1. Leopard vs. AOL

I recently took Apple to task for putting out the new OS X 10.5 with so many bugs that my AOL would not work. Attachments and the address book were the biggest problems. Oh sure, there were work-around programs, ways to make AOL do what you wanted even if it didn’t want to. These worked, but they made me wonder if the ability to run AOL on a Mac was ending.

Well, somebody up in Cupertino must be reading my column because by the middle of February, Apple put out an upgrade for Leopard. OS X 10.5.2 fixes most of the problems I had described. Attachments now attach. The address book now accepts addresses. The need to do more click-and-drag than you should have to is gone.

The strange part about this is that MacWorld, the Bible of all things, Apple sings the praises of this update for its changes in things like the hierarchical stacks and the translucent menu bar. They said nothing about fixing AOL.

There is still some bad news, here. AOL has been sending out beta tests of a new desktop. Take my word for it, you don’t want to download this. It loses e-mail. It prevents you from reading e-mail. Worse yet, it makes it impossible to send e-mail.

This is especially true of Word documents that you attach and send. Microsoft has just come out with the new Office 08 for Macs, but almost everything I have sent out has arrived unopenable. I get complaints back all day. At least I know they are getting my stuff. Still it does me no good if what I send can’t be read.

At the same time I have found that many attachments that I receive are being changed or corrupted. Can you understand how frustrating it is when I tell people to send me their stuff in MS Word because it is jumbled, and they respond that they DID send it out in Word.

I have gone back to the old AOL format and dumped the beta test desktop to avoid confusion and loss. I then called AOL to complain.

Their response was “Well you have to understand, this is a beta test.” I guess that excuses bad service.

 

2. The new DVD Champ

I recently wrote of the battle for your living room between the Blu-ray format for DVDs and the HD DVD. Contacts at local retailers would not discuss the matter with me and I was reluctant to make a call myself because of my bad luck in the Betamax vs. VHS wars of the 80s. Well, the unofficial results are in. A Warner Bros. representative has stated, “A two-format landscape has led to consumer confusion and indifference.”

With that Warner Bros. has announced a decision to go fully with Blu-ray. Thus it would appear that we have seen the last of the HD DVD format. Besides, there are new contenders for the same dollar.

On Demand, which is one of the functions of your cable channel 1 selection, has movies available for $3.99 on the day they come out in DVD. Of course, you only see them once unless you record them on your old videotape machine or your new TiVo machine. Then of course, TiVo and its competitors, like VoDo, can also sell you video content for downloading.

Or you can subscribe to a service like Netscape to send you DVDs. Apple now rents movies through its iTunes service. You have 30 days to watch these, but once you start it, you have to complete it in 24 hours or it will delete itself.

Still, content delivery is becoming one of the new service businesses of the 21st century. Some On Demand services even release films before they hit the theater. Note that these are mostly independent productions. Don’t be looking for an advance screening of the new Batman or Indiana Jones’ movies. They won’t be out until May. If you want to watch them in your living room early, you will have to buy one of those bootleg copies that the guy outside the laundromat is selling.

(I told one of those guys that what he was doing was illegal, and he told me that it was hardly a crime compared to what the big companies do. I think I would like to go to his church).

I will have more for you about the new Leopard system next time, as well as news about the new MS Office for Mac 2008.

Till then it is good to know that someone up in Silicon Valley is reading this column.