I just connected my Macbook to our network printer. Wow. Simply entered the name of the device, and bang, all the configuration info was done, even a little photo of the printer. That’s more like it.

I’ve found that’s a favourite message of the Sony Ericsson P990i that I now have. Sometimes it does it in the middle of the night, flooding our bedroom with light and playing a tune to celebrate. Sometimes it does it mid call. In any case, it’s really annoying and plainly complete nonsense. It’s exactly the sort of message that we developers like to put in somewhere to cover the bitter pile of failure with a sweet allure of it being for the users good, of failing that, someone else’s fault.

I also get a lot of kern exceptions and threads failing with other exceptions. How do I know? It pops up a nice little alert to tell me! I’ve had every single application built in to the phone (calls, messages, contacts, browser, wireless, connection manager, toolbar display come to mind) crash with some kind of error.

Lock ups and no-ops are common too. I spent a blissfully quiet afternoon last week with no incoming calls - because the radio side of the phone had crashed!

As for the user interface, well the Wait Cursor Fairy has not blessed it at all. In fact the Wait Cursor Fairy must have been on strike as most of the time there is no indication that the phone is doing anything, so you end up jabbing at it to see if it missed a click. Only to find that you’ve selected some random option as the application you requested several seconds ago has finally opened. Editing a contact, for example, takes about 2s to move to the edit screen, during which time the phone stares sullenly at you.
When it does work, however, it’s a really, really good device. Once they fix all the bugs it will be pretty much what I want.

A somewhat belated analysis of why I finally got fed up of Thunderbird and moved to Microsoft Entourage. (For Windows users, this is like Outlook done properly. Why it is only on the Mac I’ve no idea.)

The first point was speed. Thunderbird is slow. Especially searching. I don’t file e-mails, I just leave them in that big stream of conciousness that is the order in which they arrive. That means I do a lot of searching, and Thunderbird was just painful. The search was pretty broken, failing to find a lot of material that it should have.

Next was that the way that it occasionally change the name matching process. I like to type in people’s name and rely on it to be selected from the list. Most of the time this was ok, but occasionally, wham, I’d end up with the wrong person’s name. No apparent reason. Then there was name harvesting. A good idea, in theory, but in practice a royal pain. My address book had become hugely cluttered with names of people that I didn’t recognise, presumably reaped from incoming e-mails or even spam. And finally, and least, on the Mac it does not respect the normal Macintosh keybinds, or at least not the ones I use. Which meant a bump when moving from one application to another.

So now I use Entourage and it’s really good. It solves all of the above problems, and has neat project-oriented view of the world which automatically groups things for you. No need to manage your own folders, just set some tags and categories, and it happens all on its own. Wonderful.

A lot of thought and craft has gone in to making Entourage a stunningly good product, at least for me. I’ve yet to find any annoyances of bugs. Wish I could say the same for my phone. More of that later.

Still no home internet connectivity… it is quite a handicap when trying to sort out having moved house!

The story so far is that the original approval seemed to have been aborted by BT as the previous provider had not cleared the line. My ISP (the normally reliable A&A) failed to pick this up and have been dithering with it until yesterday. I’m told that BT have no cancelled the existing connection and will provision mine. But this whole process takes ten working days! How on earth can it take ten days for a couple of database entries to be changed? Sheesh.

I finally got fed up with Thunderbird on the Mac, and have now migrated to Microsoft Entourage.

My Sony Ericsson W900i has died completely, and I used a Nokia N70 for a couple of days until a new Sony Ericsson P990i turned up.

In both cases I am rebuilding my contacts list. In Entourage because I chose to, in the case of the phone because there was no option as the backup software provided with the W900i never worked. I do have most of the contacts backed up on the SIM, but there’s a whole post just in getting contacts from the SIM back into the main contact list.

Very interesting seeing how essentially the same functions can be implemented in wildly different ways. I’ll be writing more about aspects of this over the next few days.