My Macinations

It’s now February 4th, 2008 and the iPhone has been out in the US for more than seven months already.

Here in Canada, there is no mention of it yet. Not even rumours that it could be coming any time soon. I believe it will be a very long time before Canadians could buy an iPhone legitimately and use it in Canada.

This is due to the nature of the Rogers company in Canada.

For those outside of Canada, Rogers is one of the telecom giants in this country. It is a cable and cellular provider and it is the only cellular provider in Canada using the GSM system. So that makes it the only company that can have the iPhone on its network.

And for those fortunate enough to never have had to deal with Rogers, Rogers is one of the worst companies here in this country. When they were my cable providers, they had the worst service, worst customer service and they jacked up their prices regularly. It’s hard to believe, but when I was with them, they jacked up the price of the good channels package by $1 every four months. The package was basically any channel other than the local ones and it started at $8.95. Four years later the price for the package had reached $21.

I had vowed to never deal with them and I changed from their cable service to Bell’s satellite service, which while isn’t the greatest, is still better than Rogers. However, Rogers went and bought my cellular provider Fido, the only other cellular provider here with GSM. So now, I’m back with Rogers involuntarily. Bell’s cellular service sucks, so it’s not even a choice.

So now with Rogers the only cellular provider able to carry the iPhone, the chances of the iPhone coming to Canada, on any reasonable terms, are almost slim to none. Rogers doesn’t have any incentive to give Apple any good deal and doesn’t have any incentive to give its own customers a reasonable deal on its data plans.

Why would it want to? Nobody else can have the iPhone currently and Apple can’t offer the iPhone advantage to anybody else in the country at this time. So Rogers can take their sweet time to get the deal that serves them best.

However, if Rogers stay stubborn, they may lose big time.

I heard whispers that Telus (the third cellular provider in the country) is in the early stages of switching from CDMA to GSM; mostly to get the iPhone.

Let’s hope that this rumour is true and that it happens fast enough to get the second generation iPhone. It would be sweet. It would allow me to get an iPhone (without having to buy one and crack it) and move away from Rogers at the same time.

Over the holidays, I received an iPod Touch as a gift, and let me tell you, that little sucker is extremely useful as an internet device. Keeping tabs on my sites where I could find Wifi is great.

However, a couple of days ago, it stopped being able to access the internet through my home wireless network. My wireless network is created by an Apple Airport Extreme

First I thought that the Touch had a problem. I reset it few times to no avail. And then I discovered that I could connect to an open Wifi point in the neighbourhood; which made things really frustrating. The Airport Extreme had been, up to that point, the best Wifi system I’ve tested.

A couple of days worth of search on Google netted no solution whatsoever.

Out of desperation, I started messing with the Airport’s settings. Lo and behold, changing the Wifi channel from automatic to ‘Channel 9′ fixed the problem.

Update: As it turned out, the airport needed restarting the hard way. After multiple instance of losing contact with the Touch, I unplugged it for 5 minutes and after plugging it back in, I haven’t experienced any problems with the Touch going on the net.

Everybody knows that Apple’s iPhone is coming to Canada, eventually. Most people and publications speculate about when this momentous event will happen.

Today, few websites are excited about a blip that showed up on Apple’s site, and are extrapolating all kind of data from this blip.

Personally, I’m not exactly interested in when the iPhone will come to Canada. I know that it will. I would love to get one. But, it all depends on the ‘How Much?’ bit of the big picture.

Those outside of Canada probably have no clue on how ridiculous Canada’s wireless industry is.

For example, I’m with Fido (which was bought out by Rogers more than a year ago). I have their cheapest plan for my phone, which they advertise as “200 anytime minutes for $20 a month”. I have one additional service added – caller ID display – for an additional $3 per month. After fees and taxes and various ‘bend-over-to-stick-it-to-you-some-more’ additions to my bill, I pay $37.05 per month, not including any long distance calls that I may make.

So, the iPhone’s biggest question would be: how much will the data plans cost here in Canada?

Apple has been able to negotiate interesting deals with the carriers for iPhone buyers. I wonder if they can improve the situation here. I’m not too hopeful.

In Canada, the only GSM carrier is Fido and Rogers. But since Rogers bought Fido, effectively, there is only Rogers that can carry the iPhone.

Here is Rogers’ and Fido’s current data plans:

The screen capture came from this page.

Yes boys and girls, your eyes are not tricking you. That’s $1 per MB, up to 10 MB and each additional MB is an astonishing $30.72 + 14% taxes.

Rogers’ subsidiary Fido has more reasonable data plan rates, but still:

The screen capture came from this page.

Their only ‘reasonable’ data plan is $100 for up to 200 MB + $5 per additional MB. The cheaper ones are even more ridiculous than their parent company.

Compare the above to ATT’s data plan in the US at $20 for Unlimited data usage.

So while we know the iPhone is coming to Canada, the real question is: When the iPhone comes to Canada, will it be reasonable to buy and use?

Yet another useful feature has been eliminated in Leopard.

The audio controller that the Finder’s column view had for the preview pane when previewing audio files has been eliminated. Why? I don’t know. No logical explanation can come to mind.

In Tiger, if you set your window’s view to the column view and point it to a folder that has MP3 files, when you select one of those files, the right-most column shows a controller that allows you to play the audio file, select the point where you want the play head to be and control the playback’s volume. Leopard: NO MORE!

What you get in Leopard is a silly, YouTube-like preview square with a big ‘play’ button in its middle. No volume control and no skipping ahead. You can always hit the space bar to get a big window showing iTunes like display, and you can skip ahead, but you still can’t control the volume.

Somebody should tell Apple’s engineers that an UPGRADE is when you make things better, not worse.

I’ve been using Leopard as my only OS for 4+ days now. Here is a first report on where I’ve encountered the most problems.

Safari:

I spend a lot of time with Safari (can’t use any other browser as my main browser). It’s the only Apple application that I use so extensively. So far I’ve noticed few thing:

1. It crashes way more than previous versions of Safari. I guess they’re using a code-base almost completely different from the beta 3.0 version that they released for Tiger. The beta Tiger version was almost bulletproof for me. I’ve had unexplained crashes so far at least twice per day. Most of the crashes happened when I started typing in a form.
2. It seems to be unable to block certain type of popup windows. I have the ‘Block pop up windows’ preference set, and yet I’ve had two or three instances where websites managed to show me some ads in a popup window. Not good.
3. Visual glitches: A site I visited changed the size of my main Safari window to a really small size and then back to full-screen. After the expansion to full size, the tabs bar got clipped and only a third of its normal hight showed. I couldn’t get it back to normal size without quitting Safari. (side note: I wish Safari had a resize blocking feature like Camino. I just hate it when a stupid website decides that my window size is not adequate for its display and ‘helps’ me by changing the size of my browser window).
4. Scripting: Apple changed the behavior of some AppleScript commands. The ‘open’ command used to open a new window with the URL, now it opens it in a tab. The kicker is that Safari doesn’t seem to respond to ‘make new window’ command. (I’ve worked around this one by modifying my code to anticipate a new tab instead of a new window and acts accordingly.)
5. Spontaneous cookie loss: It has happened few times already. I would be surfing and managing my various websites, (most of my websites rely on cookies for log in), and suddenly, I would be logged out. I looked over cookies and most of the cookies weren’t there. They simply vanished. Not all cookies, just some. I have no clue how to track this bug.
6. Web clippings don’t work: I’ve tested the Web Clip feature and it doesn’t seem to work. When I make a clip of a page, it appears correctly in Dashboard, but whenever I reload the Dashboard, the clip is empty. I tried it with various sites with the same result.

Folder Actions:

To show my geeky side, one of Leopard’s features that I anticipated the most is the enhancements to the Folder Actions engine. In Tiger, if you had multiple folders with folder actions, those actions don’t run concurrently. They run back to back. So if folder 1 fires its action and it takes a while to complete, folder 2 won’t fire its action until folder 1′s action ends. Leopard’s feature list promised to fix this.

However, not only they didn’t fix it, a bug seems to have broken Folder Actions further. Now, even if I have multiple folders with folder actions set up, only the first active one works. All the other ones don’t work at all. So now I have to choose which folder action I can live without and which ones are too crucial.