“This game is such a pile of random broken stuff it’s tough to tell the difference between when it’s malfunctioning and when it’s just being really coy.”
— Shamus Young revisits No Man's SkyDear Apple,
Please stop making products that subject your customers to electric shocks.
Really, there are better ways to keep the cult alive.
Dear Apple,
Please stop. Plugging in my iPod is not an appropriate time for you to be plugging MobileMe. iTunes should never display an ad when I sync my device.
Never mind that I’m already a .Mac user and you damn well know it; I just haven’t enabled it on my iPod Touch, because the sync is still broken and your servers go offline at random intervals. I don’t want to hose my email, bookmarks, calendar, and contacts by syncing them through an unreliable service.
[speaking of which, plugging in an iPod Touch does not trigger a sync; you have to hit the button manually. WTF?]
Dear Matias,
[Update 10/24/08: after informing them on 10/2 that the replacement was also defective and that it was heavily used (the one I exchanged for it was pristine, by the way), I have never heard from them again. Their customer service is as bad as their engineering.]
[Update: the replacement arrived used. Not “previously owned”, used. As in filthy, sticky, and filled with hair and food from the previous owner. It’s also even worse for typing, generating phantom keys under even more conditions, like attempting to type the word “since” (which comes out “sincey”) at a normal speed. It’s junk, and I’ll never buy a keyboard from them again.]
Fuck you. “Thank you sincerely for eventually agreeing to replace the defective product and ship the replacement in parallel.”
When I sent a support message about my still-under-warranty expensive keyboard suddenly generating spurious keystrokes, I expected a better answer than this:
What you are experiencing is called a "shadow key" or "phantom key" or "ghost key". Every keyboard has them (in different locations) but most people don't notice them, because they don't type the key combinations that produce them. They are an artifact of how keyboards are built.
There is a workaround...
You can turn On the Sticky Keys feature on the Universal Access control panel, in System Preferences. This will allow you to press & release the Command and Shift keys together, and then press the key being modified on its own.
We are very sorry for the inconvenience...
This is the most useless “workaround” I’ve ever seen. “Can’t touch-type on your keyboard? DON’T TRY!! Problem solved!”
Never mind that I simply don’t believe their explanation…
Dear Apple,
How do I shut off the obnoxious (and inconsistently unavailable) “live preview” of images when I drag them out of Safari? It’s really difficult to drag them into a folder when the mouse cursor (you know, the part that determines where you’re dragging to) is hidden somewhere under the oh-so-spiffy translucent copy of the image.
