MacBook Pro

One of my biggest frustrations with NetNewsWire was that it scaled horribly. When starting the application, it would take several minutes to load -- not to refresh the feeds, but just to load all the feeds. My poor MacBook Pro would whirr away from all the work it took, and if on battery would drain it within 10 minutes.

Simply put, it was the laptop killer. I used it only very sparingly, and only when I needed to cull through a zillion posts for my BlogHer Contributing Editor gig.

But on January 9th, NewsGator Technologies updated the application with a major refactoring. Just check out the change notes:

Fixed a bug that prevented automatic sleep for some people.

W00t!

It’s possible that people who leave NetNewsWire running for hours without interacting with it in some way are having memory use go up and up, since no events are processed and thus autorelease pools are not drained.

See Mike Ash on the subject: http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/more-fun-with-autoreleas...

I’m following Mike’s advice and posting an NSApplicationDefined event at strategic times, which should drain the pools. We’ll see.

This was a big one for me, bringing my entire computer to a crawl. It was like the 'Book had a virus.

New storage system

A big problem with 3.0 was that each news item was stored as a separate file—and this caused way too much disk access for some people. It was slow. So we took the previous storage system (from NetNewsWire 2.x) and updated it some. News items storage is much, much faster than it was in 3.0.

NetNewsWire now stores the news items for a feed together. One file per feed. This was how NetNewsWire 1 and 2 stored data — so we’re going back.

We’re not going all the way back, though — there have been some changes. It’s not exactly the same.

The first time you run NetNewsWire, it will have to convert old storage to new storage. This may take a few minutes, depending on how much data you have. The next time you run NetNewsWire the startup time should be more normal. (On my machines it’s about a second, but it will be different for different people.)

Oooh!

The changelog is very long indeed. Kudos to NewsGator for truly stepping up! Already I am seeing a huge performance improvement. For one thing, I've written this entire post on battery power, with nearly two hours of time left -- something that was completely impossible before.

And now it's free! (I paid for my license some months ago, but I can't regret paying a company that ends up doing a good deed.)

You can download the now-free NetNewsWire here. This is now truly the #1 RSS reader for OSX, in my book.

It doesn't take a "genius" to know that there is something seriously wrong with my MacBook Pro. When you can't hold a wi-fi connection and get the gray screen of death two or more times a day, you pretty much have a worthless piece of junk taking up space.

I took it into the Apple Store on Twenty-Ninth Street and was greeted by a guy dressed more for playing ultimate frisbee than for working pretty much any kind of retail. I told him about the problems I was having and he snorted -- this was a familiar problem, apparently.

He walks me up to a computer "to make an appointment." Apparently nowadays you cannot have a problem with your Mac unless you have an appointment. Those of us with unscheduled failures can just twist in the wind.

After having to type in my contact information, he navigates to a screen and says, "You can have an appointment tomorrow."

"I need an appointment to have a problem taken care of?" I asked.

"You have to wait just like everyone else you see here," he said with a sneer, waving his hand at some 10 or 15 people all having problems looked at by "geniuses."

"Why can't I just drop the thing off and the tech department can deal with it when they can?"

"You have to be here."

"Why?"

"So they can know what the problem is."

Whatever.

I have never had to have an appointment to drop something off to a repair shop. I may have had to wait to get it fixed, but I've never had anyone tell me, in effect, "Take your problem away from here! Begone!"

Some years ago, home insurance companies were found to be deliberately shuffling adjusters so that people making claims would have to see several adjusters -- starting over each time -- before even getting a settlement offer. Presumably this was done because the companies wanted to delay as long as possible having to pay out money they owed to their clients.

Is this Apple's approach? Spread out how many people can actually have computer problems addressed in a given day, so that they don't have to deal with the crappy hardware they're using in their devices?

We have three other MacBook Pros in the office, and two of them are experiencing the same gray screen of death and wi-fi connection problems. (The guy with the functional MacBook Pro had at his previous job another one with the same gray screen of death problem.) Obviously this is something of a pandemic that should require a recall, not sending people with problems out into the street with no acknowledgment of anything.

Do you need an appointment to buy a computer? Don't be silly!

Oh, and I was going to buy a screen while I was there. Funny how treating the customer with contempt has an effect on sales.