July 2010 Archives

In this short screencast, I try to answer the small but important question, "What's in my Dock?" Enjoy!

Everyone who has been reading my blog today will know that I this morning sent my Macbook in to the apple store to have the case cracks repaired. Well i am happy to report that this repair was firstly free, and secondly a huge success! My macbook has no more palm rest cracks, though the bottom case is still cracked. That's mostly because i neglected to tell the repair guys that it was cracked in the first place. But other than that it was a fabulous repair. The ended up replacing both the keyboard assembly and the entire bevel for the screen. Which, so far as i can tell, included a new iSight camera for my computer. And on top of this all, having the keyboard be the right shape seems to bave bent my Macbook back into shape and allowed me to use my CD drive once again. That is fabulous, and was completely worth the time I was without my mac. And as you can see by the picture, the case is crack free, which is what i wanted in the end.

As everyone probably already knows, the older white MacBooks have this tiny little problem that Apple doesn't like to admit. Yes, i'm talking about the case cracks which turn your pristine white macbook into a 'Crackbook'. Well of course I had this happen to me, but didn't think that there was anything I could do about short of paying for the repair myself. I wasn't too keen on doing that, so I just let it slide and became best friends with a bottle of crazy glue to help hold it together. This worked for a long time and probably would have worked for much time to come. However, my father James found something out while getting the cracks on his iPhone fixed. In a conversation with one of the technicians at the apple store he found out that apple was in fact starting to replace the cracked palm rests and outer shells of these white macbooks. This got my ears perked up, so this morning I had James take my macbook over to the apple store on the way to work. Now, i had called earlier in the week to see if my macbook was eligible for this replacement program, and i got the standard apple response 'well, if your computer falls within a certain serial number range...'. I couldn't actually get anyone at apple to tell me what range this was, so i figured what the heck, i'd just bring it in. When James brought it in this morning, he was told 'if we see cracks, we fix em'. This was fantastic and as we speak my computer is getting surgerized and having its cracks replaced. The moral: If you've got a crackbook, go get it fixed for free. Apple is happy to help you out. 

Yesterday, I thought it might be a good time to give my MT5 blog a much needed refresh. I installed a new theme into the blog system, and switched over. Well when I went to publish this new layout i encountered publishing errors, and so decided to go back to the old theme. That published just fine, but to my horror when I went to view my page everything custom that I had installed was gone. My ads, twitter button, toolbar, everything. I immediately began the long and laborious process of installing everything again, only to discover that since i had built everything in MT4 that all of the components I was editing had moved to a different place. I spent the greater part of last night and today finding everything again, and installing everything I thought i had. As of right now it is back up and fully operational, although i still feel as if I'm missing something. If there's anything I am missing that you as loyal readers remember being there, please let me know. I want to have everything back, and I can't remember what is missing so please help me out.

My message to all you MTers out there who would like to give their blogs a refresh: BACKUP EVERYTHING!! I can't stress that enough. Make sure everything in your system is backed up as to not end up like me. You will thank yourself afterwords.

All for now!

Now, we all know about apple's 'solution' to the iPhonegate problems. Yes, I'm talking about the 'Death Grip'. As you probably also know, Apple has 'fixed' this problem by giving everyone a free iPhone case to alleviate the problem. Well, for me, this doesn't cut it. Take Toyota for example. When they had a serious problem with their cars (which turned out to be mostly user error), they started a major recall and fixed the problem. What does apple do? Not a recall, but an addition to their product that 'fixes' the problem. Here's what apple should have done in my opinion. 1: Change the iPhone 4 design so that there is a thin layer of clear plastic around the outer antenna that would prevent the two antennae from being bridged, causing signal loss. This would essentially do the same thing as the bumper does, only more efficiently and easier for the user. And finally 2: Recall all iPhone 4's and either add this coating to the outside of the iPhone or replace them with the newer one. This I feel would be a much better solution to this problem. If anyone has anything better to say about it, let me know. I'd love to hear what you think!

I have a few invites to the Designer/Developer community site Forrst. If you think you deserve them, @reply me on twitter with some of your best work. I'll pick the winners tomorrow afternoon. Let's see some good stuff!

Something Tabulous is coming your way. Check it out at http://www.startmytab.us