Crazy Apple News Site

With the release of the iPhone 3G, we were excited to read Walt Mossberg’s review of the new and improved hardware and software offerings from Apple. As he has with so many other new releases, Walt praised the iPhone in general and the App Store specifically, but we wanted more.
I mean, look at his review of Firefox 3:

Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now, and that it tops the current versions of both IE and Safari in features, speed and security.

Or how about his review of the App store:

compared with the graphically rich, snappy iPhone apps — many of which fetch data from the Internet at high speed — the typical program on these older platforms [Palm and Blackberrry] looks positively primitive.

But his latest review of the iPhone itself, well, it was…
it was kinda negative. And we just can’t handle that.

I mean sure, he calls it “a true computing platform with wide versatility” and “the world’s most influential smart phone”. But he also complains about the battery life, talks about it having problems with syncing email from Exchange and other systems, and he says that it’s more expensive due to AT&T’s increased prices.

How do you think that makes Apple feel, Walt? You can’t blame Apple for some battery supplier’s problems, or Microsoft’s terrible Exchange system, or AT&T’s pricing schemes. These things aren’t Apple’s fault!

And what about us, the consumers? What we want from you is happy –nay, ebullient– reviews of new products so we can feel good about spending all our money on things we don’t need and keep the economy from going in the toilet. And you give us objectivity. Great. Thanks. We can get that from bankers or lawyers.

So fine, you don’t absolutely love the iPhone 3G. Great. I guess we can deal with that, Mr. Mossberg. Just don’t say anything nasty about our good, beloved, almost-working Mobile Me…
Oh, you rat.

Every Sunday¹ we publish a list of inFrequently Asked Questions and answers to help
you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.

Today: The person who just installed our carpet² answers your questions about using DSL to connect a Mac to the internet.

Q: I’ve heard that cable is faster than DSL, is that true?

A: Oh, I don’t know, and speed isn’t all that important, you know? But I have a cousin who can install cable for you.

Q: What’s the best way to find a reliable service provider in the state where I live?

A: My brother runs a business that will get you hooked up reeeeeal niiiice, if you know what I’m sayin’.

Q: I’m not sure I do, nor do I want to. Who is that old guy that came with you, why doesn’t he do anything, and why did he just cut a perfectly good six-foot piece of carpet into two three-foot pieces of carpet?

A: That’s my dad, no? And we need the smaller pieces to finish the small room, right? So, we will do it really quick, after we go take a break and talk about it for a while. Then we will look in all your closets.

Q: So, do you think you would be able to, oh, I don’t know, put my phone jack back on the wall, so that I can connect to the internet ³ anytime soon, considering that the jack is four feet above the ground in a room you’ve already finished?

A: Oh, see, we need to keep it off, and it’s not in our contract to put things like doors or phone jacks back. But I have a brother-in-law who owns a company that does that sort of thing. I can give you his number.

Q: When will you be finished, and how did you break my Logitech keyboard, which was in a drawer in the garage, where we don’t even have carpet going in? Do you know how much I hate this old white Apple keyboard?

A: We’re done, so will you please sign this invoice that’s for another house we’re doing in two days? We don’t like keeping our paperwork straight. I have a sister who works for Logitech-

Q: OUT! Get out!

1. If we have had contractors in our house Headquarters all day Friday and Saturday [↩]
2. and made a 4 hour job take two days [↩]
3. DSL uses phone lines. CANS don’t do dial-up [↩]

Microsoft has launched the first wave of their $300 million+ advertising campaign set to counter the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads in an unlikely form.

“How’s that game playing going, Mac freaks?” asks Steve Ballmer in a form letter sent to every “@apple.com” email address. “Oh, and Squeak? Your Open Source software sucks! I mean, check out Paint.Net! That’s some Open Source software worth using, lemme tell ya!”

Needless to say, this quixotic, Tokyo Rose style spam attack was devastating to the morale of Apple employees. “Ooooh, Stevie, them’s fightin’ words,” said Jonathan Ive, SVP of Industrial Design at Apple. “I mean, picking on our open source development? Wow, that’s hitting us where it hurts, pal. What’s next, a criticism of our favorite brand of floor wax? Please, not that!”

Peter Oppenheimer asked, “How much of your $300 million did you spend on writing this email?” Reports that Steve Jobs had to physically restrain John Gruber and Steve Wozniack¹ from “hopping on their Segways and giving Ballmer a piece of their mind” are as yet unverified.

Steve Jobs’ response was typically refined. In an email response he writes: “Wow, Ballmer. That’s quite some attack, and it hurts. It hurts almost as much as our 30% profit increase this quarter. I guess the “wow” really does “start now”, only a year after you launched Vista. Wow, indeed.”

For once, it was Microsoft who had no comment, except to remind us that they could “(expletive deleted) crush” the Crazy Apple News Site, which is entirely true.

In an unrelated side note, we here at CANS have just uninstalled Vista from Boot Camp on our iMac and installed XP instead.  It is surprisingly more stable.

1. neither of whom work at Apple but both of whom have @apple.com email addresses due to tremendous whining [↩]

This is just a little note to tell you that the only-slightly-sane Ruby Ninja Androids upgraded CANS to WordPress 2.6 today. Let us know if you see any little bugs.  But not big bugs. Those scare us.

Every Friday we publish a list of inFrequently Asked Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.

Today: High-school goth poets answer your questions about Microsoft Office 2008.

Q: Excel 2007 has this cool feature on Windows where you can just set a range of colors for a range of values and it will apply conditional formatting to a column. Can you do that in Excel 2008?

A: Black is the color of my soul,
Dripping sadness runs through my hair and stains the ground with my agony.
I cannot move my hands; the weight of my soul has surpassed my will.

Q: Word seems to take a long time to load on my mac mini, even with 2GB of RAM. What can I do to speed it up?

A: I sink into the flood of your hate in the Cathedral of the Indifferent,
the black candles casting raven-fluttering shadows as I try escape.
But alas! I cannot run as fast as my eyeliner runs in my tears.

Q: Will PowerPoint ever not suck?

A: Cruel, sharpenéd lights stab my eyes!
Hardened heart, darkened soul, turn from my feelings!
Hot Topic stopped carrying leather pants in my size
And I can no longer fit in my old ones.

Q: Um… Entourage?

A: But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!¹

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the ultimate goth poet [↩]

Apple took iDisk in a new direction with the release of Mobile Me.
For years, the iDisk icon has been the now-all-too-familiar “some kinda network-magic-ball” on a hard disk, suggesting that an iDisk is, well, a hard drive on the network (or possibly the other way around. I’m not sure.) Now, however, the iDisk icon invites you to explore something entirely new. Specifically, it invites you to explore worlds where you can ride with your improbably-proportioned friends on a magical wingéd horse named Feathers into a fluffy cloudy mauve external disk in the sky.
This is a movement sure to be met well with the under-12 crowd, a group that makes up a significant number of Apple computer purchasers.
“I like it a lot!!!!!!” said a person who was not allowed to tell me their name because “Mommy said I shouldn’t talk to bloggers”. “It’s a cool new picture, and I can store all my paintings of princesses on it! It’s so pretty! I named it “pretty fairy”! And I like the prple [sic] color too!”
While we at CANS would never admit it, using the new iDisk makes us feel like royalty. Pretty royalty. Not, like, Prince Charles or anything.

As an apology for not posting the Friday iFAQ on Friday, I present to you: Vista Bullying

In a widely reported move,¹ Microsoft has announced that the “Vista Bullying stops here”.  And we here at CANS think it’s about time, too.  I mean, look at poor little Microsoft, barely making enough money to keep every single human being on earth fed, and along come big ol’ Apple, throwing its weight around, making Vista feel bad. Be nice to Microsoft! They’re doing their best, folks!  They don’t have all that many programmers in Redmond, and making an operating system is hard! Why does Apple have to be so mean, anyway?  All Vista wants to do is take over the world and make everyone have to buy OneCare to patch all the security holes left in the original operating system.  Is that so bad?

But as much fun as it is to paint Microsoft as a spoiled, whiny little nine year old getting pushed around by a much cooler five year old, It’s even more fun to look at some of the comments they actually made in the announcement:

Yes, the changes did cause a lot of pain.

What’s funny is that the full stop did go there.  (In the interest of fair reporting² I should mention that the next line was “But the customers are starting to see benefits.”) Microsoft acknowledges that using Vista causes pain, and that it’s only a year later that “customers are starting to see benefits.”   I…I just don’t have anything to say to that, but I will mention that when I took a class that required me to write software in Visual Studio, I got a “are you sure you want to run this program?” warning every time I started Visual Studio, itself a Microsoft product.  My guess is that Microsoft wanted to let me know that if I run VS, I could write a virus, which would then infect my machine and destroy all my data.

And then there’s this comment:

Brooks noted that the same architectural changes that caused hardships in Vista are carrying over to Windows 7…

What they mean to say is that the hardships are over, because all the changes were made in Vista, so Windows 7 should be a breeze.  What it sounds like is “All the hardships in Vista are carrying over to Windows 7″, which is way funnier.

One more:

You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping. We’ve woken up and it’s time to take this message forward. This is the true story of Vista…

Ahh, pure marketing speak.  Take one metaphor, muddle it up with some other vaguely fairy-tale sounding phrases, and then “take your message forward”.  The great thing about this sentence is that it doesn’t actually mean anything! Asimov would have called it “syntactically null”.  But it sounds like big news.

Now, I have to say that the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads are getting on my nerves.  So if those went away, I’d be happy. But all this whining about “people is bein’ mean to us fer no reason” is pretty silly, and isn’t going to get Microsoft any credibility in the market, especially while they’re running their own smear campaigns against Linux.

Well, this didn’t end up being as funny as I’d hoped, but one of the first rules of comedy is that it isn’t funny to make fun of something that’s already a joke.

1. that last one is the funniest [↩]
2. I do that sometimes [↩]

Every Friday¹ we publish a list of inFrequently Asked Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple User, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.
Today: Boot Camp.

Q: So, like, can I boot into a Linux partition using Boot Camp?
A: TEN-HUT! Would you care to rephrase that question, soldier?
Q: Er, can I boot into a Linux Partition using Boot Camp, Sir?
A: SIR? Do I look like a goshdarned officer to you? So you see these three stripes on my arm? Do you, maggot? While you are in this man’s boot camp you will call me Drill Sergeant! DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?
Q: YES DRILL SERGEANT!²
A: Okay. Now, in this man’s boot camp we boot into exactly two operating systems. OSX, the home country, and Windows, or enemy territory. And you little taped-glasses pantywaist GEEKS want to start fighting on a third front! You want to attack our UNIX-based, penguin lovin’ allies in the middle of a war! Does that sound like a good idea to you, maggot?
Q: NO DRILL SERGEANT!
A: Fine. Now, this is how we do things around here: 1.) You obtain a valid Windows key! 2.) Use the Boot Camp Assistant to partition your disk! 3.)Install Windows in the newly created partition! ARE THERE ANY QUESTIONS?
Q: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN AN IRRESISTIBLE FORCE MEETS AN IMMOVABLE OBJECT, DRILL SERGEANT?
A: Oh, a wise guy. Mr. College here thinks he can outsmart the dumb ol’ Drill Sergeant. Thinks Sarge never learned anything about unanswerable hypothetical questions. Didn’t think to mention the destructability of the immovable object, which, being made of granite, in my hypothetical example, IS DESTROYED IMMEDIATELY!! IS THAT THE BEST YOU CAN DO? NOW DROP AND GIVE ME 20!
Q: 1…2…3…4…5…
A: Now, carrying on.
Q: 6…7…8…9…10…
A: Once Windows is installed, you move back and forth between Operating systems by holding down the “option” key at boot time!
Q: 11…12…13…14…15…
A: You MUST use antivirus software, or it will be hosed just like any other Windows computer!
Q: 16…17…18…19…20, DRILL SERGEANT!
A: You MUST exercise caution when installing new applications! So, do you have any more smart-alek questions now, college?
Q: NO DRILL SERGEANT!
A: GOOD! Now, let’s all jog over to the mess hall and get our grub. Sound Off!
(all) I don’t know but I’ve been told
Bill Gates is getting pretty old…

1. or Saturday, if we have network troubles on Friday [↩]
2. This article is going to have a lot of CAPS LOCK action going on. Sorry about that. [↩]

All around the world, people are already standing in line, hoping to be the first to use Mobile Me, Apple’s latest revision of its online storage and synchronization tools.

Which is odd, because they can just buy a .Mac membership and it will work when Mobile Me is launched possibly later tonight.  But still they line up at Apple stores across America, “waiting for the cloud”.

“I can’t tell if they’re serious,” said an Apple store employee, who asked to remain anonymous, which we don’t like because “anonymous” is really hard to spell the same way twice, so we’re going to call him Bob Johnson. “We asked if they were excited about the iPhone launch this Friday, and they’re all like ‘pssssh.  iPhone.  Just a jumped-up Treo!  We want our image galleries instantly synced up across all our computers.’  What was really weird is that they all said it in unison.”

But not everyone shares Bob’s trepidation.  Bob hoards his trepidation, keeping it locked away, safe within a strongbox deep in his soul.  To find out more, we went to one of the thousands of “Mobile Parties” that are happening across the country today, and spoke to one of the raving fans.

“I’m so excited! I just can’t hide it! I’m about to sync my email, and I think I like it!” blared the huge stack of speakers as we entered the high school gymnasium that a group in Des Moines, Iowa had rented.  Inside was a crowd of people, all wearing shirts with the Mobile Me logo, all dancing, singing, eating apple based snacks from long tables along one wall, or plugging their laptops into one of the many LAN-party style stations on the other wall.

“Yes, I too await the coming of Me,” said a man, who would only identify himself as “stevor338@me.com”.  “With the coming of Me we shall all finally be able to transcend the myth of physical forms, not to mention have our contacts available to us from any Mac or PC.  Yes, as we embrace the Me in the Cloud, the purely physical me, the one that doesn’t take stylish vacations to Cancun or Whistler, the one that doesn’t match Apple’s vision of humanity, will be left, a shell sitting in a chair in front of a late-model G5 iMac, while our spirits dance among the servers in Cupertino.”

And with that we left them, moved and impressed, not to mention creeped out.  Will the launch of Mobile Me truly herald the coming of Mankind’s truest self, our ultimate destiny, or will we simply have 20GB of storage space online in which we can keep our plans for a home made radio laser cannon?  Only time will tell.

Every Friday we publish a list of inFrequently Asked Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple User, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.

Today’s Feature: RSS

Q: It’s the 4th of July, and I live in America.  Is there a way I can make my screen saver on my Mac look like a whole bunch of cool fireworks?

A: Yes there is! The Really Slick Screensavers Project¹  has created a screen saver called Skyrocket.  When it starts, your screen looks like you’re flying around a field where a whole fireworks show is happening.

Q: That sounds cool! Does it allow you to control what kinds of fireworks get set off? I’ve always wanted to be in control of a fireworks show.

A: Yes it does! By pressing the number keys along the top row of your keyboard (and some of the letters on the second row) you are put in control of the show! You can figure out which keys have the coolest fireworks and send those up over and over and over.  And when you get tired of running things, just stop pushing keys and the built-in pyrotechnicians will take back over.

Q: Wow! How much do I have to pay for this miracle of modern awesomeness?

A: That’s the best part! It’s free!  Hoooray! Happy Independence Day! The kind without aliens or Will Smith!  Yaaay!   But there’s a downside.  The project hasn’t been updated for the Mac since 2004.  It still works, but don’t expect cutting-edge awesomeness.  Still, why does everything need to be new to be good?

Q: Yeah!  I like week-old doughnuts far better than fresh ones!

A: …O-Okay.  Yeah!  Old things are awesome!

Q: Yeah! I’m going to throw off the bonds of “common decency” and go cruise for widowed octogenarians at the nursing home! Happy Independence Day! (Sound of running feet.)(SLAM!)(Sound of car tires peeling out)

A: Um… Not exactly what I had in mind, but, er, yaay? And Screensavers? Um, have a nice fourth?

1. You thought this was going to be all about news readers and stuff, didn’t you? Gotcha! [↩]