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A couple of weeks ago, I tried to upgrade my MacBook to Apple’s latest operating system, nicknamed Snow Leopard. Theoretically, this should have been as easy as popping in the disc and clicking a bunch of “Continue” buttons. In practice, that was not true at all. The installation software said that it could not proceed because my hard drive wasn’t the disc used to boot up the computer. Hunh? Web research ensued, and I came to the conclusion that the only solution involved erasing and repartitioning my hard drive, and then installing Snow Leopard. That sounded drastic; I put Snow Leopard away.

A few days later, I called Apple support, to try to resolve this. The guy on the other end of the line was patient and helpful, and walked me through a series of tests, before coming to the conclusion that, yes, the hard drive needed to be repartitioned. Why? He didn’t know, but he acknowledged that I was clearly not the first person to face the issue. He assured me that the Time Machine backup I had made prior to the call would work as promised, and he led me through the process.

This has a happy ending: it took about a half-hour to reinstall the original Leopard operating system, another 90 minutes to restore everything from the back-up, and then another 45 minutes or so to add Snow Leopard. Time Machine restored my computer perfectly—everything, down to each tweak, setting, and file. It was a reminder of the genius nature of that system, and credit to Apple for figuring it out: a back-up system that allows both a system-wide restoration and a file-by-file exploration, under one built-in software umbrella. And now my machine runs faster, courtesy of Snow Leopard.

***

Earlier today, I went in to the Apple story to have them check out my iPhone. A couple weeks ago, the little switch that controls the ringer just snapped off. I’ve been able, with the aid of finger nails, to flick the stub of the switch around when desperately necessary but it is a drag.

The “geniuses” in Apple’s Upper West Side store were terrific. My phone is in great shape, and it was clear that this was both a small problem—and not a reflection of serious abuse. Plus, the phone is covered under Apple’s extended warranty program.

Or so I thought. I bought the extended warranty after I bought the phone, but the salesman at the Apple store told me that just by purchasing it, the warranty was in effect. Not so: I needed to activate it, and I hadn’t done that. Today, Apple took care of that for me—it helped that I had the receipt, showing I’d purchased it last February—and then, when finished, replaced the phone. No more questions asked. Then they let me sit there while I connected the new iPhone to my laptop and “restored” the settings from the old phone to the new one, courtesy of another smart Apple back-up tool.

Which also worked more or less flawlessly. (The less: I had to manually put my music, etc., back on the phone. A very slight inconvenience in the overall process.) It took about two hours to do the full restore, but it meant that two hours later I had my iPhone back, with all my apps, settings, old text messages...

***

I finally broke up with Microsoft a little more than a year ago, and thus far, Apple has not let me down. In fact, my household has converted, my extended family has converted, and my office may convert, too. Still—despite reaffirming the high quality of Apple’s products, software, and services—these two experiences highlight the frustrating nature of computers and personal technology when something goes wrong. And invariably, something will go wrong at some point.

My experiences are not unique, but that’s the point. I remain concerned that we rely too much on these machines to (help us) manage our lives, without giving due attention to the weaknesses of the systems, or of ourselves. One lesson in all this is, clearly, back-up regularly. Another is buy Apple: the products and services are better value for the money. The biggest lesson of all may be the one we will never learn: to start relying on less fragile systems, before our collective memory needs to be erased and repartitioned, with little hope of a full, restorable back-up available.

I appreciate effective combinations of quality products and good service. While it’s often more entertaining to excoriate companies that fall down on one front or another, the folks doing good work deserve recognition too—so here’s a short item of support for the creators of the my6sense app for the iPhone / iPod Touch.

I first learned about the my6sense app through a post on Mashable back in August. They gave it a rave review for its combination of features: feed reader; information sharer; and a feature called “Digital Intuition,” that over time learns your tastes and suggests other reading material based on those tastes. For me, the initial draw was the feed reader component. I have discovered, though, that the “Digital Intuition” feature works quite well: having added my own feeds, and spent time reading different items (or not), the app has learned some of my interests, and the main feed page now provides a range of different, interesting items to look at, in addition to the feeds I added myself.

Adding or importing feeds in my6sense is easy, as is creating folders to combine multiple feeds into one reading page, so users can cluster technology items together, arts items together, etc. The top 20 items loaded are available offline, which is perfect for paging through on a subway ride where there’s no internet access.

BUT, the thing that really got me committed to continued usage was the response I received from the company when I did have a problem. Early on, two feeds that I tried to add would not go through. It was odd; everything worked fine except for these two specific, unrelated blogs . I got a range of error messages, some telling me that the items were there already, others just a slightly-too-cutesy “Oh noes!” Oh, noes indeed. On the verge of giving up—the app was free, after all, so I wouldn’t lose much—I submitted feedback through the app’s own feedback tool. That generated a reply within a day, with a person who was terrific on follow-through. She asked for more detail about the problem, and proposed a few different solutions; none worked. She was apologetic and, when she said that the developers were looking into the issue, I believed her. And, indeed, a subsequent update to the app fixed my issues.

At this point, there are a few small tweaks I’d like to see my6sense make, to improve the usability. One is to add side-to-side page scrolling, as in the Wall Street Journal’s app; right now, my6sense makes a reader go back to the top of the screen to change items. Another is just a little more flexibility in controlling the font size. A better automatic information category for the arts would be nice, beyond the celebrity-driven items that are built in. And the real stretch nice-to-have would be a “save” or bookmark feature, to keep track of a few things one may want to remember for later.

So there you have it. Great product, great price, and great service: if you’re looking for a feed reader and information aggregator, check out my6sense.

If all you read was the news coverage of AT&T’s wireless services, particularly since the launch of the iPhone, the stories you’d be most likely to see would be along the lines of the big New York Times piece from 3 September, “Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T,” or an item from All Things Digital about the launch of multi-media messaging ability for the iPhone. The tone of these stories, for as long as I can remember, is one of complaint and frustration among the many millions of AT&T customers, including about 9 million iPhone owners.

The thing is: I find it bizarre, and completely counter to my own experience.

I have been an AT&T customer since 1996, with vague but fond memories of the acquisition of my first phone, a seemingly brick-sized Nokia that worked so well it made me a committed Nokia user, until I got my iPhone a dozen years later. Not only did the phone work well: so did the service to which it was tied. It’s precisely because of the quality combination of the two that I have remained an AT&T wireless customer ever since.

While I spend most of my time in New York City, I have also spent substantial time away from here, from very rural parts of New England to middle-of-nowhere spots in Texas between Houston and Austin, to a range of other places around the country. Rare are the times I have found myself without service. More common has been finding myself with better service than Verizon or (more dramatically) Sprint customers.

The quality of my service or experience hasn’t changed since acquiring my iPhone, either. Sure, periodically I get calls that don’t go through; but hardly so frequently as to be a meaningful factor in my general experience, and no worse than ever or, as far as I can tell, worse than friends with other phones on other services. Sure, I have moments where the downloading of my e-mail seems to take forever; but it usually turns out that some idiot has sent me 10MB of photos, and the problem is either not AT&T’s or, frankly, not so unrealistic. The broad problems described by people in the Times and the many other articles one can find with a quick search have never been my experience. At all.

If anything, I continue to find the iPhone an amazing tool (and toy), something out of the science fiction or comic books I read as a kid—and nearly the real-world equivalent of the hand-held communicators and analyzers of Star Trek. Maybe I’m just old enough that, never having expected such technology to be realized during my lifetime, I’m grateful for how well it works, even with its flaws and failings. Few technologies are perfect, and the iPhone—as a unit, and as a tool to access the AT&T service—seems damn good to me.

I spend a lot of time using computers of varying kinds. My threshold for poor products and services is both high enough that I stuck it out with Dell and Microsoft longer than I might have, but also low enough that newly adopted tools that just don’t work well are traded out or discarded rapidly.

The iPhone and AT&T are not in that category. Let’s just hope that by writing this I’m not jinxing it.

OpenOffice.org - the free, multi-platform, "office" software suite of programs and tools - recently launched version 3.1. I wrote about version 2.0 back in 2006, and since then the program has only improved further. Rather than repeat the whole structure of my original argument, I thought I would just punch out a few quick reasons why OpenOffice.org can and should replace your version(s) of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access:

1. Features. These programs do everything that Microsoft's programs do - and sometimes more. For example, any file / document can be exported to PDF format with one click (and without buying or installing any additional software, like Adobe Acrobat). With two clicks, you can control the quality of the PDF, the file size, the inclusion of bookmarks on the page, how it looks when it opens, and more.

2. Interoperability for imports. In addition to being able to open Microsoft Office documents perfectly, OpenOffice.org has worked for opening a range of other files, including former Microsoft files that have been corrupted or improperly closed. Moreover Microsoft has, in recent years, dropped some of the converters it used to include by default with programs like Word. OpenOffice.org still has them - and they work better than Microsoft's ever did anyway.

3. Interoperability for exports. Want to save a file (yours or someone else's) as a Microsoft Word document? OpenOffice.org will do it, with no problems. Want to convert that presentation into an easy, web-enabled Flash file? OpenOffice.org will do it, no problem. Got an old Access database you can no longer ... access? OpenOffice.org will open it - and let you extract the data into a spreadsheet.

4. Languages. Speak another language? Want to use an office program that knows that language, dictionary and all? OpenOffice.org can be had (for free) in a wide range of languages, from Afrikaans to Vietnamese.

5. Add-ons / extensions. The smart developers at OpenOffice.org use the Mozilla / Firefox model and have opened up a whole world of "extensions," additional items components (from new document templates to new functions), many of which can also be had for free.

6. Stability. Since I started using OpenOffice.org full time in 2003, I think I can count on two hands the number of times the program has crashed. That's with heavy-duty use, for files in multiple formats and across multiple platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, and even Linux). Six years, 10 crashes? When was the last time your software worked so well, Microsoft?

7. Environmental conservation. This may sound silly, but think about it: it's a lot more environmentally sensitive (and cost-effective) to deliver a program that requires no additional packaging. Each new computer you buy with Microsoft Office installed comes with crap you will likely throw out, from the packaging to the reinstallation CDs. OpenOffice.org is free, which means that it's readily available - which means that crap is unnecessary. Need a new copy? Just download it when you need it.

8. Global accessibility. Hand in hand with the environmental message is one of global do-gooding. Free software like this is liberating: classes of people can get easy access to a valuable, high-quality product. Yes, this is limited to people who already can afford a computer; but as the cost of hardware falls, the freedom to choose other software products increases their utility. And there is a reason that governments are also switching to OpenOffice.org: it saves taxpayers money, too.

9. Cost. You can't beat free. Seriously. Especially when free is really, really good.

Every software has some thing bound to drive a user nuts. For me, it's the hidden nature of OpenOffice.org's "Recent Documents" menu: it's only accessible when some kind of document is already open. But that's a small thing, and easily managed. Everything else is great, which is why, several years later, I'm once again back telling people to take a look. It's worth it.

More technology notes: with the migration to a new server last week, and the other problems I was having with Blogger, the Atom & RSS feeds for my sites were not working.

Those problems should now be fixed. If you need to update your feeds, here's the info:
Atom: http://www.sascha.com/atom.xml
RSS: http://www.2rss.com/atom2rss.php?atom=http://www.sascha.com/atom.xml

Cheers!

It's easy - too easy - to be constantly critical, in the negative sense, of what goes on around us. Therefore when something works as it should, it seems worth saying "Thank you!" And when the something that worked as it should is a small company with a good product, saying "Thank you!" publicly is even more important.

So: Thank you, Evernote!

I have been using Evernote since 2005 to track my notes and ideas, keep clips from web sites and other sources, and generally help manage my life. The early version of the program was easy to use, easy to learn, and free. Eventually, I upgraded to a low-cost paid version, which enabled a synchronization feature, so I could sync my "notes" across different computers using a USB flash drive as the go-between.

Last year, Evernote released version 3.0, an even more sophisticated version - also free - that offers the synchronization feature across Windows, Mac, iPhone, and other platforms, along with a web interface. The premium version, very reasonably priced at $45 per year, turns Evernote into a file server: drop attachments into your notes, and they also synchronize across the entire system. Open those attachments up, edit them, and the changes are saved back to the system.

All this was cool enough, but it was not until I ran into a problem that I really appreciated how great Evernote is. A note I created with multiple attachments got corrupted; first time it has happened, and I don't know what caused it, but it stopped the program from syncing. Within one hour of asking for help, I had a response asking for some more detail; within 12 hours I had an e-mail from Evernote with the solution to the problem. Everything was back to normal after that.

If you're the kind of person who likes to jot down ideas, keep track of receipts, categorize information or to-do lists across different areas of your life, take pictures or audio notes to remind yourself of different things, and more ... Evernote is the program for you. I cannot recommend it highly enough, and they deserve a public thank you for their great product, and for their great customer service.

Over on the other side today, I once again lavished some praise on Apple for its terrific retail sales and service. But I wouldn't be telling the whole story if I didn't also acknowledge that Apple failed one small test today - something that should have been an easy one.

My wife and I went to the Fifth Avenue store today to take a look at a new machine and, most importantly, get information about running Windows on a Mac. There are, alas, a few programs that my other half uses that work only in Windows ... but she needs another computer and Macs are definitely part of my present and future.

Conceptually, we know that Windows-on-Mac is possible, via Boot Camp or Parallels or other programs. Practically speaking, we wanted to see it in action: what does Windows really look like, how will it work, is there any impact on performance ... ? All obvious questions, most of which can be answered by reading items on Apple's web site - but reading the web site and seeing for one's self, in person, on the computer, is different. Isn't that the whole point of having a retail store, so people can see for themselves, in person?

So, it was a bit of a shame that Apple seems unprepared to address this question in any substantive manner. Not a single computer in the store was running Parallels, and only one - an old laptop - was running Boot Camp. The sales staff was trying hard to be helpful, but their knowledge in this area seemed more limited than we had expected. (Certainly more limited than I expected based on past experience.)

It is probably unrealistic to expect Apple to be able to demonstrate every piece of software it sells, but running Windows isn't every piece of software: it's been a major, if subtle, selling point ever since Macs moved to an Intel-driven computing platform. If someone from Apple ever reads this, I hope they'll take this into account for the future.

Given the problems I have been having with putting my computer in "Suspend" mode - about 30% of the time, turning it back on disables the USB ports - I decided to go for a month leaving the machine running 24/7. I thought it would be worth trying for 30 days, to see what the impact might be, in exchange for not having my peripherals turned off and thus being forced to reboot the computer.

I'm running a two-year-old Dell XPS 400 desktop, with an Energy Star rating. (I also have a smallish flat screen monitor, which was turned off; no reason to leave it on.) I use the computer a lot, but not without the occasional break.

The results of my test are now in, and I can put a dollar figure to it: $25. That's how much my electricity bill went up during those 30 days while I left the computer running. Is it worth an extra $25 to leave the machine on? No - not worth it to me, and not worth it to the planet. However, it would be great if Microsoft could figure out a way to fix their Windows operating system so that the "Suspend" feature works as a user might actually expect.