Technological Bitchings

Arrgghh!!

1. Mac's thin profile Aluminum keyboard & how they were too stupid to thoroughly test it
   
   I got one of those snazzy, thin Aluminum keyboards not that long ago. As I don't like dealing with batteries and such, and my keyboard never leaves the area near my computer, I went with the wired version. Did this a little while ago, and have only had a couple of issues.
   
   
   
   • They decided to be "cool" and "different" and remap the Function keys at the top of the keyboard. The new layout itself isn't horrible, but they left out the expose for a single application button and the show desktop, and moved them around. So when I want to access my dashboard on my macbook, I hit F12. When I want to on my iMac I hit F3. I could remap some of them, but they don't provide an easy way to map any keys to volume controls. To make this even more of a pain, they actually printed icons on the keys to represent a lot of the functions, so even if I could remap things, I would have to hit the mute key on my macbook to access Expose (since F3 brings up Expose on my desktop). So I'm stuck with either have two different button configurations and accurate key icons, or remapping them on one of the computers, having the icons not be actually indicative of the function on those keys, and would have to use my mouse to open my sound settings to be able to adjust the volume. Really, Apple? REALLY?! For a company that prides itself on design, this is a UI turd. (User Interface for you non-CS types)
   
   
   • In addition to mucking up the F keys, they somehow made the keyboard so it is recognized later in the boot process. While this may not seem like much of an issue, I have used Boot Camp to dual-boot my computer with windows. While I despise Windows, I do run into occasions where I find it necessary (e.g. the idiots at RIM only provide Blackberry Management software for Windows so I can't adequately backup/restore/upgrade my Storm without it). Just so happens, this time shift in keyboard recognition handily shifts it to AFTER you must hold down the option key to bring up the boot menu. So I can hold down any keys I want, it isn't even going to check them until it has gone ahead and decided to boot the default OS. In OSX, I can choose Windows to be my default, then restart, and vice versa in Windows. After some digging I found that you can use the remote that comes with it, hold down menu, and that brings it up. So they recognize the little remote that is just for playing media before the OS is booted, but not the keyboard? WTF mate? This is an APPLE keyboard on and APPLE computer using APPLE software to dual boot. They make all their own hardware!? How hard can it be to test something before you release it? I used to think it'd be cool to work at Apple, but with the quality of employees they seem to currently have on staff, I am beginning to have my doubts.
   
   


2. My second techy rant has to do with my Blackberry Storm. Apparently they have an Idiot-for-idiot hiring deal with Apple. They put 1 frickin' gigabyte of memory on the phone (which sounds awesome) then arbitrarily divide up in a completely nonuseful way. So I have a gig on board, and it comes with an 8gig microSD card. What takes up the most room on a phone nowadays? Media. So I have 8gigs to store movies, audio, ringtones, pictures, etc. Do you think I will need to store any of that on my phone? Of frickin' course not. On the phone I will have my contacts, calendar, applications and that's about it. So I have a gig at my disposal right? NOPE. The dingleberries at RIM decided I shouldn't really have too many applications so I'm limited to like 100 megs (don't feel like looking up the exact figure) of space for applications and the rest is for personal data. Do you know how many contacts and calendar events I would need to fill frickin' 900 megabytes of space? That is the most back-ass-ridiculous way to divide that space. Why divide it at all? Why do you need to limit the amount of space I can use for applications and personal data? If I want 700 megs of apps and 2 of personal stuff, so be it. If I don't want to install any apps but want to keep the entire phonebook in my cell phone (just in case) that should be my choice. An arbitrary, nay stupid, division of memory is not helpful to anyone. And to make it worse, they won't even allow their own stuff to cross the boundary! I'm trying to update the software, and it wants to only use application space to hold the update and any install files. Of course I don't have 20 megs worth of space, but I DO have 850 worthless megs of "personal storage." God these guys suck.
   

So that's the end of my rantings. This should not be that difficult. It's no wonder our economy sucks when big corps like RIM and Apple charge an arm and a leg for underdesigned crap.

Ok, I'm adding one more... WHY WON'T NESTED ORDERED LISTS WORK IN LJ! I've been trying to just make the two sub-rants of the first rant automatically be a and b, but it just ignores any indicators and always makes them 1 and 2. Sometimes technology can really be a bitch.