The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s David Chartier posted a ‘handy little app can help you make molehills out of mountains and start managing your time again’ today and caused the Macintosh community to plummet into some crap-tastic situations. It seems that the program contained somewhat malicious code – technically no problem. However, when one of the bloggers on a widely read Apple Macintosh weblog posts the program, recommends it and does not even feel the need to REALLY test it, that’s when you have a problem. Procrastinatr caused a deletion of iCal calendars and consequently freaked a whole lot of users out. Here are some comments:
Dammit! This is sure way to **** up your iCal events! I’ll admit I (stupidly) trust software downloads/mentions from TUAW… last time ever.
You TUAW bloggers are getting lazy and sloppy. You grab anything that looks like “news” and post it without even testing it.
Downloaded it because I trust TUAW. It totally f*cked up my iCal. I’m extremely angry!
yet another example of some fine blogging.
and to think that in previous posts, people actually commented to defend the “integrity” of this site.
All right. I am very disappointed at what seems to be the downfall of a once-great blog. TUAW’s quality has consistently gone down for a couple of months now and as a matter of fact, Eli and I were just talking about how TUAW sucks a couple of weeks ago.
As a consequence, I will no longer be reading TUAW.
Additionally, we as Mac users are proud of our platform’s supposed immunity to a lot of the crap that’s floating out there for the Windows world. Unfortunately, however, we rely on (formerly) cool Macintosh blogs that recommend that most helpful, coolest applications out there. TUAW has failed its readers today. I also think that TUAW is somewhat indicative of the ‘new’ generation of Macintosh users . . .
Before you start bitching about someone else not checking their facts, it might be a good idea to check your own.
I tested the app. I ran it myself. I explained it at least two if not three times between this post and another explaining what happened, and even helping one reader provide a fix that reset everything back to normal.
Because of a really strange and unique circumstance (all of my iCal calendars were read-only Google Calendar subscriptions) this app couldn’t do anything to me, so I didn’t notice any mishaps. It appeared to simply start up iCal as a gag, kind of like countless apps before that do similar things for a laugh, like the one that promises to install cupholders on your PC. This app was also forwarded across a couple of email lists that I’m on, which was another flag that said it was ok; other human beings had tested it.
It was an honest mistake, and we moved quickly to clean it up. Here’s hoping you aren’t as quickly judged in the future if you ever *gasp* make a mistake.