Apple Nag

With your one billionth download, I started to think about the apps I have installed on my iPod Touch. I was somewhat startled to realize that I had 50 apps, yet I only paid for one $1 app — and I don’t use it anymore because a better free one became available. That works out to an average of two cents per app.

I’m known to be notoriously cheap — er, frugal, yeah that’s what I mean. But even so, you would think that the legions of app developers would be able to convince me to part with more money.

Games are not my thing, so even though I have several free games installed, I hardly play any of them. I certainly won’t pay for something I don’t use. Games are hot on the app store.

After some introspection I believe I have the answer. I don’t like your policies.

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[Psst! I'm going to talk about Twitter later. Makes it all worth reading, huh?

Will you ever resurrect the concept of Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) for your desktop computers? I can understand if you don’t want to go down that path again given what happened with the aborted GeoPort Telecom Adaptor. That didn’t work out too good for you, did it?

Many people these days don’t even have a land line connected telephone, instead relying on their mobile phones. I’m not going to get into the pros and cons of each, but I’m just musing about what could have been.

Currently, you’re so hostile towards CTI that you don’t even allow the Address Book application to dial using your USB modem.

And nobody is ever going to accuse you of embracing faxing. While there is support in OS X for both sending and receiving faxes, it’s so poor as to be less of a hobby than the stepchild Apple TV. Although, the sooner faxes become a forgotten technology, the better. I despise faxing.

But there’s a lot more to CTI than dialing out and faxing.

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That’s the new name I’m going to use when a background application “brings up” its windows and “spews” them all over the windows for the foreground application. It conjures up visions of projectile vomiting, which is how disruptive this action is.

Now if only there was some preference Pepto-Bismol to prevent this behaviour and settle the background app down.

For the history, see this post.

Was it all the way back in 2002 that you guys first starting talking about the Digital Hub. That’s seven, count ‘em, years ago. When do you think we’ll see it come to fruition?

You have made steps, for sure, because we’ve got Macs, iPods, iPhones, Apple TV, and a monitor or two. That covers desktop and mobile computing.

There’s iLife and MobileMe to tie the hardware together giving us personal web site creation, photos, home movies, the ability to burn DVDs (those old fossils), and to share content with our family, friends, and the world on the Internet.

iTunes is a big part of the integration for music, movies, TV shows, podcasts and syncing to the other devices like iPods and Apple TV. In many ways, the features are targeted at making you more money than what’s best for your customers (don’t get me started on the 2G Shuffle and iTunes 8.1 fiasco).

It sure looks like you’ve got a hub strategy. Yet, you don’t promote the hub concept anymore. Is that because it would handcuff you into implementing features that would be detrimental to maximizing your profit margin?

Let’s talk about the rough edges and one huge group of people you’ve left out — family.

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It’s been a few days since I was last motivated to nag you about the latest flaw in your various products. Oh, I’m still experiencing things I’ve previously blogged about, including some new minor things like my iPod Touch failing to connect and sync this morning. That’s the first time it did that so it wasn’t worthy of a separate post.

I’m just wondering if I’ve reached the state of saturation that I don’t even see the problems anymore, or I’m getting senile.

But, I was wondering about something. Remember that whole digital hub thing Steve was talking about — how many MacWorld keynotes ago? When do you think you’ll get around to implementing it? Now that’s worthy of a special post.

I know you’d prefer me to call the iTunes Store pricing changes to music as variable pricing, but I’m just calling it as I see it — a price increase.

When you said that the price decreases would offset the price increases, I didn’t believe it for a second. Why? Anybody who has renovated their home and listened to their contractor’s price quotes knows what that really means. The price is going up.

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The more I use my Apple TV, the more I wish you’d stop treating it as a hobby and go pro. I mean, I’d be paying the same price regardless, right?

iTunes decided it couldn’t sync with my Apple TV because it could not connect. But wait, why was it still in the sidebar then? Was there some delay in realizing it had lost touch with the Apple TV? If so, then why wasn’t the device removed from the list as soon as it realized it couldn’t connect after I asked it to sync?

The first step was to quit iTunes and relaunch. The iTunes menu bar remained even though the Dock said the app had quit. Sigh.

After relaunching, the Apple TV showed up in the list of devices, but still wouldn’t sync. I guess that means I’d have to reboot the Apple TV.

Now this is where I get annoyed.

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Yet another iPhoto post about the rough edges I’m seeing in what should be a mature application.

I’m not a professional photographer so I’m content to use the image enhancement options within iPhoto plus a few manual tweaks to get things to look the way I want them. I do appreciate that iPhoto keeps the original images allowing me to undo my latest mess. I also make judicious use of the Undo function. Sometimes because I don’t like my changes, other times to compensate for a serious iPhoto bug.

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I’m continuing to import my old 35 mm slides into iPhoto with backups to flickr.com. While I’m glad to see you have some flickr integration, the experience leaves me a little cold. Turn up the flame, will ya?

True integration would mean that iPhoto would tell me what images are backed up on each service, MobileMe, flickr, or Facebook and direct links to those photos. If I don’t back up the images immediately after taking them, then I’m left with wondering which ones I have left to do. I trudge on over to flickr and hunt through the sets trying to see if the image I’m interested was backed up the last session. Tedious and unproductive.

I made the mistake of selecting a couple of events to back up in one go. iPhoto decided what I really wanted to do was create a single set for both events. Perhaps that’s a reasonable presumption, although iPhoto albums are more like flickr sets. But, it did come as a surprise to me.

No problemo, I’ll just stop the upload and do one set at a time. Groan! You don’t provide any way to stop an upload once it starts. No Cancel button and even command-. doesn’t work. Considering that my photos are largish and I’m uploading quite a few and I might have been connected on a slow link, don’t you think that your customers might just want to stop and continue that operation later?

Once again, you aren’t considering the use cases that people will follow using iPhoto.

Here’s another bad user interface design — iPhoto doesn’t remember the privacy settings and photo size from the last upload. It’s a pretty reasonable assumption that if I uploaded some photos to be viewable only to family and friends and that I wanted the original size, that I’d pretty much want the same settings next time.

Well, if iPhoto couldn’t remember the settings at least it chose the best possible privacy option by making the default viewable only by me. Not much comfort.

Once the uploading completes, I want to go back to where I was, but you provide no option. I have to click on Events in the Library on the sidebar and find the event I just uploaded so I can upload the next one. Grrr.

I was about to write up a blog post wondering why iTunes didn’t show any content for the Apple TV in the sidebar like I was experiencing yesterday. I was suspecting it would only show purchased content. Today, I go to get the screen capture and wouldn’t you know it, it’s all listed there — both purchased and private content. Sigh.

You know, surprises may be nice in a personal relationship, but not between a man and his computer.