Brandon Live!

 Update 2/23:  Apparently the infamous Fake Steve Jobs has linked to this two-week-old post because of the little anecdote at the end, with an interpretation I didn’t quite expect.  After all, the main purpose of “the wall” is to remind us how awesome the work we’re doing is by comparison.  As always, Fake Steve is good for a laugh, although it’s a bit less enjoyable when you’re the one being picked on!  ”Microtards?”  Ouch.  Of course, I think it should hardly be surprising that people in any business compare themselves to their competition.  Can you imagine any place where that doesn’t happen?

Like the Japanese car in the Dearborn auto plant parking lot, Macs and iPhones must create problems for switchers working at Apple competitors as well as companies with a PC-or-die IT policy.

He then goes on to link to this very blog!

However, Microsoft appears to be okay with at least one of its employees running Vista on a MacBook in the office. Blogger Chris Pirillo pointed to Brandon Paddock, a self-described geek who works on search technology at Microsoft (but not in the Microsoft Mac Business Unit, where it’s okay to show up with Mac hardware and software, or at least it is at the “SVC,” the Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, Calif.).

It’s true, I’m a Microsoft developer (on Windows no less) with a Macbook.  And an iPhone!  I’m also rather fond of both of them.

I’m not the only one, either.  I see as many iPhones as Blackjacks these days, maybe more.  It’s really an awesome device and it doesn’t surprise me at all that geekier folk would pick one up.

I also wasn’t the first on the shell team with a Macbook.  My friend David used to be an SDET on the team, but is now a PM.  His primary machine is a first-gen black Macbook.  I’m pretty sure I’ve seen at least one Macbook Pro in a nearby office, and my boss has an iMac at home.

Many of them are like me, and run Vista pretty much exclusively on them.  I know some didn’t even keep the OS X partition around when they installed it.  It’s neat to play with once in a while (and the VMware Fusion and Parallels stuff is getting really impressive), but not terribly useful for practical purposes, especially if your life revolves around building a competing OS.

If you do run OS X, you can even get it on our network, although some things like getting on the WiFi take a fair bit of extra work.  Luckily there’s an IT help page that walks you through it.

But as I said, in my case it’s pretty much a PC.  A stylish, well-put-together PC.  I even recently put a Vista orb sticker on top covering the backlit Apple logo (which likes to shine through while it’s running, creating an eerie, ghostly effect).  Not because anyone ever cared that I carried a Mac around, but because I’m very proud of the team I work on and what we do there.  And it fits perfectly =)

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I love working at Microsoft.  I love that I can carry a Macbook around to every meeting and have others think nothing of it.  I love that others on the team are willing to look at, use, and sometimes even live with our main competitor’s product.  I think it’s important to know what “the other side” is doing, and to understand what users are talking about when they make comparisons.  I think it’s also important that we respect the great things they’re doing down there, and strive to do better if we see some area where they’ve got an edge on us.

Little tidbit on that note:  One day a friend of mine on the team printed off a couple dozen screenshots of Leopard, showing off various tasks the user can do in OS X, and hung them on one of our hallways.  Across from it are pictures of the same tasks in that incredibly well-kept secret of a project that we’re working on.  There are post-it notes and markers next to each wall where passersby leave comments / questions.

I wonder if any hallways in Cupertino have something like that?

iTunes 7.6 is out, with x64 support at last!  Just as I predicted

http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

It redirects you based on your OS.  Or download the 32-bit one here and the 64-bit one here.

Update: Sadly it isn’t actually a 64-bit binary.  Lame, but what do you expect from Apple, who seem to be pretty stuck in a 32-bit world.  At least it includes a 64-bit iPhone / iPod Touch driver, which is all that was really needed.

Judging by this new error message in iTunes 7.5 (which I didn’t even notice had changed the first dozen times I clicked OK to it), it seems like a 64-bit version of iTunes is on the way.  Sadly I can’t do as the message says as the 64-bit installer is nowhere to be found on Apple’ site.  While a 64-bit version in of itself isn’t much to write home about (the 32-bit version of iTunes works fine, including iPod support), it appears that iPhone and iPod Touch support will be included with it.

It’s a real shame that the iPhone launched without a 64-bit driver.  Even worse, 6 months later and it’s still nowhere to be found.  At least this is a sign of hope, though, when compared with the previous error (seen below).  Then I can finally sync with my desktop instead of my laptop.

Today comes the first Start++ update since May.  Long overdue, perhaps - but I hope worth the wait :)  As I teased earlier, a major new feature available in 0.7 is the ability to turn many iPhone web apps into Start Gadgets.  There are more examples on the Start++ home page.  But here’s another:

Just like previous Start++ customizations, these can be exported and shared on BrandonTools.com - in fact, I’ve already created a place to share them with others (and you can subscribe via RSS to see when new ones are added!).  Setting one up isn’t too difficult if you’re familiar with how these kinds of web apps work.  Below is what the gadget building UI looks like:

(Click to enlarge)

Note that Start++ is still in beta, and that the capabilities of Start++ Start Gadgets will continue to grow.

So what are you waiting for?  Go grab the download.

Update:  It’s out.

It might not contain new “features” per se, and Apple certainly didn’t make much hoopla about the release (as far as I know, there’s still no official changelist apart from the security fixes).  But I’m incredibly happy with it.

What’s great about this update is that it fixes every issue that I wanted them to fix (in terms of bugs, not features like EAS support which it still needs).  Here are the major ones for me:

1. Bluetooth to my car no longer drops out if it’s not plugged into power.  From what I read on forums this seemed like a specific interaction between the iPhone and Audi’s handsfree system.  Because of that I was afraid it wouldn’t get fixed.  But it was!
2. IMAP folder support works now.  Previously I could only sync my “inbox” folder.  At one point I managed to get the IMAP Path Prefix thing to work and could see my folders for about a day, but then the mail app started crashing whenever I tried to run it, and I had to reset the account.  Now it just works - no fancy configuration steps needed, the other folders just magically started showing up after the update.
3. Album view UI bugs are gone.  It used to be that if you went into Album view, selected a specific album, and then hit the “home” button, when you went back to the iPod app you would still be in Album view inside the album you’d selected, but without a “back” button to get back to the main Album list.  Also, hitting “Album” again at the bottom had no effect at all.  So you had to switch to another mode like Artist and then back, if you wanted to change albums.  Now it’s doubly fixed - because not only does the “back” button show up as it should - but tapping “Album” at the bottom also takes you back to the top level view.  Sweet.

 I’m really glad they were able to fix these things so quickly, as well as the security vulnerabilities reported.  When the patch was first announced, it sounded like that was all they’d addresses.  I was extremely happy, then, to find these other issues fixed - and fixed well.

My previous phones (BlackJack, PPC-6700, PPC-6600, Treo 600) all had issues and quirks that were never fixed.  Thus, I was actually prepared to live with the above annoyances because that’s what I was used to doing.

To the iPhone developers / PMs / QA people - thank you for working so quickly to address these real customer issues and not putting them off because individually they only affected a small subset of users.  My impression of Apple (a company I quite honestly disliked a great deal until a year or two ago) just keeps getting better.  I can only hope that competitors (in the form of Microsoft, Samsung, HTC / UTStarcom, Palm, Motorola, etc) take note.

The message in my previous post apparently showed up because Apple doesn’t support 64-bit OSes (ie. Vista x64) with the iPhone.  Yuck.  Come on Apple… you were so close.

iTunes and the iPod both work fine, and the iPhone is recognized and shows up as a disk / camera.  But iTunes refuses to see it and sync.  Why couldn’t they get this right?  I hope they fix it soon… having to sync through my laptop (32-bit) is kind of annoying.