how to kill a software application

All the way back in April, I took a look at the explosion of twitter applications for OS X, after realizing that my then client of choice, twhirl, was essentially end-of-lifed after being acquired by Seesmic. After much exploration, I found EventBox, which was in beta and combined twitter with RSS feeds, Facebook and a bunch of other services. Unlike many of the other social networking clients out there, EventBox had a very Mac-like UI, and while short on some features, did a lot of things really well.

So I paid my $15 and used EventBox to manage my Facebook and Twitter feeds, and after NetNewsWire acquired ads, migrated my RSS feeds to Google Reader, which was supported by EventBox. So with one app, I could manage several things all at once. EventBox had a small development team that was pretty responsive, and while not associated with a large, trendy fan base like Seesmic Desktop, was a cool app nonetheless. Recently, EventBox development forked into a separate beta called Multibox, that had a lot of future features intended for EventBox. It lacked some functionality, though, like smart folders and even Facebook integration, so I kept using my EventBox beta, which served my purposes and held the promise of a lot of new functionality and even an iPhone app. I was a happy, nerdy social networker

Well, all that’s down the toilet.

Several weeks ago, EventBox was acquired by RealMac Software. I thought “Great-now they’ll have resources to bring new functionality to EventBox in a more rapid timeframe.” Boy, was I misguided. First, they renamed the app “Socialite” (note to RealMac Software: if you’re trying to build awareness of a new application whose user base is still pretty small compared with the big apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop, don’t change the name).

Then they released a beta today that broke most of everything.

First I noticed that my Google Reader items, after being marked as Read, reverted to Unread after the service was refreshed. Then I quit Socialite to see if that would help, only to find that after restarting, the main window was not there unless I went into the menu bar and selected it. The Preferences item was grayed out, and a host of bugs ensued. I took the advice of RealMac and rebuilt the various services like Twitter and Facebook, and at least the prefs and window behaved as normal. But then I found that threads were no longer functional, whereas they had worked fine in previous EventBox betas. And Facebook keeps trying to update and fails. And yes, the Google Reader unread items bug is still present.

Realizing that one of my most-used applications no longer works, I went back and tried Seesmic Desktop, and while the interface is, to put it mildly, suboptimal, it works. Even better, it has a lot of functionality that isn’t found in Socialite/EventBox, and probably never will. Seesmic Desktop doesn’t do RSS, but I went back to NetNewsWire, and that works fine as always. I just have to ignore the ads, which is no big deal.

Back to Socialite. It’s a shame that RealMac killed it with this beta. I’m willing to wait it out and see if things improve, but I’d like to see new features, not bug fixes just to get me back to where I was before today. True, I could revert to the last beta of EventBox, but why bother when I have stability and added functionality, albeit with two applications rather than one?

In terms of social networking apps, I use Echofon (neé Twitterfon-what’s with all these social networking applications changing names all of a sudden? Geez…) on my iPhone, but could be convinced to use TweetDeck if I also cared to use it on my MacBook Pro, which I don’t, mainly because its layout is even worse than Seesmic’s. I’d be interested in seeing Seesmic’s forthcoming iPhone app, especially if it enabled syncing. EventBox was planning an iPhone app in the future, but that effort seems kinda dead for the foreseeable future. Which is a shame.

I’d love to have a single application that did twitter/FB/RSS and synced with my iPhone. But that isn’t the case so far. I paid for Twitterfon (now Echofon) and am pretty happy with that. I paid for EventBox (now Socialite) and am no longer happy with that. Seesmic is free, at least for now, and I can put up with the bad UI given that it works pretty well.

So this has been counterintuitive. I thought that a larger company acquiring a small application development team would be a recipe for success from a user perspective. It isn’t, at least in this case. I remember many, many years ago when Symantec acquired the makers of MacTools Pro. MTP was a really great system repair utility, perhaps the best ever. Symantec killed it after buying it. Norton Utilities for the Mac never approached the usability and versatility of MTP. In the case of RealMac buying the manufacturer of EventBox, it’s even worse, since the damned software doesn’t work. And who charges for a beta anyway? Paying for it sorta made sense at the time because it sounded like a 1.0 release was really on the horizon, and I could save a little money over the price when the official release came out. In retrospect, that was stupid. And it’s insane that the original developers (The Cosmic Machine) and now RealMac charged and continue to charge. I’d like a refund, although I doubt that will ever be in the cards. I’ll probably never ever pay for a beta, even as much as I like to support small software developers.

Sigh…back to checking my RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter feeds. It’s an experience.

more hard choices: new twitter apps

I’ve been sold on twhirl for my laptop Twitter needs for some time. It’s a highly capable, free app that displays everything in a single window, color codes tweets to distinguish direct messages and replies, has great notifications of new tweets and is limited only in terms of its bad, Adobe AIR-created interface.

I really like twhirl’s functionality and have learned to live with its counterintuitive interface. That said, it’s clear that twhirl has a limited lifespan, as it was acquired last year by a company called Seesmic, and that company is devoting most of its resources to what I’m told is a replacement for twhirl, called Seesmic Desktop, but one that doesn’t yet have all or even most of twhirl’s functionality.

Seesmic Desktop has been all the rage lately, especially as it was just updated to include Facebook feeds and an increased font size (by 1 pt). Clearly targeted at displacing TweetDeck users, Seesmic Desktop allows users to not only post to Facebook and read current posts to one’s Wall, but also indicate if one “likes” a friend’s post. Planned for the future is the ability to comment on individual feeds. The paradigm is similar to TweetDeck, in terms of multiple columns if one wants. Seesmic is also noteworthy for allowing multiple Twitter accounts as well as the ability to group people one is following on Twitter into different groups. Seesmic has promise, but so far lacks the clear detailed notifications of twhirl, as well as the ability to mark tweets as read. The interface, while slightly better than twhirl, does not allow customization and is pretty boring in my opinion.

Seesmic is a very usable twitter (and facebook) client, although it still lacks many of twhirl’s best features such as font customization, themes, detailed notifications, the ability to view someone’s profile within the app itself, and several others. However, it is clearly a work in development, and the developer has indicated in at least one tweet that twhirl’s functionality will be rolled in. I like the FaceBook integration, and the fact that images in FaceBook posts are displayed nicely. At the end of the day, though, it is still an AIR application, and it shows. The window above actually ran below my OS X dock, so cross-platform compatibility has its costs.

Which brings me to two OS X-native twitter apps under development. The first is Beak, which is the first commercial application from developer Mike Rundle, who is very accessible and responsive via Twitter. Beak is similar to Tweetie, but has in-window threading of tweets, which is a nice idea. I like Beak’s GUI much better than Tweetie’s, but it remains a work in progress (although an update is due out this week to address some shortcomings). Current issues include some bugs, lack of the ability to address a direct message with a click of a button (there is a direct message button, but you have to fill in the recipient’s name, at least until the update comes out).

Like twhirl, there is a message entry window on the bottom, which I prefer to that of Seesmic (which is on top, and not customizable at this time). You can’t see a user’s timeline, however, nor which twitter client they are using. There is no support right now for hashtags (I’m sure that’s coming). And I’m not aware that FaceBook integration is in the cards, although I don’t see that as a bad thing, since it allows the application to focus on one thing and do it well. Beak also has the ability to provide statistics on URLs included in tweets, although that hasn’t worked as promised for me.

But as of right now, Beak isn’t my optimal solution, although that could change with the next update. I need something that has the basic functionality one requires, along with some niceties, like what I get from twhirl. What all current Twitter apps tend to have as baseline functionality is this:

• Ability to reply, send direct messages, view current tweets
• Retweet
• Include the timestamp of tweets
• Distinguish between direct messages and @ replies
• Follow/Unfollow users
• View a user’s profile and timeline
• Do searches
• Parse hashtags
• Preferable: include a user’s real name and twitter client
• Shorten URLs via one or more services
• Upload images to twitpic and other services

For the moment (and I’m suspecting most of us serious twitter users are fickle about our applications; when something better comes along, we drop what we’re using and try the latest and greatest), I’m actually quite taken with EventBox.

EventBox has a nice UI, a text entry window at the bottom, support for URL shortening (type command-J), FaceBook (and RSS,Flickr,Google Reader and Reddit) integration, notifications either through Growl or via a very capable transparent window, quick tweet entry via a keyboard shortcut, and much more. About the only thing it lacks right now is photo uploading, threads, user profile (although one can see a user’s timeline within the app itself) and an indication of which client a user posted with. It’s fast, OS X-native, and the 14-day beta is free (it will be $15 at the end of the beta period, but the 14 days can be extended with permission of the developer). EventBox would benefit from more documentation up front, but it’s a great application, and has become my twitter app of choice. For now…

twitter client madness

I’ve been using Twitter for what seems like a long time now. I’ve used a few Twitter clients by now, starting with Twitterific on my Mac, but eventually gravitated towards the Adobe Air-based twhirl on my laptop and twitterfon on my iPhone. Both are free and neither one has any ads. I can’t say enough about twitterfon. It’s pretty fast, has a good interface that avoids excess, and the developer is extremely responsive with updates. twhirl (how’d they come up with that name anyway?) is, like all the Adobe AIR-based applications, marred by a very non-Mac-like, inconsistent interface that is at times confusing and even misleading. But twhirl is nice in several ways:

• It doesn’t take up much screen real estate
• Like the Twitter Web site, there is a window always visible for composing new tweets
• It has pretty full functionality
• twhirl provides growl-like notifications of new tweets
• Font size is relatively customizable, along with the UI colors (although I’d love to see more and better options)

I went to the developer’s site last night out of curiosity, and signed up for what was billed as an opportunity to preview the next version of twhirl. What this is, however, is a preview of a new TweetDeck-like Twitter client called Seesmic Desktop. Apparently twhirl was acquired last April by a French development team, and I’ve now read conflicting accounts as to whether or not twhirl will be replaced by Seesmic Desktop. Anyway, I test-drove Seesmic Desktop and was left wanting. First, the positives:

• Column view, if you want it (I don’t)
• A useful sidebar
• Like twhirl, a window (on top, rather than the bottom, unlike twhirl) to compose new tweets
• Ability to group contacts into different lists
• A unified search field

Now the bad news, although keep in mind this is clearly not a polished application yet, just a preview of a work in progress:

• The notification is weak. It just displays the message that you have received a new tweet, not the content, unlike twhirl (which also color codes the notifications, depending on whether it is a direct message, a reply or a routine message)
• Font size is not customizable, and the fonts are too small for my eyes
• Column size is not expandable, which is a shame since I’d love for my Home column to expand horizontally to take better advantage of my MacBook Pro’s 15“ screen
• No way to view who’s following you, or who you’re following
• Like any AIR application, a crappy interface
• Few preferences whatsoever
• A really lame name (honestly, ”seesmic?“)

I’m hoping most of these issues become moot in the coming week, since the developer seems to be very open to feedback and realizes the key criticisms of the program (that it’s too much like TweetDeck, not enough like twhirl). It has promise, but not enough to make me switch from twhirl. Yet.

Just out of curiosity, I did try TweetDeck, but only briefly. Too many buttons on top, and again, I don’t really need the columns. True, you can remove columns, but then you get a warning message that this can’t be undone, when it’s clear that all one has to do is click the desired button on top. It integrates with FaceBook (as Seesmic Desktop also promises to do eventually), but that’s readily accomplished anyway through FaceBook’s Twitter app, so I’m not sure that’s a compelling reason for me to use TweetDeck.

I also read about Nambu. It caught my attention initially for no other reason than it shares a name with a physics Nobel laureate from my alma mater, but I doubt Yochiro Nambu uses Twitter. It has a Mac-like interface but seems cluttered to me. I’ve also heard that it has some stability issues, so I didn’t see any compelling reason to download it. I probably should, but time is fleeting.

Yesterday, I also heard a flood of information about a new desktop client called Tweetie, which apparently has been very well-received on the iPhone. From all the stuff I’ve read, this is the perfect Twitter application for Mac users, with a great UI, functionality, etc. I read stuff about Tweetie that was as enthusiastic as the stuff I used to read about Twitterific, and that application seems to have less buzz around it nowadays. What that suggests to me is that users of various Twitter apps are fickle. If someone invents a better Twitter client, people will migrate from what they’re currently using since there is little or no cost to doing so.

Well, here’s a reality check on Tweetie, since after road testing it, I’m not a fan:

• It costs. $14.95 for the desktop client, $2.99 for the iPhone client. I’m cheap, and didn’t see any marginal difference worth that much money compared with the free apps out there. True, the desktop client (not the iPhone version) is available in a free version with ads, but you also get reminder popups every so often inviting you to purchase the ad-free version.
• Nice UI, with very readable text and an iChat threaded format that is just like the one used in Twitterfon. But rather than having a window always present to write a new tweet, you have to initiate the process through either the menu bar or a keystroke combination, or the Dock icon or a subtle icon in the lower left corner. I like the open window paradigm.
• Bad name. Sorry, but ”Tweetie“ sounds stupid.
• Retweeting is in a non-customizable format (ie, it’s always ”via @xxxxx, rather than RT @xxxxx). Not a big deal, but I like the RT convention and wish I could choose the format, which I can do in both twhirl and Seesmic Desktop.

So I’m back to twhirl on my desktop and am continuing with Twitterfon on my iPhone. What I’d really love to see is a way to sync between Twitter apps. There’s talk of Nambu, I believe, being able to do this at some point, but at the server level, it would be great to have this as a universal Twitter feature so that it would be application-independent.

What would get me to switch to Tweetie? Drop the onerous reminder windows in the free version, for starters, or at least drop the price. And while many would disagree, I’d love to see the option of having a composition window open all the time, since that’s kind of the Twitter paradigm. I have no issue with shareware and feel that developers should be paid for their efforts if they choose. But I also reserve the right to not bother to purchase someone’s product if it isn’t compelling enough to warrant the price. I just don’t see how it’s worth $14.95.

And since Twitterfon is doing just fine by me and is free, I can’t justify switching to Tweetie on the iPhone either. I was thinking of even trying the iPhone app for three bucks, but after reading some reviews in the iTunes Store, I’m definitely sticking with Twitterfon. There doesn’t seem to be any significant advantage over Twitterfon, which as I mentioned is free, and there are limitations compared with Twitterfon. Tweetie on the iPhone doesn’t cache anything, so startup is slow since it has to reload all the tweets. Also, there is no notification of new messages, unlike Twitterfon, and you have to manually refresh since fetching is not automated.

At the same time, there is a lot to love about Tweetie. It’s compact, yet full featured and has a UI that is very usable and highly readable. It does seem slower than twhirl, at least to me, and I’d be curious how various Twitter clients compare with regard to speed. The main issues for me with Tweetie are its cost and lack of a notification window for incoming tweets. Maybe it could tie in with Growl at some point, which would solve that issue for me. I can live with having to type Command-N for a new tweet, but the other issues are show stoppers for me, at least right now. Still, it is a cool application, and I probably will try it some more, hoping the ads or nuisance window aren’t too intolerable.

superdrive madness and other hardware glitches

I’ve noticed some weirdness with my MacBook Pro’s SuperDrive recently, where burning DVDs as backups would be hit or miss. Mostly miss. I would keep getting error messages about how the laser failed to be calibrated, usually at the beginning of the process, sometimes at the end of a failed burn. At one point this past weekend, a DVD-R would not be ejected after a failed burn, and no matter what I did, the disc would not eject. I tried restarting while holding down my mouse button, running the Unix drutil eject command, and even took some online advice and held the Eject button down while tilting my MBP so that the drive bay door was aimed at the floor. Nothing worked.

So I went to the Apple Store in King of Prussia, PA, where the service is really good. The Apple Genius was all set to install a new SuperDrive when we tried booting up from a Netboot drive and to both of our surprises, the MBP was able to burn a disc. So the thinking was that it was an OS issue. I did an archive and install of OS X last night, which meant I had to reinstall some drivers and update some apps like iTunes and Safari (I’m running the beta of Safari 4 and really like it), but that was a pretty rapid process. However, the MBP still can’t burn discs, even if I login as the root user, so it is clearly not an OS or Home Directory issue.

So I’m back to the Apple Store. The drive repair should take an hour and hopefully that will be it. We’ll see how that goes.

And then there’s my external LaCie hard drive issue. Again. This makes three LaCie drives that have failed in less than a year, usually within 1 day-four months. This last one was a replacement for the replacement of a failed drive. The online support folks at LaCie are sending me a replacement AC adapter on the possibility that it is a power issue, but let’s be real, it’s most likely a disk crash or failed hard drive controller, judging from the sounds I’m hearing when the drive spins up but doesn’t mount. I do have a 1-TB Western Digital drive on order from Buy.com (thank goodness for all the gift certificate points I’ve banked—I think this is costing $12 in the end) and that should cover my backup needs just fine. I do have a Western Digital 500 GB portable drive that has a FireWire 800 interface, and it’s very fast and stable so far. I also have a nearly 1-year old LaCie drive that I’ve called back into service, and am just praying it’s stable for the short term. I just can’t trust LaCie drives, even when they’re provided as replacements by the company itself. Hardware is replaceable, data isn’t.

Hoping this ends my weird computer hardware karmic storm for now…

UPDATE: well, it’s not the SuperDrive after all. Or the OS. Might be the logic board…

i pollute the web thanks to a podcast

Dr. Philippa Kennealy is a business coach for physicians who assists doctors with building their businesses, which is more critical now that so many of us have left clinical practice and are trying to find our niche in the business world. She also uses twitter, and we’ve been following one another through twitter for some time now. Anyway, she decided to tape a podcast with me this morning about the application of social media to medicine, which is a topic near and dear to me. I hope I didn’t sound too ridiculous (it was hard to tell over the phone, in large part because Philippa is just too nice and I don’t know if she would tell me if I were being bombastic or whatever). In any event, the podcast is here. I really hope I didn’t say anything stupid (I haven’t listened to it yet, so it’s very possible, if not likely).

does someone at the iTunes app store not know how to average?

My crude calculation: mean = (5+5)/2 = 5 stars

So how did some genius get 2.5 stars?

Must be that fuzzy republican math…

it was a good five years

While I rarely use my 60 GB, 4th-generation iPod these days (my 16 GB iPhone is what I take with me, generally), it’s been around since 2003 and has seen a lot of use. Over the past year and a half, it has had intermittent issues where it would just die in the middle of a song or wouldn’t restart. If I tapped it enough times or the sunspots were favorable, it worked again just fine. It was never a matter of lacking charge, and given the audible clicks when it was failing to start up, I suspected either a hard drive issue or some power management problem. Regardless, it has worked well over the past year during those times when I would use it, although I always knew that there was a chance it would crap out on me again.

Well, it crapped out for good. I couldn’t restore it, or even mount it in iTunes, so I figured a good postmortem was appropriate. My medical opinion is that it had a crashed hard drive. And of course, it would cost too much to fix, and since I use the Flash-based iPhone anyway, there’s not much need for a replacement. Another reason why Flash drives are better than mechanical hard drives, although the former are of course much more expensive.

Anyway, here are the last photos. Very sad—the ROM still can start up, but obviously it shows an error image when it gets to the point where the hard drive would spin up. It was a great friend for five years, and a significant improvement over my previous iPod, the second-generation 10 GB model (which, interestingly, still works although it can’t hold a charge to save its life). Were I religious, I suppose I could say kaddish for it.

best and worst free iPhone apps for 2008

I’d been meaning to write this for a few days now, so here goes. All of these apps are, or were, free when I downloaded them. I have yet to pay for a single application on my iPhone—I’m cheap, and not every app I’ve downloaded has been free of major bugs, so at least if a buggy app is free, there’s no loss in deleting it from my iPhone.

In no particular order (although I’d probably give Twitterfon #1 since it’s just so well-done):

Best

• Twitterfon This is, simply put, the finest Twitter app on the iPhone, period. I’ve tried everything else, from Twitterific (too much fluff) to Twittellator (hard to read). Twitterfon is simple, yet does everything 99.9% of folks need to with regard to Twitter. The developer is responsive, keeps everyone informed via Twitter, and does everything possible to make this a great iPhone app. And it’s free. Amazing.
• NetNewsWire This is my RSS reader for both my iPhone and MacBook Pro, and it keeps getting better and better on the iPhone. If it just implemented a way to mark selected posts unread, it would be perfect.
• AirSharing I also use this quite a bit to dump files from my laptop onto my iPhone. If I’m traveling, which happens pretty often these days, it’s nice to have all my itineraries on my iPhone. Same with business documents and journal articles. It reads almost all common document formats, so PDFs, .xls, .doc, etc. are all fine.
• BlocksClassic A very nice implementation of the classic Breakout game, and it’s frequently updated with new levels
• Easy WiFi for AT&T This does one thing, and does it well. When I’m in an airport or coffee shop that uses AT&T Wireless, instead of having to go through the whole mess of entering my iPhone number into a Web page and waiting for a text message giving me access, Easy WiFi provides access with one press of a button. Very convenient.
• Facebook While I’d love to be able to view a friend’s contact list from my iPhone (hopefully this will be part of the forthcoming update I keep reading about), and it crashes on occasion, this is very useful if you use FB. I really like the fact that it syncs with the online database, so you only get notifications once.
• Google Mobile App The voice recognition is cool. And I think this has a lot of promise. I’d like it better, however, if it contained its own browser functionality. It’s a pain to click on a search result, go to Safari, then have to switch back to GMA to look at another result.
• LinkedIn Not as full-featured as it could, or should be, but it’s helpful enough if you use LinkedIn as much as I do
• Truphone Best attributes: it lets me make calls internationally for pennies over a WiFi network, plus they give you $4.00 free credit when you start. Worst: If you’ve used your iPhone for any length of time without a restart, it won’t work without restarting due to a memory leak issue. Truphone now supposedly senses if you make an international call from the iPhone and automatically routes it to the Truphone app, but I have yet to see that happen. Given how few people I know would be using this when I am, I’m skeptical of the value in free Truphone-to-Truphone calls, but it’s nice that it is theoretically possible.
• Wikiamo A nice Wikipedia application
• WordPress Kinda less useful without the ability to embed links (isn’t that a major point of blogging?), but for a quick post on the road, it’s better than nothing.

Worst

• NYTimes The worst. Absolutely the worst. Why? Because it is impossible to read a single NYT article without it crashing. This is something a lot of folks have been reporting since it first came out, and every time I redownload it and hope for the best, my hopes are dashed. This isn’t some lame app being developed by a 9-year-old in his basement; it’s from the New York Times. It could be great if only it weren’t so buggy. The Grey Lady needs to buy itself a decent debugging module. Shameful, even if it is free.
• iSushi Aims to provide the nearest sushi restaurants based on your current location. It doesn’t.
• Free Hangman This would have remained on my iPhone if only it gave a hint for the word you’re trying to solve. Otherwise, you’re just picking common vowels and letters and hoping for the best, which isn’t engaging after a few minutes.
• My Gas Wars This was supposed to provide local gas prices. It never found anything—totally useless.
• LabCal Crashed and crashed and crashed. Not the way to provide lab calculations.
• Blanks Nice idea: an app to quiz you and teach you new verbiage. But seeing the same words over and over again, and easy words at that, didn’t increase my vocabulary.  

i did not know Time Machine did this as well

Noticed this by accident, having activated Time Machine while in Mail.app. Very nice—I assumed one would have to restore the Mail backup files in ~/Library/Mail via the Finder (which is what usually comes up for me when invoking Time Machine in OS 10.5.x), but this is much nicer and much more elegant.

avoid portable hard drives by LaCie. seriously.

All mechanical hard drives will eventually suffer a head crash—it’s just a matter of when. I’ve had external hard drives crash after a year of use, and I’m still in search of a really reliable backup drive. But when all is said and done, LaCie is now the worst of the worst in my opinion. I purchased a 250 GB portable drive back in May; it died on day one of use. I then got a replacement from Amazon, and that has now died after between 6-7 months of intermittent use. Pretty disappointing.

I did the reasonable thing and e-mailed tech support at LaCie. My message detailed what happened and asked for a refund or a more reliable drive, since I suspect they have a major design flaw in that drive (the 250 GB portable drive designed by Sam Hecht, whoever that is). After two days, I got a response telling me they’re sorry and I should send the drive back for repair.

Send the drive back for repair? After a head crash? And I’m supposed to feel reasonably comfortable putting my data on a refurbished drive when two new drives failed in less than seven months? Really?

Sensing that this was going to be a very frustrating situation, I called LaCie and asked to speak with a manager. I was told the manager was on the phone and would call me right back. I made the customer support person read back my phone number, since he didn’t do it automatically, and sure enough, got the digits wrong. But armed with my correct phone number, I assumed the manager would call back in a reasonable period of time. After 2.5 hours, I figured that the reasonable period had expired, so I called and got the same guy who assured me the manager was just getting around to calling me back. 

Yeah, right.

Anyway, I spoke with the Tech Support Supervisor, who told me in a very nice way that his only option is for me to send in the drive at my own expense so they could refurbish it. No refund. No new drive (not that I’d trust it anyway). And there’s no one in the entire US, according to him, who is above him. So other than e-mailing their corporate office in France, which I did, I’m either stuck with a dead drive or else will pay to ship the drive back for repair and then have a drive that I wouldn’t trust for all the money in the world.

I’m told that Western Digital drives are reliable and will probably get one next week. But that’s not the point. What’s up with companies that don’t stand by their products and that don’t work to at least meet their customers halfway? Unlike Kensington, which replaced a defective and potentially dangerous laptop case (due to very sharp edges) with a better model for free, LaCie’s support is bad. And I wouldn’t trust my data on their portable drives. So my advice—be very careful buying portable hard drives, and avoid LaCie’s models like the plague. 

I should mention that I do have an external 320 GB LaCie drive purchased at the same time as I bought the portable lemon, and that is still working okay. I think it’s a time bomb, but it does work. But it is an external drive and has a fan. The portable drive doesn’t, and maybe that’s part of the problem. I’d like to think that LaCie’s tech folks would be interested in investigating whether there might be a design flaw in their Sam Hecht portable drive, but I’m not optimistic.

OK, rant over.