If you're getting ready to get into the wonderful world of WiFi (and it is wonderful), you might want to avoid pulling the trigger on one of those new Airport Extreme base stations, huge numbers of people are reporting problems. But actually, this gripe is about the Apple “Knowledge Base” and about such things in general.
As for Airport Extreme, the hint in that thread above about telling OS X to look for a specific network might be the ticket, my WiFi has been solid for about six hours now, which beats the previous record by a factor of six. I'll report back on whether it stays solid, because when it's working, this is one sweet network setup.
Before I ran across that discussion group (via Google, natch) I
wasted invested some time in the
Knowledge Base, which is both
wonderful and maddening.
There is some huge number of helpful little hints in there, I'm pretty sure
that they've got the poop on anything that's going to wrong with my computer.
But, much like the equivalent offering over at microsoft.com, the navigation
is horrible.
The search engine is slow, the result lists are confusing, and the “browse” offers one (count 'em, one!) level of drill-down before dumping you into a long page densely packed with tiny tastefully-grey sans-serif text overloaded with default-decoration hyperlinks. What makes this maddening is that if you squint your eyes and lean forward and actually plow through some of this stuff, you discover that there's useful content there.
It is poor comfort that Apple is still better than most of the competition.
I founded Antarctica in 1999 based on the premise that all Web apps are starting to look like all other Web apps, and there had to be better ways to navigate information than what we have now, which is either a search-window/result-list or a dense text directory inspired by Yahoo circa 1994. I haven't seen anything to make me change my mind.
I'll have to dig around and find the right person at Apple to sic our Sales VP on.
