One reason why I like the Mac platform as a whole is that Mac developers communicate properly.

OSS

In the open source world, if you have a software problem, you go into the land of mailing lists or forums and try to ask someone who happens to know anything for an answer. 50% of the time the project has gone dead and no one's around to reply to your messages. The other 25% of the time the developers are "too busy" to help with support, or they are just a bit on the snobby side. You also end up with tutorials and FAQs that are completely overtechnical or underwritten and hard to follow. You end up with nothing but trying to figure out the problem yourself, which, can happen, but not always. Not to downplay OSS, I use it daily and love it, but "support" can be an issue.

Windows

Most "proprietary" or freeware !OSS software are explained insanely elaborately. For example, video converters (mostly shareware) are all ducked up with 5 paragraph long explanations of functions in some humongous Windows help file. It takes you 10 minutes to find the help article you were looking for, and then you have to spend 10 minutes readnig the whole thing only to find out "oh, it's in the TOOLS menu" or something of the like. Overdocumented.

Mac

On the Mac however, it's more or less shareware-esque companies. They understand Apple KISS philosophy and explain things as straightforwardly as possible. Help files are clear, and if you DO ever have a problem you can email them and they'll send you a friendly reply. If you bought the software, you get what you pay for.

I just noticed this after a few issues with GNU screen. I wanted some information on how to use it and the GNU Homepage about it is laughable. It gives this weird technical explanation for it and then the "more information" link leads you to some random GNU-Land page that was clearly written by an Open Source evangelist. Your best hope is to find a random blogger who wrote a GNU screen primer about it, which I did.

I've used Windows and have been baffled by some freebies out there. Either there's absolutely NO documentation or way too much, and on the Mac I've had few complaints.

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So yeah I guess I forgot to blog about this.

• New Domain: I finally registered jole.ca and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. For all those Canadians out there who want to register one, beware that you'll have to face CIRA first, this ridiculous Canadian organization that manages all the dot ca's. I encourage the idea of having Canada manage it's own TLDs but they seriously need to resolve some issues.

First of all they don't put any glue on any of the NS servers, so you can't use your own domain to create your nameservers. Plus they limit your number of NSs to 2. I would prefer having 3 NSs at least, but they don't allow that. Sigh…at least once you have a dot-ca you have the option of becoming a member of CIRA, so I suppose I could recommend this to the board, but what a pain.

• New Website Design: In celebration of the new domain, I redesigned the site a little bit. I know I just updated it, but the whole misaligned left bar and everything was really annoying me. I designed this all myself using the awesome fluid guide from [CSS Tinderbox http://csstinderbox.raykonline.com/] It's fully fluid, and I pulled a few tricks to get that header image to be fully scaleable and still look great. In case you haven't noticed, it rotates through a few different pictures of mine.

Also I changed the directory structure up a bit. I now have everything in folders. (I would use mod_rewrite but I'm way too lazy to figure it out.) For anything jole just add a slash. All the feeds and stuff should still work in legacy fashion but you may have to update a bookmark or two (if anybody bookmarks my site…)

And of course if you're sitll using jole.ahtr.net it will still work, but make the move to jole.ca!

Hope everybody's having a great summer!

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Ok, so I don't have an iPhone so I totally don't have the right to give it my review, but I can still have an opinion.

Basically from the vast reviews I've read, I think that overall it works very well, and all in all, as advertised. As for this insane hype around it, I agree with [http://leoville.com Leo} on this one, that basically everyone hates their phone for the most part. It's awkward to use, the screen sucks, and they wish they didn't have to carry their iPod AND cell phone at the same time. This sums everything up into one device, and everybody went banana's over it.

In regards to these little software annoyances. (eg. Keyboard can't go landscape 'cept in Safari; Mail app sucks, Bluetooth is headset only, No Flash/Java) are…just that. Software annoyances, that most probably will be upgraded as time goes on. We know they will actually push out software updates, because they kept their word for Apple TV and delivered YouTube as a bonus.

Of course the question is, "Am I buying one?" and for now the answer stays no.

• Doesn't work in Canada (yet, and some have shown ways to circumvent that. I still need a phone though )
• Apple is literally pocketing almost double the actual price of device, which means as they get less greedy and they sell more of them, prices have to go down. Plus like the iPod I can see there being an iPhone Mini (don't know about the iPhone shuffle though!)

Some of my other complaints such as lack of video recording on the camera, and other features are upgradeable and I see Apple updating the firmware very soon.

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