I’m Not Ignoring You

Apologies for the generally worthless post, but I discovered the other day that I had inadvertently enabled a setting on my mail server which deleted all items from my inbox which were older than 30 days. There were probably 30 or 40 emails I still needed to return which are now gone forever. So if you wrote me something in the last few months and I haven’t responded to it yet, please write again!!! Especially if you’re the person who wrote in with those two really, really nice examples of sIFR-ized sites you’d designed or if you’re from that technical school in Seattle and wanted to say hi. Those are the two that I remembered clearly and tipped me off that something was wrong.

Anyway, that’s it. Sorry for the interruption.

P.S. Is anybody else as baffled as I am that after 10.4, 10.4.1, and now 10.4.2, Apple’s Mail program still takes 5-10 seconds to pull up a new mail window when you hit the “Reply” button? Is that really such a hard problem to fix?

P.P.S. Safari is also crashing on me about once a day now. Anybody else? Two years of virtually no crashes and now this? I think it’s a known issue with the newest Safari release but are we going backwards?

P.P.P.S. Anybody tried Vonage? Especially for a business? Any good?

37 comments on “I’m Not Ignoring You”. Leave your own?
  1. mike wood says:

    i am definitely getting more safari crashes with the new version. i chalked it up to the flash player 8 beta i installed, but if other people are crashing too…?

    i also get a lot of “flash artifacts” in this version, meaning, if i have an html page with an embedded swf in the current tab, and switch to a new tab, the new page shows up, but the flash movie shows up on top of the new tab’s content and wont disappear! (not sure if that run-on sentence made sense, but i did my best)

    aside:
    working on the new burton snowboards website, in all its sIFR goodness for august 15th. ill send you an email when it launches for a critique ;)

  2. Safari crashes all the time for me, and always at the worst time. I don’t know what it is, but I think it started for me when I installed Macromedia Dreamweaver (which, itself crashes daily). Safari doesn’t crash for me after a clean re-install (which I recently had to do because my ibook decided to stop loading OS X after I upgraded to 10.4.2). However, It might just be coincidence that these problems started appearing after I installed the Macromedia suite.

    Another issue I have is how Flash playback slows to a crawl when the Safari window is not active. I’m sure that it’s done to save system resources, but it often butchers flash sites.

    OS X is still better than the alternatives, but it seems like more and more bugs are creeping into the OS

  3. Jeremy Flint says:

    I have noticed the same lag with Thunderbird. I wonder if it is tied into the size of the address book or contact list.

  4. OSX Mail: For some reason Mail is jacked on my iMac (Tiger) When I launch the app it tries to pull in all my mail and eventually just freezes, I end up force quitting and starting all over again. Still haven’t figured out what the deal is.

    Safari: Safari 2 is still rough, I’ve been using the latest version of Camino, which has been running really well.

    Vonage: Not too terribly detailed, but you can read one of my posts on Vonage service. Why Vonage Is Bad

  5. Brian Rose says:

    At my little company we’ve been using Vonage with great success. It really cuts down on the minutes we were using on our cell phones – so much so that the $25 expense is well worth it.

    Combining Vonage with a service like Virtual PBX, we never miss a call whether it be at the office or on the road. It’s a great combo for any small business, especially when you need have demand for a dedicated line to your office.

  6. Josh Bryant says:

    • As for your Mail.app issues, I have not particularly noticed this. Since 10.4, I have had some issues with the program, but never the speed issue.

    • As for Safari… YES!!!! I have had crashes upon crashes, it is unbelievable. It’s so funny, because at work, I used to be so proud of my mac with Safari and brag to my co-workers about how stable everything was. Now, I sit at my desk, go to work on something with them watching, and the application just disappears and comes up with the crash message. It is a little embarrassing. I then have to switch over to my PC and fire up Firefox or IE to demo stuff. I have no idea what is going on. Sometimes I can even reproduce the crash by going back to the same website which is particularly frustrating.

    Just today I decided to delete all my Safari plugins. I only had 2 installed, Pith Helmet and SafariSource, but I got rid of them and SIMBL all together. I am hoping that that takes care of the problem, but I have a sneaking suspension that it won’t. However, I haven’t had any crashes today so who knows?

    • On Vonage – VOIP is really a great technology and I was especially attracted to it because the service seems to rich in features for price as compared to the traditional phone companies. I decided on Vonage because they had a nice website ;) I have been fairly happy with their service so far. Here are just come cool things we have been able to do with it:

    What works really great, is that right now my wife and I live in Canada for school, so we got 2 numbers, one Canadian and one US, so that no matter who calls us, whether family from Seattle or friends from Canada, it’s local for them.

    The call forwarding options are really great. We have it right now set to ring the house number for 30 seconds, then ring the cell phone, then the work phone, then the voice mail… You can also set it to ring your house and your cell phone at the same time etc…

    Checking voicemail online! This is one of those features I just love! I always got frustrated with the traditional voice mail, of waiting for the special dial tone to check, and then dialing in, etc… Now, I get an email when we have a new message, I log onto the website, download the message to my desktop and it opens right up in Quicktime. Simply awesome!

    The complete call history log online is really nice. I have yet to put it to use, but it is really cool.

    So all in all, it has been a great choice for us. I have used their technical support once and it was very good. They actually knew what they were talking about so that was nice. One note, when they ship you your phone router, it is not a wireless one, and to my knowledge they do not offer a wireless one. So, if you have wireless internet at home, you end up setting up multiple routers and it just gets messy. You can however get a wireless phone/broadband router at Fry’s for pretty cheap, so that maybe a good option.

    The ONE complaint I have about the service is the call lag. Every once in awhile I experience a little lag, i.e. I say something and the people on the other end do not hear it for a split second afterwards, so you get caught in some awkward conversations. However, this only happens every once in awhile. A friend of mine signed up and right away was experiencing more than 3 seconds worth of lag on every call! That was unbearable, but I believe that customer service helped him out in the end.

    Cheers

  7. Alex says:

    WebKit is open source now, and rapidly progressing in the amount of bugs being fixed. However, since the recent updates, and the branching off of KHTML group into its own project, there’s still some catching up to do. Give it time, and report your bugs! (Yes, they want to get bug reports) at the bugzilla

  8. Faruk Ateş says:

    P.P.P.P.S. Is it possible to make a post filled with more P.S.-content than the original entry itself has?

    P.P.P.P.P.S. Are you going to try?

    P.P.P.P.P.P.S. I’ve just re-sent my mail to you. Pretty big deal what it’s about, as I got some WaSPs and Britpackers excited about it, along with several others. :-)

    P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. This line is pointless.

  9. Vaughan says:

    Yeah I’ve definately found Mail to be slow as molasses but i just put it down to my relatively slow Mac mini (and slow ADSL connection).

    Quick query: When I’m in Safari and my mouse pointer is hovering over straight HTML text I get the text cursor (normal behaviour) but sometimes when i move it and hover over a link it stays the same (doesn’t change to a ‘link hand’). I also get this when i’m middle-clicking tabs to close them down – it’ll be in text-cursor mode rather than normal mouse pointer mode. Maybe silly observations…but amazingly frustrating!

    Bring on ‘Leopard’ or quash the bugs!

  10. Vaughan says:

    Whoops, disregard the middle-click comment – was thinking ’bout Firefox on my work ‘pooter.

  11. Conánn says:

    I have had more problems with firefox then safari.

    Forward all your mail to a gmail account for backup, you don’t have to use it but you will know it’s there.

  12. Matthew says:

    Mail: I never got used to mail. Something always felt missing and sluggish to me, so I switched to Thunderbird a while back and am very happy with it. Feels responsive to me, but then again to each their own.

  13. Jeni says:

    I can’t comment much on Vonage for business (give me a few months), but I use it as our primary landline at home. It’s great, especially accounting for price and feature set (much like Josh, I love being able to check the voice mail online, and the call log feature rocks).

    The call quality varies. Most of the time, it’s crystal clear and hard to distinguish from a normal landline. Occasionally there’s interference, a horrible modem-like squeal, or one person can’t hear the other. I notice that it’s usually when I’m making a call to someone with a cell phone, and usually during peak bandwidth hours. It’s not enough to really bother me, but if you’re in an area where your bandwidth isn’t always reliable, it might make a difference.

    The only other bummer is the 911 access. They’ve rolled out traditional E-911 access in some areas, but the place I live isn’t one of them. I tried calling 911 through Vonage once and was completely unable to get a connection to any sort of emergency service (my cell phone had also died, natch). Luckily the hospital was only 10 minutes away, but it was a reminder nonetheless that Vonage isn’t extremely reliable in emergency situations.

  14. Geof Harries says:

    Mike Wood,

    Finally, the Burton website gets some much needed web standards t-l-c. After random years of obscure navigation and general Flash abuse, I am stoked that the site will really kick some butt. I’m all for crazy funky graphics but good code structure matters most to me :)

    geof

  15. Kevin Tamura says:

    Do you have an old-messages folder sitting in your inbox? I noticed this folder when older messages went missing and was relieved to find them there. I think it’s a Dreamhost default, because I don’t recall setting it up.

  16. mike wood says:

    agreed geof.
    but im guessing 90% of our audience are solely looking at those funky graphics. if we can make them easy to see, we’ve done our job. i cant say we’re changing the game completely, but this years site should do a much better job of merging what this community is into, with what the snowboard community is into. thanks for the input!

  17. Geof Harries says:

    Mike,

    Yeah, I’d definitely agree with you. Most snowboarders are into the style more than substance, which is cool. Guess I’m just an old man and a web standards geek at the same time :)

    Regardless, the re-launch of burton.com each year is a huge deal for me. Even after 19 years of riding, I still get so excited about seeing the new stuff and will spend a couple of hours touring around your pages when it first arrives. Burton kicks butt in visual design and has such tremendous product/community. Your soul, reputation and long term dedication are the brand for me.

    geof

  18. mike wood says:

    hey geof, would you mind shooting me an email?
    mikewo [at] buton.com

  19. mike wood says:

    that would be [at] “burton.com”.
    sheesh. sorry for the worthless posts everyone.

  20. Mike D. says:

    Mike: Great news on the Burton site. Can’t wait to see it.

    Kevin: Yeah, the problem was that I didn’t have old messages set to go to that folder. I had them set to get deleted. Ugh.

    Everyone: Thanks very much for the tips on Vonage. The feature set is definitely compelling enough for me to use it. My main question is quality. If it’s cell-phone quality, then it’s a no-go. If it proves as reliable, crystal-clear, and delay-free as a land line, then I’m all for it. From what I can tell, a lot of that seems to depend on how good your internet connection is. I’m getting 7 megabit DSL installed so hopefully that will render quality a non-issue.

  21. Mike,

    THINGS YOU NEEEEED TO KNOW ABOUT VONAGE!

    I have used them for a few years. For the mosty part I have been happy with their service, HOWEVER, they left me without a phone for almost a month! I found out the hard way recently that they have THE WORST support that you will ever find.

    I feel horrible that I recommended their service to so many of my friends.

    If you plan on never having a problem, especially with bad hardware, then Vonage is great. But for me support and a billing department that doesn’t LIE is equally important.

    I’m currently looking into Packet8 and some other VOIP providers.

    Collin

  22. Also – The quality was the Cisco ATA Phone adaptors they used originally. Now that I have a Linksys Vonage adaptor and router all in 1. I notice the line quality is not always that great even though I exceed the broadband requirements.

    For most outbound calls there is a little fuzzines in the sound that clears up in a few seconds then the quality is great both ways.

    On a few inbound calls I will hear some weird sound and need to call the person back to clear it up. They never hear it on their side.

    I recommend you shop around a bit. This is a young technology and is certainly worth it in LD savings but don’t expect to never have a few glitches.

  23. Eric says:

    Mike,

    I signed up for vonage and ported over my 212 number and never looked back. I have referred the service to some family members and the 2 free months service is definetley worth the referrals. A lot of people on forums and even in your comments suggest customer service “sucks” but I have found that if you email them or call the response is slow but usually you can figure out the problem.

    Quality has never been a factor except for once when 2 computers were on my wifi network downloading at the same time – I noticed some quality degradation, but the other person could not tell. I have a cable connection with Time Warner cable and a family member has Cable with Road Runner – both provide crystal clear sound.

    In my case they gave me a linksys VOIP box capable of connecting to my Linksys wifi box with no problems and even has capabilities to add another line (voice or fax) I would check which hardware you will be sent as this may also be a factor in your decision.

    Also – just so I dont sound selfish – you might as well signup for Vonage under SOMEONES affiliate link because its free for you and great for them. (Let me know if you need help finding one;)

  24. gnome says:

    yep. Safari crashes, 10.4.n generally is running ruffer than anything after 10.1 until now. bummer. Seems like Apple might be at the threshold of missing the point.

  25. Eric Blaska says:

    Why do you use Safari instead of Firefox? I was using Safari and stopped because it didn’ t have all the plug-ins that Firefox has, I’m much happier with it.

  26. Kyle Haskins says:

    Speaking of, is there a sIFR gallery somewhere? It would be great to see how people are using it.

  27. To Kyle:
    You could always check out the sIFR documentation wiki where people like to post their sIFR enabled websites. If you’re looking for pre-made sIFR fonts, you can check out sIFRFonts.com.

  28. Re: Post 23

    Eric, True that they are slow. I don’t want to get into great detail but their support is more then slow. Contacting them online will never get a response. Maybe it did once but last month I never heard back after emailing 3 different departments several times.

    When I did call them, they charged my card $99 without telling me about it! My call got disconnected before a resolution was made so I had to wait another hour to get someone on the phone again. I found out that it’s a big game where you never know who you are going to get. The best you could hope for is someone in the NJ main support center but they have hundreds of less then adequately trained Indian staffers that you often get sent to. I was told lies by at least 3 different people who claimed to have spoken with superiors about the charge on my card being removed but I am sure that none of them ever did. The billing department gave me trouble about getting my money back even after the defective hardware was sent out.. AND I was lied to about the new hardware going out next day air. THEN I was lied to about getting full credit for the month for both of my phone lines. (First there was no mention of it put on my account and then only 1 line was credited to my account)

    They waited until the defective hardware was recieved, it went out ground and they didn’t show it received in their records even after UPS showed it was signed for. They waited 2 days then sent out the new hardware through the USPS!!

    It was almost 3 full weeks of being without a phone. I spoke with at least 15 different people, if not more. During that time there was only 1 person in NJ who has been there long enough to know their systems. And as nice as they guy was, he was the last one who told me that a full credit for the month would be added to my account. I was charged 2 days later, for $25 and change.

    I am using Vonage for now and the service is currently working fine. I have lost all faith in their customer service and supprt though.

  29. Bayou says:

    I have had the same problems with Safari, so I’ve begun to use Firefox more and more. It has it’s slow moments but at least it doesn’t freeze up like Safari has been. Plus, I’ve found with firefox that I have fewer compatibility issues viewing webpages and less trouble with forms.

  30. Oooh, Mail does take about 5 seconds to open a reply window. I’d never particularly paid attention. That’s frustrating!

    Haven’t had the crashes with Safari that you seem to have had. Firefox, on the otherhand (which I use to blog with), constantly freezes or crashes.

    The BIG, and largely the only, irk that I have with Tiger is that it’s seemed to render Quicksilver on my 17″ PowerBook useless. I know I should just do a fresh and clean system reinstall, but that’s a lot of darn work just to get QS running.

    Well, that, and iPhoto. But we just won’t mention iPhoto.

  31. Jay Haverty says:

    Vonage really is just a residential phone service. It is entirely best effort and provides a very limited featureset compared to a business phone system.

    Take a look at some of the “designed for small business” VoIP solutions like CallTower (www.calltower.com). They have a much more business class featureset – voicemail features, hunting, call groups and their quality is much higher than a best of effort service like Vonage or Packet8.

  32. Collin says:

    Jay there are some awesome phone systems that you can buy now days that have VoiP built right in for internal calls and transfering calls between offices and such. My buddy found one which was under 2 or 3 grand and had some crazy cool and powerful features, auto-attendent and all that nice stuff. I didn’t look at what Call Tower has to offer but I do think a small investment in the hardware is a good way to go. He was then able to hook up a few lines with PacBell but used multiple Vonage lines. As far as I know this worked great for him and he can use the cheapest, most reliable VoiP but manage the companies phone system himself.

    Vonage support & customer service STILL SUCKS! :-D

  33. I’ve had amazing luck with Vonage over the last three years or so that I’ve used them. Their rates keep going down and the quality of their service keeps going up. You can’t beat that.

  34. gmn17 says:

    I think safari version 2 is fantastic and is far superior on the mac’s latest iMac from version 1.2 I am a windows user but I check my pages a couple of doors down on that cool looking iMac all the time. first mac I actually liked. It has never crashed btw even though I am not very bright on a mac, go figure.

  35. timr says:

    We have Calltower and they are horrible. The internet goes down, then the phones go down. All they know how to say is: “Have you rebooted your firewall? Have you rebooted your firewall?” Every time, I tell them, I have servers not behind the firewall. It’s been down most of the time for the last few days and they are clueless.

  36. Scott says:

    Mike,

    (I like your work.) Was vectored to your site via Google when trying to resolve a multiple router issue with … Vonage.

    So here’s my two cents about Vonage. In general, the service is average (3 on a 1 to 5), better than Cellular, but not as good as dialup. I currently have 4 vonage lines on 3 different routers and am pushing the limits I think. The FAX service is pretty spotty and I frequently have to try mutiple times to get it to work – this is a known issue.

    If you just want to set up 1 or 2 business lines and you can put the Vonage router right behind your cable/dsl router, you should be fine. I’d be sure you had avreliable uplink speed of 256K, more if you need to put files while talking. For the arrangement above I have 6mb down and 756 up. I never get the 6 (more like 2.5 – bastards) but usually get 800 up.

    You may want to check out Speakeasy.net. They are out of Seattle, have great quality and customer service, but don’t support faxes ( … probably because it doesn’t work reliably) I am thinking of switching my service over to them (because of the multiple router issue).

    Scott

    PS – Love the picture of gasworks. Am living in San Diego now, but was born and raised in Seattle and miss it frequently.

  37. I’ve never thought I would thing dialup can be sometimes good, but having had troubles with Vonage I had to change my mind.

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