Betalogue

A few weeks ago, Apple revamped their Apple Developer Connection web site and affiliated services. I have nothing against a good revamp.

But then they also decided to revamp their e-mail services, including the ADC News e-mail that gets sent out regularly.

Somewhat predictably (unfortunately), someone at Apple decided that HTML e-mail was a good idea, so they decided to start sending out the ADC News e-mail in HTML format. They did include an option to continue to receive the ADC News e-mail as plain text, however, so I went to my preferences page and changed the setting to plain text.

The next issue came to me in plain text alright, but unfortunately the entire body of the message was hard wrapped (which is normal) with double return characters after each line (which is not normal).

After struggling for a while to find a place on the ADC web site to send feedback, I finally found the address and sent a e-mail complaining about the issue. I simply said: “I am subscribed to your newsletter as plain text, but since you’ve ‘upgraded’ the system a couple of weeks ago, all the plain text e-mails I get from you have double returns between each line of text. Very annoying.” Here’s the answer I got:

Re: Receiving Bi-Weekly ADC News – Plain Text vs HTML

Hello Pierre,

Thank you for contacting the Apple Developer Connection regarding ADC News.

We appreciate you taking the time to send us your comments. Please be assured that your feedback has been passed onto the appropriate Apple team.

For future reference, if you would like to change your ADC News delivery preferences, you can do so by logging in to your ADC membership as follows:
– Log in at .
– Select “Profile” from the Members Areas.
– Select “Preferences” from the “Profile” area.
– Click on the Check Box next to ‘Send me ADC News’ and populate HTML or Plain Text.

We hope that this information is useful to you. Please let us know if you have any questions or need further assistance.

Best regards,

Clearly someone at Apple thinks that software developers are rather dumb people. My first sentence was “I am subscribed to your newsletter as plain text“!

I sent a reply asking, “Is this your not-so-subtle way of saying you won’t fix the problem? :-)“. And I got the following reply:

Re: ADC News

Hello Pierre,

Thank you for your follow up email.

We appreciate that you have taken the time to alert us to this issue. Please be assured that all of your comments have been forwarded to the appropriate Apple systems team for their review.

If you continue to experience this issue please let us know.

Best regards,

I am afraid that, at this point, I lack the courage to try and make this person understand plain English. It is obviously beyond me.

Needless to say, I have since received two more regular ADC News e-mails, and they still both have the same problem.

This double return issue probably has to do with the fact that line feed/carriage return conventions vary from platform to platform (PC, Unix, Mac) and that at some point the new ADC News e-mail newsletter goes through a system that misinterprets redundant LF/CR combinations as double returns.

Well, I don’t know what else I can do about this. Start a petition?

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Friday, March 25th, 2005 at 1:25 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.