A trip to Argos later and we were back at the house installing on the kitchen iMac. After 10 minutes or so the install was complete and we were ready to fire it up for the first time. Unfortunately when the game tried to contact EA’s licence servers it failed for some reason and just displayed an error message asking us to try again in a short while ! Ben was gutted as you would expect…

Over on the EA Forums for Spore I found a number of threads complaining about Internet servers ( authentication and licence ) being under capacity and failing to allow excited new owners to play. While we “waited a while” I decided to check a few other options to make sure the error was valid. Ben’s account on the iMac is setup as a Standard User ( not an Administrator ) and additionally has Parental Controls switched on. As a test I logged in as Admin, switched Parental Controls off and made Ben an Administrator then switched back to Bens account and tried again.

Hey presto, connection went through straight away and Ben was able to get down to the serious business of “evolving”.

A minor frustration and one I am routinely faced with in the world of Microsoft where the vast majority of consumer applications appear to require that the user is a machine administrator to run them, but not something I have come across in the last 4-5 years I have been a Mac user. I suppose it is fair to say that this is the first commercial game I have bought for a Mac which is a shame as it may well put me off buying further titles ( especially from EA ).

You would think that after 7 years of development a simple bug like this would have been spotted wouldn’t you?

It looks to me like a slightly elongated Gen 2 Nano, which I think is really odd. Are they saying that the Gen 3 Nano design was a mistake ? Clearly the form factor of the Nano is constrained to a certain extent by the sceen dimensions, and I suppose if the associated announcement of HD video content from the iTunes Store also materialises then this would probably be a factor in the selection of a wide screen format display for the new Nanos.

Still it just seems odd to me, not that I doubt the authenticity of Kevin Roses’ sources which seem to have been fairly widely acknowledged as genuine.

Personally I hope they are wrong. Part of the buzz around all of Jobs keynote speeches is always that “One More Thing” moment right at the end and the events where this doesn’t happen are extremely disappointing.

What do you think ? Big shock or damp squib ?

Presumably all the Twitter community who follow John had decided to have a look at my link as well resulting in lots of traffic and comments to this article. To be honest I have had a Twitter account for some time and have only really dabbled with it. I never expected that it could be used to drive traffic to a web site in this sort of way.

I suppose it just shows that social networks are immensely powerful tools for marketing and viral spread of information. It has certainly made me think about Twitter in a whole new light.

UPDATE : It seems on further examination that the traffic is coming from Johns very popular website http://daringfireball.net and not Twitter as I first thought. Still I guess I wuoldnt have got the link from John if I hadn’t posted on Twitter so it amounts to the same result in the end. If anything in fact the result is better, Johns site has more stiction than Twitter ( it will be around longer ) so hopefully will be more beneficial long term.

FURTHER UPDATE : Word is spreading. After DaringFireball.net linked to me Ars Technica have now picked it up and run a post in the Infinite Loop ! All in one day… Wow.

It has been reported all over the rumour sites that there will be a new Nano and possible significant drops in the price of the iPod Touch. Earlier rumours of an all you can eat iTunes subscription service launch have been played down over the last week or so and it is now not expected to be on the cards for next weeks show.

Should be interesting what ever happens.

There had to be something wrong and looking around the forums I found a number of others reporting similar problems but none of the suggested solutions appeared to work. These ranged from removing all the installed apps, then reinstalling one by one to a range of what appeared to be mumbo jumbo approaches. Suffice to say I either didn’t try them or they didn’t work. Then the other night I noticed one comment in a thread ( which I can’t now recall ) that mentioned USB hubs possibly being at fault.

Now my iPod is normally plugged into a Belkin USB hub which has always worked fine so I really didn’t see this being a solution, but as the proposed solution ( plugging direct into my iMac USB ports ) was not a major effort I thought I would try it. Revelation ! Sync completed in about 5 minutes….

Now quite why this should fix the problem I am not clear but solve it it certainly did. If you are having problems with iPod Touch/iPhone synching performance, try this ( if you are using an external USB hub ). If it fixes your problems I would love to know.

Cheers

Cheers

It actually sounds more complicated than it is. Download the application and try it, it is FREE after all.