The other side of iTunes Store

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Apple’s been getting so much crap recently about problems with developer service with iTunes that I just had to share this bit of customer service I got as a customer of the store.

I sent the following two days ago to Apple’s iTunes support:

Hi!

I just had iTunes 9 ask me to reauthorize my computer after an update and was surprised that iTunes claims I have 5 computers authorized. I’m currently using 3 authorized computers total, and I know I lost 1 authorization a few years ago when I sent my Powerbook for service and the replaced motherboard caused the authorization to disappear. However I’m at loss as to where the 1 additional authorization has gone, and it’s a bit scary that I’m up to the max with just 3 machines running iTunes.

I tried an old workaround of trying to deauthorize the computer a couple times after the authorization to see if the count would have gone down, but that didn’t help.

I wonder if you can see how many of the authorizations have been used recently? I’d at least assume you might be able to notice the authorization destroyed by Apple service hasn’t been used for years, and clean that up from my count.

Thanks, Sulka

and got the following reply after a couple hours:

Dear Sulka,

I understand you are needing the computers on your account to be de-authorized. My name is XXX and I am more than happy to work with you until everything has been resolved to your satisfaction.

I have deauthorized all computers associated with your iTunes Store account. You can now reauthorize the computers that you intend to use.

… snip couple links to support articles …

In the future, if you find you have reached 5 authorizations due to system upgrades, you can reset your authorization count by clicking “Deauthorize All” on the Edit Account Information screen. Keep in mind that you can only use this feature once a year. The button will not appear if you have less than 5 authorized computers or if you have used this option within the last 12 months.

I hope this helps you. If you need further assistance or have any questions, feel free to reply to this email and I will be happy to assist. It was a pleasure assisting you Sulka. We here at the iTunes Store appreciate your business.

Sincerely, XXX, 
iTunes Store Customer Support

My expectation based on dealing with customer support of most companies was that I’d maybe get a reply a day or two later, and that I’d have to fight to get any computers deauthorized. I was slightly stunned that the issue got resolved in a couple hours and just happily went to sign in on a couple of the machines I use with my iTunes library.

Now, the real kicker was the following letter I got today:

Dear Sulka,

This is XXX, with a follow-up. I haven’t heard from you and wanted to make sure that your request was handled to your satisfaction. You’ve truly been a remarkable asset to the iTunes Store Family and as such I don’t want to leave you without any type of resolution, so if you do not respond, I will be closing this request. I hope that you continue to enjoy the iTunes Store and would like to thank you for being such a wonderful member of our family. If you find yourself with any other questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to send me an email.

Have a wonderful day!

This is the most adorable response I’ve ever got from a customer service representative, ever. Yes, it certainly goes a bit over the top telling me how wonderful I am, but I have to confess it made me warm and fuzzy inside. The contrast to the passive-aggressive letters some CS reps are sending that tell me to f*** off with my problem is just so mind-blowing that I just had to blog this. And I can assure the rep will be getting a 5/5 rating when the followup request comes in.

(CS representative name censored.)

EyeTV iPhone application – a quick review

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Elgato released an EyeTV application update (3.2) and an iPhone application about a week ago. I’ve been trying it out a bit, so here’s a mini-review.

The promise of the new app is that you can watch live TV (and your recordings) on your iPhone anywhere. This is pretty cool and is definitely something I’d have used, especially when I was abroad, had this been available earlier.

The way the app works is that it connects back to your home Mac and streams the video from the Mac to your iPhone over the Internet. If you watch live TV, your mac transcodes the stream to h.264 on the fly and sends it to the phone. If you have the Elgato Turbo h.264 HD USB stick, the encoding uses the stick, and is supposedly much faster. I have the stick and haven’t tried how slow it’d be without the stick, so I have no idea what the difference really is.

Now, how does it work in practice? Unfortunately, not very well. The problems and gripes I’ve encountered this far are:

  • The video quality on the phone is sometimes ok, sometimes just terrible. I can’t see myself ever watching anything that looks as bad as this. Most of the video is just pixelated jumble. I converted a nature documentary over and when viewing the clip, it took me several seconds to recognize the blob square blocks on my screen was a whale. Here’s a screenshot from the app showing a frame where you might be able to recognize something (see all the nice tropical fish? This is pretty far from the original HD production.):
  • Occasionally, but often enough to be annoying, the application complains it doesn’t support the video format of the stream from the EyeTV app. Restarting the EyeTV application on the Mac seems to fix this, but this is exactly the workaround that I can’t do when I want to watch something on the phone.

  • The problems that haunt dual-tuner EyeTV setups rise to another level with the iPhone app. The issues seem to stem from EyeTV not checking what each tuner is doing when it needs a channel for recording. Typically this means that if you’re watching something on EyeTV, instead of using the idle tuner for recording a show, it chooses to record the show on the tuner you were using to watch TV on. With the iPhone app, if you’re watching something on the TV and a family member wants to watch TV, EyeTV seems to always hijack the tuner that’s being used for watching (and not the idle tuner) and changes the channel to whatever was selected on the iPhone. And I bet scheduling recordings using the iPhone app breaks the dual-tuner scheduling in new interesting ways, as if the existing breakage isn’t bad enough.

  • If you want to watch a recording, you have to pre-convert it. No, even if you can watch live TV, you cannot transcode recordings on the fly. The rationale for this that was given on the Elgato forums is that the dev team wanted the recordings to support fast forward (which can apparently only be supported if the video is pre-converted?) but I still don’t see this as a sensible requirement. Converting my whole library of ~800 GB of recordings is not feasible due to the amount of time and storage space required so effectively I can’t watch my recordings. To make things worse, you can’t even request a recording to be converted from the app – you have to do this by clicking a checkbox in the EyeTV app on the Mac.

  • No support for video over 3G. Even if the connection is fast enough. I can’t see the sense in this, given I get much better quality video from YouTube over 3G than what the Elgato app gives me over WLAN. Further, my 3G downstream speed is most of the time guaranteed to be faster than my home ADSL’s upstream speed, so this just doesn’t make any sense. 

  • The application doesn’t work as a remote. I’d have assumed this is the very first thing they’d implemented, but, sadly, this is not the case. I’d have shelled the 3.99 just for the remote without the blink of an eye, and instead the dev team seems to have seen fit to develop something that’s taken them at least 10x the effort, and doesn’t really work.

  • DVB subtitling isn’t supported. This isn’t surprising since the only support EyeTV has for DVB subtitling is that you can watch it when viewing TV. Exporting clips that have subtitles? No go. This means I can’t watch about a thirds of the content I’d be interested in using the app, since those programs are in languages where I need the subtitles.

  • None of the views in the app that show you tons of items, such as the list of recordings or the tv guide, have search.

So… My verdict for the 1.0 release is – it just doesn’t work. There’s one thing that does (maybe) work and it’s that you can schedule recordings when you’re not at the Mac. This is very valuable if it does indeed work, but I’m assuming you can’t manage things like recording schedule conflicts or being out of recording space using iPhone, so I’m assuming this will be only 50% usable. I’m sure the first fixed version will be much improved but I’m not holding my breath on some aspects listed above, since those issues have been unaddressed for years.

Edit: added a picture. And, having to add a couple kind words: the app looks very polished and clearly a lot of work has been put into it. Most my problems with the application seem to be in the Elgato core technologies, which need fixing, and not in the iPhone app as such.

HP 3570c scanner software for Leopard and Snow Leopard

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Update: The instructions below probably don’t work anymore. The installer requires (?) Rosetta, which Apple has deprecated as software companies had their 10 years or so to port software to be native on Intel. If you still have this scanner, I recommend you recycle it and get a $50 Canon scanner, which will have better image quality and save you hours of frustration.

HP doesn’t officially support 3570c on OS X 10.5 nor 10.6, but I’ve found the software is installable once you work around bugs in the driver installer. The software is prone to crashes, but tends to do it’s job on my machine the next try after the crash.

DISCLAIMER! WARNING! Installing unsupported software on your Mac can cause severe problems. Please do not follow these instructions. They worked for me, but might not work for you.

1) Download this: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software5/COL10835/sj-31472-2/COL10835a.dmg
2) Mount DMG
3) Right Click the Installer and select Show Package Contents
4) Navigate to Contents/MacOS/Sub Installers
5) First install the “HP Scanjet 3500”, “HP Scanjet Scanner – Common” and the “HP Scan Pro” packages
6) Go to /System/Library/Extensions and delete “hpPlugInInit.kext” (why does a scanner want to install a kernel extension which isn’t even needed, is beyond me)
7) Do not restart your computer immediately, as OS X rebuilds your kernel
8) Done, use the HP Scan Pro application Hewlett-Packard folder under Applications

With this method, in addition to working in both Leopards, you don’t get any of the useless crap the standard installer wants to put on your computer. Snow Leo will probably prompt you to install Rosetta during the installation.The only reason I’m keeping the HP is that it still works for the little scanning I’m ever doing, so I can’t justify getting a new one (from some company that is not HP). I guess I might have been happier if the install hadn’t worked for Snow Leo.

Interesting small economic change in WoW patch 3.2

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The latest big patch in WoW (3.2) implemented a change which has interesting (albeit probably small) virtual economic implications:

Players will now be able to trade soulbound items with other raid or group members that were eligible for the loot. This system will work like the Item Buy Back system and allow 2 hours for players to trade an item after it has been looted. Players who choose to enchant or add gems to the item will get one last confirmation before losing the ability to trade the item.

Prior to this, most of the better items looted from dungeons were bound on pickup, meaning the item never became part of the trade economy of the game. With the new change, you can actually loot items and barter on the item after returning from the dungeon.

From economic perspective this is a small thing, but I’m sure some users will start to take advantage of this at least in PUGs that use Need Before Greed, as you can now not only ninjaloot the item, but also blackmail someone who’d wanted the drop for more than the resale value of the item. Of course that won’t win you any friends but I can’t see that stopping people from abusing the system.

CCP FPS MMO, cool!

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As reported by Lum, CCP is putting out an a console-based FPS MMO which is tied into Eve, both thematically, as well intertwined game mechanics. Gamasutra has some more details. This is very cool, and if the interaction mechanisms between Eve and Dust 514 (what an odd name?) are even remotely well done, I think it’ll be a smash success.

One detail I’m extremely interested to get to know more about is how the economic tie-ins are going to work. Gamasutra’s report states “Players in the PC MMO can “fund mercenaries and give them goals” in the console title” which indicates you can transfer ISK between Eve and Dust. What strikes me as potentially complicated is how you balance the two, given some parties in Eve can transfer megabucks, while in an FPS it doesn’t necessarily make sense to make players have more cash than necessary to handle the dude you’re playing. An obvious design workaround to this would be that you need to equip whole squads of troops with your money (burns more cash) and not get to play any personified individuals during the game, but lack of personified avatars would reduce the amount of emotional attachment to the game.

Anyway, good job CCP – hope you’ll do fine with the game.

You need to see this film

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The Finnish national broadcasting company YLE recently broadcasted Rip! A remix manifesto. What an excellent, inspirational film! I think everyone on the planet should see this film before it’s too late. In the spirit of the film, the makers have put the entire film online to be viewed and remixed.

Intro embedded here – view it now and check the rest on the websites linked above.

EU Telecoms Package

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It seems that EU is about to vote on directives that might change some Internet access policies quite fundamentally. Most of the changes sound like things that have already been shot down local legislation level, so the lobbying corporations are now trying to pass the legislation through as directives.

Perhaps the scariest part of the proposal is that it gives ISPs open rights to change Internet connections to whitelist content available to users. Yes, not blacklisting inappropriate content, but whitelist a pre-defined set of services you’re allowed to use. If this goes through and becomes the norm, we can kiss the Internet goodbye, especially given that the text in the directives that tries to guarantee citizens’ right to create and distribute content have apparently been removed.

Some people are calling this trying to change the whole of Internet into operating on the classic TV broadcast model, where ISPs will start to offer you content packages similar to TV channel packages, where you have to pre-order websites you want to access. Sounds pretty scary.

There’s more information available here, and I recommend you write and call your MEP, contact information of whom is available here. I’m ashamed to see the Finnish MEPs are in favor of the legislation, so time to contact them.

Atlassian 555

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Atlassian software has a great deal available for 5 days – you can get a 5 person license to Jira and Confluence for $5!

I have experience of both products and think Jira is a grea issue tracker, and Confluence is a great enterprise wiki product. Both have their weak points (maybe biggest one being the fact the software is so flexible you can really shoot yourself in the foot by taking the customization too far), but I don’t think there’s better products in their class in the market. Even better, Atlassian folks are very pleasant to deal with and they’re one of the most open companies in their communication to the customers, which I respect a great deal.

Best of all, the money made with the offer goes to charity! So, go get your licenses now!