Gary's Bloggage » mac

iPass Connect on the Mac; great service, appallingly designed app

Gary — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:44:06 +0000

I find myself travelling a lot for work these days and that means a roaming service for wifi hotspots and hotel internet connections really makes life simpler. I could maintain subscriptions to The Cloud, T-Mobile Hotspots, BT OpenZone and so on and so on, but fortunately Yahoo! provides me with an iPass subscription.

iPass is great; it allows me to connect to pretty much every hotspot and hotel internet service there is. I’ve been using it for over 4 years now and can only think of a single time when I haven’t been able to get a connection. I’m using it right now, sitting in the departures lounge at Berlin’s Tegel airport waiting for my flight back to London.

So far, so great, but the current, Snow Leopard supporting, version of the iPassConnect app, v3.1, seems to have been designed by someone with scant regard for anything approaching consistency and usability. Let me count the ways in which this app frustrates.

1. Quit iPassConnect? I see no Quit menu option.

From the Mac OS X GUI you can’t stop iPass running. The app lives in your menu bar and scans and rescans for wireless networks (which I’m sure reduces battery life) even when it’s connected to a wireless network. If I’m connected to a wireless network why would I want to look for another network, all the time, constantly? There’s a red and white animation going on in the menu bar which I’m sure someone thought was cute but which is incredibly distracting. But let’s overlook that for a moment. To quit an app, you simply select the menu bar and select Quit or press Cmd-Q.

Not that I’ve ever been able to find the mythical Quit command for iPassConnect. The only way to kill the damn thing is from within Activity Monitor or by the killall command from the shell within Terminal.

Simple resolution: Let the user choose when they want to run your app and when they don’t. Add a Quit command.

2. Install as a Login Item? Every single time?

It’s a simple, plain fact that the more apps you have in your account’s Login Items, the slower your login time will be. Like most people, I keep the number of Login Items down to a bare minimum and then start apps up as I need them. If I don’t use something all day, every day, it’s very unlikely that I want to make it a Login Item. Most apps are well behaved and ask your permission before inserting themselves as a Login Item but not iPassConnect. Run the app and hey presto you get a Login Item. Mildly annoying but at least you can remove it from your list of Login Items. Run the app again though and hey presto you get a Login Item. Each and every single time. It’s frustrating the first time it happens and induces psychosis after the hundredth such occurrence.

This is uncontrollable, un-configurable, totally unacceptable and verging on downright insulting. It’s an app designer’s way of saying to the user “I don’t care what your preferences are, I know better than you”.

Simple resolution: Act in a well behaved manner, ask the user for their preference, act on it and remember it.

3. Update? What update?

Most apps these days have a way of calling home and checking for an update. For those apps that run within a window there’s usually an Updates option in the application’s menu. For those apps that don’t run in a window there’s usually an option in their preferences pane. Note the word usually and let’s have a look at the iPassConnect preference pane.

There’s an Updates tab which is a good start. There’s an Enable automatic updates option which is also a good thing. But it only controls the hotspot dictionary that the app maintains. Want to update the app or know whether there’s an update available? Not with this app (and the iPass website is remarkably update free as well).

Simple resolution: Add an update option and ask the user if they want to check for updates.

4. Snow Leopard support. In 32-bits.

Snow Leopard continues Apple’s march towards a pure 64-bit operating system. A cursory glance at Activity Monitor shows that most apps running are Intel (64-bit) and this includes the System Preferences app. So let’s try to set some preferences for iPassConnect.

Ah yes, the iPassConnect preferences pane is 32-bit which means that you have to restart System Preferences in 32-bit mode and there it stays, running in 32-bit mode, until you manually restart System Preferences in the default 64-bit mode.

Simple resolution: If you say your app has Snow Leopard support then fully support Snow Leopard. That means 64-bitness across the board.

iPass is a great service, it deserves a great app; version 3.1 is not that app.

Written and posted from Berlin Tegel Airport (52.5545447, 13.2899969)

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Deliciousness: Sherlock Holmes, Car Desks, Macs, GeoVation, Crocodiles and Total Carp

Gary — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:59:33 +0000

Yet again it’s been a while. But there’s stuff out there on the Internet you know.

Considering he was a fictitious character set in 1880′s London, Arthur Conan Doyle certainly made sure that Sherlock Holmes got about; someone’s even displayed all of this on a map of London.
Want an instant ergonomic desk? Let me rephrase that. Want an instant ergonomic desk that clips to your car’s steering wheel? What more could you need? “This has been a total lifesaver. It allows me to prop my sheet music against the wheel, allowing me to play the guitar with both hands while driving.”
Recently DropBox stopped synching my files from my local DropBox to my remote one in the cloud. Deleting ~/.dropbox helped get things synching properly again.
I can never remember the key combinations needed to start my Intel Macs into single user mode, or to boot from the DVD. The Apple KnowledgeBase has it all documented.
The GeoVation Challenge made into the BBC. Disclosure; I’m on the judging panel.
Want to travel from Newquay in Cornwall to Kyle of Lochalsh in Scotland? Want to do it by train? You better have a grand to spare; £1002.00 to be precise.
In Schipol and seeing a crocodile in a suitcase? This may help explain.
Best. Magazine. Name. Ever. Part 2.
I never made it to the Social Media ’09 conference in London this year; but I was there in Tweet if not in body.

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Deliciousness: themes gained, avatars lost, accents found, London and the end of the world, scrobbling and Streetview

Gary — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:17:33 +0000

Look at all of this stuff that fell down the back of the internet and got lodged in my Delicious bookmarks …

Posterous recently gained themes and Twitter lost the background and avatar settings for lots of accounts, mine included.
Need to write München, Côte or Café with proper accents while on a Mac? Easy when you know how.
If you live in London, apparently you’re either very rich or a loser. It also rained a lot and the world ended, at least in Old Street.
Spotify can scrobble to Last.fm … why did I not know this?
Want to know how Google Streetview is put together? Google Japan have a explanation.
I reached an inspiration dead-end while preparing for this week’s AGI conference; turns out I’m not alone.

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Delicousness: iPhones, boarding passes, Cult of Mac, nerd subclasses, Snow Leopard and weird ads

Gary — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:16:46 +0000

The end of the week, semi regular, hand selected, carefully edited snapshot of what made it into my Delicious bookmarks this week.

Last week I blogged about my experiences with an electronic boarding pass, hosted on my iPhone, while travelling home from Amsterdam’s Schipol airport. Cult of Mac came across it, liked it, and used it as a basis for an article. Which was nice.
Remember those Venn Diagrams you did in maths class? Now you can use one to work out which of the subclasses of nerddom you belong to. Naturally I place myself in the geek with a life subclass, which is strangely absent from the diagram.
At the weekend I upgraded my work MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest version of the OS X operating system. And then 4 days later I downgraded it back to Leopard.
Want to buy used toilet paper, a used tombstone or a rottweiler called Mr Giggles? Some people think you do.

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Why Snow Leopard Thawed Back To Leopard

Gary — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:42:53 +0000

Last weekend I upgraded my MacBook Pro from Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5.8, to Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6. This kind of classes as early adopter behaviour as there’s no bug fix release for Snow Leopard out in the wild yet to iron out any kinks or rough edges but I wasn’t particularly bothered by this.

I’ve used OS X since version Cheetah, version 10.0 and have gone through the intervening releases, Puma, Jaguar and Panther. With Tiger I stopped using a desktop machine and took a decision to make my Yahoo! supplied MacBook Pro my sole day-to-day machine, an experiment I didn’t regret and which has become the norm for me.

When Leopard arrived I took the early adopter plunge and upgraded and, apart from a few teething troubles, which I can’t even recall now, all was well. Then Snow Leopard arrived and I waited a week, not quite early adoption but early enough. I heard no shouts and screams and even my one blocker, the lack of suitable Cisco VPN support for the version required to connect to Yahoo!, was resolved so I made sure my backup was up-to-date and upgraded. The backup gives me more foresight than I really deserve.

At first all was good. The Exchange server my corporate mail is hosted on is Exchange 2007 and at the right service pack level to work with Snow Leopard’s rather stringent requirements. Mail took my authentication credentials and set up my Exchange account, iCal did the same and so did Address Book. Granted they took a while to sync up but that was over a VPN connection, over a wifi link, over my home broadband connection so some slack was cut.

And on Monday I went to work and lived with Snow Leopard on a day-to-day basis. Then the minor niggles, gripes and whinges began …

A meeting invite would arrive, be responded to and deleted out of my Inbox but Mail still thinks I have one unread message. The only solution I found would be to rebuild the mailbox, of 10366 messages at the last count, every time a meeting invite or update arrived.
Talking of meeting invite updates, each one created a new appointment in iCal. Got a meeting invite and 5 subsequent updates? Hey presto, you’ve now got 6, count them, meeting invites.
Safari Input Handlers were finally disabled. Now I know that they were undocumented and never actually supported by there’s some plugins I use a lot that now just don’t work, including DeliciousSafari and Inquisitor. If you’re going to remove some functionality at least open up a plugin API for Safari developers. But no. Yes I know I could run Safari in 32-bit mode but that’s not really the point.
Mail lost all my previous settings for Junk Mail. I could understand it for my Exchange account as that was, too all intents a new account, but for every other mail account I have as well?
Safari lost all my settings which said don’t remember user name and password for this site.
The Mobile Me and RSS screen saver vanished with no replacement on offer; no Flickr photo RSS feeds for me.
Exchange calendars can’t be synchronised with an iPhone over Mobile Me, you have to use ActiveSync, and if your company doesn’t support it, well no syncing for you then.
The entire printer driver architecture seems to have changed and all my printers needed new drivers. Which would be fine but alas the updated bundle of Ricoh drivers doesn’t include the printer that is on every single floor of the Yahoo! office, so no printing for me.

I could go on but I won’t; the lack of printing was the final straw and so I spent 50 minutes last night restoring my Leopard install from that backup I mentioned earlier … thank you Shirt Pocket for writing SuperDuper!

So I’m now back to a machine running Leopard, without native Exchange support, but with all of my working environment back and … working. When the next release of Snow Leopard comes out I’ll try again, but I’ll make sure I take a full backup beforehand. Just in case Snow Leopard needs to be thawed again.

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Deliciousness: Mac OS X 15.6, gallons of chilli sauce, globes and Virgin Media

Gary — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:13:27 +0000

This week’s trawl through my Delicous bookmarks. Actually this is last week’s trawl but real life got in the way of posting and I beg your indulgence.

Last week, Snow Leopard, AKA Mac OS X 10.6 was released though some places seem to now be selling an even more advanced version, Mac OS X 15.6.
I like chilli sauce, I have a fine and wide range of the stuff in the larder at home; but some people must really really like the stuff to buy it a gallon at a time.
In my day job I do geo stuff but I wasn’t aware that a globe, an inflatable one come to that, has sharp corners and isn’t suitable for children.
While we’re on the subject of geo, Virgin Media found out the hard way that place names aren’t unique and sometimes there’s more than one place sharing a name; Whitchurch in this particular case.

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I Haz Snow Leopard

Gary — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:40:27 +0000

It was inevitable, but once I’d found out that a new version of the Cisco VPN client was available, the one thing that was stopping me from installing Snow Leopard, then a Snow Leopard upgrade was on the cards. So off to the Apple Store on Regent Street in London I went.

Once home, it was time to see what’s in the package, to which the answer was not a lot, as it was even more minimalistic that the Leopard box.

And then on through the best part of an hour’s worth of installation with a single reboot roughly half way through.

… and yes, I do have more disk space now that there’s no PowerPC support and so there’s no Universal binaries and yes, though it’s totally subjective it does feel a darn sight faster. Now to test Exchange 2007 support …

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Deliciousness: yet more bacon, Snow Leopard, Hitchhiker’s, WhereCamp Europe, under your feet and shell scripts for your baby.

Gary — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:19:33 +0000

This week’s trawl through what appeared on the interwebs and made it into my Delicious bookmarks.

The march towards all things bacon flavoured continues unabated; now you can get bacon (and mint) flavoured, err, mints and that get-you-going-in-the-morning first cup of coffee can now be bacon flavoured as well. Where’s this going to end?
Mac OS X 10.6, AKA Snow Leopard, got officially released today. Some people rushed out, bought it and installed it. But as ever, there’s some compatibility problems, not the least of which (for me at least) is that the Cisco VPN client may (or may not) work properly. It’s also for Intel based Macs only so a lot of PowerPC based Mac owners are going to be sad.
First reviews of the new Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy book, not written by Douglas Adams on account of him being dead, find it “not really funny” and “less a case of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish and more a case of So Long And Thanks For All The Money“.
#wherecamp, the geogeeks (un)conference of choice, is coming to Europe in the form of the aptly named #WhereCampEU. Naturally, I’ll be there.
While walking into Soho, I found one of London’s lost streets right under my feet. Literally.
And finally, real men don’t rock their child to sleep, they write a shell script to do it for them.

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Sad iBook G4

Gary — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:12:32 +0000

No Snow Leopard for you with your PowerPC chip.

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