Search Results for: vista

Twhirl & Adobe Air: Catch-22

Posted on May 14, 2008 ·

My favorite Twitter app, Twhirl died on me two days ago. Actually, it’ snot Twhirl itself, the error message clearly identifies Adobe Air, stating the installation is damaged.

Fixing it should be easy: just reinstall Air. Except… I can’t. Adobe installer says: This version of Adobe Air is already installed on your system. Yeah, thank you, I know, but it’s corrupted.

Oh, well, next step is uninstalling Air, then installing it again. Except… I can’t do that, either. A quick search shows I am not alone: several users report that in Vista Adobe Air does not show as an installed application, hence you can’t uninstall it, either.

Catch-22. I hope Adobe proves otherwise.

Update (5/16): I found a forum tip: run the Adobe Air installer from a command prompt with the -uninstall parameter. It worked, I got Air off the system, then installed it again. Guess what: Twhirl still reports damaged Air file. Next I thought I would uninstall Twhirl – I can’t. Unlike Air, this one is listed in the Control Panel, you can click on Uninstall – nothing happened.

I’ve been off twitter for several days now, have seen evidence of users reporting this issue but received no response whatsoever from either Twhirl or Adobe yet. This s*cks, big time.

Update (5/16): Adobe Support came through, the recommended the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility. It helped, although not in a straightforward way. Steps involved:

Install Windows Installer Cleanup Util
Cleanup Adobe Air and Twhirl
Now Adobe Air shows up in Control Panel, so I click Uninstall. Error: This app requires a version of Adobe Air which is no longer supported. Oh, well, on to the next steps…
Install current Air version
Try Twhir: still shows Air error, the installation of the application is damaged.
But there is hope, at least now I can uninstall Air from the Control Panel.
Install Air again (same installer I just did minutes before)
Try twhirl again: still shows “damaged” message.
Try uninstalling twhirl from control panel – can’t. Air error again.
Try re-installing twhirl again. Can’t: already exist in current location… but that’s a good clue.
Installed Twhirl in new directory, and voila! it works now. To bad i have leftover crap from previous install.

In the end, after several days and many hoops, I am back on twitter (twhirl) again. Still like twhirl as a product, but their support sucks. Non-existent – at least on the very media they live and die for: twitter. 5 calls for help over 5 days left unanswered. I received better support from Comcast on Twitter.

Filed Under: Software · Tagged: adobe, Adobe Air, Customer support, twhirl, Twitter, vista, windows vista

Zazzle Very Sick Today

Posted on April 6, 2008 ·

Zazzle, the online T-Shirt business has been ill for a while. I wanted to order my own T-shirt, but needed a slight addition to the design. Well, it’s kinda difficult to work on the design when images are not displayed properly…

Today Zazzle’s condition appears to have worsen: any time you try to talk to her, she just blurts out:

An error occurred on this page which may make it unusable. If this occurs please refresh the page.

I did. Refresh. She blurts again. Again.

Ouch. Dear Zazzle, I hope you recover soon…

Update: I am not experiencing the above errors from another laptop, running XP. But it’s not browser-specific either: on this Vista computer I run into the same problem whether using Firefox or IE7. And yes, I cleared everything (cookies, permissions, cache) on both browsers.

Filed Under: Misc · Tagged: cafepress, online retail, online t-shirt, t-shirt design, zazzle

Apple Sneaky, Microsoft is No Angel, Either

Posted on March 25, 2008 ·

I’ve been observing an annoying trend on TechMeme for a while now: when a good discussion happens over the weekend, obviously some writers will miss it – then they sleep on it, come back to it a few days later and TechMeme picks it up as a new theme.

That’s what we’re seeing today with ZDNet blogger Ed Bott coming back to the Apple Update brouhaha and trying to place Microsoft on a morel higher ground.

In summary, the issue was that the Apple iTunes update program all of a sudden wanted to install the Safari browser on Windows PC’s and had it as the preselected default. That’s certified bad behavior. Even worse is the fact that it’s not new at all – a fact missed by almost all but yours truly. I pointed out that:

the same update program has been trying to install iTunes on a Windows machine where I don’t have it, don’t need it forever, despite unselecting it every single time
the update runs because I do have Quicktime installed, and Quicktime itself is as aggressive as it gets, re-installing itself in the XP systray no matter how many times you remove it.

To me this was all about respecting users choice or not. But the discussion went the “wrong way”:

Apple fans are a religious cult who came in hordes to defend Holy Apple. (before you chastise me, just look at how often I point to Apple as a better choice, without becoming blindly faithful)
Most debate focused on whether Firefox or Safari is the better browser (IE dully ignored) – nice tactics to change the subject…

And now here comes Ed Bott with a provocative title: What Microsoft can teach Apple about software updates:

For the record, I think Apple is dead wrong in the way it’s gone about using its iPod monopoly to expand its share in another market.

Right.

Ironically, an excellent model for how this update program should work already exists. It’s called Windows Update, and it embodies all the principles that Apple should follow.

Dead wrong.

I can’t believe anyone in their right mind would quote Windows Update, known for delivering patches that mess up one’s system only to be patched again and again as the ideal model to follow. One does not have to go too far, just look at the reports on systems disabled by the recent Vista SP1 update. The worlds richest company could not put a decent operating system together in five years, and a full year later the best they can deliver is a botched update!

But since Ed takes the opportunity to place Microsoft on the moral high ground in general, let’s not forget about another recent Microsoft update coup:

The windows live installer, released last September while offered an opt-out screen like Apple does now, then proceeded to install Windows Desktop Search, without ever asking for permission or even notifying the user.

Not only this was outrageously bad practice, completely ignoring the users right to decide what they want on their computers, it was also performance degrading, especially on systems that already had another desktop search installed (see system bar above).

So back to Ed Bott: yes, I condemn Apple’s latest move, but please, please, never in a million years would I think of setting Microsoft as the model to follow.

Update: This window just popped up on my system:

Windows Firewall blocked Foldershare – a Microsoft product, which just got updated a few days ago. Only (?) problem is, I have (I should have) Windows Firewall turned off, since McAfee is installed, too. WTF is this message? Or has Win Firewall been turned on by some update, without asking me? And why is it my job to investigate?

Filed Under: Customer Service, Software, Technology · Tagged: Apple, browser, desktop search, firefox, foldershare, ie7, iTunes, microsoft, Safari, software update, update, windows firewall, windows update

Web Applications on the Desktop

Posted on March 22, 2008 ·

The latest trend in Web Applications is – surprise, surprise! – going back on to the desktop. e Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are two technologies that help Web Apps behave more .. hm, surprise, surprise! … desktop-like. Full circle? Why the “move to the cloud” circus if we’re coming back to the desktop anyway?

Well, we’re not. We’re just doing web apps differently. Matthew Gertner, former CTO of Allpeers (in the deadpool) who is currently working on Prism provides his perspective on TechCrunch. I can’t even attempt to add to the technical discussion, so I’ll play the dumb business user (won’t be too difficult ) and explain what I see from that angle.

First of all, there appears to be some confusion in this dialogue: Google Gears and Single Site Browsers (SSBs) are two different animals, even if Gears has future extension plans.

Gears is all about offline access, which, let’s face it, make sense, until we have “always-on, everywhere” connectivity. It’s data access, and it’s good, albeit somewhat cludgy.
SSB’s are all about convenience: instead of just having tabs in the browser, certain applications now have their own window, can be minimized, when closed can show up in the systray ..etc – in other words they behave like desktop applications. When the everything-in-a-browser concept became popular we all worked on 15-17″ displays. Today huge displays are affordable and popular – but now that I have all this screen real-estate, I’d like to be able to display 3-4 windows at a time – not flip-flopping between, but have them all available. I can’t do that with the browser tabs, unless I launch multiple browsers ( waste of resources) or find the way to detach some tabs – that’s what SSB’s do.

A commenter on TechCrunch asks:

So it is progress to send things back to being one window with no tabs?
Wasn’t the point of tabs to put all of those windows into one?

No. The point was not having to install myriad applications that need to be patched, the data files scanned for viruses ..etc. Now, I consider myself progressive, and like to support the future trend just out of principle, but I am first of all a user, and nothing convinces a user better then their own pain. So here are a few examples of my own pain with desktop computing, just from the last two days.

I turned on an older laptop I don’t often use nowadays, and I literally had no access to it, the damn thing kept itself busy for an hour with Windows Update, McAfee update, (I killed the virus can), Foldershare sync and Copernic desktop search indexing. In other words, it was struggling just to stay up-to-date, and I could only get to use it an hours or so later.
The very reason I turned it on is that even though I now have a screamer desktop, I have to fall back on the slow laptops any time I need to edit a PDF file: my trusted old Adobe Acrobat 6 is not supported on Vista, and I am not about to cough up the price when I don’t need new functionality, so I have to keep the old junk running, just to avoid losing functionality I paid for. I won’t have to do this forever, some of the Web-based Acrobat alternatives are getting pretty good…
I’m in the middle of a major paper elimination project: throwing away boxes of expired folders, keeping only electronic copies of the crucial stuff. This involved hours of installing and uninstalling obsolete software this afternoon: Turbotax versions all the way from 1996 only so I can read the .tax file once and convert it to PDF. Intuit now offers Turbotax entirely online, and while I haven’t found any info on how long they support retrieval of old returns, as the years go by I’m sure they will address it – and I don’t have to install anything.
A few hours later the old PC started to choke: it ran out of hardware space. Impossible! Just a few months ago I removed all my photos, that’s a huge gain, I should have ample space. Yeah, right, it turns out Foldershare, which I use to keep the 3 household computers in sync accumulated over 10G in its trash folders, which is nothing on the new PC, but a third of the old laptop’s 30Mb storage capacity. And would you believe there’s no setup option to auto-clear trash from time to time? (It can auto-delete your real files, just not trash.)

Personal computers, and the desktop computing model were liberating in the 80’s, when they got us off the dumb green terminals, which we could only access at work, that is those of use who worked at large corporations who could afford a mainframe. PC’s were expensive enough that any one of us only owned one, if any, and the ability to work on that single machine actually meant increased access and mobility. But as we upgrade, we tend to keep the older computers, and I bet most of my readers have more than one computer in their household, let alone business.

Keeping all of them up-to-date, having the same Application versions on all, synchronizing data is becoming more and more of a pain. Just as computing shifted to the Client model in the late 80’s, we’re facing another shift now, and the move off the desktop, on to the Cloud will be just as liberating as getting onto it was 20 years ago. Access to applications and data will no longer will be tied to a particular piece of hardware and we don’t worry about updates, maintenance – offload it to the Service Provider.

In other words Software as a Service is increasingly all about the second “S”.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS, Technology · Tagged: adobe, Air, cloud computing, Desktopize, Flex, google gears, Mozilla, Prism, SaaS, Single Site Browser, SSB, zoho

Apple’s Sneakiness Did Not Start Today

Posted on March 21, 2008 ·

The entire blogosphere is up in arms against Apple, for their attempt to sneak the Safari browser onto Windows machines, via Apple Update. Everybody is shocked, after all we’re more used to such behavior from the (Micro)Borg, but Apple are supposed to be the good guys…

Except they aren’t, and have never been. The sneakiness hasn’t started today, it just went unnoticed for a good reason. What’s wrong with the screen image below?

Safari selected as default? Nope. Nothing new there, that’s what everybody’s talking about today. What’s really wrong is the selection of iTunes. Wait! – you may say, this is the iTunes update program in the first place … Wrong!

I happen to be one of those weirdos who don’t have iTunes on my computer. This is a Vista PC (no, I am not happy with it, but that’s another story) and I’ve never ever had iTunes installed. In fact I don’t like to have Quicktime either, for its stickiness (close to impossible to kill if off the systray), but I need it as some videos are only available in this format.

But why is this thing pushing iTunes on my machine, without any config option to unselect it once and for all? It’s just as much of an aggression as the Safari invasion today.

Now, it’s the top of TechMeme – but where is FSJ?

Update (3/22): A commenter below warned:

Be careful not to touch the “Thin Skin of Apple Fans”.:-).

Boy, was he right. Look at otherwise reasonably objective Dennis Howlett come to Apple’s defense, who is turning it into a Mozilla issue, talks about “Badmouthing the competition”. Dennis, you know Apple is out of line, if this was Microsoft, you and I both would condemn it, like we did in the past.

Filed Under: Customer Service, Software, Technology · Tagged: Apple, browser, firefox, ie7, iTunes, microsoft, Safari, software update, update

Intuit’s Update Fiasco: There is a Better Way

Posted on December 17, 2007 ·

Intuit appears to have entered a new market, that of permanent file deletion. Whether you want it or not:

“Mac users who installed an update to their QuickBooks software over the weekend were met with a nasty surprise: missing data.

The update caused several Mac users to lose data from their Desktop folders, infuriating many who were hoping to close their books this week for 2007, only to lose valuable purchase orders and spreadsheets” – reports News.com.

Intuit’s recommendation:

“For those of you who have been affected, we are testing out options for recovering the deleted files. Our recommendation for now is to turn off your computer and do not use it further. If you continue using your computer or reboot, you may over-write the area on the disk where the deleted data is stored, preventing any recovery efforts from being effective.”

Hm…considering the type/size of businesses typically using QuickBooks, not touching their computer in the middle of the year-end rush may not be a viable option.. Intuit is clearly throwing in support resources, customers can register and will be called back to individually assess their situation. For many, the damage may very well be more than losing a few hours:

(This is where I wanted to quote an Intuit forum message claiming lost file, lost business damage – I saw the post 15 minutes ago, now it’s gone. Could it have been deleted?)

We’re living in the age of crappy software. QuickBooks is not alone, this incident is just more dramatic than the typical update failures. Even when updates don’t fail, they are becoming a nuisance. Last week I just pinged someone on Skype, when my Internet connection dropped again – a “standard” Vista feature, to be remedied by a reboot. So there I was, waiting to resume the chat session when the machine decided to implement 9 updates. This being a ‘screamer’ PC the update only took 7 minutes before shut-off, and a few more to configure on re-start; by the time I could come back online, my chat partner was gone. The two XP laptops in the house are a lot slower, so I just left them alone to complete their 11 updates… experience tells me sometimes these take half an hour or more. clock Who has time for this? Between the applications we actually use and all the crapware needed just to keep our computers running (virus scan, firewall, anti-spy, desktop search, backup, synchronization …etc), it’s just getting way too much to deal with.

By now my regular readers probably know where I am heading: there is a better, safer, easier way. Proponents of Cloud computing (On-demand, SaaS) typically point out portability, collaboration as key benefits, but there’s another huge benefit: ease of mind. The web applications I often use (Gmail, the Zoho Productivity Suite, CRM..etc) get updated just as frequently (actually, more) than their desktop counterparts, but I don’t have to worry about these updates: the service provider takes care of them. The whole process is not transparent to me, the user. I dumped the responsibility on the service provider: they work for me.

Are you ready to have peace of mind?

Update: I could not have made this up: just as I was about to post this, I checked TechMeme for updates to the Intuit story, only to see this headline: Microsoft security update cripples IE .

I rest my case.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: cloud computing, gmail, ie7, intuit, microsoft, On-Demand, patch tuesday, quickbooks, SaaS, software patches, software updates, vista, Windows, zoho

Ulteohhhhh…

Posted on December 12, 2007 ·

Before I say anything, I want to prefix this post by stating that I am an Advisor to Zoho, which can be perceived as a competitor to Ulteo, the company that just announced providing OpenOffice On-Demand. That said, I often I’ve repeatedly stated my belief that we’re at a state of early expansion for Software as a Service, and for now, the more players the better. It’s not about slicing the pie yet, it’s about making sure the pie will be huge:

Summing it all up, I believe the winner of the “on-demand race” will not be Google, Zoho, or any of their competitors – the winners will be the customers who will have a lot more choice in picking the right business solutions later this year.

So I am happy to see new On-Demand offerings that work – and am royally p***ed when they don’t. I tried to use Ulteo, repeatedly. At the first attempt in the morning, I got stuck with a blank screen:

Next I tried in the evening: I spent a minute or so at the above blank screen, but finally I got some signs of life:

Oops… I don’t know of another instance, I don’t have Openoffice installed on this machine, and a Vista glitch forced me to reboot since my early morning attempt with Ulteo. And I certainly have no clue who the *** user u7670 is or how I should close Openoffice for this user on the Ulteo servers. But let’s click Yes to continue anyway:

Why am I in document recovery mode and just what is it I am about to recover? Finally, I got into this somewhat broken screen:

Not a very positive experience, if you ask me. On the other hand, it’s still more than the previous web-office “announcement”: Live Documents, which is still to materialize…some time next year.

Like I said, I am happy to see more On-Demand services. Those that actually exist, and perhaps even work.

Update: Jason Brooks at eWeek had similar experience.

Filed Under: Open Source, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Startups · Tagged: Google, live documents, microsot, ms office, office 2.0, On-Demand, Open Source, openoffice, openoffice.org, SaaS, ulteo, web office, zoho

Shared Link Blog Not in My Feed

Posted on December 3, 2007 ·

It just dawned on me that I’ve never announced my Shared Link Blog, so most of my regular feed readers don’t know about it. It’s a selection of items from my Google Feed Reader, has it’s own URL, and while it’s not included in my feed, if you click back to the blog, you can see the current items in the sidebar:

Filed Under: Blogging · Tagged: Blogging, feed reader, google reader, link blog

Gmail … Microsoft Style

Posted on November 20, 2007 ·

It’s definitely Holiday time: slow day, no news, my feed-reader is empty… took a walk outside, did not meet anyone. But for a minute I got confused, thinking we’re heading into April Fools’ Day, not Thanksgiving. It’s all because of Philipp Lenssen’s brilliant post: What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?

I won’t spoil the fun, I want you to read his piece, here’s just a little teaser. Starting point, regular gmail:

He then rebrands Gmail to something longer, like Windows Live Gmail, change the URL to the more professional looking http://by114w.bay114.gmail.live.com/mail/mail.aspx?rru=home, adds new panes, breaks up messages from conversation threads into their individual parts, adjust the spam filter to be a bit more MS-like … etc. Here’s the final result:

I actually think this last pic is overdone…nevertheless, it’s good reading. Tomorrow Philipp plans to discuss “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista.” Artful play with the words. You could read it like this: “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista” – but we know that is the case, so that leaves us with the only possible interpretation: “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista.”

Filed Under: Humor, Software · Tagged: gmail, Google, hotmail, Humor, microsoft, microsoft design, vista, windows live mail, windows vista

Tech Support – the HP Way

Posted on November 17, 2007 ·

Reading this gem (hat tip: Ben Casnocha) about the nightmare of trying to get HP support their PC’s reminded me of my own horror story. Actually, not horror – just comedy.

Anyway… yeah, I was weak, fell for the good deal at Costco, and got myself a Vista-loaded junk from HP. There’s one component that shines – literally: the display. 22 inches of shiny black beauty, sharp screen, it tilts and moves around in every imaginable way, even pivots for a vertical view. But there was a little glitch with pivoting: I had to lie down to read the screen. There was no way to get the screen image rotate – something that should happen automatically.

I’ll spare you the first 20 minutes or so of the online chat with HP support, let’ s just jump to where it got really interesting:

Support: You probably have a video card that does not support auto-pivoting.

Me: That’s not possible. I did not build this machine, it’s a standard HP system out-of-the-box.

Support: I don’t understand.

Stop. Take a deep breath. This is just hilarious. Rather than trying to find the answer, the easy way out is to claim a standard configuration HP is selling consists of a mismatched video card and monitor. She has absolutely no idea how she is damaging the brand. Oh, well, let’s get a supervisor … wait .. disconnect.

Btw, “disconnecting” appears to be a standard HP solution to support issues: I’m still waiting for this other fellow to “gather all information” to my email over a month ago. Perhaps he’ll figure it out by the time I dump this PC.

Filed Under: Customer Service, Personal Productivity, Software · Tagged: Customer support, hewlett-packard, HP, LCD, technical support