• The extended downtime, delays at stores, temporary bricking (in many cases during all working hours of today) that seemed to affect the .mac → Mobile Me transition, the iPhone and iPod touch 2.0 firmware release, the iPhone 3G first day of sale at stores and the launch of the App Store altogether have made for negative press. The flak frankly seems deserved to me. Whether they ran into unexpected issues late in the development process, didn’t expect as much demand, or failed to deliver for some other reason, it simply sheds a terrible light on this launch day. Wasn’t one of the three major improvements summarized as “Enterprise support”? Don’t Enterprise™s typically want to, say, actually use their products?

  They could have launched Mobile Me next week, or the week before that. Could have launched the App Store some other time. Could have said “hey, we’re just not ready; let’s delay this just a little bit as to make for a smoother initial run”.

  This boils down to human error, and other companies would have suffered the same. But maybe they wouldn’t have applied the false pride of doing too many things at once.

• I reject the idea that the App Store should serve as a cream-of-the-crop selection of iPhone/iPod touch applications. How, then, would I retrieve applications Apple deems unworthy or subpar? Short of jailbreaking (and special, limited enterprise and ad hoc options), the App Store is the only source of apps, and it is censored enough as it is. It is thus that tweets demanding that Apple be the arbiter of quality not only annoy me; they concern me.

  I can sort-of accept the limitations Apple is imposing; they did provide a rationale, more or less (however, why make the DRM mandatory, rather than letting developers choose on their own?). I also hold that Apple tends to have rather good taste in their decisions, and this may very well translate to a rather good selection of third-party applications. But already, the arbitrariness of ‘arbiter’ is showing. Good app? Bad app? You don’t decide. The reviews don’t decide. Apple does, and some people outside the company actually seem to like it that way. Disturbing.

• To end this on a positive note: while I don’t have a chance to test them (and let’s not even start about how trials and beta tests are pretty much impossible in the App Store), I hear there are, indeed, some excellent apps out there already. This tempts me greatly to buy an iPhone, even when I have my doubts I’d actually use it to its full potential.

Oh dear.

This is not at all a slam against Gorobay; I highly appreciate his contributions to MYSTlore.

It is instead me failing to comprehend how anyone could have thought that a software should treat “Guild of burial workers” and “Guild of Burial Workers” as distinct articles to begin with. Without a redirect set up (as Gorobay did), going to the non-existant one will simply lead you to a 404-esque page, with a search link, which will then redirect you to the correct page. Why have that interim step to begin with?

There are actually cases on MYSTlore where we take advantage of the case-sensitive nature of MediaWiki article titles. Off the top of my head, “MYST” and “RIVEN” come to mind: they point to the games, whereas “Myst” and “Riven” point to the Ages. This distinction makes sense insofar as spelling the two in all-uppercase is a marketing thing; they’re not acronyms, initialisms or anything, but instead names, so they should be capitalized as proper nouns. Therefore, when one writes them as all capitalized, they are more likely to refer to the product.

But that’s an extremely rare occasion, and still a very questionable one. Perhaps you meant the other one after all? Perhaps (quite likely) you don’t really think of them as distinct at all? And how are you supposed to know the aforementioned rationale for the redirect?

If there’s one word that describes my feelings about WALL•E with unsurpassable accuracy, it must be “woah”. Just the way WALL•E says it. It’s been getting rave reviews all over the place — with 96% at Rotten Tomatoes, and 93 at metacritic.com. And boy, does it ever deserve those.

This one rivals Monsters, Inc. as my favorite Pixar feature film.

Having spent over two hours fixing my Boot Camp drivers (and partially failing), I finally got around to trying to install Team Fortress 2. This involves setting up Steam, Valve’s content distribution system. It makes for a far more convenient buying experience, at least in theory.

Valve’s website points me to their Steam site, where I get to find the title I was looking for, among a choice of bundles that would include it. Next to it: a price tag, and a button labelled Purchase. So far, so good.

That button asks me if I have Steam installed. Still good. After downloading and running Steam’s installer, it updates itself, then asks me if I have an account, or offers to create one. This is where it gets not so good.

1. Its password fields don’t properly work with my keyboard layout, or the software doesn’t seem to understand keyboard layout changes. That is, I have to exit Steam, change my keyboard layout, then relaunch it, just so I can enter my password. A minor annoyance, but an inexplicable one nonetheless.
2. It doesn’t support the plus sign (+) in an e-mail address. Many websites pull this nonsense too, never having read the appropriate spec. Still, this means I can’t use GMail’s wonderful support for this, nor can I use that sign for any other reason.
3. It masks the passwords when entering… But then, without warning, it shows the password you in clear text when it’s done setting up your account. If you’re going to proudly show it off, why mask it to begin with? I don’t remember the last time I saw any app or web site do this.
4. I installed it by clicking “purchase” at the Team Fortress 2 website, but after installation, it says absolutely nothing about TF2. I would have expected it to remember I was looking for TF2. Instead, I basically had to do the same search twice — once in my browser, and then in Steam’s embedded browser.
5. I get all the way through purchasing, only to have it tell me the game is not available in my country. Yeah, uh, thanks for collecting my address, credit card number, blood sample and fingerprint, only to tell me I don’t even get to buy your game? (Which, by the way, doesn’t make sense. You’re your own publisher. Why would you not want to distribute your game to Germany, one of the countries with the largest gamer populations?)

I’m still going to play this one way or another; that’s not the point. My problem is that the average person would have or should given up after those steps, and unnecessarily so.

1. Why doesn’t Steam use standard controls, so it can work with keyboard layouts just like any other Windows app?
2. Why can’t software developers wisen up that, yes indeed, you can have a plus sign in your e-mail address?
3. Who thought having a masked password field only to reveal the password mere minutes later was a good idea?
4. Why can’t it pass on the information what game I was looking for when I clicked the Purchase button? Making this as seamless as possible is the whole point of Steam, at least as far as the consumer is concerned.
5. And if country limitations are so relevant, why not ask me much earlier what country I’m in, so the software and I both waste far less time?

The browser download URLs, from 37signals’s announcement “Phasing out support for IE 6″:

1. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx?wt_svl=10005WDH_OS_Other1&mg_id=10005WDHb1
2. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
3. http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

As Denis says, you can pretty much type apple.com/<productname> and expect it to either work or at least redirect. Firefox’s URL isn’t too bad; Microsoft’s could use a lot of work. In fact, anything past the /ie/ is or should be completely redundant.

This isn’t just a minor nitpick. For one, it really shows which company’s culture emphasizes simplicity more. And, you can be sure which of the three is least likely to change after a re-design…