För första gången i mitt liv formaterade jag en Mac.

Anledningen till detta var inte virus eller att den blivit slö. Jag hade misskött terminal-installeringar väldigt kraftigt. Jag hade installerat mysql via något som heter MacPorts, som installerar saker på lite okonventionella platser. När jag uppgraderade till rails 2.3.2 så inkluderades inte mysql librarys längre och jag var tvungen att installera mysql gem’et. När jag skulle göra detta så avbröt jag installationen halvvägs för att fläktarna på datorn slutade snurra och jag var tvungen att lämna in den på garanti. Eftersom jag avbröt installationen halvvägs fanns det saker som inte installerades korrekt, vilket gjorde att de inte gick att ta bort korrekt heller.

I slutsats hade jag ett par version av mysql och ett par versioner av ruby installerat och de krockade så att saker inte ville ladda korrekt.

Det gick i alla fall smidigt att formatera om, jag skrev upp en lista med alla apps jag hade på den och installerade alla idag på drygt en timme eller två. Nu är jag up and running igen med en fräsch clean installation och allt fungerar som det ska.

Det är ungefär det här som krävs för att man ska få problem med en Mac, gör korkade saker på ett väldigt avancerat sätt och få den att gå sönder hårdvarumässigt samtidigt.

Keeping in sync sucks.

I’m not talking about keeping in sync with fashion, current events or even real life. I’m talking about having a stationary computer, a laptop and a smartphone where everyone has notes, calendars and contacts that you want to keep in sync.

My main wish right now is that I could have my calendars in sync. I want to be able to add and edit events on all three devices and have all three devices more or less automatically updated.

Now there is one marvelous feature that comes from the Apple company and that is called MobileMe. It syncs calendars, contacts, mail – even passwords you save on different devices and check this: third party application data and preferences! That is fucking awesome. But it is also fucking expensive, it’s $99 a year, which really isn’t all that much, it’s just that I’m piss poor.

So what to do when you’re cheap? I figured someone must have figured out a solution, and I recently thought I had found it. Google just recently made CalDAV available with their calendars, meaning you could sync online without having to go to the google calendar site. And i gotta tell you it works really awesomely well! I’ve set up both my iCal calendars (on both computers) with CalDAV to gCal. It just works.

But now the iPhone won’t sync properly. Since for some reason (I’ve been told) the iPhone doesn’t fully support CalDAV, I can’t edit or add events to the gCal calendar, hence all changes I make on the phone are just synced to the computer I choose to sync it with. So I’m kind of back to square one, if the phone calendar doesn’t work to edit or add I’m pretty much crippled.

I then tried NuevaSync, a marvelous free service that provides over-the-air sync with google calendar. But I pay by the MB for network traffic that’s on the 3G/EDGE band (and it is highly likely I won’t have access to Wi-Fi every time I wan’t to edit my calendar) and one simple small sync was 6kB, not acceptable.

So what do I do? Pay the 99 bucks a year?

Nu har jag fått min efterlängtade iPhone! Jag vår tyvärr tvungen att köpa den från telia, men sånt är väl livet… Jag är nöjd iaf och nu har jag börjat vänja mig vid att skriva på den också! Just nu bloggar jag ifrån wordpress egna app som man kan installera.

I couldn’t find an e-mail adress to mail to Apple and complain, so to whom it may concern:

Dear Apple

You lowered the prices for the 3G iPhone, thats great!
I thought…

First of all, you contract the phone to a specific provider, that’s OK i guess. I mean, you have to make money somehow right. But how did you choose to do that? I live in Sweden and i think you had absolutely no idea what provider you chose here. You chose the absolute worst, most unpopular, most boring and most non-apple like provider in the entire country. They just plainly sucks!

You said that now that you lowered the price of the iPhone to make it available to everyone. Well, if you wanted it to be available, mission failed. Even for the 10 people in Sweden that wants to use Telia as their provider (the one you chose) it’s incredibly expensive. The total cost for the iPhone after 18 months of payment comes to $1316 dollars. Suddenly the price of the phone has gone up one thousand dollars.

This is insane. You can’t expect anyone to pay these outrageous prices?

Apple products are supposed to be fun, directed to young and technically interested people. Telia has directed the phone to corporate users with an abundance of money.

And you might say, “Well it might be a thousand dollars more expensive but you get traffic and minutes to talk for that money aswell”. While that may be true, there is no alternative. You can’t buy the phone without the 18 months subscription and I aswell as most other people are already tied to one provider (one that isn’t so lame as Telia) so we can’t even buy what is available.

So Apple, you have effectively set the price of the iPhone to $1316 for practically everyone in your customer base. Thank you for killing the dream.