Danny Stewart

An experience I feel I should share.

While in the Apple Store buying my iPhone 4, I was treated like royalty by Apple. It was like I was their only customer. They asked for my name and constantly referred to me by it. They asked if I had questions or concerns and walked me through the whole process. The guy even made casual conversation about bumpers and some other design-related things about iPhone 4 while we were waiting for my iPhone to activate. But since I was using my brother’s upgrade eligibility, we needed to switch the numbers on the phones, which required AT&T.

AT&T had a small table of their own inside the Apple Store. It was, to say the least, a stark contrast to my experience with Apple. The Apple employee introduced me by name to the AT&T workers, who ignored him. They were sitting at the table with ugly Dell laptops running Windows XP, Internet Explorer, and some incredibly ugly proprietary software that still had the Cingular logo on it. The AT&T employee I dealt with was coughing and sneezing into his hands, then handling my phone. Another AT&T employee jokingly chided him for not using gloves to handle a customer’s phone, which they both then laughed about right in front of me.

It took AT&T several failed attempts, repeatedly entering the same information, to get the numbers switched on my phones. It seemed to me to be a combination of carelessness and not being entirely sure what they were doing. Dealing with AT&T took roughly three times as long as dealing with Apple.

While I found some of the experience amusing, I found a lot of it disturbing. How is coughing on a customer’s newly purchased and just unboxed property and then joking about it with your fellow employees in any way professional or acceptable behavior?

I was frankly astounded at how great of a job Apple did with their service. I would have probably broken down after a couple of hours of iPhone launch sales. But they were the image of politeness and professionalism. AT&T was embarrassing.

Just thought I should share that.

(Regarding iPhone 4 itself, my experience echoes that of most other people. The device’s design, display, and speed are a joy to experience while making the iPad feel outdated just months after its release. There is little else I feel the need to add. It’s an amazing update and well worth it for anyone considering it.)

So, Apple’s tablet has finally been unveiled in the form of the iPad. John Gruber made a post over at Daring Fireball that got me thinking. You should read his post before you read mine.

There are some things he said that resonated with me; more than anything, that “the iPad is what they’ve been building toward all along” and how they’ve invented a totally new UI paradigm with the iWork apps.

Someone on Twitter said the other day that “this is the end of the desktop OS.” When I read it, I thought it was overdramatized, but after thinking about it, I see what they’re saying and I agree with it. This truly marks the beginning of a change in times. Not long from now, the mouse will die off, to be replaced by a keyboard/touch interface. The iPad is the start of that, and I think it’s a pretty big deal.

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Here are a few simple AppleScripts I’ve written to make my life a little bit easier. They are not saved as “Run Only,” so you can open them up and poke at the code inside all you want. These are posted mostly so people can learn from them; untouched, they won’t be much use as they are written for me. Feel free to customize them for your own purposes. If you want to rerelease your own scripts, some credit is all I ask. The scripts include:

• Startup: A startup script I wrote to launch my most frequently used applications, depending on a few different things (whether I’m connected to the internet, which external hard drives are connected to my computer, etc.).
• Reinitialize: A very basic script that kills the Finder, Dock, and SystemUIServer. A nice way to reinitialize the core components of the system without logging out and back in. It was more fun to make than it is to use.
• Restart into Windows: My most useful script. Sets my Windows drive as the default startup disk for one restart only, allowing me to switch into Windows and then go back to Mac OS X the next time I restart without having to give it a second thought.

Click here to download the whole set.

For the past several years, I’ve been relying on Google for all my online personal information needs. That includes Gmail for my email, as well as Google Calendar and Gmail contacts for my basic calendar/contact needs.

That changed a bit once Apple came out with their new MobileMe service to go along with the launch of iPhone 2.0. In order to have the best experience using my iPhone, I wanted to manage my calendar and contacts through MobileMe instead.

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Nothing groundbreaking in the final release of Safari 4, but it really feels like a polished final release instead of a beta. Everything feels faster (yes, folks, Safari seems snappier), the UI has improved noticeably, and there are lots of little touches and additions that just make it feel nicer.

The one thing I noticed right away after installing Safari 4 is that Tabs on Top seems to have been pulled at the last minute. It’s just gone, and all traces of the feature have been removed from Apple’s site as though it never existed. Ah well. I had gotten used to it, but I won’t miss it too much. It’s certainly nice to have my title bar restored to normality.