One week later, I still haven’t touched my MacBook. I want to hand it down to my daughter for whatever life it has left. I just want to be sure I can let it go. It hasn’t been easy. The company who is making it most difficult for me to break the connection with a desktop computer? Apple. Post-PC revolution? Not quite.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the iPad. I still love my iPhone. No regret. No longing to go back to Android. ::shudder:: But there’s always room for improvement.

So far I’ve experienced iPad-only #fail on:

Managing photos. When you connect an iOS device to a PC photo library, you are given the option to delete photos from camera roll after the photos have been transferred. Then you can sync the photos back to the device nicely organized with a fresh slate in the camera roll. Organizing the camera roll without a computer is a mess. You can use 3rd party utilities to copy a photo to an album. There’s nothing I’ve found to move a photo to an album and delete it from the camera roll. Why does this matter so much? Apple insists on adding new photos to the end of the roll, with no way to change the sort order. So the more photos on the roll, the more scrolling it takes to get to the latest photo when you select the roll from another app. Annoying. I’d love to hear if anyone has other ideas.

iTunes gifts. I have 2 kids with their own iTunes accounts. Neither has a credit card associated with their account. They both get a weekly allowance. When they want to buy an app, music or video they tell me and I will buy an iTunes gift certificate and email them the code, then take the money from their “account.” There is no way I can find to purchase an emailable gift certificate without desktop iTunes. I can go the Apple Store app or site and buy a gift card in a set amount. Not what I want. From desktop iTunes I can also gift a specific movie or music. Great way to spend exactly what I need for them, no more no less. Not possible from an iPad

Sharing iCloud Calendars. since we all have iCloud accounts now, we also have a shared family calendar. My older daughter was the last in the family to activate her iCloud account, so I wanted to now add her to the calendar the rest of us share. No way whatsoever I can find to add/edit iCloud calendar sharing from an iOS device. Can only be done from iCloud.com on a desktop computer or through iCal on a computer. Seriously?

If Apple wants a “post PC revolution” shouldn’t they start in their own back yard?

Work email/calendar/tasks is on an Exchange server, personal email is on Gmail. I switched to iCloud for personal calendar/tasks when I got the iPhone 4S last fall to make it easier to stay in sync with my family. I backup data to iCloud. I long gave up on iTunes for podcasts and now love Instacast. When I got the iPad yesterday I subscribed to iTunes Match to sync up music that was on my computer, and PhotoSync dealt with the images. No reason to hitch to a computer. Yes, if I have to restore it will take much longer, but I can live with that.

I’m considering going to NTC next month without schlepping the heavy-ish Lenovo ThinkPad Convio gave me. Thanks to a Zendesk app and a couple of Salesforce apps I can probably deal if a work issue pops up while I’m away. I’m looking forward to going to a conference and not living power outlet to power outlet. My MacBook battery now gets about 90 minutes at best on a full charge and I didn’t want to buy a new battery if I could help it.

I’m beginning to get why Apple is all about the unification of the user interface.

I don’t think I spent more than 2 hours total on an iPad before yesterday. Yet because of my years of iPhone experience, I was able to use muscle memory to know exactly what I was doing right away. Feels natural. Special to the iPad, I am already loving using 4 fingers instead of the home button to move around and switch between apps. I caught myself doing it on the iPhone this morning. I’m also surprising myself how fast I can type on the virtual keyboard.

I have to admit, I was disappointed when I saw how iOS the next version of Mac OS will be. That was a big reason why I thought it was time to go all-in on the iPad. If the future of the Mac experience is going to be iOS across the board, I might as well use the device that uses the operating system best. I still think Apple is doing a huge disservice to the Mac by not taking advantage of what makes it worth using a device that can multitask in multiple windows and has a separate input device, but I guess that won’t be something I have to worry about. I guess I believe Apple now when they say that’s all my desktop or laptop computer is…a device. I can take it away, and it doesn’t make that much difference. I didn’t appreciate just how easy and seamless it can be until I had both an iPad and an iPhone. I hope it always works as reliably as it has the past 24 hours.

We gave both our daughters iPads as Bat Mitzvah presents. Kid #1 got her 1st generation iPad in 2009 (still going strong). Kid #2 got her 2nd generation model last year. I’ve written before how helpful I think it’s been for them. Mom and Dad both got 3rd generation iPads yesterday. I said to kid #1 (who has high-functioning autism), “Four iPads in one house, three different models. How many families can say that?” Her response: “Only the really geeky ones, Mom.”

Nonprofit Salesforce Practitioners (NPSF) is a 6 year-old Google Group now with over 1700 members, averaging around 300 messages a month. I’ve been co-moderator of the group since 2009. Only requirement for membership is that you have a connection in some way to nonprofits using Salesforce. User, administrator, vendor, consultant. Doesn’t matter. Even though I work for Convio, Common Ground gets no special treatment. The group is completely independent. It’s a fantastic, friendly group so my co-moderator duties are mostly around approving join requests by new members. We have the group set so topics are public, but only members can post and membership has to be approved to avoid spam.

About a year ago I stopped getting moderator email…to a @gmail.com address, no less. I still get email for other groups, just not NPSF. I looked in every setting. I filled out a form reporting a problem. Nothing. Google is switching Groups to a new user interface, which frankly I do not like. Every time I log in to the old interface to accept new users I was nagged in a bar at the top to switch to the new UI. Yesterday, I clicked the link in the bar thinking it would take me to an information page but in fact brought me to the new UI. Big. Mistake.

While in the new UI I noticed a setting along the lines of “opt-in to receive email from Google about Google Groups.” Thinking this might solve my email issue, I changed the “No” to “Yes” and hit Save. Big. Mistake.

On my next click I was locked out of the group!

I switched back to old UI. No difference. When I tried to access the group from any link, I was told I was not a member and should request entry. Everyone who was a member of NPSF saw this. Email to the group worked somewhat. And the group was still listed under members’ “My Groups” but the group itself was inaccessible. Clearly, this was something that could only be fixed behind-the-scenes by a real, live human.

I started looking for the Report Problem link or the Groups user-to-user forum to get some attention on this. Nothing. Gone. Just a bunch of lame troubleshooting articles that I couldn’t use because they all required actually getting to the group. Quietly, Google removed the very last remnant of human support for the free Google Groups.

The group is fixed now. How? I sent out pleas for help on Twitter and Google+. A list member read my plight on Google+ and circled in his cousin who works for Google in a completely different area. That kind soul managed to find someone at Google who could go in and fix it.

Using social media to find someone who knows someone who may know a guy is not customer support. Google Groups is free. I get that. But I could list 100 other free services where the developers stand behind their work and will address an issue that is entirely out of the users’ control, as this was. I’m writing this post in WordPress.com, a free service. But if my blog vanished tomorrow I know I could get help directly from Automattic. Free/Freemium is a business model. It’s not an excuse.

This wasn’t just a minor inconvenience for me. This affected 1700 other people as well. Worse, I know I was able to report a problem with Google Groups directly to Google in the past and access a monitored user forum, and now that option is gone. Providing direct support for a broken service is not a feature.

Google is putting all their attention in to Google+ these days, but truth is if that disappeared tomorrow I would shrug and move on. I’ve already been burned by Android. I still use Gmail and Google Voice. The nonprofit synagogue I volunteer for uses Google Apps. I’m questioning my choices and considering alternatives. Google doesn’t care, and that bothers me too.

Must be a lot easier to build a service for millions of people when you don’t have to put that much attention into being directly accountable to users for issues with the service. Slap a “beta” on it and/or rely on the greater community to do the support work for you. Not a model I trust very much these days. Do you?

Our application, Common Ground, doesn’t have any membership functionality (yet). So when an organization wants to track membership, they need to either install another 3rd party app or add custom functionality to their Salesforce instance. Recently two different organizations wanted to track on a contact/account records the date when membership will expire based on when a membership payment was last received. The first wanted the date to be exactly one year later, the other wanted the date to be the last day of the month a year later.

In both cases, I didn’t want to advise creating any new custom objects or record types since it would make it harder for our team to provide support later. I came up with a rather simple solution that uses the brand new in Salesforce Spring ’12 cross-object workflow field update feature and just a couple of custom fields.

Start with a custom date field on the account object (ex: Membership Expiration) and a custom formula date field on the Contact that simply pulls the value from the account custom field.

We will use a cross-object workflow field update to fill in the field on the account based on the close date of an opportunity, which will then automatically be duplicated on all contacts in the account. Lost you yet? Don’t worry, it’s easier than it may sound.

Rather than create a new record type, I just added a new picklist value to the Common Ground Transaction Type field to indicate that it’s a Membership payment. We just need something in the opportunity to differentiate a membership payment from other gifts since we only want our workflow rule to fire for membership payments.

Now, the workflow rule. In this sample case, the rule will fire when the Transaction Type equals Membership and will be evaluated when the record is created or edited and didn’t meet the criteria before.

Now the fun part. Set a Field Update and tell it to update the custom date field you created on the Account. New in Spring ’12!

Select the custom date field you already created, and have it fill in a formula to set the date. In this case, this will calculate the last day of the month a year later.

DATE(YEAR(CloseDate)+1,MONTH(CloseDate)+1,1)-1

At first I was figuring out which months had 30, 31 or 28 days and figuring out how to account for leap years, etc. Then it dawned on me…just set it to the first day of the following month and then roll back a day. Tada! I love when the tricky problems are solved by simple solutions.

If you want the date to be exactly a year later, then use:

DATE(YEAR(CloseDate)+1,MONTH(CloseDate),DAY(CloseDate))

And there you have it. Update a date field from opportunity to account to contact with a single workflow rule and a couple of custom fields! (The Last Membership date field below is just a roll-up summary field)

First, let’s move the elephant aside. The people directly responsible for hiring me had no idea when they hired me. Everyone except for the folks at the very top found out on the same day, which was 2 weeks after I started. I have no idea what it means or how it will shake out. I can’t talk about it. I’ll delete any comment that even mentions it (reread the sentence that begins with “I can’t talk…”). From now until I’m told otherwise, it’s business as usual so moving on…

I was originally hired last year for the role/title of Senior Implementation Specialist on the Common Ground Programs team. After spending time with my Manager and flushing it all out, we agreed that the title didn’t quite fit. “Implementation” implies that I’ll only be working with Common Ground clients when they’re first getting started, and that couldn’t be further from reality.

Most clients don’t approach Common Ground the way I did at Fight Colorectal Cancer: knowing Salesforce and its ecosystem first. Most clients buy Common Ground as a stand-alone product that just happens to run on the Salesforce platform. It’s like getting this big, new house with all these empty rooms. Convio has put all its attention into the kitchen and bathrooms and added a heavily customized bedroom or two on to the garage. Folks can live quite comfortably that way. But look at all they’re missing out if they never touch the den, living room or the extra bedrooms on the 2nd floor? If they know nothing about the ground their house is built on? That’s where I come in. I look for the pain points (and opportunities) that clients are having on the Salesforce platform and help alleviate them. Not consulting, although I do handle a few support tickets and am working on some projects with clients directly, but systemically so it benefits the most clients at one time. It’s a bit of training, a bit of documentation, a bit of reworking processes, a bit of liaison and bridge-building internally and externally.

I still get to play a role in the larger Salesforce/nonprofit community. The big difference is that instead of bringing knowledge and connection back to one organization, I’m bringing it back to all organizations on Common Ground.

My title now? Senior Client Success Specialist, Common Ground. Much better.

It’s not even winter yet and we can poke around and see what’s coming in Salesforce’s next release, Spring ’12. I got my pre-release org yesterday and spent a few minutes exploring it. At this point, we’re flying a bit blind since the “Discover Spring ’12″ link in the corner leads to a “not found” page.

The newly revamped Salesforce Ideas is a good place to begin to explore what’s new. It has tagged ideas that are “Coming in the next release.” These are user-submitted and voted up ideas. Some are huge. And disappointing. Note that not all new things in Spring ’12 come from the Idea Exchange. There are some other things I’ve noticed right away which I’ll get to at the end.

Update: Thanks to @aognenoff for pointing out that the release notes are in the Help & Training section. Sure enough.

Let’s start at the top… Exception Reporting, also known as Outer Joins. Over 4000 users clicked the button to say this was something they wanted/needed. 9 other ideas merged into this one. Over 180 comments for years. I kind of like to call this the “raise your hand if you’re not here” report. Show me all the accounts that don’t have opportunities. Show me everyone who didn’t participate in an event. Sounds simple on the surface, apparently not so easy to do.

There’s a great 3rd party app, Apsona, that has exception reporting built in but the reports generated by the app can only be downloaded or viewed in the app. They can’t be added to a dashboard, for example. I know there are many other 3rd party applications that enhance reporting, some probably have a steep price tag.

Next there’s the ability to report on multiple children at the same time. This is very, very cool. Right now, you can report only in a parent -> child -> grand child line. There’s no parent -> sibling/sibling reporting. No show me everyone who has opened a case and made a donation. I have built a number of custom objects, most are the children of the account or contact. I continuously  run in the same wall when I can’t report on all objects related to a contact or its household at the same time.

How about Campaign inclusion reports? I have to be honest and feel a tad smug on this one. Convio Common Ground already has a rather nice campaign segmentation tool which does this kind of “Show me everyone who is in Campaign A but not in Campaign B” type work quite nicely. There are other tools/add-ons that have helped close this gap as well. This is a huge thing for nonprofits.

All of the above features/ideas are coming in the next release! At last! Paar-tay! Not so fast. This functionality will be included in a new package from Salesforce called the Analytics edition. An add-on. Additional cost. Per user, per month. Every user must play. Ouch. Perhaps in direct response to criticism I expressed on the internal MVP forum for the misleading “Coming in the next release” tag, the product manager for Analytics posted a blog explaining that these ideas while indeed coming, was coming at a price. I won’t speculate here as to what that price is, but I’ve heard rumors and suffice to say, it may be tough for smaller organizations to swallow even with the Foundation’s discount.

To me, this feels like instead of fixing the rusted pipes, Salesforce has developed a really cool, super-special brand of bottled water and they’re selling that. I get that the new Analytics package is awesome. It’s probably going to be the best business intelligence tool out there. But I’m not looking for really cool, super-special bottled water. I want to be able to go to the sink, turn the tap and drink. I want to be able to report on two objects that are siblings of each other. I want to be able to edit a report to add in an additional object without having to start over with a new report. Is that really best-of-class business intelligence?

There seems to be a trend at Salesforce lately to sell add-ons and modules rather than fix the #core…unless it’s Chatter. It’s worrying me. And I can’t help but wonder where it might lead…when the most popular idea, multiple contacts on an activity, is finally done will it be delivered in a “Contacts Edition” because it took so much to make it happen? I hope not.

Update 1/31/2012: Salesforce does the right thing and all this goodness will be included in Enterprise Edition for no additional charge.

There are some touches in Spring ’12 that are right there in the Enterprise Edition:

There’s an expansion of the cross-object workflow field update functionality. I’m bummed that I’m leaving FightCRC before this is out, because there are a few areas where this will be very helpful. Used to be that you could only update the parent object in a workflow rule if both the objects were custom. Now this functionality is improved so you can update the Account based on Opportunity. You can also update an Opportunity based on something happening on the Opportunity Product. And you can update some standard objects from changes on child objects.

There’s also a nice feature that will be part of base analytics so you can drag & drop filters in the report builder. I admit that more than once I filtered down to a field in the left hand column, only to remember that since it’s a filter, I have to click somewhere else. Nice touch, and works exactly as you would expect in the pre-release org.

You can add dates to the new dashboard filters.

The Idea Exchange says that the default view on reports should be “All Items” rather than the hated “Recently Viewed.” But I don’t see that implemented in the pre-release org yet. With the new drag & drop report filtering you’re no longer limited to just 10 items, and it’s a nice touch that filtered fields are highlighted in the field list.

Searching got a little bit of love too:

And finally, the Idea Exchange indicates that we can tell which end is up in the schema builder, but it doesn’t mention that you can now create fields right from the schema builder by dragging the field type to the object. Interesting. Still no printing though.

The most obvious difference on first login to Spring ’12 is in Social Contacts. I’m still not sold on it, mostly for reasons that my fellow-MVP Elizabeth Davidson explained on her blog. But it’s better than it was before, and since it’s social, it will likely get continuous attention.

You can now unlink a profile that was set to the wrong person. And they’ve added YouTube and Klout:

Still rather useless for finding someone with a common name since you can’t see anything other than name and avatar:

What have I missed? I’ll edit/add to this post as I find out.

I now have an iPhone 4S and my Infuse is being used by a family member who will better appreciate it. It’s a long story, but I managed to do some switcheroo’ing with the phones on my family plan in such a way that I was able to upgrade. Lesson learned. Won’t let it happen again.

I miss the larger screen on the Infuse. I miss having my Google accounts baked in so logging in with my Google account to certain apps/pages was as easy as selecting my Gmail account from a list (I have 2-step authentication turned on so logging in with my Google account is often a series of hoop jumps). Feature for feature, Android may even be a better operating system. Right now, it’s such a fragmented mess I can’t tell. iOS is mostly stable. And when it’s not, it gets fixed. That’s good enough for me for the foreseeable future. I’m done being Google’s forgotten beta tester.

Yes, it sucks that Apple has such a closed system in iOS. But the Android model replaces an undesirable system with a broken one. Agile software development (release what you got and fix it as you go) and 2 year phone contracts don’t mix when the software developers have absolutely no control over the carrier and manufacturer.

This wasn’t something I learned recently. I knew this. What I didn’t anticipate before I owned a phone running an outdated version of Android was just how much the little things would matter. Stuff that’s hard to put in to words. ZDNet’s James Kendrick probably comes as close as anyone to summing it up and he’s talking about the latest release, no less:

Ice Cream Sandwich is the best version of Android yet in my experience, but it still annoys in a lot of little ways that add up to a frustrating user experience. Google has made Android an open platform, a good thing, but there’s such a thing as being too open. Android is too open for the user’s own good. It’s as if Google set out to make sure Android app developers could have a good time by doing things however they wish. In all that touchy-feely openness, me the user is not having a good time. And the user is the only one in the ecosystem that ultimately matters.

And he’s talking about Ice Cream Sandwich…can he imagine how I felt running a brand new phone with Froyo?!?

For a model that is so open, I never felt so trapped and closed in by technology as when I owned an Android phone.

It’s not Google’s fault that the carriers and manufacturers are screwed up, but I certainly hold Google accountable. This is the world they created. If Google & Friends want to break Apple’s control and dominance over the smartphone space, then they need to come up with something that’s better, not just different.

Yesterday, something glitched on my iPhone and I couldn’t use the Messages app. It would either lock up or crash. Restarts didn’t help. So I restored the phone. 30 minutes or so, start to finish. When done, my phone was working perfectly and everything was exactly where it should be. If I still had problems, I knew I could visit a Genius. I thought about what restoring my Infuse would have been like. Since I was a good girl and didn’t root the phone, my backup program only kept data, no apps or settings. I would have had to reinstall every app. It would have taken hours and hours, with no guarantee that it would fix the problem or that I’d get everything back. Then hours of frustrating runaround as I looked for someone at AT&T or Samsung who could help. No thanks.

Why is this okay with Google? Why isn’t a fantastic user experience a priority? Enough with the features and bells and whistles. Fix. It. And then do whatever it takes to show that you care about the community you already have by making those fixes available to them.

But that’s not the way it works. When I bought an iPhone, I became Apple’s customer. When I bought a Samsung Infuse, I wasn’t Google’s customer. Any more than I’m Google’s customer when I use Gmail. On the web, the advertiser is Google’s customer but at least when Gmail innovates, I’m not left out in the cold. My experience using a phone running a version of the operating system that Google no longer cares about was of no consequence to them, even though it was on a brand new phone. And that’s kinda sad.

A few weeks after 8th grade began in September, she asked if she could start bringing it to school. My first reaction was “hell to the no!”

She kept asking. Her middle school has a SSR (silent sustained reading) policy. Students must have a reading book with them at all times. When there’s time left at the end of a period, or a delay before a program, they’re expected to be reading. If they have nothing with them to read, they’re given demerits.

Our local library is small and lacking. It was cheaper/easier for her to read her books on the iPad as iBooks or Kindle. But then in school she was complaining that she didn’t have an SSR, or she would be reading something on the iPad that she wanted to continue reading in school.

We relented and let her bring the iPad to school on a few conditions:

1. It was entirely her responsibility. If it got lost, stolen or broken there is absolutely no excuse we would accept. It would not be replaced under any circumstances. She keeps begging us to test how responsible she could be. This was her chance.
2. If I got even a single report of the iPad being used to entertain or distract there would be no second chance. It would never go back to school. There is no wifi for students in the building, and her iPad doesn’t have 3G.
3. She had to ask permission of all her teachers (they all said yes, given the conditions we already set).

Last week I visited each teacher for parent/teacher conferences of the first marking period. Her report card was excellent and one of the best of her middle school career. Only one grade below 90 – an 86 in honors math – her toughest course. Last year, she was a solid B/low A student in her academic subjects. Definite improvement this year.

Each teacher I spoke to, in between raving about what a pleasure my kid is to have in class ::kvell:: remarked that the iPad has been a positive influence on her education. She’s been taking notes and emailing her teachers when she has questions (they all say they don’t mind). She uses iStudiez Pro to keep on top of her assignments instead of the messy paper agenda. They haven’t seen one minute of her using the iPad inappropriately or carelessly. In fact, a few have recommended apps to her she should try.

Finally, when she’s home she’s texting less and using Facetime to keep in touch with her friends. Full sentences. Eye contact. Conversation. Less misunderstandings, fights and teenage drama. Yay!

I knit on and off through college and after I got married. In 2008, I found Ravelry. Knitting became an obsession in my life again and I haven’t stopped. It helps that I have a yarn store less than 10 minutes away and have a whole bunch of real-life friends who are as serious about knitting as I am.

In late 2009 I knit a pattern from the Fall 2009 issue of Knitscene magazine. As everything else I knit, I logged it in Ravelry. In the middle of knitting the project the designer, Mathew Gnagy, emailed me through Ravelry to say that there was a mistake in the printed pattern and if I gave him my email address he’d send me the correction since the magazine hadn’t printed the errata yet.

That’s what’s awesome about Ravelry. The people who make the yarn and the patterns are also members, and they can communicate with the folks who do their work and see and comment on their progress. This wasn’t the first time I had direct communication with a designer due to Ravelry.

Mathew sent me the correction. I quickly realized that the correction needed correction and Mathew and I had a nice email exchange about his pattern. He then asked me if I had ever done any sample knitting. I had not, but I expressed willingness to try.

A few weeks later he sent me a box of yarn, a very rough pattern and a full size schematic of the design. Communicating entirely through email and sending him pictures taken on my phone, I completed the sweater pieces, taking notes on stitch counts and making changes as we went along based on Mathew’s feedback. I sent the finished knit pieces back to him and he assembled them into the final garment.

Then Mathew signed a book deal with Interweave Press! Along with a number of other knitters, I signed on to knit for the book. That book is Knitting Off the Axis, available now at a bookseller near you!

In the end, I knit 4 of the sweaters photographed for the book, including the cover.

Here’s the full cover sweater (Becca):

This was actually the last of the sweaters I knit for the book. As it was late in the book prep process, time was tight. I knit the pieces for this sweater in just 5 days!

I knit Deille before beginning the book project with Mathew, so glad it was included. There’s a bunch of pretty details in this jacket that the photographs don’t accurately capture.

Next was Merielle. In the description, Mathew notes: “this design was literally turned 90 degrees on its side. I had planned a bottom-up dolman, but as i pinned together the first incarnation for a fitting, I accidentally folded one of the fronts along the center—what was once a hem became a wrist and the cable ran up the arm rather than up the front. instead of a hip-length dolman, I had a cropped jacket with a triangular silhouette. internal shaping produces the great angle of the body; a shawl collar adds warm style.” That bottom-up dolman was the first piece I knit for him. Mathew noted to me that he loved the way it looked when he accidentally pinned my pieces to his dress form in the wrong direction, and this is the evolution of that idea:

And finally, there’s Meredith. What’s most interesting about Meredith is how much of a mystery it was. I remember knitting it. I remember loving the detail at the elbow. But this was one piece where I just had to trust the process, trust the schematic and know that Mathew would make something beautiful out of what I sent back to him.

When the book came out, I had to look back through my notes to remind myself that I did  knit that sweater! Here’s an in-progress photo from the elbow detail knit in September 2010. I also remember how feathery and beautiful the Tivoli yarn is.

I’m so proud of Mathew and his success in his first book. After nearly well over a year of working together, we finally met in person for the first time this past January in New York City. Since then I’ve worked with Mathew on an afghan blanket pattern that appeared in a Knitscene magazine:

And on a sweater that is in a new “Best of” Knitscene book:

I have another sweater sitting on my lap right now that should be done in the next day or so and will hopefully be published somewhere soon (can’t say what it is or what it’s for yet).

Even when I was doing graphic design work, I preferred the production side of the process to design. I much prefer taking other people’s ideas and layouts and making them “real.” So this work allows me to do what I love (knit!) and plays to my strengths. Can I make a career out of knitting samples for designers? No. But it did help feed my yarn habit over the past couple of years.

Android is going to be a great mobile operating system. It’s improving all the time, and Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) looks promising. But I can’t get excited about a new OS that I’ll likely never touch. An iPhone purchased 3 years ago can be upgraded to the latest operating system, but an Android phone purchased 3 months ago is stuck with an evolving operating system nearly 2 complete versions behind. My phone launched in May 2011 with Android 2.2 (Froyo). I bought it in late August. An update to Gingerbread 2.3 was announced in July 2011. It never happened. It’s unlikely that this phone will get any further attention from AT&T or Samsung since the Galaxy S II is the latest darling. I feel as if I bought a brand new computer running OS X 10.1. Great promise. Buggy as heck. Very unfinished.

I knew all this going in. I knew that this was a huge complaint about Android phones that don’t have “Nexus” in their names. I didn’t realize until I started using Android day in and day out how much it would bother me. How frustrated the quirks and bugs would make me. How depressing it is to know there is no relief in sight.

My husband put it best: When my phone is working well I like it, but it’s not working well enough for me to love it. There’s still a lot I do love…just not on the whole. I love Google Maps. I love widgets. I love how quickly developers update their apps in the Market. But even they can only do so much. Case in point this email I received from a developer after reporting a bug that he earnestly tried to fix but couldn’t:

Sounds painful. I think we may have a hit a bit of a wall though, because Android is meant to handle all that routing, not our app. And to make it worse it varies per phone
So long story short I’m not entirely sure what we can do to help you out…in some ways this is why I prefer coding for iOS, so much simpler from a developer point of view.

When I go back to iPhone it will be one of the first apps I get, if for no other reason than to support the developer.

I love how integrated Google services are (duh). But the bugs. So many bugs. Apps that start and stop at random times. Inconsistent wifi and bluetooth. I try and use voice control to “Call (person) mobile” when (person) is in my address book and the phone searches and dials a pizzeria in Idaho. I could go on.

My phone is not rooted. I only install apps that are well-known/popular. I keep my caches as clean as I can. Yet I am rebooting the phone way too often to solve various software ills. Sometimes by force (removing the battery) due to hard freezes that are unrecoverable. I’ve already exchanged the phone once due to a bad antenna. I’ve had enough and it’s only 3 months in.

I don’t think I’m going to make it to 2013. I had a nice little chat with AT&T today about my options. I’m waiting for someone further up the chain to call me back to see if they will grant me an extra early upgrade due to my long history with AT&T. In 10+ years with Cingular and then AT&T I have never played this card before. I’ve always completed my contracts. At first I was offered an early upgrade to any phone but an iPhone. I couldn’t even buy a no-contract phone. I didn’t accept that. Sure, I can get the Galaxy SII which at least has the hope of getting the latest OS at some point. But then 3 months later something shinier will come along and that will be that. I’ll be stuck with the bugs that still exist in Ice Cream Sandwich, just as I’m stuck with Froyo’s quirks now. Not sure I’m willing to go down that hole again. I am so frustrated that I’m almost willing to break my contract and start over…but if I did that, I assured her that my replacement iPhone wouldn’t be on AT&T. Her supervisor seemed willing to allow the override, but apparently it has to be escalated and now I wait for a decision. The woman I spoke to, Micky, was wonderful. Very understanding and friendly and willing to do what she could to resolve this. I’m sure I’m not the first, nor the last, frustrated Infuse owner she has spoken to.

For my friends who also leaped from iPhone to Android…are you happy? What am I missing? And yes, I know there are tons of folks who love Android and don’t have any of the issues I’m having. I’m sure I’ll hear from all of you in the comments too.