Software

The Vanquis App Disaster

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It is not clear what has happened with the Vanquis app and they are certainly not going to admit to anything untoward. I have an image of a disgruntled employee handing in their notice and hitting the delete button on the way out. Whatever it is it is amusing to sit back and watch; but I have a zero balance – it will be considerably less amusing and more frustrating for users who actually need to use the app to make payments etc.

The average banking type app gets four or five reviews a day. The Vanquis app gets around fifty five star reviews every day. These are clearly fake reviews and are there to drown out the one star reviews from frustrated users. Several of the one star actual users have commented on the fake reviews and ask that they be reported to Apple. I have done so but what Apple could or would do remains to be seen. Who would not take time out of their day to say something was “Easy to use”?

Fake five star reviews of the Vanquis app

Well Mr Christopher Johnson (or the less than BrillentAJ) for one and anyone else who was not be paid to do so. Of course there will be the inevitable glitch and user 260446 failed to read the instructions and gave their “Easy to use” review a one star rating.

Mostly real one star reviews of the Vanquis app.

Although the app (and web site) was broken before the recent update to iOS 16 many users noticed it after updating and so attributed the malfunctioning to the iOS update but there is a wave of frustrated users on Android devices too which suggests the problem is systemic at the Vanquis end rather than on individual devices.

Android reviews of the Vanquis app

But, let us whisper it, the Internet was not designed to do any of this stuff and so you have layers of complexity added to it to give the illusion of usability and security when a peak behind the curtain reveals the whole thing is cobbled together with bits of string and blu-tack and can start to fall apart at any moment. That message from your bank about their online services not being available overnight due to important maintenance should say “we have found yet another hole large enough to drive a bus through and are frantically trying to patch it before anyone notices”.

At least it is not as bad as all the crypto/web 3 nonsense. Even Safe Hands Sunak could not resist joining the imbecilic gold rush.

Farewell Minecraft

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I don’t play games much but I have had a Minecraft account for many years without any problems. After Microsoft took over Minecraft I put off moving to a Microsoft account for as long as possible – fearing the worse. Once the day came and they insisted I moved to the dark side it was as bad as it could possibly be. Anyone else would just move the Minecraft account details but being Microsoft to get from A to B you have to go via C and F having ticked boxes D and E on the way.

Having successfully moved the account I did manage to use it once. But attempting to log in to the new account today for the second time I am greeted by:

To which the obvious solution is to give up, close the account and move on vowing never to touch anything bearing the Microsoft name again. But this is Microsoft so even closing the account becomes a labyrinthian chore which is going to take some time.

It is the inability to access the account as usual which is the problem. But this being Microsoft they are able to utilise their full computing power and will get back to you in thirty days. Bizarre.

Restoring sounds to the iPad via memory lane.

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I was confused as to why the iPad would play music and the sound on videos but fell silent while playing games. I eventually realised it was in Silent Mode. Swipe down from the top right corner to open the Control Centre and tap the Bell icon to toggle Silent Mode on and off.

Best of all – this also restored sound to the wonderful SoundForest app which had been silent for a while. Created by Justin Alexander it seems to have been abandoned but still functions on the latest devices.

Many (many!) years ago I wrote a little thing for the Amiga called Beat Sheets which triggered brief sound samples. It was part of a series I created for children called Kids Disk, which were distributed on floppy discs for free from Public Domain libraries via snail mail. It was written with AMOS, which was pretty fancy for the time, probably in 512 kilobytes of memory. I did add a hard drive to the Amiga at some point which added 20 megabytes of storage – which I described at the time as “like having a vast empty warehouse to store stuff”; for context the SoundForest video below is 155 megabytes.

Lo and behold (isn’t the Internet wonderful?) someone had a video of Beat Sheets in action which they seemed to be running in an Amiga emulator…

Beat Sheets on the Amiga 1993

Fast forward several decades and SoundForest is a far more sophisticated app, downloaded from the App Store and running on a hand held device with a terabyte of memory. It follows the same idea of tapping sound samples into a grid. You can extend your song by swiping to the left for a fresh sheet. Tapping the top bar stops and starts the player and double tapping changes the speed. Different sounds are available in the various environments – jungle, desert, ocean etc. Great fun.

The Reset

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Over the years the old Mac had become such a tangled mess (the oldest file dates back to 2009) and iCloud Drive had become inaccessible from the Finder which insisted I needed to log in although everywhere else insisted I was logged in, and everything was working normally, but System Preferences refused to let me log out. Having tried killing birds and all manner of Terminal artfulness which failed to change anything I decided to just set up a new account and move into that. Alas this meant finding all the Serial numbers/licences for a lot of apps etc. Most seem to working now but I am sure something will turn up and refuse to work. Have made a fresh Time Machine and will try and keeps things better organised until the new iMac’s arrive.

Have reduced the web site to a minimalist HTML site because that is all it needs to be. Yes you could make a case for a little CSS design but we will live with it for a while. Have removed the Indie Web stuff from this blog as I was not using it and had no real interest in doing so; similarly the link to micro.blog is gone as I do not do the social/interaction thing so derived nothing from it – as excellent as these projects are and worth supporting if that is your thing. At some point I will develop my own theme for this blog.

Onwards.