Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

A Rant about Ubuntu 11.10

Every 6 months when Ubuntu releases I throw caution to the wind, click the upgrade button on my desktop, and leave, expecting to come back shortly to an awesome new operating system. And every 6 months it seems I don’t come back to something awesome, but to a whole collection of new problems. Usually it’s a whole collection of conflicts or broken packages. Sometimes the system won’t boot. Sometimes X won’t start or some weird new graphics problem pops up. It pretty much always leads to a fresh install. This time, however, things were different. With 11.10, things went smoothly and everything came back up nicely. That is until I logged in and realized all my GNOME settings were non-existent afte the upgrade to GNOME 3.

I don’t really have any particular loyalties or love of GNOME, I just used it because that was the default and tends to be the one that’s been polished the most by Ubuntu. While the new desktop looks great, it seems to have gone backwards quite a bit in usability. The integrations with Banshee/volume controls seem to be gone (or at least not working after my upgrade), menus are confusing and way too click-heavy, and there seems to be almost not configurability to the desktop. Even the new gnome-tweak-tool seems to have very little customizability. It seems over half of the customizations have to do with fonts and really small things that don’t matter to me at all. There are those who are passionate about fonts, but I am not one of those people.

Perhaps worse, there’s a new menu item under your username on the menu bar for “Online Accounts”. When I clicked on it, it brought me to a screen asking to give access to my Google account.. I thought maybe this could have some promise, so I granted it access to my Goolge account and it said that it had access to, among other things, docs (which I thought was going to be really awesome). However, nothing really indicated any next steps for accessing things. After poking around a bit and not finding anything, I did a quick search online to see if anyone could give any indication for what this thing was supposed to do. And, as it seems.. It does nothing. While I do enjoy a good technology preview.. I had to remind myself that this was an actual release. Ugh. I just granted access to my Google account for.. what?

One pleasant detail that I did thoroughly enjoy about the new GNOME is the OSX-style alt-tab/alt-~ app/window switching. Grouping applications and switching windows within the apps that way has been something that I’ve desired for a long time when switching back and forth. I know that most will probably hate it, but I’m a fan :)

Tags: ,
Filed under Rants : Comments (0) : Oct 26th, 2011

Smartphone Multitasking Fail

When Apple announced that it was going to offer multitasking (some time ago) I was a bit nervous about the experience. I was not sure I was a fan of the idea because I’ve seen others try it and fail miserably. I’m not sure about Android, but I know that I’ve used Blackberries and Windows Mobile phones that try to multitask (and can, I suppose) but it degrades the experience dramatically. What I’ve seen on iOS 4.0.x has been better than those of old, but certainly not idea. However, my bad experience came to a head today.

I have an iPhone 3GS and have noticed it’s been considerably faster at doing some things (which is good!), but after a while it slows down. Last week I did the upgrade to iOS 4.1 and noticed the phone was noticeably faster and have watched it slow to a crawl until today when I couldn’t stand it (after the fact, it might’ve just been the reboot that caused the speedup). Turns out, I just needed to kill some apps. Okay, easy enough to fix this time. I just killed off the apps I didn’t need running all the time, and voila! things are back to normal. But.. therein lies my problem.

You see, I really don’t want to have to deal with that crap. I want my phone to receive/place calls, texts, emails, and occasionally (okay, I might be addicted) play a game or two. Navigation, browsing, using Facebook and playing music is cool too, I suppose. But, the thing is, I don’t want to go into some manager every day or so and kill off apps so my phone doesn’t get dog-slow. We’ve gotten used to having to do things like that on our PCs that we don’t even think twice about doing it on our phones. But I say this is wrong. I don’t need another thing in my life that needs manual intervention and management to stay running properly. I don’t do those things at the same time on the phone’s small screen anyway. Heck, I can barely multitask on a 30-inch monitor.

This is not to say that there’s anything inherently wrong with multitasking on phones. It’s all cool. I’m just fed up with what seems to be the status quo.

How about Android users out there? I’ve only heard second-hand that it’s a pretty similar experience. Doing some searching/surfing around the webs suggests it’s similar, but no one rags on it too badly (after all, that’s what Android was touting before it came to the iPhone!).

Okay, done with the rant.

P.S. In spite of fear of coming off as a huge fanboy, was Steve Jobs right all along when they didn’t do multitasking from the beginning and only wrong by introducing it in its current state? :)

Tags: , , ,
Filed under Rants : Comments (1) : Sep 14th, 2010

Who’s More Closed Than Apple and Adobe? AT&T

There’s been a significant amount of chatter lately around the Adobe v Apple we’re-more-open-than-thou pissing match, but AT&T has proved once again that vendor lock-in and control in the software industry is nowhere near as bad as the cell phone industry (heck, Verizon will even disable GPS devices in phones to make sure users have to pay for their navigation service).

AT&T has done so by announcing it is nearly doubling its early termination fees on smartphones and netbook data plans. This announcement has some seriously unfortunate timing after rumors of an iPhone able to run on the Verizon network emerged once again and seem to have been validated by AT&T’s rate hikes. As if the fee hikes weren’t enough, AT&T also seems to have taken a really idiotic stance on how it will keep its customers as well.

The money quote from the Wall Street Journal from this last week is that “about 80% of AT&T’s customers are on family-talk plans or business-discount plans, which are very ‘sticky.’” That’s it? That’s the reason AT&T isn’t scared? Because it’s a big pain to switch away? Because I’d have to switch more than one phone at once and that would be annoying? How about: “We’re not scared because we have better coverage and our customers know it” or “We’re not scared because our network is faster” or even “We’re not scared because our customer service is the best”? Instead, we get: “We’re not scared because it’s way too freakin’ expensive to switch.”

Why doesn’t AT&T list any of those reasons as the primary reason? Well, I think the answer is obvious. I work about 2 miles from the Apple headquarters, where you would think coverage on the iPhone with its exclusive provider would be top-notch, if nowhere else. But, alas, I drop calls and don’t get audio on calls all the time. This just doesn’t happen with my Verizon phone (I have an iPhone from work and a Verizon phone for personal use).

All right, now that the rant is over, when I imagine AT&T execs making this decision, all I can think of is:

Tags: , ,
Filed under Rants : Comments (0) : May 23rd, 2010