati and received no reply or even acknowledgement that they’d look into it. So I figure in this crazy new world, maybe my only hope of getting in touch with Technorati is to actually write about them on my blog and let them somehow find it. Ironic, but it might just work?

I understand that Technorati must face a huge support dilemma. But if they’re going to simply not respond to support requests, it would be better to take the option to submit them off the page. When you submit a request ticket at Technorati, you get an automated email which contains the first sign of rotten-ness in the form of this sentence:

Translation: “support requests regularly get lost and go unanswered, so the onus is on you, the consumer if you actually want this to be tracked responsibly.”

I’m no expert, but if I was building a business, I would see this as a huge, red flag. If you have to build your apology for bad support in to the automated response then somebody is doing a terrible job or you haven’t hired all the people you need to in order to conduct a proper business.

The first couple times I submitted requests, I just waited patiently. Who am I to presume that my little indexing problem is worth rudely following up on the request. I’ll just wait it out. Surely they’re working on it. After a couple months or so I decided maybe their system requires you to actually go through the follow-up phase to turn into a “real ticket.” I responded to one politely and noted that things hadn’t been improving. No response.

I give up on your rotten support system, Technorati. It doesn’t work. It’s a black hole. Nobody responds and it makes me feel like an idiot. It’s rotten! You’ve got a great system and a great site but if you can’t patch up the mistakes then it’s worthless to me, and misleading to your customers.