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So, the internet (or perhaps, more specifically, the iPhone early adopters) are, to put it mildly, frustrated at AT&T following yesterday’s announcement of the new iPhone 3GS. Why? Well, three things come up: failure to have MMS in time for the launch, failure to have tethering in time for the launch, and the additional $200 on the price of the handsets for those who have less than 18 months on their current contract (that’s all iPhone 3G users!).

In addition to its dramatic influence on the design of handsets (including built in software), and the sale of additional applications and content, the iPhone has also in the last 24 hours demonstrated a new type of customer to the carriers of the world. These are the early adopter Apple fans who must have the latest phone. They’re vocal, as a quick trip to Twitter, or even the top iPhone and Apple websites & blogs will demonstrate, and they’re annoyed. What could have been a great day for AT&T (and, from what I’m reading, O2 in the UK is just as bad) has turned into a PR nightmare for them. AT&T in particular is being lambasted from all sides. People are annoyed about coverage, about the fact that they failed to deliver the two new network features (that most other iPhone network operators will have on time), and then they slap their “valued” customers in the face when they try to upgrade.

I’m not saying they’re wrong to require the 18 months before they offer the discount (if that’s the time the subsidy was amortised over, then that’s only fair). But, they could have handled it in a much better way. Especially when it is actually cheaper to cancel your contract, pay the pro-rated early termination fee (ETF), and then sign a new contract. Here’s a simple way they could have made this more palatable to the iPhone early adopter crowd:

Choose:

• Pay the remainder of the ETF and sign a new 2 year contract;
• Extend your existing contract by 24 months.

That’s not really a lot different to what they have done, but I think it would have come over as more palatable than just being hit with a $200 premium for the new phone.

I’m going to be out of the office for a week. Including the two weekends, that means 9 days, and the App Store daily reports are only maintained for 7 days so that would mean losing 2 days of data in AppViz, the amazing tool from IdeaSwarm that I use to keep track of sales and reviews etc. What to do?

Well, three options came to mind:

1. Accept the loss of data (AppViz will fill in the missing information to some extent from the weekly reports, so it is only really a loss of resolution);
2. Take a laptop, find an internet connection on my trip and download the data files to there (AppViz can read the downloaded files);
3. Find a way to schedule the AppViz to download the data on its own while I’m away.

The first two options didn’t appeal much, so I asked on Twitter if anybody had any ideas for scheduling AppViz. And two people responded with the information I needed (thanks @jonathanbenari and @graiz). So, without further ado, here’s what I did:

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Those who follow my Twitter feed might have seen that we received a snarky letter from our HOA here at Bayport in Alameda this week complaining about our front lawn. The complaint itself was not specific (it said something along the lines of the lawn needing “weeding, edging, mowing and/or fertilizing”).

Now, my opinion of HOAs in general is pretty low (and of the particular management company used here, Vierra Moore, even lower), since most of what I have seen from them has been silly time wasting nonsense. At our expense since our monthly dues pay for these time wasters. To highlight just how much nonsense Vierra Moore believes in, one of last year’s “straw polls” for potential new rules they could impose on residents included whether home owners should be allowed to fly flags, and if so what sizes and types of flag. Pathetic people. Learn how to live and let live. Let’s take away all the rules that are not ensuring safety and deal with it.

But, complaints about lawn condition have a much larger implication. By requiring that lawns be kept ‘green’ they are essentially requiring a massive, and unacceptable, waste of water. And the houses here in Bayport do not include grey water systems (a shame in newly built homes). Currently water is a precious resource here in northern California, with a serious drought entering its third year now. Why are we wasting it watering grass?

Unusually for me, I honestly think there needs to be a change in the law to prevent HOAs from requiring their members to run irrigation at all. If grass can’t survive naturally in the climate, then it is simply the wrong thing to plant. That said, even when it is burnt badly in hot summers, it usually comes back unaided when the rain returns in the winter months (as the many un-irrigated hillsides in the bay area demonstrate every year). Of course, it doesn’t look green all summer, but really people, is having a green lawn more important than having water to drink? Perhaps this year we can make brown the new green.

I do think it is time that cities and/or states stepped in here to prevent these pathetic, bullying organisations from being able to require their “members” to waste precious resources. So, I am going to be sending this post to a number of places, including local and state politicians, to see if anything can be done to knock some common sense into these HOA management company bullies.

Update: iNewz 2.7 is now available on the iTunes App Store (as are iNewz Tech 2.7 and iNewz Green 2.7).

Busy weekend this weekend. I finally got the update for iNewz (and iNewz Tech) that I’ve been working on for a while now submitted to Apple for review.

What’s new?
Well, the most visible differences are the switch to the black top bar (somehow it looks a little more sophisticated to me), and moving the thumbnail images from the left to the right in the headlines view. “Huh?” you ask. Well, the other big difference is that when there is no image for an article, it no longer displays the placeholder iNewz icon. And with the images on the left that made for a ragged left edge which was hard on the eyes.

So, images are on the right, when available, and they’re scaled to keep their aspect ratio and feature rounded corners now (yes, I’ve been having some fun with the CG section of the SDK!).

Another big change: Maintenant, iNewz inclus les actualités français. Nouvelles de langue française vient de France et au Canada.

iNewz Tech
The technology variant of iNewz picks up the same UI changes of course, and a few extra sources, including KRAPPS and MacWorld.

One Last Thing
A new iNewz variant was also added to the family with this update: iNewz Green. For all your environmentally sound, eco-friendly green news in the palm of your hand.

Well, it took a little while, but eventually Christina from Comcast’s national customer care center called me, and left me a number to call her back on. After a little phone tag, we eventually connected and she was able to see the payment that went to the transitional account as well as the ones to the new Comcast account. Something that none of the other people I’d spoken to at Comcast had been able to achieve (all claiming that I’d need to talk to the other group to get the problem resolved!).

Long story short, in a matter of minutes she managed to apply the old payment to the new account, and also credited me one month’s service to account for the increased price.

So, if you ever need to contact Comcast to get something resolved, skip the regular customer service and go straight to the national center. It is staffed by people who care, know how to fix things and have the authority to fix them too! Their email address is We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com, or you can get them on Twitter too via @ComcastCares.

Hopefully somebody in Comcast’s upper management is going to take a look at the way the APT transition was handled and make sure that this kind of debacle can never happen again. The cost in terms of support calls and truck rolls could easily have been avoided (and in the current climate, avoiding unnecessary costs should be high on the agenda).

Monday morning, at 8am, I call as requested to verify that I’m home and see if the technician can make it before 8:30am so I can catch my ferry to work. Unfortunately, it seems that the person I spoke to on Friday did not actually do what he said he’d done. There was no note in the account explaining the situation. So, once again I’m unable to get to work because I have to wait for Comcast to sort out their problems.

Just after 9am, the technician rolls up, looks at the problem and then discovers that he doesn’t have an HDMI DVR. I wouldn’t be too surprised at this normally, but for the fact that I had also talked to the person I booked the appointment with on Friday about that very topic to make sure that the person they sent out had an HDMI DVR with him. That too was meant to be in the notes. But it wasn’t.

The guy who turned up here this morning, when I mentioned that I’d specifically talked about HDMI to the person on the phone and that he’d promised it would be in the notes, simply replied that it was not unusual for them to miss information like that in the notes. He is now driving across Alameda to try to find another technician who has the right DVR on his truck for me.

So, by not making that simple note (despite saying he had), that tech support person on the end of the phone has managed to do three things:

1. Waste my time, making me even less happy with Comcast;
2. Waste the technicians time (he’s now got to drive around Alameda trying to find a compatible DVR);
3. Made him late for all his other appointments this morning, upsetting even more Comcast customers.

The one comment I do want to add though is that the technician who came out here this morning did care enough to both call all the other Comcast people he knew were in the area, and his boss to find out if there were any others in the area, and then drove off to find one who had a compatible box. He could easily have just said I’d need to book another appointment. From his comments, it sounds as though they’re used to being given incomplete information, and having to work around it. That’s a sad indictment of the efficiency of the company though.

Update: As promised, the technician returned having tracked down a new HDMI DVR, and that is now installed and working. The real test will be what happens when a scheduled recording kicks off (which I need to set up again), but he was more confident of this box being more reliable than the new one I had before.

Oddly enough, the remote initialisation of the DVR did nothing to fix the problem with it crashing when it tries to record. I come in tonight to find it locked up in the same way as before.

I’m not yet convinced that this is a hardware issue though. So I am not expecting the box they bring on Monday to fix this issue unless it is a different unit (or has fixed software on it). Others are also having problems with the Motorola DCH3416, and Comcast’s service in general by the sounds of it.

And, yes, that’s yet another visit (my third so far) from the Comcast technicians - I asked tonight if they can book recurring appointments so they can just come out the same time each week and fix whatever has failed since the last visit. At the rate they’re going, they may as well just park out front.

Sadly we found out a few weeks back that Alameda’s own cable TV company was no more, and that Comcast had acquired the service and all its customers. Until we were transitioned (more on that later) we would continue to get our cable and internet services unchanged. Right, so that’s why my DVR service was suddenly disabled on December 7, 2008. And that’s where this saga starts.

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Update (December 14, 2008): Version 2.5 is now available in the iTunes store.

The new version of iNewz is now with Apple for review… New features include an offline reading mode which was requested by a few people, complete with a simple bookmark option to tag an article if the summary information from the feed makes it sound as though you’d like to read more.

The offline mode will be used automatically if the application detects that there’s no network available, but it can also be switched on manually so that all articles will display in offline mode. You can then use the Open Page button to get to the full article on the web.

To make offline mode work, there’s also a bulk sync option that will update all the sources you’re subscribed to - can take a while if you have a lot of sources!

Devicescape’s new application, a version of Easy Wi-Fi especially for AT&T, has been in the app store now for a few days. The screen shot here from my iPhone shows that it has no reviews (and if you scroll down to the bottom, the place where the link to any reviews is found also says that there are no reviews.

So what? It’s only been a few days after all. But wait, if you click on that button to open the reviews page, you get this:

So there are actually five reviews. Why doesn’t the app store app indicate that?

And want another mystery? See that average ranking there - 3.5 stars, well I don’t know how they calculate it because all five of those reviews have 5 star ratings. Last time I checked, 5 * 5 / 5 is 5, not 3.5.

Seems the app store has a number of basic arithmetic problems! And this is not going to help developers much. The ratings and review system is bad enough as it is, but this makes it worse still. An average of 3.5 when all the ratings shown in the reviews are 5 star is pretty damaging. Have you checked whether your aggregate rating is correct?