I love Netflix. I also love Gamefly. They both use the U.S. Postal Service to deliver their wares to us customers. They even use similarly sized envelopes (Red and Orange, respectively). How come, then, I get Netflix (even from California) in a day or two or three and Gamefly games take a week or longer to arrive?!
Anybody have any thougts?
Update: I contacted Gamefly about the latest long wait for a game, and they apologized and sent out my next game right away. Good customer service, but let’s see how long this one takes to arrive, huh?
Update: NBA Street 3 was shipped on July 22 according to Gamefly and arrived yesterday afternoon, July 25. Three days is not bad at all, especially considering that the 22nd was a Friday and the 25th is a Monday. Good job, Gamefly!
Anyone who manages a website knows that you spend quite a lot of time in your FTP client of choice. This is one of those few areas where I simply must have my mac, because the FTP clients out for Windows are absolutely horrible. (well, except for Windows’ built-in FTP in explorer, which is really quite good for basic tasks and puts Apple’s similar efforts to shame) All the Windows clients are a mess of buttons with no labels, and feel like they were designed by someone who couldn’t decide what he loved more: DOS or UNIX. In absolute stark contrast, Fetch has been the mac client ever since ever and it is really quite a nice program. Nowadays, though, with Mac OS X and modern Cocoa software, there are some great options like FTPeel and Interarchy. My personal favorite though, is Panic Software’s Transmit.
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With all the public angst around spyware, worms, viruses, and trojans, and with all the negative reactions to Microsoft’s “Trustworthy Computing” attempts, it’s nice to see someone who not only reacts to what goes on on the net with an updated product that works, but also finds a way to make the system both secure AND usable.
Enter Apple. Tiger was released with a bit of fanfare, touting Spotlight and Dashboard as the two most important—and most valuable—features. Dashboard, however, quickly became marred by the realization from outside Apple that it was quite the security risk. Safari automatically downloaded and installed widgets and there was no built-in way to manage widgets. Many on the net proposed that this would usher in a flood of spyware and other malware via Dashboard on the OS X platform. Well, that hasn’t happened. Not only has that NOT happened, but Apple has solved all those problems while keeping Dashboard the friendly development platform it was built to be, all in the new 10.4.2 release.
Yes, there’s not a built-in widget manager. No, it’s not a Preference pane (the Mac equivalent of a Windows Control Panel). Instead, it’s actually just a widget itself, but it works just great. Widgets now prompt the user to be installed and upgrading prompts the user to replace—both good improvements.
The best improvement by far, though, is the “test drive” mode into which all new widgets launch. It looks like this:
Visually the user can understand that this widget is closed off, though perfectly usable, and there are clearly marked buttons to keep it or delete it. Underneath that though, Apple has adjusted the dashboard engine so that these widgets that are being “test-driven” cannot harm the system in any way. Score 1 for Apple.
Yes, I’m masking the URL of this site. Unfortunately, the way that GoDaddy lets you do it, it continues to mask all URL’s even once the user leaves my site. I know this is a crappy thing to do and I’m working on it. Sorry.
According to a story on Appleinsider,
If reports are accurate, Mac users have a lot to look forward to in regards to web browsing under Mac OS X for Intel. According to sources, web browsing in general is much faster under Mac OS X for Intel than it is under the shipping version of Mac OS X for PowerPC. Web pages snap to the screen, the same way they do in Internet Explorer running on a new Pentium system, they say.
