Yes. That’s Finale – and that’s my story, I’m sticking to it.

I was glad to see that 2009 fixed their incompatibility with MOTU devices using non-default CueMix names (as in “Finale crashes-on-launch, can’t use the program at all” incompatibility). They left this specific fix off the list — but Finale 2007 worked, 2008 didn’t, and now 2009 does again. (Yes, I deleted my preferences.) $90 upgrade for nothing, thanks ’08. It stayed in the box and was never installed.

“Save as PDF…” problems not fixed since 2007
OS X’s built-in “Save as PDF…” feature is one of the best things ever to happen to Finale for sharing music electronically. But just try to “Save as PDF…” a part that has a slash in the name (say “Piano/Vocal” for instance). Finale just decides to leave the part name off. This would barely make sense on WINDOWS (maybe replace the illegal character with an underscore?), nevermind that “/” is a legal character for Mac files. WTF? And hopefully you don’t want to “Save as PDF…” both the score *and* the offending part in the same “Print…” command, because the part will overwrite the score without any warning, and you’ll be left with only the part — but named to look like the score. Nice hack-up of OS-level file operations.

Another example of bad Save box behavior is evident in Auto-Saves. Old Finale files always open as “Untitled” in newer versions. If you have Auto-Save enabled, it will prompt you to “Save As…” upon the first saving. But, if you have any other dialog box open at the time Auto-Save is triggered (which in Finale is extremely likely), the “Save As…” sheet opens behind your dialog box. The save window can be clicked forward in front of the dialog box you’re in, but it never gains the mouse or keyboard focus. Meanwhile, it did manage to steal the focus *away* from the box you were just in, thus leaving you with zero control over the program, no ability to save your work, and your only recourse is to Force Quit, losing all your work. This is exactly the opposite result you should get with an Auto-Save feature. This is not new to 2009. Does *anybody* at MakeMusic actually use Finale on a Mac? They’d find this bug in under 15 minutes. How is this okay in commercially-released software — not to mention, version 2009b.r3!!

Other little things
Staff styles no longer have the final say. My old trick of selectively enabling “Allow optimization” on only certain measures doesn’t work anymore. And when I tried to selectively hide Measure Numbers (staff style with Items To Display > Measure Numbers unchecked), it did nothing.

The new 2009 Expressions categories work beautifully. But the arbitrarily hard-coded six categories is odd, nevermind the fact that it doesn’t merge categories when you import a library file. How else do you push a house style out to other files, then? The whole thing is still clunky and does not foster any confidence. Plus, I heard these categories only came to Finale because Sibelius does them that way.

Lyrics still are tedious in Finale. You already hope and pray they don’t get messed up, and after a certain amount of copy/paste, you give up on keeping anything orderly behind the scenes. I was surprised that now in 2009 Automatic Hyphens and Word Extensions don’t display when you first open the file. Open and close the “Edit Lyrics…” dialog box and they reappear. Why? Why not! (It’s not every file, just don’t forget to always check that the program is doing its job.)

Now that Finale 2009 “runs” sufficiently on Leopard and our score files aren’t stranded forever, it’s finally time to box this line and investigate Sibelius.

Updating Mike’s first-gen iPhone to 2.0 was no problem. As everyone warns, give yourself an hour or more to complete the update. The firmware and software updates finish in about 20min. But because the update performs a full wipe, all your media needs to be recopied and that’s what takes most of the time.

So far, iPhone 2.0 is 95% awesome. Of all the advertised improvements, the most noticeable are Calendar (color distinctions and general iCal-iness now), Contacts (search is handy), Calculator (flipping to scientific mode is just cool), and of course the App Store.

And by far, the sleeper hit of the App Store is Apple’s “Remote“. Seriously, this could be the best thing about iPhone 2.0 for me. More on that ridiculousness in a later post, I think.

In the fallout of the botched MobileMe launch, it’s been hard to determine what issues were temporary and which were just limitations of MobileMe on iPhone 2.0. I’ve spent a little time testing things, and here is my wishlist:

Allow data sync between MobileMe Family Pack accounts
This one is major, and central to the slightly misleading impression given by the MobileMe tagline “Exchange for the rest of us”. Some have said “It’s MobileMe, not MobileUs,” and that’s true. It functions great as “Exchange For Me”, but a tiny change (to features that feel more like bugs anyway) could turn a MobileMe Family Pack into “MobileUs”.

Family Packs provide 1 primary and up to 4 sub-accounts — each with their own Contacts, Calendars, iDisk space, and Email address. There is no sharing of data between them as far as I can tell (confirmed here) except possibly some way to transfer files thru shared iDisk folders. Family Packs are simply a quantity-discount over buying 5 individual accounts.

But Apple, why not take the “Family” part seriously and make Family Packs “just work” the way a family works? Our desktop and laptop computers sync to one primary MobileMe account, so that we benefit from all the integration goodness .mac has always had to offer. We have our own @mac.com email addresses, but we share common calendars and contacts. It’s even fairly simple for a sub-account holder’s iPhone to participate in this little makeshift family workgroup. You just enable only their sub-account Mail and then enable Contacts, Calendar, and Bookmarks for the primary account.

That works great, but the main problem is this: Push Email is an option for sub-accounts only up until any data sync option (Mail, Contact, Calendar, or Bookmark) from the primary account is enabled. An iPhone can only actively “sync” to one MobileMe account, so sub-account holders (or grandfathered .mac Email-Only accounts) must choose between push email or over-the-air data sync. Once anything from the primary account is turned on, “Push” becomes “Fetch” for the sub-account. I have confirmed this on Mike’s iPhone, and a lengthy Discussion Thread on Apple’s support site details it further.

My hunch is that Apple chose to limit the persistent push connections to just one per iPhone. Allowing multiple push accounts would enable runaway connection demands on their servers.

However, MobileMe has certain quirks that essentially make this Push Email vs. Sync decision for you. The biggest is that calendar colors from iCal are communicated to your iPhone calendars only after an over-the-air sync (feature or bug?). Your initial iTunes USB-sync gives your calendars a confoundingly random color scheme. I’m not about to retrain myself on new iCal colors, so if the only way is thru MobileMe data sync, the push email takes a backseat.

Settling for Fetch email is a small price — but it’s annoyingly second-class. Another drawback is only the primary account has web access to the data synced from the desktop. MobileMe’s online apps are amazing replicas of their desktop equivalents, and giving out the master password so all users in your “Family” can access the Address Book just isn’t always an option. To the “get your own individual account” crowd, that still wouldn’t allow Mike to share calendars and contacts with our desktop apps. And to the “use someone else’s services then” crowd, we’re extremely pleased with (and heavily dependent on) our @mac.com email addresses and the .mac integration way-of-life. Going without Push email is annoying, but not enough reason to forego data sync (except Contacts…for now, see below).

There are two solutions to this that I can think of:

1. On an iPhone with multiple MobileMe accounts enabled, allow Push privileges for only one account and force all others to switch to Fetch. (This would retain the one-connection-per-phone limit.)
2. Enable the MobileMe Family Pack primary account to sync selected data with its sub-accounts.

I really hope Apple goes the Family Pack route. Email-only’s are being phased out, and having inter-Family-Pack-account sync happen on the server would be tremendous. Imagine a Family Calendar that all the kids can view on their computers, and a Family Contacts group that means the kids’ AIM Buddies don’t clutter up Mom and Dad’s Address Book. Family Pack users should have the option of treating their accounts as either 5 distinct users or as a true mini-workgroup environment “for the rest of us”.

Re-enable selecting a subset of contact groups for over-the-air sync
A major drawback to over-the-air MobileMe contact sync is that you lose the ability to choose which groups to sync.

When a MobileMe account’s Contacts sync is enabled on an iPhone, iTunes then defers management of Address Book sync to the phone. I had hoped that meant you could continue to selectively sync only certain Address Book groups (in the same way iTunes allows). Alas, all contacts and all groups now sync to Contacts on the iPhone. (Thankfully, there is search now.)

+1 for Push Sync, -1 for feature removal.

A simple iPhone Settings screen or an additional config page on MobileMe’s account settings web page could easily replicate the disabled preferences formerly set in iTunes.

And, that’s it for now for my wish-and-a-half-list. I’m sure I’ll have more to say when I finally get my own phone. And yes, I’ve written all of this to Apple iPhone Feedback, and I encourage everyone do the same for your own gripes. I do think they listen. And I would like to think I encouraged a few features that appeared in iPhone 1.1.x updates. Let’s hope to see some more in iPhone 2.1 — and beyond!

Seriously.

I had called AT&T for something else and they mentioned my balance, which was $100+ more than usual. We were on the road, so I was going to check our usage on Mike’s iPhone. Except I couldn’t log in!

You attempt to login, it redirects somewhere, then kicks you back to the login screen.

Calling *MIN# is the official way to check your minutes. Nice, AT&T: You can’t just have low-balance email alerts like all my bank accounts do? Of course, why invest in that when you’re making an extra $100 off our ignorance. I wish Apple were its own virtual network already.

By the end of fiscal year 2008, discontinue warmed breakfast sandwiches at our North American stores

…We made this decision because, in short, the scent of the warmed sandwiches interferes with the coffee aroma in our stores.

If by “scent of the warmed sandwiches” you mean BURNING PAPER, then yes, it interferes. I was one of the complainers myself, thinking it would get the schmos at Waverly & 6th to fix their toaster. Turns out it wasn’t just them. The sandwiches were blamed for stinky Q1 FY08 results and the mighty SBUX is dumping them in an attempt to return to their roots. The oven company, TurboChef Technologies, fell 15% after the news came out. :(

The only sandwich I dared to stomach was in a moment of desperation while stuck on Long Island. It was the unfortunately named “Reduced-Fat Turkey Bacon, Cholesterol-Free Egg, Reduced-Fat White Cheddar Oven Roasted Breakfast Sandwich” and isn’t that much fun to order. (Nevermind that despite the qualifications, it’s still higher in fat and calories than the unsuspecting “Spinach, Roasted Tomato, Feta & Egg Wrap”.)

But relief is coming soon. I look forward to the time when Christmas Blend is next ushered in and the sandwiches are kicked OUT!

See here:

• 2.0.0.8
• 2.0.0.7
• 2.0.0.6
• 2.0.0.5
• 2.0.0.4rc

…and so on. You actually don’t even need to be on Firefox. Try it!

A word to the wise — allow for shipping time so your AppleCare Protection Program box arrives before your limited warranty expires, or just do the upgrade over the phone in the first place.

I bought a Mac mini a year ago and use it as a file server and central backup device for my network. Apple sent me a nice note a few weeks ago that my 1 year limited warranty was about to expire — would I like to purchase an AppleCare Protection Plan and extend my coverage another two years? I really like my mini and it’s a crucial part of my business, so sure! But of course, Platforms took my attention for a few weeks, and I remembered on the last day of my mini’s coverage that I needed to renew.

No problem I thought, it was still Oct. 6 in Cupertino, so I hopped on to apple.com/support, paid them my money, and expected to receive a “thanks for extending” message, or at least an email containing the magic enrollment number which I could plug in to the APP signup page. Instead, they had to ship something to me. Uh oh.

I received the box today, so I went to enroll online. But it wouldn’t let me and told me to call Apple Support. After a 20 minute game of giving my serial number, then holding, then giving the contract number, then holding, then being asked where I bought the mini, then holding, then told I needed to fax the APP receipt to Apple (which I had just *bought* from Apple), then holding, then giving my APP web order number, hold, APP enrollment number (second time I gave it), hold, APP serial number from the box, hold, then a big hold for 5 minutes — finally I was told without fanfare that I was all set and to expect confirmation in the mail in two weeks.

I was ready to fight, but thankfully didn’t have to. After all, I’m probably throwing $161.48 (pesky NY sales tax) straight into their bank account, as I’ve only ever needed service on my macs 4 times in 21 years of Mac ownership. (One was on a Mac Plus, the other 3 were laptops.) And if you wanted to get technical, I did purchase my plan before the limited warranty expired. But even so, I’m not trying to sneak in a few extra days, just add two years to the original expiration date and we’re all happy.

Even tho I presented her with a bit of a gray-area problem, I have to think some fat could be trimmed from their process. What does 25 minutes of Phone Support Girl’s time cost Apple, I wonder?