Recently I've tweeted a couple of times about wanting to see iTunes killed off, and both times I've received replies asking why. It's not possible to explain what's wrong with iTunes in 140 characters so I've moved it here.
Apple mostly follow the Unix philosophy - write programs that do one thing and do it well. If you look at Mail, Address Book and iCal they all have one primary use case, and they interoperate perfectly.
Deleting Unwanted Calendars from the iPhone
For future reference, this is a royal pain in the arse.
Stupid changes in Snow Leopard #2
The F8 play/pause media key on the keyboard now launches iTunes and starts playing music, meaning you can’t use this key to play and pause music in any other application that you might want to use. Stupid.
Stupid changes in Snow Leopard #1
Clicking on the volume control in the menubar, I now have to move my mouse down so that the pointer is over the slider in order to be able to use the mouse’s scrollwheel to change the volume. In Leopard I could click and then scroll without having to move the mouse.
The Apple Tablet Prediction Game
Feel free to come back here in a couple of weeks and tell me I was wrong, but my gut instinct on this whole tablet thing is that the speculation so far mostly ignores one key ingredient, and that is that Apple will be wanting to completely change the game in some area or other. That area isn’t going to be tablet computing as the only people who bought a tablet PC in the last 8 years were sales reps.
iTunes UIWTF
With every release the iTunes UI seems to get worse. This morning I attempted the seemingly simple task of copying a video from my Mac to my iPhone. Firstly, I need to drag the video to iTunes which then creates a duplicate copy of the video on my hard drive for no apparent reason. The video then shows up in iTunes, so I attempt to click and drag it to my iPhone.
EyeTV and Turbo264
Two products from Elgato, EyeTV lets you use your Mac as a PVR and Turbo264 massively speeds up video encoding to h.264. You’d expect them to work together beautifully but this is what I see every time I ask EyeTV to export a recording through Turbo264.
The last operation could not be completed because an error of type -536870176 occurred. Such a shame that they can’t seem to make two of their own products work together.
Photo post
Worst. Logo. Ever. And still no support for OpenDocument, a ratified ISO standard since 2006, but proudly supporting Word's de facto .doc format and still using another new proprietary format? Shame on you Apple.
MacBook hard drive replacement tip
If you try to restore from Time Machine after a hard drive switch, Time Machine won’t see your new drive after you’ve formatted it until you restart.
New iPod Nano
The Nano lives in the price sweet spot that makes it an affordable xmas or birthday present, I’d guess Apple shift an awful lot more of them than any other iPod in the line. So yesterday Apple held a special event named Let’s Rock at which they announced new iPod Nanos and some crappy Genius feature (a poor man’s last.fm) which has been added to iTunes. Now, ignoring how saddened I am at the seeming demise of the larger capacity iPod Classics, it’s amazing that Apple thinks this warrants an event.