Category Archives: Software

Apple App Store Inaccessible With Verified Account

Software

Yesterday I bemoaned the poor user experience when signing up for an Apple iTunes Store account via my new iPhone. I expected that the process was going to be the path travelled by literally millions of Apple iPhone users and therefore very smooth but that wasn’t the case.

After finally managing to get my new account verified and confirming that it worked by signing into iTunes, I am still unable to access the Apple App Store via my iPhone. After providing my credentials when attempting to install an application, I’m presented with an error stating that my account isn’t yet verified – even though it works on my desktop.

Realising the error of my ways after stumbling through the account verification process already, I fired up iTunes on the iPhone and then clicked the URL within the verification email. To my surprise, the URL loaded up again and was presented with the same response, that I couldn’t perform this action on my iPhone.

What is the next course of action?

Apple iTunes Store Account Signup Process Needs Work

Software

Since getting my Apple iPhone 3GS last weekend, it seemed like as good a time as any to see what all the fuss was regarding the Apple App Store available for the iPhone.

I open up Safari on the iPhone and navigate to a site to download an application that I want to install. Following the bouncing ball to install the application, then find out that I need an iTunes Store account. At this stage, I figure this must be a very common scenario, so persist thinking it’ll be super smooth and it’ll be over with in a minute.

After gonig through the iTunes Store signup process, I then find out that they use the common two phrase signup process – signup and then verify. A little annoying as I haven’t configured any email accounts on the iPhone yet but am determined to follow the process through. After configuring the email account, I open the verification email and click the link to activate my iTunes Store account and am then told that I can’t complete this action on my iPhone.

I’ve opened my email on my desktop and clicked the link in the verification email. The web page opens but I am not presented with the normal ‘your account has now been activated’ type of message and the page isn’t thinking, strange. There is some small text on the page that says if iTunes didn’t open, open it yourself – which I subsequently did. At this point, I assumed clicking the link again was going to make iTunes do something – alas that was an incorrect assumption. I was viewing the ‘check your email to verify your account’ page within iTunes again – strange. It wasn’t until I realised that below that message there was a ‘Done’ button just sitting there with no instruction associated with it. After clicking that button, something happened and my account was verified.

What would have made this process that much smoother:

  1. If a user is creating an account for the first time on an iPhone, it’d be worth telling them that they’ll be sent an email to verify their account up front. That way they know they’ll need access to email on their iPhone to complete the process.
  2. If the Apple iTunes account signup process cannot be completed on an iPhone, either inform me that I can only complete 90% of the process on the iPhone up front or don’t let me begin it at all. By allowing me to start the process, the expectation was set that I should reasonably expect to complete the process as well which wasn’t possible.
  3. When clicking the link within the account verification email and iTunes doesn’t load, provide better instructions on what to do next. The page that loaded within iTunes wasn’t clear enough and I was left wondering what, if anything I should click on next to try and get my account verified.

These are all just small things in the grand scheme of things, however go towards making the user experience of using an Apple service that much smoother and would leave a nicer taste in the mouth of a lesser skilled user.

Windows Live WordPress Web Activity

Software, Websites

While playing around with the new functionality in Windows Live last night, I noticed that they had a WordPress Web Activity.

Adding the WordPress Web Activity to my profile, it asked for my WordPress.com URL and provided suggested formatting of that URL on the textbox. While I do have a WordPress.com account, I don’t use it for blogging for obvious reasons – so adding that URL would have been rather boring for anyone viewing my Windows Live profile.

I assumed that Microsoft hadn’t necessarily collaborated with WordPress.com to allow that integration, after all, the information they are attempting to display within Windows Live is publically available through an RSS feed for a given site.

Making some assumptions about how Microsoft were going to perform their magic, I added in this blogs URL – even though the form suggested http://something.wordpress.com. After hitting submit, their service hit my site and found an alternative formatting for the content within the HTML (RSS), which gave them everything they needed for the integration.

Within a minute of me adding the WordPress Web Activity, the six most recent posts from this blog were visible within my Live.com Profile. Within my activity stream (all of my activity, not just WordPress.com), they were displaying the title, date posted and a short snippet as well with the title linked back to my blog to read the full article.

What I really liked about this piece of functionality was that the Windows Live team didn’t hobble their implementation with over zealous validation. They could have taken the hardline and not accepted anything not in the format of http://something.wordpress.com for a URL – however it would have severely limited its usefulness. Simply because of their forward thinking, millions of users who have their own WordPress blog that aren’t hosted on WordPress.com can now automatically have their posts published into their Windows Live profile.

Windows Live Is Getting Smarter

Software, Websites

A couple of years ago Microsoft embarked on a new product and brand named Live. From memory, the Live product was initially a fight back from Microsoft in response to the might of Google after they recognised that MSN Search wasn’t a strong enough product and brand to combat Google Web Search.

In more recent times, Microsoft have been quietly working away and releasing a number of high quality services, such as:

  • Live Messenger (replacement for MSN Messenger)
  • Live Mail (desktop replacement for Outlook Express & web mail)
  • Live Writer (desktop blog publishing utility)
  • Live Photo Gallery

Probably the most visible amongst those is Live Mail, specifically the web mail – which historically went under the banner of Hotmail. The progressive rolling out of Live Mail has been a refreshing breath of air as the existing Hotmail service was falling by the weigh side in speed and functionality compared to other newer services such as GMail from Google.

The next evolution has been plodding along from Microsoft, which is the notion of a user profile – not unlike what you have on most other web sites. You’ve long been able to login any Microsoft service with your Hotmail and subsequently Live account; Microsoft are now finally capitalising on that single sign on to embrace the social web landscape that has seen incredible growth over the last 3 years.

With recent upgrades to Live.com, when signing into your account you can get a snapshot of your online assets – such as the last x emails you’ve received in your Hotmail account and a history of your activity with various Live products like changing the status message in Live Messenger.

Today there is an amazing set of new functionality within the Live.com profiles, which allows users to consume other social network content within their profile. Microsoft are calling these things ‘web activities’ and are marketing it as a method which will allow your friends to keep on top of all things you, without having to visit potentially dozens of different web sites. The new web activities go by the name of widgets in other sites, small blocks of pluggable content from a different source which is displayed on your site. As a simple example, they have web activities to plugin your Facebook stream and literally dozens of others to your Live.com profile.

While Microsoft have come into the user profile space behind Google, who first released them in December 2007 – the evolution of the Live user profile functionality seems to be happening at a much faster pace. Google Profiles allows a user to tell others about themselves, associate their profile with other social network profiles via a simple URL and in some instances, consume content via widgets but not to the extent that the Microsoft Live profiles do.

A feature that is surely high on the Live list of functionality will be vanity URL’s for users. The current user profile URL’s are horrible and completely useless for a consumer, mine being http://cid-067d01ecc9a1cc7b.profile.live.com/. Only in the last month have Google provided vanity URL’s as an option for their profiles, which are either numeric by default or based on your Google Account username. To explore how that might get used, I’ve enabled the vanity URL’s for my Google Profile at http://www.google.com/profiles/alistair.lattimore.

I’ve been a late adopter to all things Live, so I’m really excited by the functionality and features that are flowing into the Live products. I keen to see where Microsoft are going to take this going forward – maybe there are plans for tighter integration with Facebook or their own social network down the road?

Windows Vista Business Double Clicking On Single Click

Hardware, Software

In July 2007, I was fortunate to win a copy of Windows Vista Business at a Gold Coast .NET User Group and it wasn’t until January 2008 that I installed it when I was re-establishing my geek prowess. Since that time, I’ve had very mixed opinions about Windows Vista – some have been really positive and others have been quite negative.

Within the last month, I’ve been having a problem with my Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer optical mouse. At whatever interval it feels inclined, whenever I would single click – Windows Vista would register a double click. It would then take several single click attempts before Vista Business would finally register a single click and not another double click. As you can imagine, if you’re mouse is registering double clicks nearly all the time – doing some of the most fundamental computer tasks becomes very difficult and tiresome.

In case software settings within Windows Vista or another program had gone astray, I went through a few different sections of basic Windows configuration to restore default settings such as Folder Options (single click to open an item) and also restored the mouse settings via the Control Panel without any success.

Virtually all of the problems I’ve been having with Windows Vista have been related to hardware driver support in some manner. With that in mind, I also tried uninstalling the current version of Microsoft IntelliPoint and separately changing my mouse drivers back to a standard mouse – neither of which helped. I thought something may have changed on my computer with a Windows Update or some other software. To rule out an incompatibility with my older version of the Microsoft IntelliPoint – I downloaded and installed the latest version via the Microsoft Download Centre but the double clicking symptom persisted.

This evening I connected an original optical Microsoft IntelliMouse which has been absolutely punished from gaming. While it was completely crusty from living in the bottom of a big plastic storage container for an unknown amount of time – the single double clicking issue seems to have vanished for the moment.

While the problem isn’t showing up at the moment, I don’t think that it is my original mouse that is causing the problems. Searching online shows that there are a lot of people having a similar problem – however after reading through a lot of different web sites, I didn’t come across a clear root cause.

Frustrating.