Apple’s daily Knowledge Base changes digest
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshMarch 22nd, 2004 • 11:18 pm
I recently subscribed to Apple’s free daily Knowledge Base changes e-mail digest.
On the whole, the service is useful. It sends you a daily digest of all the changes in the Support area on Apple’s web site, including links to software updates, new or updated Knowledge Base articles, etc.
There are a few problems with the service, however. First of all, it is quite frequent that, on a given day, there aren’t any updates. Instead of simply sending a short messsage saying “No updates today”, Apple sends a full-blown digest, with the header information, etc. — except that the relevant sections are empty. In order to see that they are empty, however, you need to scroll down the message, because, even on a large monitor, the visible portion of the digest that you can see when you first open the message doesn’t include the table of contents, which is lower down. It’s a minor annoyance, but it would be nice if Apple could include a simple “No updates today” message at the very top of the digest or, better yet, in the subject line of the digest message itself.
The second problem is that, when there are updates, they tend to be mentioned twice, two days in a row, as if they had be added to the Knowledge Base on, say, Tuesday, and then changed again on the Wednesday immediately after. This is, of course, not true. The changes only took place once. But for some reason they are featured twice in a row in the daily digest — which is again misleading for someone who’s simply trying to keep track of changes in the most efficient fashion. (I don’t need to be told twice about the changes, thank you very much.)
Finally, today, the digest mentioned the following:
New and Updated Knowledge Base Documents ========================================= Mac OS X Server 10.3: Get the Latest Documentation <http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n107912>
The problem is that, if you follow the link, you’ll see that the page doesn’t exist. Slightly problematic.
All this is a bit too amateurish for my tastes.