I’ve recently been sucked back into the world of Java to work on a fairly agile-friendly project. We’ve got 2-day iterations going on and quite a lot of communication. Despite a severe lack of testing – which i’m working on – all seems well. But i’ve noticed a habit that bugs me a little. We’re meant to be passing this code off to some other teams and as such are trying our best to keep it clean and well javadoc’d for those that follow us. The problem i have with this is a simple little tag that Eclipse likes to throw in whenever you start a javadoc comment for a class; that tag is @author. I can’t stand the little bastard. We’re a team – we’ve all ripped at the guts of this code and if we’re anywhere near as agile as we aim to be then ownership of code shouldn’t matter. I’m aware this this auto-generated tag doesn’t really mean much but its mere existence irks me.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about the Tacate truck it is actually related. As the old coding parable says: “how many developers could be hit by the beer truck and the project still survive?”. Figured it’d be fitting since i was ranting about the topic of code ownership.
About 4 years ago i made the switch. You know, the one they used to talk about in all those ads. I bought a little 12″ Powerbook and loved it. OS X – Panther (10.3) at the time – was infinitely more stable, attractive, and functional that Windows which i’d given up a few years before and didn’t require as much work as my Gentoo/Fluxbox setup i ran at the time. The laptop itself was just as portable as and much more powerful than the Gateway (remember them?) Solo i was replacing.
I wouldn’t call myself a fanboy – really who would wantonly label themselves as such – but i’d been fairly loyal for the most part since that powerbook. But lately things have just felt off with AAPL. Specifically with their mega product launch recently of the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2.0 firmware, and MobileMe. All of which have been getting less than stellar reviews.
Updating to the iPhone 2.0 firmware was a rather painful experience for most on release day. I for one was left with the dreaded Error -9838 as were many others. The firmware itself is getting bad press over slow downs, problems answering calls, battery life, and unresponsiveness as well.
MobileMe has been down for ages and Apple has at least had the sense to extend the trial twice. I was personally able to access the syncing features and email of MobileMe fairly early on but wasn’t able to log in to the website. I sent in a support ticket and was eventually responded to with how to reset my password which i’d already done. I replied as such and got no response. Shortly thereafter i was unable to log in to any of the MobileMe services. No phone service is available for MobileMe and the website simply greets you with this gem:
I’m sorry but insanely large amounts of support requests are not exactly the same as “overwhelming interest”…
I know i’m being a little bias right now as i’ve had a slew of issues with Apple’s latest release bonanza but i just worry that maybe they’re spreading themselves a bit too thin at present and should dial back a bit. I will likely continue to support them in hopes that this is a mid-life crisis of sorts and that things will settle down soon.
Update: Just ran across an article on the 37 Signals blog on iPhone 2.0 that i felt appropriate to link: iPhone 2.0: The glory wore off in wash.
