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Dealing with iTunes -100000 download errors, and why Apple customer service is brilliant

July 26, 2009 in Apple | 5 comments

ITunes_8_OS_XI had a bit of a scare yesterday. I spent £6.41 completing the soundtrack from Moon (I’d already bought two tracks from the album, hence the discount on completing it) on iTunes. All was well until the final track, Welcome to Lunar Industries (Three Year Stretch….) downloaded – and failed.

I started with common-sense troubleshooting methods – error -100000 (the error returned by iTunes) wasn’t mentioned on the Apple support website, so I assume it is one that is as-yet undefined. I ran “check for available downloads”, and it happened again.

Undeterred, I tried again, deleting the temporary download folder and running “Check for Available Downloads” again. This time, instead of bailing out with an error, as soon as it reached the end of the download phase, it simply deleted the downloaded file and restarted again. This repeated seemingly endlessly and for no readily apparent reason.

I tried on another machine, and that failed. I updated the Mac to iTunes 8.2.1. Again, no luck. With that in mind, I contacted Apple technical support.

The person who dealt with my request was very polite and e-mailed me back within six hours (impressive, considering it was a Saturday). I’d tried practically everything in the e-mail, but for old time’s sake, I tried again.

It was another case of lather-rinse-repeat – until I decided, off the cuff, to try something different. Instead of using the Check for Available Downloads route, I clicked the ‘restart’ button on the entry in the Downloads playlist. And it worked.

I e-mailed the fix back to Apple, and received a speedy (probably template) “thank you for contacting iTunes Store customer support” message. It may have been template, but the service is certainly better than some companies I’ve run in to: for example, Apple got back to me on a Saturday (most other companies wouldn’t have bothered until Monday) and the person who served me was incredibly polite throughout the brief communiqué.

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WWDC roundup and iPredictions

June 8, 2009 in Apple | 2 comments

Sadly, it's just a mockup, but it's gorgeous anyway

Sadly, it's just a mockup, but it's gorgeous anyway

Well, not long to go now until WWDC 2009. The rumour mills are once again chugging away, and the general gist of them is as such:

  • Apple will almost certainly announce a new iPhone, probably with video conferencing. iPhone OS X 3.0 will certainly be putting in an appearance.
  • Snow Leopard’s final preview build will be released (we know this) and we can expect speed improvements, improved memory management and 64-bit optimisation, a brand new Finder written in Cocoa (really? it took nine and a half damn years?) and possibly a new UI, codenamed Marble. It’s known that QuickTime is getting a major upgrade, and is also getting a revised silver icon.
  • This isn’t really a rumour, but it’ll be interesting to see, in the coming months, how Apple reacts to Palm’s move to make the Pre fake an iPod (and therefore sync with iTunes). They could do one of three things: they could update iTunes to remove the sync functionality with the Pre, they could leave it as it is, or they could offer an olive branch to third-party hardware developers and start offering an iTunes API. I think the third would be the wisest, but the second is the most likely.
  • And finally… the Dear Leader. He took leave from Apple until sometime in June, and we know that his minions, Phil Schiller and Tim Cook will be doing the WWDC keynote. Although Schiller ain’t bad, he’s not as confident and doesn’t have as much charisma as Jobs. Tim Cook is like watching Dick van Dyke trying to read the news—it’s painful. However, if video conferencing on the iPhone is one of the features that will be announced… well, I wouldn’t be in any way surprised if he made a surprise appearance, say, calling from a fresh iPhone in the audience.
  • Someone, somewhere in the WWDC audience will need fresh underpants at some point during the keynote, because the previous set will have melted.

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The Apple Keyboard on Windows

March 21, 2009 in Apple, Hardware | No comments

As I’ve discussed before, the Apple keyboard works with PCs, just like any bog-standard USB keyboard.

However, there are several elements of Macintosh keyboards that differ from normal PC keyboards, and they can be incredibly annoying. The Apple keyboard’s United Kingdom layout is closer to the International English and US English layouts, and this can be a major source of annoyance if, like me, you’re trying to use the keyboard to control a Windows machine.

With this in mind, I’ve created a keyboard layout for the UK Apple keyboard for Microsoft Windows using Microsoft’s brilliant keyboard layout creator. It covers the changes on the main keyboard area, but not outside the main alphanumeric block. That is, it doesn’t make the media, brightness, dashboard and Exposé keys work. However, it does swap the at sign (@) and the speech mark (“) around, and also swaps some other keys to mimic the Apple layout.

Get the installer here. Problems? Let me know.

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