I Love Dreamweaver, Except When It Acts Crappy

Macromedia... er... Adobe Dreamweaver is one program I use almost every single day. Aside from Firefox, it is my most-used application. I love it.

Except when it acts crappy.

In the many years I've used Dreamweaver, there have been some encounters with craposity. Usually, this occurs when I've upgrade to a new version -- which I do with religious fervor. Most recently, I upgraded to version CS3 and I ran into this bit of crap today:


The only thing more crappy than software misbehaving is misbehaving software that gives you utterly unhelpful error messages.

"An error occurred"? Oh, thank you so much for that news flash, Adobe Dreamweaver CS3! Could you possibly give me a clue as to why?

Dreamweaver threw this error when I tried to use its Web photo album (Javascript) command. Unfortunately, the photo album is something I use frequently and so I cannot just ignore the problem and hope it'll go away. So far I have found nothing useful through Google or the Adobe support site. The only suggestion that seems remotely helpful is to completely re-install DW and Fireworks (which DW uses to generate the photo album).

This is a royal pain the ass because the Adobe Creative Suite 3 installation -- of which DW and FW are components -- is painfully slow. I mean, it took something like 2 hours for me to install it initially. Plus, it forces you to close all Web browsers while you're installing it. So, your computer is essentially useless while it's churning along.

Man! What a piece of crap!

Update 8/30/07: In desperation, I tried the uninstall/reinstall method. Took about half an hour to uninstall DW and FW. I don't know for sure because I started it going in my office and then went home for the day. The next day, I began the reinstallation. Timed it. Clocked in at 45 minutes. Sheesh.

But, of course, the big question is, Did it fix the problem?

Answer: nope.

I guess it's time to give up on this function of Dreamweaver. Yesterday, I experimented with Photoshop's Web albums. They work just fine. I'll start using them instead of DW's.

This makes me suspicious. Is Adobe sabotaging a formerly Macromedia product? Are they making DW and FW buggy so that users will shift over to Photoshop? Do they just not care about fixing DW/FW issues?

Or am I just being paranoid?

Are Tankless Water Heaters Crap?

We recently had a Rinnai water heater installed at our home--at a cost of $2,600 (considerably more than a conventional water heater). It's a tankless heater, which means that instead of constantly keeping a tank of hot water at the ready, it virtually instantaneously heats water when a request for hot water is made.

The principle is a great one and Marysia is quite familiar with their use in Poland where, as in much of Europe, they are quite common. They conserve one's use of natural gas as the gas only runs on demand. It doesn't needless heat hot water when hot water is not being used. They're so green that they qualify for a $300 tax credit.

It all sounds great, right? So, what's the problem? Well sir, the reason these heaters are possibly crap is their minimum water-flow rate. ...

To read the remainder of this post and the 17 annoyed comments made on it, please go to the new location for the Crappy Software blog:

http://crappysoftware.tvcrit.com/?p=52

Crappy Aspects of the iPhone

A couple of weeks ago, I reluctantly acquired an iPhone.

My wife and I were forced into a new phone purchase by AT&T (ah yes, the return of a monopoly!), which discontinued the TDMA service and killed off our old phone. We were perfectly happy with it and with the super-low $30 plan we were on, but AT&T (the former Cingular) required us to both buy a new phone and, if we were to stay with them, "upgrade" to a plan that cost more money and suited us less.

But that's a post for another Crappy Software day. What I want to chronicle today is the iPhone's shortcomings. Actually, for the most part, I'd say the iPhone is filled with longcomings or shortgoings, or whatever the opposite of shortcomings might be. I'm 75% pleased with it, but that remaining 25% is driving me a little crazy.

25% iPhone Crap:

The biggest iPhone failings are in the Department of The iPhone as a PDA Replacement:

1. On Windows, the iPhone calendar only syncs with Microsoft Outlook.
2. There is no task manager, and thus no task manager to sync with a desktop application.
3. There is no password manager.

I absolutely hate MS Outlook and I've managed to avoid using it for many years. I do not want to start now. So, I've tried to get around this by using Google Calendar, then syncing it with Outlook using Remote Calendars and then syncing Outlook with the iPhone. Outlook thus becomes a mere conduit between Google and the iPhone. I should've known such a bass-ackwards workaround was doomed, but instead I invested about five hours futilely trying to get this to work. I'm sure Remote Calendars is a very fine open-source project and it's probably Outlook's fault, but RC kept crashing and stalling out and giving me odd errors such as "startindex cannot be less than zero." Huh?

So I'm stuck. No suitable, acceptable desktop calendar app which which to sync my iPhone.

And Apple, how hard would it be to come up with a task manager? In this respect, I guess I'll have to go with a Web-based manager. Remember the Milk looks promising, but I'm not ready to fully commit to it.

I'm already sorely missing a password manager. I've seen some Web-based solutions proposed for this, but I don't feel comfortable trusting my most-secret passwords to some online service. It looks like I may have to keep using my Palm PDA solely for this purpose. I've got a great password manager on that: SplashID. Oh, if only it were ported to the iPhone!