MacFixIt’s scare tactics
Posted on October 26, 2007 by Brian Webster
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I just read this article on MacJournals regarding MacFixit’s tendancy to overhype problems, and I’m glad someone is calling a spade a spade here. MacFixIt used to be a useful site, but in recent years it has gone downhill in the quality of what they publish, almost to the point of being useless, or worse, harmful. It reminds me somewhat of Symantec trying to hype nonexistent virus threats to the Mac so they can sell more copies of Norton AntiVirus that nobody needs.
The article uses a recent MacFixIt post on DiskWarrior as an example, and I actually used to work for Alsoft for a few years, and it’s definitely not the first time this sort of thing has happened with MacFixIt. We had to deal with them on several occasions when they posted various stories, mostly regarding DiskWarrior, that either stretched the truth or were just outright false.
It seems that a large amount of MacFixIt’s material comes from reader e-mails and other such input. That’s not a problem in and of itself, but the problem is that there is almost no effort put forth on their part to filter and/or verify the statements made by their readers. The result is that stories go up on the site that have absolutely no basis in reality, simply because one or two readers e-mailed in. “I noticed that when I upgraded my iLife on the full moon, it crashed my machine, but then when I rebooted and tried again when the moon was waning, it worked!” results in the headline “Warning: iLife installer deletes your photos when installed under a full moon!“
MacFixIt seems to hardly ever even bother to try some of these things readers write in about to see if they actually behave as described, but even worse, they often won’t even try verifying something with the developer of an application if a problem is reported with it. This happened several times at Alsoft, where some reader reported a problem with DiskWarrior and blamed it on something, and MacFixIt happily plastered it on their front page as though it were gospel, causing all sorts of people to panic about running DiskWarrior under whatever circumstances they claimed caused the problem. I remember one case in particular where they claimed that DiskWarrior wouldn’t work with Firewire 800 drives (which is utter nonsense), simply because some reader had had a problem rebuilding their own Firewire 800 drive. Of course it turned out to have a completely different cause (a bug in Quicktime), one that had actually already been well documented months ago, on MacFixIt’s own site!.
Had they bothered to simply shoot an e-mail or phone call our way, we could have provided them with the solution, they could have referred their reader to their old article with the solution, and saved everyone a whole lot of hassle. This is not only a problem for MacFixIt’s readers, but it costs the victim company time and money in responding to the resulting support calls and e-mails, plus the effort needed by the company to try to set the record straight.
So, if you’re a regular MacFixIt reader, I would encourage you to take everything they say at least with a grain of salt, if not to stop reading the site altogether. They have journalistic integrity on par with the National Enquirer. And if you do experience a problem with a program, contact the program’s developer. They are often quite helpful and actually know what they’re talking about, and will be happy to help you with your problem. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go install Leopard before the tides come in…
Apple totally stole my line!
Posted on October 17, 2007 by Brian Webster
Filed Under Apple | 3 Comments
I was looking through the Mac OS X Server section of Apple’s website, which has also been updated with Leopard info in the last couple days, when I saw this:
Hmmmm, this is seeming awfully familiar… where might I have seen this before?
Yeah, OK, my evidence is a little slim…. so far. But I’ve got my eye on you, Apple!
Top 10 obscure new Leopard features
Posted on October 16, 2007 by Brian Webster
Filed Under Apple | 1 Comment
I was just reading through the 300 new Leopard features just posted today on Apple’s site. They usually have a list like this with each major OS X release, and I always find it interesting, as there are usually a few little features that don’t make the “top features” list, but are the kind of refinements that can make upgrading worthwhile. Here are a few that I found that I’m looking forward to using.
- Scriptable System Preferences: There’s all sorts of functionality in System Preferences that I wish again and again I could change using a script. It doesn’t look like everything is scriptable, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction
- UI Recording and Playback: Back in the day, Applescript used to support recording, which was a great way to set up simple tasks and learn scripting. This has fallen by the wayside in OS X, but I’m glad to see some kind of recordability make it back into the OS, even if it’s slightly less sophisticated.
- Spring-Loaded Dock: I knew about this before, but apparently in addition to opening folders via the dock, you can also “spring-load” applications. Pressing the space bar while holding a drag over an app in the dock will launch the application. I’m pretty sure I’ll find ways to use this.
- Finder Path Bar: This is a nice little touch that puts the full path to the current folder in the bottom bar of your Finder window, similar to the one you see when selecting a search result. Simple, but will definitely make life easier.
- Inline iCal Editing: I never really liked having to shuttle all the way over to a separate window/drawer to edit iCal events. This looks like it will be much more intuitive.
- iChat Audio/Video Recording: I don’t do audio/video chats that often, but I love having transcripts of my text chats to look back at, and being able to do this with audio/video chats is definitely nice to have.
- Self-Tuning TCP: One of those under-the-hood optimizations that probably should have been done a while ago, and for which there are multiple third-party ways to enable it. Nice to see this here.
- PDF Manipulation in Preview: This is sweet, being able to reorder pages in a PDF, or copy pages from one PDF to another. You can combine multiple PDFs into on or split them apart. Preview is really getting to be a pretty powerful little application.
- Calculations in Spotlight: Finally, I can do quick calculations directly from my keyboard without having to open a separate app or widget.
- Scroll Non-Active Windows: Another little feature that I’ve found myself wanting fairly often. I sometimes employ the command-drag trick to drag a background window’s scroll bar, but just being able to crank the scroll wheel is much nicer.
WWDC 2007
Posted on June 18, 2007 by Brian Webster
Filed Under Apple, Development | 1 Comment
Well, I just got back safe and sound from the week long Apple geek-fest know as WWDC. I hadn’t been to the conference since 2001, back when I was still a student going with a free pass provided by Apple’s student developer program. That was back in the heady days of Apple’s reemergence and the dot com bubble, when there were about 1/4 as many people, it was still held in San Jose, and Jamba Juice flowed like water…
Uh, what was I saying? Oh yeah, WWDC 2007! It really was amazing how many people there were this year, enough that it got me wondering if they’ll have to change venues in the future if attendance keeps growing like it has been. They couldn’t fit everyone in the room for the keynote, so lots of people had to watch from the overflow rooms, and there were also a fair number of sessions that filled up and threatened to violate the fire code.
The keynote didn’t hold many surprises, but Leopard still looks like it will do well once it’s released. My only gripe was Steve Jobs trying to pass off developing web apps for the iPhone like it was something spectacular. Sorry Mr. Jobs, your audience just isn’t that gullible. You can’t sell a Whopper and tell them it tastes like filet mignon. I understand why they wouldn’t be able to provide a full OS X based SDK yet, especially for the first release of the product, but I would have much rather he just admitted “Yeah, it’s not ready yet, but while we’re working on that, you can still write web apps for the iPhone. We’ll get working on the real thing right away though.”
The upcoming stuff in the real OS X is looking pretty sweet though, and I definitely learned a lot at the sessions. I found out that with Time Machine, it will xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxx xx xxxxx and also xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx. The Core xxxxxxxxx talk was my favorite though, where they had this really cool demo that made the xxxx xxxxxxx fly around over xxx xxxxxxx xxx and even if you xxxx xxxxxxx xxx xxxxxx x xx xxxxxxxxx xxx, it will still slice through that red ripe tomato! Oh, and did I mention that all the material presented at the conference is confidential? Yeah, bummer. But trust me, it’s cool.
So, after a week of sitting on my butt in uncomfortable chairs, I am glad to be back home, sitting on my butt in a much more comfortable chair. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Leopard beta seed to install… 
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