Apple Nag

What’s up with trying to disable Palm Pre syncing with iTunes? Are you guys so afraid of Palm and their miniscule market that you’re willing to expend programmer resources to try to block the Pre?

When I was managing software developers I made it clear that I didn’t mind if they put Easter eggs into the code as long as they wouldn’t damage the company’s reputation when they were discovered or leaked. A bit of humour is good for the soul and can make a monolithic company a bit more human.

But there was one caveat. If there were anything other than cosmetic bugs in the code, or if we missed a deadline, I was going to be P.O.ed about them wasting development time on fun when the serious business of robust code or meeting commitments was getting the short end of the stick. There’s a bit more to this discussion, but I don’t want to digress any more.

My question to you is this — why are you directing effort at the Pre when you have so many defects in iTunes and syncing with iPods, particularly my 2G Shuffle? Just look at your own support forums for a huge list of bugs. Get your own house in order before you worry about the Pre — it’s just an Easter egg.

Or are you threatened that much?

iPhoto is a bit rough around the edges. Take Places as an example. It’s a great feature idea that needs some more shaking out.

I visited a beautiful lake on a motorcycle ride yesterday and took some photos. Then, I used your iPhoto Places and tried to locate the photos using GPS coordinates of the form N45.24835 W78.89166 that Garmin’s Roadtrip software uses. That’s acceptable to the web version of Google Maps, even though it gets the position on the wrong side of the road and doesn’t show part of the lake. But, that coordinate format is not acceptable to iPhoto’s integrated Google Maps locator. When I enter the coordinates, I get the spinning gear and then — nothing. Nothing changes at all. Wouldn’t it be better to give an invalid coordinate format error message?

So I tried the format 45.24835, -78.89166. That works, but again shows a terrain without all of the lake. That’s a Google/Tele Atlas problem, not yours.

Once I got the pin, I tried to zoom in and set the circle diameter that controls the relevant area, but I could only zoom in so far and was not offered the circle controller. Yet, if I switched to Satellite or Hybrid modes, I could at least zoom in. We need consistency, guys!

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Aside from my conspiracy theory that you release “security” patches to destabilize the OS in preparation for a paid upgrade — “Anything has got to be better than this OS!” — perhaps there’s another reason for the abysmal stability of OS X Leopard and the mess your applications are in.

It’s all those Windows and Linux switchers who are coming over to the Mac platform. It’s all their fault. Well, mainly.

You look at your market share rising as a result of the poor, down-trodden Windows users seeking salvation with the Mac and say, “Hey, these flea-infested customers are used to having crappy software so why should we expend much effort in maintaining high quality or a consistent user interface?”

When your market share was closing in on the low single digits and was less than half the percentage of people who donate blood each year (yes, that bad), you needed to offer some differentiator to Windows. You tried quality and consistency and succeeded quite well, with the occasional brain fart.

Now that it’s cool to own Macs — geez, even Microsoft thinks that’s true — you’ve been spending time adding features and stealing resources for the iPhone. But, you seem to have forgotten the user interface designers and quality inspectors in that building you sold a few years ago. They might still be there, you should go have a look.

OS X was improving in stability until 10.5 Leopard came along. Now, every time I try to do something I hesitate not knowing what wonderful behaviour I’ll experience.

While you integrate your apps, there’s so much inconsistency between how they function now, that it looks like they were designed by totally different companies. I’ve covered this in several previous postings.

Without the Switchers, there may not be an Apple, but they’re lulling you into a false sense of godhood.

Having Switchers in the Mac camp is like being adrift on a life raft surrounded by salt water. You need water to survive but this water will poison you.

If the following is a typical Windows switcher, you know what I mean …
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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.

That seems to be the question you ask your customers when they want to do silly things like, oh, say sync both Events and Albums from iPhoto to the Apple TV. For some bizarre reason, you make us choose one or the other, yet you support both in iPhoto.

I guess the Apple TV really is just a hobby for you. Would you mind putting a co-op student on the Apple TV full time? Maybe we could get some consistency in user interfaces, and in his spare time he can fix the horrendous lag between clicking the remote and anything happening on the screen. Thanks.

I had some HD video podcasts that I wanted to take with me on the iPod Touch. Unfortunately, you guys never considered that we might like to watch the podcast on the Mac, the Apple TV, or the Touch, whichever was best suited at the time. Your own children don’t know how to play nice with each other.

Elgato’s EyeTV allows us to create a schedule and specify that we want to transcode automatically to an Apple TV or iPod video format. We can’t select both, unfortunately, but that’s for another nag.

iTunes forces us to manually do the conversion. That’s bad enough, but your user interface experts don’t seem to understand the concept of a “use case“. They haven’t thought through how real people want to use the features.

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Here is a very sad posting on your discussion forums about the iTunes 8.1 and 8.1.1 updates breaking the 2G Shuffle. It seems that your internal developers are treating their own tech support folks like mushrooms — keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em manure.

The poster contacted two different support techs who gave pretty much the same message. They’d never heard of the the 2G Shuffle problems and required the poster to run through some silly steps to arrive at the conclusion we already know — iTunes 8.1 made a total mess of the 2G Shuffle.

Surely, the iTunes manager, once aware of the 2G Shuffle problems, would immediately inform tech support so that customers and tech support wouldn’t have to waste their time chasing known issues. So why didn’t this happen?

This can mean one of several things; incompetence, design intent, or … ?

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