Sunday, June 28, 2009

Excellent Customer Service at Adafruit

I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but I just haven't gotten around to it. Well, that ends now! The time has come!

A little over a month ago, I ordered a couple of kits from Adafruit Industries. When the box arrived at my doorstep, it seemed a little too small. Once I opened the package, my fears were confirmed: they had only included one of the two kits.

I typed up a quick email to customer support that night, and figured I'd hear back in a few days time. After all, they are a small company (I think they are small. I don't really know.). The next morning, I was surprised to find this email in my mailbox:

hi daniel -

that's odd - we're going to send out a starter pack immediately - and
we will check the order to see what happened.

cheers,
adafruit

That email was sent at 3:03AM. They immediately sent out the second kit. It arrived a couple of days later.

I was surprised and pleased with their customer service. They didn't question my claim, didn't beat around the bush, and didn't make me wait. They corrected their mistake as quickly as they could. Adafruit Industries is a top-class outfit. I will be ordering (many things) from them in the future.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Arduino librxtxserial.jnilib on MacOS

After re-installing MacOS from scratch, I found that I was having problems launching Arduino. I got the following error:

In order to solve this, I followed the instructions at rancidbacon.com. The solution was to use Finder to configure the application to launch in 32-bit mode. I quickly looked to see if I could modify the Info.plist file to enforce this behavior, but I don't see any way to do that.

Another solution from technobabble is to replace the library inside the Arduino app bundle with a 1.6 compatible version.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Quick, Over There!

I'm going to try to continue posting stuff here, but it's worth mentioning that I will also be posting over at the Gents with Beards blog. Anything related to the iPhone will go there (though I will make brief mention of it here). Anything else might go there, might come here, or might get cross-posted.

I made a couple of posts so far, related to my experiences with OpenAL in the iPhone Simulator and differences in the Initial Developer Experience between iPhone and Android. I hope to write one or two about Git, and who knows what after that.