Since last year, I have a MobileMe subscription. I find it quite convenient to have an easy way to sync my “important” stuff to my Macs and iPhone. This year, as I tried to re-enable my account as a Family Pack Master, I stumbled upon a little thingie that managed to get me irritated.
I assure you, that’s rare for me and an Apple-made user interface.
I re-enabled my account and tried to add some people to my Family Pack. I knew that option was somewhere around the Account pages. So I went there.
In the Summary page, there was a “Family Member Accounts” row, but of course didn’t show anything, just a generic “no accounts” message. I looked around for a link, conveniently placed somewhere, that would help me add some people to my account. No link to be found.
After a bit of search, I decided the Account Options page was what I needed after all. Again, no visible link in sight. Just a big red warning that my account will expire (gasp!) in Jan 29, 2010. As if I needed to be reminded on the day I’ve renewed my subscription.
After a bit of back and forth, I found the bugger. It was a tiny link just above the red warning, which I missed, of course. You can see it above.
Why, Apple? You go around spoiling us with pixel perfect, intelligent user interfaces, and your MobileMe account management (one of the most important parts of the interface) is so subpar it hurts.
It’s weird how those tiny things make or break a user interface.
What’s so special about a Javascript animation library site?
It’s so simple and cute it hurts. That’s special. Especially considering other Javascript library sites.
Take a look:
Yes, of course, not much info is portrayed, there is no function breakdown or examples that I can quickly check out, but hey – the page states its name, its features, its size and two links, to download and see manuals (ok, some ads too, but I can’t blame anyone for putting ads on a site). Enough for a small project.
Sometimes it’s not so bad to radically reduce frontpage content, especially when working with a niche.
And who am I kidding, those moving clouds & trees look très cute.
You may noticed I’m kinda offline these days, due to the recent change from our family OTE phone and DSL line to some double play greek provider. Which sucks.
I won’t go into speeds and bitrates and whatnot, I’m happy with my ‘net if it’s stable and relatively fast for browsing. What I can’t tolerate though is lack of proper documentation, awful interfaces that just don’t work and lack of proper support.
I’ve spent my first night as a Tellas Zisto customer trying to get my Internet to work, following the instructions on their leaflet obsessively, talking on the phone for half an hour trying to figure out what’s wrong. It turns out, nothing was wrong with my line. It was just that their leaflet had the wrong settings from my area, the modem they provided me with was wrongly set up, and the Siemens Speedstream stupid interface couldn’t work on the Mac, neither on Safari nor on the Firefox.
I’ve never seen something like this. Since the modem was pre-set up, I couldn’t select a different username than ‘admin’, which I had to choose from an one-choice select box. When I tried filling up the password and logging in, this nice interface would inform me that it needs a username. But, I just selected one.
Long story short, I managed to make it work through Windows.
Needless to say, the same settings just refuse to work with my (lovely) Linksys WAG200G. Complete fail. I’ll try again tomorrow with a different router to see if the problem is mine, but for now I’ve had to share my Ethernet through Airport throughout the house. And since the Windows machines around here have problems recognizing WEP passwords coming from the iMac, I had to leave my WiFi unsecured.
So now you know. If you happen to be around my house, hey, drop by! Free WiFi.
I hate it when things don’t work at once.
P.S. I think that most technical people that work on phone support talk in a very different manner to men and women. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get them to understand I’m not the usual clueless user, so they should spare me the shit and go on. Story of my life.
