Apple.com is Great but Lacks Support Features

Apple, I love you. Your overpriced computers are so well crafted. I don’t mind (over) paying you guys every few years for a new system. My MacBook Pro serves me well.

I was just visiting Apple Support to how to upgrade RAM on a MacBook  Pro though and found these features strangely missing.

1) My Systems
Let me store my info. I’m running in Bootcamp right now and there is no ‘About This Mac’. Dell.com has a nice Manage my systems admin panel.

2) Login and Session?
Why not let me login right on the home page? I have to find a buried link on the support page to reset my Apple ID, get to the forums… put an optional website widget everywhere that tracks my forum posts, alerts me of updates.

3) Let me edit my iTunes playlist?
Sure would be nice to be able to add songs I have streaming on a radio station, running in Safari on Bootcamp, or from my iPhone.

4) Google voice/wave type interface?

Snap To Grid is Broken in Illustrator and always has been

I was just reminded of one of the reasons why I hate Adobe. Aside from the fact that they abandoned the great tools from Macromedia including Freehand and Director, even their flagship vector editor, Illustrator, can be extremely frustrating… when it comes to their woefully broken Snap-To-Grid feature.

At least one other blogger feels the same. I just commented on his blog post about terrible snap to grid performance.

In a nutshell, it seems perfectly logical. Adobe owns Illustrator, Flash and Photoshop, and these are probably their top 3 sellers, so you’d assume these tools would work well together. Think again. Broken! You create a 1-pixel grid in Illustrator, turn on snap-to-grid and expect everything to just work. Well, it doesn’t.

Here’s a list of things that just plain don’t work:

1. You create an object using drawing tools. It’s all snapped to grid perfectly. You can then edit points and drag them off the grid.
2. You grab a handle with the Free Transform tool. Sometimes it will snap to grid, other times it won’t.
3. You make a symbol out of an object that is all snapped to the grid, and drag another instance onto the page. Sometimes it snaps, sometimes it doesn’t.
4. You edit a symbol in context. If it was snapped, sometimes just clicking into the symbol to edit it unsnaps the object points.
5. You edit a symbol in context to snap the edges and points to the grid and escape the symbol. The symbol is now unsnapped.
6. You have an object that is snapped to a 1px grid, copy and paste it to Photoshop. Your line edges are now antialiased. They shouldn’t be - a 1px wide piece of vector art in Illustrator becomes a fuzzy blob when pasted.
7. As Steve pointed out on his post, You type in values for widths or heights of objects that should be on the grid. Save, close and reopen your document and you’ll see that Illustrator added minute amounts of measurements to your object. Presumably these are rounding errors? It’s unclear.
8. You click the pen tool and assume that when you click to draw a path, all points will always be on the grid. They almost never are.

There’s probably several more examples. Basically snap-to-grid is useless. Come on Adobe - get your act together.

Software Updates are Annoying

Have you ever had a start up sequence end in a wide variety of software and plugins alerting you to the fact that a software update is now available? Flash, Shockwave and Java - plus my anti-virus software, plus Windows XP (An important security update required me to fiddle with your box…) all at once bothering me at boot time. Is it just me, or are these alerts happening more frequently? I work on Macs too and it’s not a lot better, so it’s not just a Windows thing. Isn’t there a less annoying, less frequent way for you to invade my privacy with an ad important security bulletin? Maybe my computer runs just fine the way it is. Go away, evil pop-up.