If you recently completed the great move of 2011, from MobileMe to iCloud and your Apple ID uses a different email address than your MobileMe email, then you’ve likely now discovered the odd duality that is your new iCloud account. Following the transition, I was left with two iCloud accounts:

1. The primary iCloud account appropriately named “iCloud” which has synchronization for all options but Mail enabled (or at least the rest can be optionally enabled – Mail cannot).
2. A secondary iCloud account named myaccount@me.com which only has Mail, Contacts and Calendars enabled. This account has no storage associated with it and my Mac’s prefpane tells me that it is not my primary account.

I assumed that the move included iCloud automatically importing my calendars and contacts from MobileMe and that for whatever reason Apple couldn’t associate my @me.com account with my usual Apple ID, so it set up two different accounts. Although contacts transferred without any problems, my Calendars only existed in my MobileMe secondary iCloud account.

The oddest part is the inconsistency between the two accounts. Contacts are available in both (duplicates), while Mail and calendars are only available in the MobileMe iCloud account. Even more confusing is that in Apple Mail on Lion 10.7.2, my MobileMe account was renamed to iCloud, but in iCal, the account is still called MobileMe (in actual fact you see both MobileMe and iCloud calendars – two separate CalDAV accounts). Talk about confusing!

My objective became simplification by attempting to move everything I could to the primary iCloud account. Since moving mail over is up to Apple, and Contacts were already in place, I simply disabled contacts on the secondary account. But calendars are a different story. Here’s how to move them:

NOTE: you must use iCal on a Mac to do this. If you’re using Windows or only have iOS devices, this guide will not help you.

To begin, backup all of your calendars. Choose File > Export > iCal Archive.

To transition all of your calendars to your primary iCloud account, you need to create a new calendar on iCloud for each one you have on MobileMe. As an example, I’ll use the calendar “Personal” here.

1. File > New Calendar > iCloud
2. Right / Context click on the Untitled calendar under ICLOUD and choose Get Info. Make the Name “Personal” and change the colour to match the calendar on MobileMe then choose OK
3. Right / Context click on “Personal” under MOBILEME and choose Export. Remember where you’re saving it since you’ll probably want to remove it later, then choose the Export button
4. Choose File > Import > Import and select the file you just exported from MobileMe
5. It will then request that you choose witch calendar to import into. Select “Personal” under ICLOUD

You should now see duplicates of the calendar events. Uncheck Personal under MOBILEME to get rid of the duplicates.

Repeat these steps for each of your calendars if you have more than one. If you had any shared calendars before, you will need to reshare them by right / context clicking on them and choosing Share Calendar. If you’re comfortable with the changes, then you can go ahead and remove the MobileMe Calendars from your devices. For Mac OS X 10.7.2 here’s how:

1. Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences > Mail Contacts and Calendars
2. Select your MobileMe account in the list (it will have an iCloud icon, but should show your @me.com account as the name).
3. Uncheck Calendars.

The process is similar for iOS:

1. Go to the Settings app and choose Mail, Contacts, Calendars
2. Select your MobileMe account (it will be titled with your @me.com address)
3. Turn the switch to “OFF” beside Calendars

Be sure that your actual iCloud account has Calendars set to “ON” otherwise your calendars will no longer appear on the iOS device.

I hope this guide manages to help others who also wish to simplify this odd duality of iCloud accounts that Apple has created for the ‘devoted’ MobileMe crowd.

These are my options:

• Factory Unlocked – I can take it with me to Mexico and anywhere else in the world and use a local carrier for cheap. Great!
• $749 for the 32GB iPhone 4S – OUCH! That’s pricey.
• Only 1 year left on my contract with Rogers, then I’m free to re-negotiate and (probably) switch carriers

• Locked to Rogers for the full three (3!) years from today
• $269 $429 ($319 + $75 Hardware Upgrade fee + $35 Administration fee) for the 32GB iPhone 4S.
• Add another two years to my contract, putting me back to three years down the road until my next phone.

Can you tell why I refuse to renew my contract? Before I get into the details of my comparison, let me first say that I paid $199 for my iPhone 3GS two years ago and that my 3GS is unbearably slow to the extent that I am unable to do most of my work on my phone. The 4S will resolve this problem.

If I were in the US, my contract would be done and I wouldn’t be paying any penalties – I would be free and clear to pay the regular $299 for the 32GB iPhone 4S and enter into a new 2-year contract. Yes it would be $30 more in the US – $30 more for 1 less year on contract? I’ll take it! Oh wait, I can’t; not an option in the great white north. 2 years is reasonable, 3 is not. As of 5 years ago, three year contracts made sense since phone technology was advancing at a roughly equivalent pace. Every three years a new slew of phones would tide you over until three years after that. But it’s a new decade: phone technology is advancing so fast that 3 years is pretty much two lifetimes for a cellphone. 3 year contracts simply don’t make any sense anymore.

Wait, why is it so much more expensive than the new contract price of $269?

Good question. I filled out a bunch of inormation on Rogers’ website and it came back with the magic number of $429. Which means it’s marked up 63% above the normal 3-year contract price even though I’m getting exactly the same thing a brand new customer of Rogers would get. AND the phone remains locked.

For an additional $320 I get the wonderful ability to renegotiate my contract in a year (or change providers) and the ability to head anywhere in the world and make use of my phone at a decent rate. By the time I’m paying $429, what’s another $320?

The results of this analysis are that Rogers is failing to recognize a few key facts:

1. 3-year contracts no longer match with the pace of innovation in the mobile device market
2. I’m more than willing to pay a reasonable premium to do an early hardware upgrade. $160 on top of the regular price for the phone is not reasonable.
3. When your upgrade premium brings the price of the phone to more than 50% of the outright purchase price, it begins to tilt the scales in favour of buying outright. This is especially true because there are two major benefits to buying outright: factory unlocked condition and the ability to negotiate a new contract with retentions (or simply walk away).

Rogers should be doing a better job keeping their customers around. It’s in their best interest to keep you upgrading your phone and renewing your contract, yet these new upgrade policies are not accomplishing that. How can they do this? Here’s a few ways.

1. Come up with a better hardware upgrade policy – especially for those at the two year mark. I would be willing to pay $50 to do the upgrade a year early. Maybe as much as $75 – but no more than that. You’ll note that $75 brings the price to only 46% of the outright purchase price – keeping the balance below that precious 50% mark.
2. Do what they did a few years ago when the iPhone 3GS came out a year after the 3G. Upgrading to the 3GS (2 years early no less) from the 3G cost only $100 on top of the phone price. That also falls perfectly into line with my $50 at year 2 suggestion above ($50 / year early).
3. Reduce the benefits of buying outright. Allow customers to unlock their phones after a few months of their contract (or immediately after the return policy is over). If I didn’t have to wait until the end of the 3 year contract to unlock my phone, I would absolutely lock-in for another 3 year contract with Rogers and save the $320.

Short Introduction to the Google+ Launch

For those who have not had a chance to try out Google+, its greatest functionality essentially boils down to a mixture of the public nature of Twitter and the real-time conversations of Facebook. There’s also a great underlying layer of privacy control in the form of a fun-to-use interface that you’ve probably heard about called circles. The reason why circles isn’t really much to talk about anymore is because once you’ve got your big chunk of initial contacts within circles, you rarely see that interface again. You kind-of forget about it.

If you already had a Google account (read a Gmail account), then you didn’t really need to do much to get signed up except agree to their terms of services and start throwing contacts in circles. The barrier to entry is so small that millions of users signed up in the first month. This bodes well for Google because what’s a social network without users? You can post all you want, but without your friends, family, persons of interest and acquaintances, you’re not following or talking to anybody that is important to you. Since Twitter and Facebook cover persons of interest and friends, family and acquaintances already, if these folks don’t make their way to Google+ (at least a large portion of them), then why would you? Thankfully large numbers of them came in droves to test out Google+ and that first couple of weeks was alight with activity.

Notifications and the iPhone app

After a while, though, the pitfalls begin to stand out. You forget to continue visiting the website and realize that your only form of notifications is their constantly annoying emails. So you turn them off. Then you really forget to visit the website. Thankfully Google did one more thing right – they released the Google Plus app for Android and iPhone. My notifications started coming through and that initial hump was overcome. But the app (at least the iPhone one) isn’t perfect. And just like with the web service, the shortcomings of the app start showing as well.

The first big problem is the way notifications work on the iPhone app. When someone sends you a message the notification shows up in the messages area, but after you’ve read it, the notification remains. To clear it, you have to not only read the message, but also visit the notifications pane and refresh all the notifications. This is a few steps too many and most certainly gets frustrating when you’re getting dozens of messages (if not more) each day.

Huddle

Huddle is Google’s response to SMS replacement messengers like BlackBerry Messenger, Kik, Whatsapp, and the myriad of equivalents. When I first got the iPhone app, I was all for Huddle, it was faster to load than all of the other messengers and had roughly the same features. I was hooked. But as with everything else related to Google+ I began to get discouraged from using it due to the unfortunate behaviour of the application. The first problem was the notifications issue I mentioned above. The second issue is that everywhere I went that had low signal (whether wifi or 3G), my messages would start refusing to send. The annoying part is that it tells me they sent, then later on they’ll show me there was actually an error. I get the option to resend, but the resend button doesn’t do that! It brings the text of the message back to the text input box and I have to click send again – why make it two steps when it could easily be one? It’s not even close to the expected behaviour compared to all other apps that do the same thing. Clearly Google didn’t actually do their homework and use any of the other applications.

The most serious problem with Huddle is in the entire concept of how Huddle works. Huddle is only available in the mobile iPhone or Android application. You cannot use Huddle from the web interface even though the web interface already has a messenger application included! Google Plus web edition has Google Talk integrated in the same way Gmail does. People love Google Talk. So why in the world would Google make Huddle completely separate?! The worst part about all of this is that Facebook absolutely destroyed them on this very point.

During the launch of Google+, Facebook developers were hard at work integrating Facebook messages with Facebook chat. Just a few weeks after the launch of Google+, out came the new Facebook messaging platform – an integration of everything to do with private messaging through Facebook. From the email-like messages to the in-browser Facebook chat to Facebook chat on mobile devices, everything remains tightly integrated and in one combined messaging system. While I have my own tiny little personal issues with the new Facebook Messaging, overall it is extremely well done and absolutely destroys Google+ and their horribly fragmented chat and messaging systems. It sets the example for what should have happened with Huddle and Google Talk – they should have been one combined service. Had they done that, they would have beat Facebook to the punch and provided all first-mover Google+ users a good solid reason to stay with Google+. No such luck.

The non-existent API

I know what you’re thinking. “Why does anyone excluding developers care about an API?” Because they do, they just don’t know it yet. The existence of an API allows just about anyone to hook in to Google+ and make apps that take advantage of it. If Google had created an Google+ API right off the bat, what kinds of features could we all be taking advantage of? The biggest ones I was craving in those first few weeks are:

1. Notifications. Yep they came on the iPhone, but I also spend my time on my iPad and MacBook – no such luck there! I am a huge fan of the beautiful Boxcar app for notifications on my iPad and MacBook, but I can’t use Boxcar for Google+ notifications because Google+ provides no way for them to hook in to do so. Damn, too bad there’s not an API for that.
2. Automatic status updating. I already enjoy updating Facebook and Twitter. I do not want to update three or more services – that’s pretty damn time consuming. Dozens of applications already allow updating Facebook via Twitter and vice versa, but despite there being a demand for it, they cannot update Google+ because there’s no API.

I’m sure there are dozens of other great ways an API could benefit Google+. Too bad they weren’t on the ball here either.

How else should Google have integrated services? Does anyone remember their last ‘failed’ social media attempt? Google Buzz integrated your Facebook, Twitter and other services into one simple stream. So why aren’t Google Plus and Google Buzz integrated in any way? This one truly baffles me. If Google Buzz were integrated with my timeline in G+, my friends that prefer to update their Facebook status wouldn’t be a problem! I would then see their status updates in my Google Plus timeline. Those who prefer Google+ could then easily stick with it without the requirement to fall back on their Facebook timeline. Survey says: not happening.

Improvements Lacking

Here we are roughly 1.5 months later. Google has updated its iPhone Huddle app once and I discovered none of my only annoyances fixed. You might be thinking, give them time! But yet in this 1.5 month period Facebook has made massive changes to their messaging system to blow Google+ away (including the addition of video chat). In today’s world of connected apps, one week is a long time, and so when roughly seven of them pass without any major improvements, I (and I’m sure many others) begin to lose interest and faith that Google has the ability to improve the platform in a decent timeframe.

Google has historically been known to be way too slow to make changes. From what I’ve read, they have a problem when it comes to snap judgements and instead choose to launch multi-month studies to make their decisions. When you’ve got time to do this, that’s a fantastic approach. When your competitors are iterating faster than you, it’s time to wise-up and change your decision making methods in order to keep pace. I have yet to see this from Google+ and my hesitation towards the service grows ever stronger.

The general idea: Do what you love and put your passion into it. Don’t think about how to get money from it, just do it and build your brand equity. The money will eventually come. It contains similar teachings as found in the Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, a book that I refer to every single week for some 80/20 magic or motivation.

My favourite quote from this comes near the very end: “stop watching FUCKING Lost.”

It’s only gotten worse.

With cell phones and the horrible fact that everyone thinks an immediate answer is necessary at all times, we’ve become dependant upon interruptions to go about our daily lives. In an office you’re interrupted non-stop for meetings, updates, reports, what-have-you. On your computer or tablet, you’re interrupted by notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Emails, and just about every application on your favorite device.

It never ends! Except that it can; you rule your life, whether you know it or not.

There’s a fix for every one of these problems. To accomplish this, I have defined areas where I’m OK with interruptions and areas that I’m not. First up, telephone calls.

Telephone Calls

I cannot stand telephone calls – they interrupt whatever I’m doing no matter what it is at any point in the day (or night). The call may just be a friend or family member looking for a status update while I’m trying to fix a serious issue with a server. No way it makes sense for me to answer that! If I’m in the midst of reading a rather complicated chapter of an important book (non-fiction informational typically) a telephone call could make me need to read the chapter all over again. If I’m programming, a telephone call can make me lose track of what I’m working on and start the whole section anew (wasting precious hours of my time). What to do?!

Let everyone know you don’t want phone calls. Set up your voicemail to inform others that they’re welcome to leave a voicemail, though email is preferred (email is quicker to respond to and gather information than is voicemail). Tell people to email you or text message you, but not to expect an immediate response at all times. If people understand your methods, they’re more likely to obey them.

This also lends a hand to prioritization and emergencies. If someone only calls you when its an emergency, you’re much more likely to answer the call than if they call you all of the time. You could accidentally ignore an emergency if you don’t have something like this set up purely because you’re accustomed to all of your phone calls being of the same importance level. How can you prioritize a phone call if you don’t know what it’s about? You simply can’t unless you’ve arranged the call in advance – likely by email.

People in your face

I hear people constantly joking about families that are emailing or text messaging each other within the same household – often across the hallway or room from each other. And they scoff at it. But it’s effective and efficient! And hey, it can be pretty fun too. This works exactly the same for offices. Why would you walk down the hall (or across the room) and interrupt someone’s workflow? The only time it makes sense is if there is an urgent matter to deal with immediately. In every other case, both people are benefited by emailing instead. Why? The person who gets up to go talk to you clearly has nothing better to do or is avoiding doing work. You get interrupted in the midst of whatever you’re doing, and overall the net productivity of the situation is considerably lower than if the information being passed on were simply emailed.

But I can’t describe the problem by email

Bullshit. Most people are horrible at describing things in general. But when you sit down to itemize the information you’re trying to transmit, it’s amazing how clear it can become! By outlining a description on your computer, you have the ability to actually see what it is that you are saying and realize that you haven’t been saying it very clearly all along. This happens to me all the time, and those that think they don’t need it are almost always wrong. There are exceptions. Some people are excellent at formulating thoughts (even long ones) in their heads, but most of us simply aren’t built that way. For the rest of us, there’s writing.

Next time you’re excited about telling someone something that’s rather long, instead of running up to them and describing that thing, write it down and itemize it. Put it in clear terms without editing as you go along. When you’re done, sleep on it and read over it the next morning. You will see how unclear and completely unoptimized it truly is! This is a quick exercise to see how you can improve communications with others, but I wouldn’t do this every time. After a while you can edit as you go along and come up with roughly the same effectiveness as before while improving your speed greatly. Not only do you improve your ability to communicate that thought but you improve your writing skills in general – this can only be a good thing in the Internet age.

If I don’t get back to person x, they’ll think I don’t care!

While this is certainly possible with some people these days, the people that really matter, whether in business or your person life, will not fault you for this. You would be surprised how understanding people are of simply needing a bit of time to answer a question. If these people are not understanding, are you sure you want to be doing business with them? If it’s a friend, well perhaps it’s time to space yourself just a little bit from this person – for the sake of your sanity.

Choose your weapon: prioritization on all of your devices

My computer tends to be my notification frenzy device. I typically leave a dozen apps running that notify me of things, like Facebook notifier, Twitter, Mail, Sparrow, OmniFocus, Evernote, Skype, Adium and possibly more I’m not thinking of. This means when I need to get some real work done, I need to do one of two things. I can quit all those programs and only use the one I need to be working on or I can switch to a notification free device

My iPad is my weapon of choice for no interruptions; it’s a mostly notification free device. I use it to read, write and research, all of which should be done in an interruption free environment, so I disabled notifications from anything that pops up regularly enough to annoy me. I take my iPad with me any time I need to get anything done (except programming sadly).

My iPhone is somewhere in the middle. I’ve disabled push notifications for almost everything except the most important business interruptions and key messenger programs like Kik and SMS that only really work well on the iPhone with its constant cellular connection. I have business support tickets set up for push, but NOT all emails. This way people who actually need help can get through to me immediately, while the rest can await my next free moment, at which time I will open the Mail app and take a gander.

Signal to noise ratio (SNR)

SNR comes from sound or radio communications where you want to eliminate noise and focus in on the signal. Sound familiar? It should – you’ve just been reading over 1000 words about it. You’re improving the signal to noise ratio of the information all around you by taking some or all of these tips to heart. I’ve been living with these types of adjustments to my life for roughly the past year and a half and it is completely liberating. I find when I need to get things done, they get done considerably faster than before and my stress levels remain comparatively low.

My only regret? Not realizing I needed to do this before I started university.

My friend and colleague went on vacation in Florida with his Bell Canada locked iPhone. A few days in he discovered that he had been charged $0.75 for every text message in and out, and due to his obsession for text messaging, this added up to around the $200 mark. This is unfortunate, but certainly not Bell’s problem that my friend had forgotten to obtain an appropriate roaming plan for texting in the US.

After realizing his mistake, he called Bell and spoke to a representative to arrange having a roaming package added to his account. The package details were $30 for the month to make his text messages $0.20 per text rather than $0.75. My friend expected this would take effect for the remainder of his time in Florida and was pleasantly surprised when the Bell rep informed him that he could retroactively apply the package to all previous text message charges incurred in Florida, thus negating the excessive charges on his account. Thanks to the excellent support provided by the Bell Canada representative, my friend was satisfied and hung up a happy man.

Two days later his phone was disabled.

Upon return home from Florida, with a nearly useless cellphone because Bell’s automated system had disabled it for being over a predetermined limit on the account (about $300), my friend called Bell to inquire as to what had gone wrong. Since the only way for that amount to accumulate on his account is if the rep didn’t apply the package correctly, one would assume that Bell would take care of this by fixing up the account (applying the package) and re-enabling his phone. Nope. Not even close. Here’s what really happened.

Another call to Bell revealed the following key points:

1. They have all of the notes in their system showing what the first representative had done – you know, the guy who provided excellent customer service.
2. The Bell rep and about three supervisors all claim that the notes are invalid because the rep was wrong about being able to do everything he said he could do and thus the charges are valid.
3. Although the phone being disabled was entirely the result of a poorly trained representative of Bell (in other words, Bell’s fault), nobody at Bell can re-enable his phone because the balance has not yet been paid

This leaves us with a completely ridiculous situation. To re-active the phone, my friend must pay $300+ which he should never have owed to begin with, then make a claim against Bell to have them refund the amount he shouldn’t be paying because of their error. Why would Bell ever agree to pay him back any of that money? If they’re refusing to admit that he shouldn’t owe it now, then why would they change their mind and pay it back to him after the fact? That’s just asking to get robbed.

Let’s go back and examine the real problem(s) here and see how a rational supervisor or manager might resolve this. Firstly, the Travel USA Text bundle does exist – the rep could not have been wrong about that. You can see it right here on Bell’s website with all the details as described above ($30 for $0.20 texts and 150 included for free). Thus it seems likely that the wrongdoing on the original Bell rep’s part came in the form of backdating the plan – it’s likely that this is not actually possible and that it would only apply to all text messages following the date my friend called to add the plan. Although it is certainly a problem that the rep thought he could do this, let’s say there’s absolutely no way to ever backdate a plan, such that Bell assumes my friend is lying, even though he is not. Then my friend is still on the hook for the original $200 applied up until the day that he called. What he should have absolutely no claim to pay is any fees above $0.20 per text beyond the first 150 from the day he called. Yet his bill is $100 higher only a few days later because Bell did not actually apply the plan.

The solution is simple then. Bell admits that they have terrible training issues that result in ridiculous overcharges that they refuse to take care of for their customers, re-enables the phone and removes all charges above and beyond the $200 initial charges + fair rates for all other text messages based on the Travel US roaming plan. This is the perfect compromise scenario.

Bell’s Solution

Rather than the compromise I described, Bell takes the road of incompetence. “Sorry, we don’t have the ability to re-enable your account until you pay your $300 bill”

And that’s that. Apparently they really don’t have the ability to do anything – nobody at Bell has the ability to re-enable cell phones. Nobody.

Conclusions

1. Nobody – including supervisors and managers – has control over Bell’s software system, and thus no employee is empowered to actually accomplish anything, leading to terrible customer support.
2. Supervisors at bell have no comprehension of conflict resolution, let alone the compromises that are required for this to occur.
3. Staff at Bell are not properly trained on how their software works and what they are capable of doing (and of course what they are not capable of doing).
4. My friend should stop texting so much.

Despite my distaste for Rogers’ handling of unlocking iPhones, I have, overall, had great experiences with them. Not once have I encountered a situation that their telephone reps were not empowered to do regarding my own personal account and iPhone (albeit with a few transfers to higher departments here and there). Even when I posted about my confusion and frustration regarding unlocking my Mother’s iPhone, I was met with a response providing clarity on their policies and, although I didn’t agree with one of them, I was told it would be forwarded on to the higher-ups. This may not be true, but at least they tried to help me out. I am appalled that any customer service oriented company (really that’s all cellular service is) could have such a lack of empowered employees. Clearly I will never be using a Bell service in the future, and any sane person reading this should follow suit.

It starts with a jailbreak, needed in order to obtain access to the internals of the iPhone operating system. Once there, hackers need to find bugs to exploit in the iPhone’s cellular firmware in order to free your phone from its carrier. Why isn’t this easier? Because Apple’s agreement with the carriers mean they can keep your phone locked until the carrier allows you to unlock it. And although they do allow you unlock it, their unlocking services come with extremely ridiculous and complicated requirements.

Note: If you’re looking for specific information on the policy and do not wish to read my story, feel free to skip to the summary at the very bottom of the article.

Background

My Mother obtained an iPhone 3GS that is locked to Rogers Wireless from a friend in Canada. Her friend has since upgraded to the iPhone 4 by buying out the 3GS contract and signing a new one for the iPhone 4. This means the 3GS is no longer under contract – it is free and clear. My Mother lives in Mexico, so having a phone locked to a Canadian carrier is next to useless unless she only intended to use it as an iPod – she did not.

While visiting my Mother in Mexico, I figured I would take it upon myself to get her new phone unlocked, after all, why not use it to its full potential? I had recently heard about Rogers unlocking iPhones for a fee [Electronista] once the contract on the phone is completed. Although I could (somewhat) easily soft-unlock the phone using the complex method I described above, this isn’t optimal, since then I have to warn my Mother to avoid software updates and it would also create other minor annoyances, such as possibly broken GPS (at the time of writing this article). Therefore, a carrier-level unlock would be much simpler for her. This makes paying the $50 that Rogers is asking for the unlock a reasonable investment. So I called Rogers.

The Ridiculousness of the Rogers Unlock Program

The conversation starts off pretty well, with the first contact representative having heard of the unlock program and transferring me to the correct department. From here things go downhill. I described the situation, how I obtained a phone off-contract and that I’d like to pay the fee to get it unlocked. Unlocking the phone is something you would think Rogers would be happy to do since the phone is no longer on contract, they are receiving $0 from the device at this time (phones on contract pay them a certain amount every month as part of the plan). Handing over $50 for something that costs them nothing, aside from negligible phone operator costs, is a nice small profit for them. Sure I’m just one guy for now, but many people are likely to want to unlock their off-contract phones in the coming years as iPhone 3G and 3GS device contracts come to a close. Their unlocking service should add up to a good little profit over time.

I clearly described to the operator that the phone is not tied to a contract and asked her to look up the serial number so she could verify this. She refused. I asked her what is required, if not the serial number of the phone, in order to unlock the iPhone. Her response? She wants my account information. I told her that the phone I’m looking to unlock has nothing to do with my own Rogers account, but when she wouldn’t continue the conversation until I gave her the info, I relented. Her having that info shouldn’t do any harm anyway. She looked on my account and found my own 3GS (with a different serial number) and the contract on it that has about another two years left. Paraphrasing her response: “I can only unlock phones for people that have no contract on their account.” This apparently is true even if it can be proven that the phone being unlocked has absolutely nothing to do with the account in question. In other words, if you once had an iPhone 3GS and have since completed a hardware upgrade with Rogers to a BlackBerry, Android phone or a new iphone 4, you still cannot unlock your old iPhone. Even though it has been paid off entirely.

What does this mean?

For me and my Mother, this meant I simply had to soft-unlock the phone after all. It also meant Rogers didn’t obtain another penny for the iPhone 3GS in question, which is a puzzling business decision.

For others with iPhones, it means that if you do a hardware upgrade you will never be able to legitimately unlock the older hardware until three years after your ‘last’ device purchase; if you want to unlock, you cannot get a new phone. Even though you have paid for the older phone in its entirety, you are unable to unlock it. How absurd is that? I can walk into an Apple store and buy an iPhone 4 for about $750 factory unlocked. But after I’ve paid $1,440-2,160 (~$60 [conservative estimate] per month for 2 or 3 years) I’m forced to keep the phone locked to Rogers? Even when they have the ability to unlock it AND I’m willing to pay additional fees to do so?

Now that is ridiculous.

Why would they do this? There is only one reason that makes any sense. If the hoops you have to jump through to get your phone unlocked means that more phones remained locked to Rogers, then whomever you sell or give your iPhone to will have to sign up for a new plan with Rogers. It’s the opposite of loyalty, they are actually forcing people to use their service when they should be using their marketing and customer service to attract customers and create real loyalty instead.

[UPDATE] Elise from Rogers was kind enough to clarify on this point in the comments below. Apparently the rep I spoke to was misinformed on this particular topic. Although it is true that I could not unlock that iPhone because it was never under my account (an aggravating policy), the original owner in Toronto supposedly could call up and have it unlocked even though he has a new iPhone 4. In other words, hardware upgrades supposedly do not negate the ability to unlock the original handset.

Conclusion

You can bet that the next iPhone I buy will be factory unlocked and that, because of this experience, Rogers may very well lose me as a customer. This negative attitude I have towards Rogers is in stark contrast to my former attitude; up until this point, I have enjoyed their service and promoted Rogers everywhere I could. The new attitude boils down to a simple economic decision that is so poorly thought out that it makes almost no sense: Because Rogers refused to accept my $50, over a policy that sounds as ridiculous as what is coming out of the CRTC these days [Financial Post], I am no longer comfortable entrusting my account with the company.

[UPDATE] Elise – a Rogers representative – has responded in the comments below. Keep reading for further details and hopefully further clarifications regarding the policies in place for unlocking your iPhone with Rogers.

======== Appended Aug 16, 2011 ========

[UPDATE] Since this article is #1 on Google.ca for ‘Rogers iPhone unlock’, I think it’s in everyone’s best interests to have a simple summary with a clear description of how their program works based on the information provided by the Rogers rep I talked to on the phone and by @RogersElise in the comments below.

Summary of The Unlock Policy

1. To unlock your iPhone you MUST have an active Rogers account in good standing. Despite what the Rogers rep on the telephone told me, @RogersElise clarified that you can have an iPhone or other device on contract as long as the iPhone you are unlocking is currently not under contractual obligations.
2. If you have purchased the phone from someone else who did not unlock it, you will be unable to unlock the phone through Rogers
3. You are required to pay $50 CAD to unlock the phone. I assume that is before tax.
4. While I appreciate @RogersElise’s personal response on the matter, and believe that it is great that they’re reaching out to people to help clarify their policies, I believe this particular policy is not well thought out.

It is my belief that verifying (via Serial Number or IMEI – both unique identifiers for the phone) that the iPhone is not under contractual obligations or reported stolen by the original owner should be enough verification for the phone to be unlocked. In other words, account information should not be required. Why do I believe this? Because there are multiple cases where someone without a Rogers account would be willing to Pay Rogers to unlock their phone and should be granted that right as the full-owner of the phone. One example is my Mother, discussed above, who lives in Mexico and was given the phone as a gift. Another example is someone who sells their phone on eBay, Craig’s List, Kijiji or elsewhere without realizing they need to unlock it. The buyer, as the current owner of the phone, should be able to unlock it to work on their carrier of choice.

A counter-argument to this is suggested in the comments below by someone named Matt. He believes they require a valid account for security reasons. My response to that can also be found below, but the general idea is that by the time the phone is off-contract Rogers shouldn’t be imposing any further security upon your phone at all – that should be considered an invasion of privacy, even if it is supposedly to protect you. In other words, although I am open to good arguments in favour of the current Rogers policy, I do not accept Matt’s argument as anything but a weak rationalization.

Why are they doing this to us?

Because it saves the manufacturers money. They figured out at some point that it was getting costly having to ship French Canadian keyboards to Quebec and US keyboards to the rest of Canada, so to save some cash and simplify shipping, they all started shipping with French Canadian keyboards – regardless of the destination.

Why do I care?

I care because every time I type on one of these extremely annoying French Canadian keyboards, I’m reminded how horribly laid out they are for anyone trying to type in plain old English. If you are a hunt-and-peck typist, then you probably won’t care, but if you have been trained in proper touch typing at any point, then these keyboards will drive you mad.

What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that the left shift key is split in two; the left side is normal shift and the right side becomes a slash. When touch typing, it is not only convenient, but simply more comfortable (and probably better ergonomically) to curl your left pinky down a row and SHIFT away. When the key is split so that its ‘sweet-spot’ is no longer actually a shift action, your typing becomes a myriad of slashes in places you certainly did not intend.

What’s more, the enter key is also broken. Typically an enter key is reached by the right pinky finger directly beyond the apostrophe. However with these ridiculously designed keyboards, reaching for that spot actually writes some other unwanted character.

Conclusion

Well… I can’t change it, but I sure as hell am not going to like it. At least I don’t have to own one! In all honesty, I think the manufacturers should allow free keyboard swaps to those who request it, without the owner having to pay for a new US-style keyboard layout. It’s not the customer’s fault that the manufacturers are opting for laziness and cost savings over their satisfaction.

The large and vibrant screen showcases the colours of the comic books beautifully, making it the perfect medium for this purpose. Reading with the Marvel app is simple and elegant – I love it. But it does have its drawbacks. I have a number of comic books in CBR and CBZ formats on my computer, from old classics to independent fan-created graphic novels, all of which could surely benefit from such a fantastic reading environment. I couldn’t do it with the Marvel or IDW (similar) applications because they are limited to purchases in their own in-app stores. So I went on the hunt. I found a free app called CloudReader and began using that, and while its reading experience is well done, the file/comic book navigation and cataloging is terrible. It’s a simple list with no covers, no title parsing, and no folders – not very useful if you have a number of comic books you wish to read and keep on the device. And thus, my search continued.

I looked for reviews and eventually came upon a Gizmodo review comparing Comic Zeal for iPad ($7.99) and Comic Reader Mobi ($15). Not only is Comic Reader Mobi more money than I’m willing to spend on a comic book reader, but their entire website is done in Flash. How clueless can you get?

I visited the Comic Zeal website and found a beautifully designed site that showcased their iPhone version of the app wonderfully. This must be it, I thought, who could make such a nicely designed site and iPhone app and fall short on the iPad version, probably the best physical device made for their market? And so I went to the iTunes app store and paid for and downloaded the latest release at the time – version 4.0.5.

Note: the review is now updated to reflect some great new changes in v4.0.13

Setup

Comic Zeal provides two options for transferring your comic books to your iPad. The first uses the built in file transfer within iTunes and is by far the best method of sending over your comic books. I highly recommend using it for all your comic book transfers. I also tried out the wireless Comic Zeal sync app and found it to be useful in very specific situations, but overall I was unimpressed. It uses a seemingly intuitive and simple drag-and-drop mechanism for converting and sending comic books to your iPad, but appearances are deceiving.

User Interface for Comic Zeal Sync

My first reaction was to drop my comic books where it clearly states “Drop files here”. I then set the Series and Issue names and target device and I’m all set. The problem is that processing begins as soon as I drop the comics in the app, meaning I need to set the series and issue names first. The UI indicates no order (with numbers or arrows) for how to do things and if there were an implied order, then it would be telling me to drop the images first, then set the series and issues names because I naturally process the app from top to bottom.

My only remaining complaint with the main window is that the target device dropdown does not remain consistent across restarts of the application. This caused me to accidentally convert some comic books to the “All devices” resolution of 1024 pixels which is not suitable for the iPad since most of the speech bubbles become difficult to read. I’m not sure why this “All devices” format is even there considering it is even smaller than the target resolution for iPhone which is 1546 pixels (with iPad at 2048 pixels).

Synchronization Agent: SyncDocs

The sync feature uses what I assume to be a third party plugin entitled SyncDocs. I would like it to be well hidden. I think the user should click the Sync button and an indicator should appear that it is waiting to begin syncing with iPad/iPhone. Instead, it launches a separate window with a list of all the files that you have converted and an array of buttons that are surely confusing to most users. Why not hide this window and manage it all through visual indicators in the main window’s interface? It also binds itself to a common port (8080) by default. This conflicts with XBMC or Boxee, which could be running on your Mac or on another computer on your network. This means Comic Zeal Sync might fail to work if you’ve got one of those media centre apps running on your computer (or a proxy app using 8080, which is also common). It also means that when your iPad or iPhone scans your network for devices, it finds XBMC and Boxee servers, which might be confusing to some users. These last few points are not problems, per se, but they made the sync app seem a little rough around the edges.

But, enough about syncing and set-up. Let’s get to the app itself!

First Impression

The first time the application is opened you’re presented with this plain textured background with nothing on it. It’s empty, with not even a gloss or brand applied to it. Right off the bat, my thought was, “well what exactly do I do?” I expected to find an iBooks style interface with my comic book collection on shelves or in boxes (like real-life comic filing boxes as the iPhone app video walk through on their website shows). Instead I’m given nothing. I’m disappointed that this application doesn’t present something fun, like a closet with shelves full of comic book boxes with sharpie-marked comic book titles and the comics themselves popping out from within. I am certainly hoping for something more engaging for two reasons. First, I consider $7.99 a slightly high price for this application and because of my perception of the price I expect a high quality user interface. Just about every application I’ve paid for was purchased due to their impressive UIs. Second, and this is something I will mention again later, the iPhone app and their website are really nicely designed – I wanted to be just as impressed with the iPad version of ComicZeal. Considering these are the first few releases for iPad, I’m willing to forgive the lack of such an engaging user interface, although I am still hoping a redesign will be provided eventually.

Still in search of my comic books, I immediately looked to the bottom to see if there was a tab bar that I could navigate the app with, as nearly all iPhone/iPad apps have, but there was no such option. To the bottom right I found controls for viewing comics, including buttons for taking a picture, rotation lock, some sort of eject option (WTF?) and back and forward page buttons.

There are a few problems with this:

1. If I don’t have a comic book open, the buttons are useless, so why are those options even there? They simply serve to confuse me at this point.
2. Why do I need a rotation lock button when the iPad has a hardware option for this?
3. What the hell am I going to be ejecting from my iPad with that eject button?
4. Why do I need page turning buttons if the iPad has gestures for this? These buttons are not quite as unnecessary as the others since many people have expressed their preference for buttons over gestures for such things – I just don’t happen to agree with that sentiment.

On a more positive note, having the screen capture button could be useful. Many are unaware of the ability to take a screen capture by pressing the home and power buttons simultaneously and others may have simply forgot about the inherent OS level functionality. Although I rarely feel the need to store a picture of anything from a comic book, I’m sure more invested readers do at some point or another.

The progress bar is also very handy. Although Comic Zeal’s plain slider control implementation isn’t as pretty as Marvel’s thumbnail bar, the thumbnails in Marvel’s app are not differentiable anyway. In other words, I bet nobody can tell the difference from one page to another while using the Marvel app’s thumbnail bar, so in that regard it doesn’t provide any additional functionality over Comic Zeal’s slider. There are still a couple downsides to using a slider over thumbnails. First, thumbnails make it pretty clear what the control does. Comic Zeal’s slider could initially be perceived as a zoom or pan slider or some sort of volume control – perhaps for those who like to listen to music while reading their comic books. Second is something I discovered only after quite a bit of reading. When you’re looking for a particular page, you often know approximately where it is in the book in relative terms – “I think the page I’m looking for is about three pages from the end.” This provides a big bonus for thumbnails, as they allow direct page-by-page indication of where you are from the beginning and end.

Marvel for iPad Thumbnail Progress Bar

Navigation

Now that I’ve examined the middle and bottom of the screen, my gaze drifts upward to the only remaining UI elements that I can interact with, and I discover the tab bar on top. I read a review somewhere (that I can no longer find) that described the reasoning behind the top-positioning of the tab bar as being due to the bottom of the screen being hard to reach while reading. This reasoning makes no sense to me.

1. If that’s true, then why are all the controls that are provided specifically to manage your reading on the bottom? (No, seriously… I’d like to know.)
2. This belief should not be considered more important than consistency. Nearly every other application available on the app store has tabs on the bottom and iPhone, iPod Touch and now iPad users are accustomed to it. Having tabs on the top is downright confusing. But I digress.

Severely width-limited viewing area. Background is useless!

Having discovered the tab bar, finding my comics was then simple. I tap on Collection and up pops my comic books. Not in a full screen grid or list as I was expecting (the background is still plain and doing absolutely nothing for me). The comic books show up in one of those scrollable pop-up widgets that are found throughout iPad apps. Thus my area from which to view my comic book collection is limited to a vertical strip taking up less than half of the screen. I have nothing against these iPad UI widgets, but I feel like they have their place, and this particular use for it seems wrong. Why not take advantage of the entirely unused screen real-estate and show the collection there? One does not need to see an individual comic book and their collection simultaneously except when heading to the next comic book in a series. Thus, I suggest converting the collection pop-up into a series pop-up, showing only the series within the box that is currently being read. They could even have it show the top of your comic book box at about a 45º angle, with the next comic book in the series showing and the previous books flipped down – as if you were flipping through a box of comics. I believe this suggested implementation represents an excellent combination of user friendliness and powerful features.

The widget overlay is the first part of the collection navigation that really strikes me as being ‘off’. I want to clarify before continuing that I believe the comic book collection mechanisms in Comic Zeal to be a brilliant extension of a real-life comic book collection, with the use of boxes and sleeves. Despite this, the graphics used to represent these ideas are lacking, leading to a feeling of lower quality than I had anticipated. More detail on this topic in the following few paragraphs.

Viewing My Collection

Blur around edges and off-putting shadows

I can sort my comics into their respective boxes and the covers are immediately grabbed from the first pages and shown right there as thumbnails. When I navigate within a box, the covers of all the comics show up within. It looks pretty slick apart from a collection of odd graphical issues. For some reason the comic books (and boxes as seen to the left) have a really ugly blocky-grey drop shadow. I suggest using a proper alpha channel smooth drop shadow, as long as its not the current Word 2000 style drop shadow – it’s ugly. The second graphical issue is that when using large icons, the boxes appear to be low quality with blur around the handles, and stripes that are not very sharp – these need to be cleaned up around the edges a bit.

There is also a very subtle problem with the background of the collection’s toolbar (and other similar widgets throughout the app). Take a close look and you will see the Apple provided black transparent background being covered by a custom black gradient background. It leaves a feeling of inconsistency with other applications for iPad and that there is something ‘off’ (although it’s hard to tell without taking a close look). I think this might have just been overlooked when transferring from the iPhone version. I hope it can be removed as the buttons appearing directly on top of the Apple provided widget is considerably nicer looking

In terms of view options, you can have small covers to the left with titles and ‘reading status’ on the right and you can also have a grid view, with two, three or four covers per row. The problem with this view is that I don’t see any indication of reading status or numbering. Because of this I can’t tell which comic is the next one in sequence while reading through a series. This is a bit annoying. I was in fact wrong about this. Bitolithic uses a clever mechanism for showing which comics have already been read – a plastic sleeve! All comic books which have been read are placed within a sheath, just like we do with our print comic books. It’s a fantastic idea, however its implementation isn’t quite worthy of the praise. I didn’t notice this feature until it was pointed out to me on their website, at which point I looked closer on my iPad and found that the covers of those within plastic sheaths are slightly faded. I think this problem could be remedied by giving the plastic sleeve a more glossy look – it needs to be clear to the user that these comics appear different from those that have not yet been read, otherwise the feature is not useful.

Box View

Small Box View

Cover View

Tap on any comic book and it loads immediately in behind, with seemingly no load time at all. Cool. For some reason my collection is still hovering above the comic, which is a bit irritating, although I suppose could be useful if you accidentally tapped on the wrong one (I never did). I await the usual 3-5 seconds for the controls (bottom buttons and tab bar) to disappear so I can focus in on reading, just like it works in iBooks and while watching movies. It doesn’t happen. I wait a little longer, bupkis. I finally notice the little upward pointing arrow in the right hand upper corner of the screen and tap it. Controls disappear as I was expecting them to do automatically. Odd, but manageable. You can also tap anywhere in the middle of the screen for the controls to disappear, which feels a little more natural. With version 4.0.13 tapping on a comic book in the collection now results in the comic book appearing full screen and the interface disappearing automatically. Perfect!!

Reading

Background on sides is distracting

Reading the comics themselves is generally pleasing with a few minor quirks. First is that textured background I mentioned before. Since the aspect ratio of most comic books is slightly skinnier than the screen, there is space on both the left and right side of the screen where the comic book does not take up. In movies and the Marvel app, this is filled in with black; it’s easy on the eyes and provides a sort-of smooth transition into the black frame of the iPad. Comic Zeal sticks with its plain textured background, making it brighter on the eyes in dark rooms and simply put, not a very nice border for reading.

This has since been fixed! In version 4.0.8 the ability to change the background has been added and I was able to change it to black to make it easier on the eyes in dark rooms and for better consistency. Even better, the magic background feature auto-detects the background of the comic and sets it accordingly. It works very well resulting in me leaving that mode on at all times. Additionally, the zoom lock feature added in 4.0.13 means you rarely need to look at the background anyway!

My next quirk is in page-turning. I can slide my finger across and it slides smooth until the left side of the comic reaches the left side of the screen. At this point it suddenly stops and then appears to do a really fast slide off screen before revealing the following page. It’s slightly awkward looking and inconsistent with iBooks (real-feeling page turning) and other readers that slide the pages across. While I like iBooks page turn animation, I don’t think Comic Zeal could pull it off since you’re often zooming in and out and panning up and down – detecting a page turn would be rather difficult amidst all these other gestures. A smooth slide across could work, though it might feel less authentic. I think the smooth slide might be the better option as it would feel like it fits in better with other iPad applications, though I’m not entirely sold on it either. Perhaps I’ll have more to say on this after further time is spent reading in Comic Zeal.

Pinch zooming works flawlessly. Although I expected double tapping to zoom in to the frame, it instead revealed the tab bar and controls again, despite there being a button for this in the upper right corner. Why do we need two methods of bringing that up? In the preferences there is an option to enable double-tap zooming rather than bringing up the controls – I think this should be enabled by default. The odd thing about double tap zooming is that it appears to not zoom in to anything in particular. It would be nice if it could approximately detect a panel and zoom into that or, if tapping on a speech bubble, zoom the bubble alone (without zooming the rest of the page).

Tapping on the “Collection” button in the tab bar to see my comic collection again doesn’t seem to work the first time. I always have to tap it twice. When it does come up, it takes me back to the root of the navigation every time rather than showing me where I was. If I want to get to the next comic book in the series, I must bring up the tab bar, double tap the Collection button, find the series again, tap on it, then find where I was in the list (which is hard if you are in any type of covers view). Not very intuitive.

Both of these bugs have been fixed in 4.0.8. Double tap no longer required, and it automatically shows wherever I left off in the hierarchy of my comic book organization.

Conclusions

When it comes to comic book collection management, Bitolithic has the right idea with a poor implementation. They know how people want to navigate their comics, but they haven’t yet made the best use of the iPad’s screen real-estate. People take pride in their comic book collections and since comic book covers are illustrious and normally more vibrant than regular book covers, showing them off should be a huge benefit of this application.

When it comes to reading, this app is the best of all I have tried hands-down. Although page turning isn’t quite as smooth feeling as others, the zoom lock feature, magic background and extremely fast load and page turn times make it near-perfect for reading.

The company has shown with its iPhone apps and very nicely designed websites that it knows how to design. It has shown from its iPhone and iPad apps that it knows how people want to read comics on their mobile devices. I’m now awaiting the trifecta that would combine those two huge benefits with a powerful and beautiful comic book collection management system. I’m looking forward to further updates to this application that set the standard for presentation of comic book collections on the iPad.

If you’re a comic book lover that has downloaded your comic books from a variety of sources (or plan to do so in the future) and you would love to put them on your iPad – as you should – then definitely download this application. If you don’t own any electronic comic books and would like to start getting into new series, perhaps the Marvel or IDW app is best for you, as you can set up subscriptions to automatically purchase and download new comic books.

Pros:

• Shows the makings of a really powerful interface for organizing comics
• One of the few ‘reader’ apps on the App store that actually focuses on Comics and not general purpose reading (like PDFs, etc.)
• The developer(s) are very keen on updating the app – this is something that is very important to me
• Opening a comic book is instantaneous
• Zooming and panning is as responsive as doing so on pictures in the Photos app
• Has its own Wifi Syncing application AND supports syncing wired through iTunes
• Magic background colour feature is truly magic – I really really like it.
• The newly added (v4.0.13) zoom lock feature feels natural and makes reading a fantastic experience
• Saves your exact position in a comic book when existing the app so you can get right back to it upon launch

Cons:

• Comic book collection is presented in a half-screen widget as opposed to using the entire screen to show it off. The background remains unused with a default plain background, which unfortunately is the same background used in the collection viewing widget.
• Controls appear even when they’re not needed/useful. These same controls probably don’t need to exist at all, except perhaps the progress bar slider
• The tab bar is on the top unlike almost every other application for the device and the device’s siblings
• Some UI elements appear to be lower quality than I’d like to see. These include boxes, which have blurry edges and shadows which are clunky and don’t feel natural.
• The majority of views for comic books in the collection make it impossible to see your progress in the series
• The plastic sleeve effect used to indicate comics which have already been read is not noticeable enough to be useful
• After selecting a comic to read, it appears in behind with the collection still remaining on top Fixed in v4.0.13
• The background should probably be black while viewing comics to blend in nicer with the black border on the iPad and for consistency with other applications. (Like while watching videos on the device) Fixed in v4.0.8 with the option to select your background colour.
• Clicking on Collections while viewing a comic book requires two taps and takes you back to the root of the collection rather than where you left off. This means you have to navigate the hierarchy again just to find where you were in a series. Fixed in v4.0.8

[Note: this article has been updated to include new findings with v4.0.13]

I worked at Future Shop the AM of the Windows 7 launch, so although I didn’t miss the launch itself, I missed the long-form news reports on the topic, along with the always-excellent review from Ars Technica. So I sat down today to read through the many page review and quickly realized there were going to be many parallels between the reviewer, Peter Bright’s opinions, and my own. As with all reviews, there will also be things I disagree with.

Since my memory is not always the best and since I love summaries, I thought I would take the opportunity to include some of Peter’s writing here – the parts I find most interesting, whether it be sections I agree with wholeheartedly, or pieces that I disagree with.
I’d like to start with this paragraph on the first page

Although Windows Vista may have caused vendors and users alike some amount of pain, it was all for a good reason. To take advantage of modern video cards, Windows needed a new graphics stack; to withstand the increasing malware onslaught, Windows needed to tighten security and make running as a regular user more comfortable. These changes were not made lightly; the break with the past was necessary to put the operating system on the same footing as its competition and to address long-standing, legitimate criticisms of the platform. Microsoft was never going to revert to a more XP-like operating system, no matter how desperately some cling to the old OS.

Amen to that. Despite my frustration with customers, friends, and everyone else I talked to who insisted that Windows XP was the best, that Vista was terrible, that they would never upgrade, I’m confident that they all wound up upgrading eventually. The best part? I bet they loved Vista once they gave it a shot. In the end, the true problem was the quasi-enthusiasts – the people that didn’t really know why Vista was a necessary step, that didn’t actually try it (or if they did it was a short try-out), and that stood in a position where people asked them their opinions on software, hardware, and anything IT. They abused their position of power by not giving Vista a true chance and went around proclaiming how bad it was and how everyone should stick with XP. It was the company’s ‘IT guy’ or the computer-savvy nephew that I was constantly having to shoot down in order to get the facts through to those that asked.

And the paragraph right after I agree with completely – it’s amazing how such a seemingly simple feature becomes so important to your daily flow.

I have way too many icons in my Start menu and way too many documents on my PC for hunting through hierarchies to ever be an effective way of finding, well, anything. Hitting the Windows key and then just typing what I’m looking for beats browsing hierarchies hands-down. And it’s like crack; I was hooked from the first time I ever did it, and using Windows XP (with its dumb old-fashioned Start menu) feels like stepping back into the 1980s. People put up with that? And for so long?! Unbelievable. But I digress.

Last sentence of the first page speaks the truth.

Third parties could, and should, have done better, but they have at least caught up now.

Along with the following tidbit on the different version of Windows 7.

Starter Edition is worthless; it’s crippled (it omits most of the user-visible features that make Vista and Windows 7 worthwhile), only available for 32-bit systems, only available as an OEM pre-install, and really should never have seen the light of day

Internet Explorer 8 can be removed?

One thing that has people excited—especially legislators—is the ability to remove Internet Explorer 8. If IE8 is unticked, then Windows removes all user-visible ways of invoking the Web browser. The “working” parts of the browser are unaffected because so many applications (including the OS itself) embed them for various reasons, so the rendering engine is still present and still important, but as an actual Web browser, IE8 can now be fully removed.

I’m well aware of the European release requiring a browser selection (which we don’t get in North America), but I wasn’t aware of the fact that IE8 can be completely removed. Although I support the browser selection concept and I believe it should have been implemented in all releases of Windows 7, I don’t see a real benefit to having IE 8 removable entirely. Despite this, at least it should mean that Microsoft applications that once ignored your default browser setting, and loaded IE instead, should no longer be able to do so since IE will now be modular – if it doesn’t exist on the system, what would those apps do?

Post install, Bright describes the default wallpaper as irredeemably ugly and horrid.

Once up and running, after briefly admiring the new startup logo, you’re presented with probably the ugliest default wallpaper of any current OS; even the fecal brown of Ubuntu is more aesthetically pleasing. The Windows 7 betas had an amusing fish as their wallpaper (a betta fish; betta, beta, geddit?). The fish has unfortunately had his chips and is gone, replaced by a frankly gross Windows logo overlaid with silhouettes of trees, butterflies, and random dots. The styling is inconsistent with the visual cues in the rest of the operating system (it doesn’t follow from the theming of either the new startup screen or the logo on the Start orb, or anywhere else that the logo is used), it’s inconsistent with the Aero Glass appearance that 7 inherits from Vista. And, most importantly, it’s just irredeemably ugly and horrid.

Here is where my first disagreement comes in to play. I very much enjoy the default wallpaper – it embodies many characteristics which I love for wallpapers. First, the majority of the wallpaper is subtle gradients which make it simple and easy to look at without being distracting from your actual windows and icons. The centerpiece is not just the Windows flag, but a version of it that feels fresh and new – exciting. It has little patterned images representing summer or spring and evokes feelings that we only get 5 months out of the year here in Halifax NS. I love it.

Bright’s intriguing comments on Internet Explorer vs. Windows Explorer UI.

And OK, it’s being picky, but why oh why do Explorer and Internet Explorer look different? They are meant to look the same. An attempt has clearly been made to give them the same styling and appearance. Yet they’re gratuitously different. Not terribly different, but different all the same. The spacings are different, and the address bars are different heights. It’s just haphazard and random. The widgets have been plopped down onto a window and someone’s just said “yeah, that looks close enough”, even though it’s wrong. Fit and finish matters. As the new UI guidelines say: Pay attention to detail, and make sure everything is polished. Don’t assume that users won’t notice small things. They will.

While I agree, I had not noticed this, despite my usual uncanny ability to notice 1 pixel differences in margins and padding on websites and applications. This is likely due to my use of Google Chrome the majority of the time and very rare use of Internet Explorer.

On the topic of taskbar features.

The big problem is that the number of applications offering this level of integration is currently low. Even within Windows itself, most of the built-in applications offer either no customization at all, or they drop back to the default automatic Jump List that is available to any application that uses the built-in Most Recently Used feature. This makes the experience quite hit-and-miss, which rather detracts from it. Granted, Windows 7 is brand new, and so it will be quite some time before software is updated to take advantage of these new capabilities; and we’re already beginning to see third party software add Jump List items (for example, Chrome adds entries for recently closed tabs and opening incognito windows, and iTunes has playback controls in its thumbnail and adds tasks for visiting and searching the iTunes Store).

This exactly represents my feelings on the topic, although I wouldn’t be so quick to shrug it off as “Windows 7 is new, so we’ll see what happens.” Windows 7 has been available for free in Beta form for quite a few months. It wouldn’t have killed application developers to have put support for this into their apps, and yet we have next to nothing. When new functions become available to app developers for the iPhone or OS X, it’s like a race to see who can put them in first, but when it comes to Windows the developers just don’t care? That’s not a very good attitude to take regarding something as neat and useful as this (as well as other features now provided to developers by the OS).

Note: Back at PDC last year, we talked to Steve Sinofsky about this; Windows adds UI capabilities and then Microsoft software fails to use it properly, resulting in an inconsistent experience and leading one to question why Microsoft even bothers adding new features and guidelines if they’re not going to be used. He told us at the time that the reason for this is that within Microsoft, the software that sets the UI standard isn’t Windows, but rather Office; if the Office team’s UI rules don’t match up with Windows’ UI rules, then the Office team prevails. He did tell us that the Office team was involved in the new UI features of Windows 7, and so I hope that in the future there will be closer alignment between what Microsoft says you should do, and what it actually does. I’m not going to hold my breath, though, because interface consistency is not something the company has ever been good at.

Wow, that is not just interesting and shocking to me, but also sounds quite backwards. I’m not going to pretend I know very much about the topic, but why should the Office team get this much power? I realize they develop the most profitable software Microsoft publishes, but it’s Microsoft’s job to ensure the two get along so well that the experience between the two is seamless – not to battle it out over who gets to use what features and what should be where.

If you’re coming from XP, or if you disabled the new Start menu in Vista, then you might be in for a shock, as the new Start menu is now mandatory.

They should have done this in Vista. Those that refused to switch by then should have just crawled under a rock and given up on using computers – these new features and designs are provided for a reason. They allow for more efficient use of the computer through quicker access to the things you need and now the lack of being able to change back means the operating system will finally have start menu consistency. Finally. The Office team got to remove menus entirely from 2007, so why didn’t the Vista team get the same thing? It got so bad, that when I saw a machine with the classic start menu I would refuse to work on it without changing it back. The ability to use the classic start menu destroyed the entire experience of the operating system for me.

The Virtual WiFi architecture even permits a WiFi connection to be shared by WiFi, with the same adapter both connected to an access point, and acting as an AP. The feature currently lacks any kind of user interface; configuration is all performed through the netsh command.

Whoah, that is pretty neat! Too bad there’s no UI for it yet…

Windows Vista came with lots of bundled applications; Windows Media Player, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, Windows Media Center, and Windows Movie Maker. Windows 7 has scrapped Mail, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker moving these applications into an add-on pack called the Windows Live Essentials. Microsoft has decoupled them from Windows so that they have their own release cycle and sidestep bundling and anti-trust concerns. The company hopes that OEMs will preinstall the Essentials, but apart from a download link, the company does not otherwise promote them within the OS.

The funny part is that I’m pretty confident that none of the OEMs that we sell at Future Shop have included the Live Essentials. (It’s possible I didn’t notice it installed on some). This includes Sony, Toshiba, HP (and Compaq), MSI, Acer (and Gateway/eMachines), LG, Dell, and perhaps a couple others I’m forgetting. Although we install the Live Essentials pack as part of our paid set-up routine, we also install Mozilla Thunderbird – giving the user the choice. Similarly we install Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to provide the user a choice of browser.

Finally we get built in codec support – this officially beats Apple’s support out of the box… does this mean Windows users don’t need codec packs anymore? I doubt it – as the article says, the built in codecs are slow, plus I would be willing to bet there’s still some missing, such as MKV support.

The big changes are WMP’s new codecs, and the ability to stream media to other devices. Windows now ships with built-in support for, among others, MPEG2, MPEG4 (which covers DivX and similar widely-used implementations), and H.264 video, along with AAC audio. The support seems to work well enough; the codecs aren’t the fastest ones around, which can be a problem especially with H.264, but a large proportion of downloaded video will now play in WMP without requiring the use of third-party codecs.

WMP11 would use embedded album art in preference to the hidden JPEG images stored in each album’s directory (the hidden folder.jpg and randomly-named friends that are readily visible on any WMP-managed directories). The hidden files would still only be the small images that WMP downloads, but within the program itself it would display the large embedded image. With WMP12 that’s no longer the case. The hidden JPEG files are the only thing that WMP will display. Make the Now Playing window anything other than tiny, and it looks stupid.

That’s unfortunate. I find album art has become an increasingly more important part of our music libraries over the past 10 years to the extent that it now annoys me when there isn’t album artwork for a song. This is especially true when playing back from my iPhone – it just looks so much nicer when the artwork is there. Thankfully iTunes does a better job of this, so I don’t have to worry about it on my phone.

Conclusions on Windows Media center:

The look and feel has been refreshed, and overall feels quite a bit quicker. I might be imagining things, but MC on Vista always felt quite sluggish; my main Windows 7 machine is a lot slower than my main Vista PC, but Media Center certainly feels far snappier.

This makes me a bit sad that I sold my media center PC. While I always loved the provided features in Vista Media Center, I had two overarching problems with it. First, network hard drives would cause the spinner to just lock up the software. This would then lead to an ‘end task’ and re-launch where it would then tell me that my tuner was in use already (frustrating). My second problem was that QAM support was for cable-card devices only which was ridiculous. Microsoft reps said this was to be fixed for SP2 on thegreenbutton.com, but nope, never came. It’s frustrating that I would have had to upgrade to 7 just to make these things work properly, but at the same time I kinda wish I still had that PC just to try it out.

On a related note, I switched to AppleTV many months ago and I’m quite dissatisfied with it. It’s only saving grace is that I have installed XBMC, allowing it to be used for bigger and better things.

It has become a popular pastime amongst government employees to load as much sensitive data as possible onto a laptop and then deposit that laptop in a public place so that someone can find it. This hobby has likely spread to the private sector too, although it attracts less attention there. There are many spoilsports out there who regard this as a poor use of resources; they argue that sensitive data should be kept out of the hands of thieves. To appease these meanies, Windows Vista’s BitLocker feature enabled encryption of whole partitions, requiring a PIN or suitable USB key to decrypt them.

Hahaha, very much enjoyed the first sentence. It refers to articles describing lost laptops by the FBI and other government officials. One might think this happens rarely, but this article helps put it in perspective.

The Problem Steps Recorder should be a boon for helpdesks everywhere. This simple tool lets you make a recording of the steps required to reproduce a problem (yeah, I guess the clue was in the name). The recording includes screenshots, system information, and optional annotations as necessary, and should do a good job of taking the guesswork out of supporting end-user problems.

Very cool. As someone who is constantly trying to reproduce problems with computers at Future Shop along with bug reports for Adium, this type of logging/tracking system would be extremely beneficial.

Hitting Win+P provides a neat little tool for choosing how to handle an externally connected monitor on laptop systems; all four options (laptop only, mirroring, extending the desktop, external only) are available at the click of a button. This certainly beats messing around with Fn-key combinations and trying to decipher the consistently unclear icons on my keyboard.

Love this feature.

If this isn’t enough to fix the problem app, it’s time for virtualization, in Windows XP Mode. It’s not really a “mode”—it’s an XP SP3 VM running in the new Windows 7 version of Virtual PC—but it should provide a solution to most remaining compatibility issues.

I’m not going to go into it in much detail now; the final RTM version of Virtual PC and the Windows XP Mode system image weren’t available at the time of writing (though they are out now), so a follow-up article will cover XP Mode in more detail. But in brief: the virtual machine is somewhat integrated into the host environment, so that programs installed in the compatibility environment can be invoked from the Start menu or launched via file extension associations, and moving data between the VM and the host environment is mostly seamless.

First: it sounds like VPC finally is getting support like VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop does for OS X.

Second: there’s one catch to the ‘new’ version of Virtual PC that is used by XP Mode. It ONLY works with processors that have VT-X (and of course a motherboard that allows it to be enabled). I had a customer with one of those few Core 2 Duo processors that didn’t have the VT-X extension and he was not pleased that it didn’t work. It should be mentioned that running Windows in virtualization without VT-X is doable and even usable, just not quite as fast. This does NOT mean that it’s not fast enough to work well, which is why I was surprised that they made VT-X an absolute requirement.

One last thing about this. When I installed XP Mode (and couldn’t run it on that customer’s notebook), I discovered that it places the WinXP activation code in the XP Mode ‘application’ folder in C:\Windows\Program Files … so if you want a free XP license, just get someone who bought Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate for a computer without VT-X and you’re all set!

Overall, it’s pretty clear that Windows 7 is “Vista R2.” Hell, the branding of the server counterpart is a dead giveaway here. Windows Server 2008 RTM was exactly Vista SP1; Windows Server 2008 R2 is exactly Windows 7. Why does one retain its branding but not the other? Because the Windows Server 2008 branding is popular and successful (the OS was, quite rightly, very well-received) in a way that the Vista branding is not. If Vista had gotten the reception it actually deserved, and become a brand worth keeping, it seems highly likely that the name would have been retained. And Microsoft knows it, which is why internally, Windows 7 is only version 6.1. Sure, the company has made specious claims that this is to avoid breaking applications with bad version checks, but the logic doesn’t really hold; many of those applications are just as broken by “6″ as they would be by “7,” and if that were such a concern then the minor version wouldn’t change either.

But at the end of the day, that doesn’t really matter. Windows 7 is, overall, a fantastic OS. It builds on a solid platform, and just makes it even better.

Very intriguing parallels drawn between Vista and 7 and Win Server 2008 and its R2 release. The conclusion is something I agree with and, as I’ve written before, I’m a supported of Windows 7 and use it often on my HP Mini Netbook.

This summary has helped me gather my thoughts on some of the key features of Windows 7 as presented by Peter Bright over at Ars Technica, and I hope some of my comments and additions might come in handy for others as well.