Microsoft Store Non-Experience

There was a promotion for a free application advertised on my Windows Tile-Application-Menu, or whatever they are calling it these days.  I tried to click on the Free button, but then it said my Internet connection does not work.   My Internet connection is fine, especially as parts of the application are working, and the fact that I am writing this blog.

I clicked on Music and Movies & TV tabs in the Store application, and both had the same results: "Check your Internet connection".  Other parts of the application work correctly.

This might have something to do with the fact I am in Belgium now.  I expect that I could access the media I had purchased, but the very least, have some default landing page, not have zero functionality.

Google Play Music - Slice of Awesome

I was able to upload about 5000 songs into Play Music and playlists cropped from iTunes on Mac OS X (Mountain Lion).  Once I got past initial application glitches and bugs from Google backend systems, everything worked great.

I can play my music on any system that has a Chrome web browser (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows), and also on my Android gadgets or iPhone/iPad/iPod gadgets.  I haven't tried any of my Apple products, as iTunes to manage music there.

For Android gadgets, I tried it with Nexus 5X phone and Nexus 9 tablet.  I was able to select some playlists and download the music for offline use.  The Play Music has some nifty features to organize the artists and fetch latest photos of the musicians for the cover art.

Thus so far, I have 5000 songs in the cloud, and I pay essentially $0.00 per month for this service.  Amazon and Apple cannot compete with that price point... 

Amazon Customer Disservice

I ordered some packages, and they are sent back with "refused shipment".  I never refused anything, and I never received a slip.

I open a support ticket requesting a callback, it is closed and with a brief note that they do not handle issues with resellers.

The following day, I open a chat session with Kameswari, and he says things like: "sorry", "you have been refunded", and "there is nothing to worry about".  I explain that THIS IS NOT THE ISSUE!!!  But, because I purchased from a 3rd party reseller, not Amazon, Kameswari schedules a call back... with reseller support.

With Reseller support, Chad explains they do not handle these issues, patches me through to customer service.  I ask Chad why am I talking with reseller support, which is support for vendors that sell things through Amazon's platform. We're both baffled.

Now, round trip back to support India, and this new agent does the same thing as Kameswari, she apologies and assures me that I will be refunded.  I explain that THIS IS NOT THE ISSUE and that Amazon has failed to deliver my package; I want to know what happened; and that I am concerned that I cannot get packages. 

She offers apologies, and I explain I don't want apologies, I want solutions.

This call essentially goes no where.   I cannot escalate it out of India, I cannot talk to anyone that could find out what is happening.  So, I do the only thing I can do, I reorder my items, and cross my fingers.

In a few days, I wake up to a phone call in the morning.  It is someone from Amazon Logistics who informs me that there is a driver with my package outside, and that there's a note on the account that says "Do not deliver here, ever".  

I told them I never put this message for my home address, emphasis on NEVER.  Baffled, I go out and get united with my package.  I am glad the driver knew something was strange and called into Amazon logistics — finally a thinker and not a drone. But I am also frustrated that I had to jump through hoops like a walrus, and after it all, routed to India twice, I get no where, no solution path, no way to talk to ANYONE in Amazon to find out how to resolve this.

This could have gone on for a long time, with packages marked as "refused delivery" and there is no one I can contact at Amazon for help.  

Amazon, cost cutting customers out of the equation.

Scandalous Amazon Application

I looked at the reviews for this free Amazon Cloud Drive application from Amazon.  There's 63% that give it 1 star.  

I was surprised to see 19% gave this application 5 stars, but then you look at the actual reviews, you'll notice that many reviewers only have "ok", "good", "great" as the review.  Other 5-star reviews beyond one word had small phrases or sentences, such as "Great app!" or "Works as stated".  I wonder if the one of the engineers automated some fake users to give it a 5 star rating.

Given the lack of professionalism, and had some questions:

• How can any product management or management, sign off on releasing such a broken application?
• What are the software quality efforts at Amazon?  Do they exist?  
• Were SQA engineers ignored by poor management, or was it some outsourcing the quality activities issue?
• If the quality process is truly bad, do other Amazon products like AWS have bad quality as well? 

Amazon Cloud Drives Into a Ditch

I saw that Amazon now has this new cloud drive service and has a Photos & Videos application as well.  So I am thinking that this might be a useful way to organize photos between devices, How cool!!!.  Amazon did a decent job with their Kindle application, so I am sure they'll do a great job with this service... NOT!!

For Mac OS X, Amazon has you download a synchronization application.  That's reasonable I would think.  But the application is essentially a web application plastered in a dialog box — essentially a window that cannot be resized.

THE USER EXPERIENCE (UX DESIGN)

The embedded web application's borders extend beyond the dimensions of the dialog box, so buttons and other widgets are chopped off.  When I first launched it, it offered to upload some folders, like photos, music, and so on.

But I don't want this.  I may have private photos or other files and in the case of music, I have gigabytes of music that would take untold hours to upload.  I unselected everything and hit enter, and then the application continue to upload files form my home directory, some of them not even data files, but resource files within Mac OS X bundles.

I canceled out of this, and afterward, the program would not even launch.  I am guessing it is crashing in ball of flame somewhere.  This is the User eXperience that Amazon wants for its customers?   What an embarrassment?

RANTING...

"When I was a young whippersnapper..." (in grandpa voice) applications never made it out of the Alpha quality gate if they had zero functionality... I cannot imagine anyone putting this out in the public... as their final version... their final cut... I pile of flaming poo 💩 💩 💩... that they give to the public... wow... 

Holy Bad-Application, Batman.

Playing with Google Play Music

THE PROBLEM

Apple used to have the best technology in this area.  The iTunes application was initially very simple and elegant, and it was easy to manage and synchronize your music on both desktops and devices.  But it seems quite often, they need to radically change the user interface, forcing you to relearn the user interface.  Apple's iCloud services for synchronizing music has been abysmal.  The music you buy from the iTunes store, can only be used on iTunes, which is fine if all you use is Mac OS X and Apple's gadgets, but not cool if you use non-Apple products.  The Windows version of iTunes hasn't gotten a lot of love, and consequently, doesn't have a very rich user experience there.  The workaround is to buy a Mac.

THE SOLUTION

Thus I am open to looking for something new, some alternatives.  Enter Google Play Music.  You manage your music through web applications or mobile device applications (which are ultimately web applications with a different wrapper).

THE EXPERIENCE

The experience on Mac OS X was a little rough.  To get access to the application, you have to use Google Chrome, and then install Play Music from Google's web store.  After this is installed, you can try to upload music, accessed through menu icon in the upper left.  Going through the process, you'll be prompted to Add a credit card to verify your country of residence:

In my experience, I had an error, which baffled Google's technical support.  There was no insight from the error, which simply said: "Sorry, we were unable to process this request.  Please try again later".  In the main page, it just says "Server error.  Try again later".  This is not a lot of useful information that could be used to troubleshoot the issue.

I eventually found the error on my own, I had a default invalid credit card on my account, and even through the user interface showed a valid credit card, it bombed out.  I'm guessing it was using invalid data for valid data.  I had to navigate to the main Google Play application, and adjust my account  information, then I could go forward in Play Music and upload my music.

Google's Music Manager: Failing Forward to Greatness

After wrangling with some bugs for Google's online music service , I was finally able to download Google's Music Manager, a seperate application you can download on your Mac.

On Mac OS X, you download an disk image file (musicmanager.dmg), then drag the icon into the standard Applications folder on Mac OS X.  This is typical of most OS X applications these days.

This is application, is essentially a web browser port in an application, using QtWebKit libraries. It gives you a basic web client skeleton application that requires you to log into your Google account.

When I first launched the application, it crashed.  I am hoping this is not the expected user experience from Google.  But if at first you don't succeed, restart, so I relaunched the application, and it did not crash this time.

Once logged in during the first launch of the application, it will go through a secondary installation of background applications, ask you how you want to upload your music, and places headphones widget on your menu bar.  It will then begin the upload process, and for me, I chose to upload my whole spanking iTunes collection, because, well, it's free.

You can have your whole collection online, and then synchronize back down to devices.  Apple offers this service as well, which they'll charge you $$ for the service.  When you use the service with Apple, iTunes will then block you from synchronizing music to your devices.  Yes, that's right it BLOCKS you from synchronizing music from your desktop to your devices.  So kiss goodbye to the Steve Job's digital hub concept.

Conclusion: You can get access to your music collection online for free, and you are not blocked from synchronizing music to your devices, as you are with Apple's service.  You get the best of both worlds, though, the trip to get there from Google might be rough, with errors and crashes, but you get there.

Yosemite Installer

Creating a Yosemite installer image on USB stick reformatted as "Untitled":

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app —nointeraction

Powershell vs. Curl or Wget

I wanted to do silent downloads using the command line, so this way I can install tools like Homebrew, RVM or GVM using Puppet.

On Linux or Unix, you can use curl or wget:

source=http://website/somepackage.tgz
path=/tmp/packages
file_path=${path}/somepackage.tgz
username='jdoe'
password='secret'

curl -u ${username}:${password} -o ${file_path} ${source}
wget --user ${username} --password ${password} ${source} -P ${path}

On Windows, I found a cool Puppet module called pget.  This module does something like this in Powershell to get the same effect:

$source = http://website/somepackage.tgz
$target_file = somepackage.tgz
$username = 'jdoe'
$password = 'secret'

$wc = New-Object System.Net.WebClient;
$wc.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential(${username},${password});
$wc.DownloadFile(${source},${target_file})