So true. iTunes was great back 10 years ago or so but today it’s just awful. Just like so much other Apple software. They’ve got huge issues, I’d guess with developer retention and culture.
Setting the bozo bit on Apple
61–70 of 185 posts
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#62For about 10 years I’ve considered Windows iTunes to be malware. Music playback w/ apples own apps on MacOS has been bad ever since Apple got into the music business…. Sigh, if only the Beatles estate had won that lawsuit over the use of the ‘Apple’ brand for music…
Services and operating systems should just be separate things. They can (and should) be able to work together, but pre-installing AppleTV+ on my Macbook and Candy Crush on my Windows machine are both stepping over the line. iTunes/Apple Music is definitely the perfect example of this, going from "slick Winamp upgrade" to "Apple Music sales vector" over the course of 20 years. It's reasons like this why I advocate for…
Isn’t integrating services with the OS the whole point of Android for Google?
They aren’t licensing technology to handset vendors, they just are keeping the numerically larger but profitability smaller sector of the smartphone business safe for advertising.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#63> iTunes used to be if not the, then certainly a flagship app for Apple. I have used iTunes off and on for around two decades and it has never been a great or even mediocre experience. It was always bad. The author is fondly remembering a time which might never have existed.
At least the old itunes wouldn't randomly jump into a fullscreen video player (!??) for some fraction of songs in my library.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#64> These are sent via WhatsApp so the audio recordings are mp4 files, which for some bizarre reason won't open in Music and instead open in QuickTime Player, despite definitely being audio files. .mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should op…
> .mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should open it, really.)
mp4 is a container format, all it does is wrap some codecs and add metadata. There's no requirement that it contain video. The smart thing to do would be to inspect the mp4 and open it in an audio player if it contains an audio stream but no video stream.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#65> iTunes used to be if not the, then certainly a flagship app for Apple. I have used iTunes off and on for around two decades and it has never been a great or even mediocre experience. It was always bad. The author is fondly remembering a time which might never have existed.
I’ve been using Music (previously iTunes) since it was called SoundJam MP. It’s always been fine for me. It’s had some issues here and there but nothing that would ever get me to describe it as “bad.”
Why do you think it’s bad? I’ve heard others say the same but I’ve never heard a general (as opposed to esoteric) reason.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#66As annoying as some of this stuff is, i've found Android/Windows/Linux to be as broken in this regard. The last time I tried transferring photos/videos from my Android to a PC, it transferred at ~5-10MBps over a USB 3 connection because of limitations with MTP. So these phones can record in 4K@60FPS, have 256/512GB of storage but 5-10MBps transfer speeds.. and there is no easy way to get around this limit.. Any sort…
> and there is no easy way to get around this limit.. I mean, Apple could just add a better physical connection to the iPhone. Either the USB3-speed Lightning port they used twice on a few iPads, USB3.x over USB-C, or even the brilliant Thunderbolt standard they helped make nearly a decade ago. But... the iPhone's physical transfer speeds are still stuck in 2001. It's genuinely an unbelievably amount of negligence fo…
USB3/USBC is coming in the next set of devices (thanks EU), so at least the speed issue will be resolved.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#67> These are sent via WhatsApp so the audio recordings are mp4 files, which for some bizarre reason won't open in Music and instead open in QuickTime Player, despite definitely being audio files. .mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should op…
> .mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should open it, really.) mp4 is a container format, all it does is wrap some codecs and add metadata. There's no requirement that it contain video. The smart thing to do would be to inspect the mp4 and…
File extensions alone decide how to open something. Inspecting the data takes time, and you might be opening many at once.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#68I echo this - I bought an apple watch but ended up returning it because it was so hard to reliably do basic tasks like connecting your AirPods and listening to a podcast. It would work fine ~80% of the time but sometimes it just wouldn't work at all and there's no clear fix other than resetting everything which is super annoying. Apple support was also completely useless. The apple watch hardware is amazing but the s…
That's the new Pixel fingerprint reader experience.
They buried it under the screen (why? who gave a shit?) so they can make it (generously) 70% reliable instead of the 99.99% reliable reader they had on the back.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#69> How can such basic functionality be this incredibly broken? That's what I'm thinking almost every day when working with Apple devices. There is so, so much basic stuff broken on both macOS and iOS. I truly miss the days where Apple devices were a reliable tool, even a source of inspiration.
I would say this is no longer basic functionality. Personal music collections were huge in the mp3 era, but today few people care about moving music between devices. Further if you think of the complexity involved, streaming is a more “basic” task, than navigating file formats, transfer protocols, DRM, disc storage, library metadata, and more.
It’s basic in the sense that it’s conceptually trivial from the user’s point of view and therefore should just work, and not break in non-intelligible ways, given that the functionality has been made available at all. Users shouldn’t have to carefully navigate their use cases based on what the majority use cases might be.
A more general point is that software should establish a clear conceptual model of the things it allows to manipulate (music files, tracks, playlists, …), and all basic operations on that (insert, move, remove, reorder, rename, syncing between two devices, …) should be straightforward, orthogonal, and just work. Only having specific workflows available/functioning requires the user to memorize those specific workflows, instead of being able to reason about what they can do based on the conceptual model.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#70The bozo bit as described is how I thought about Sony for a long time. I had a different name for it, "The idiot engineer". That for all the amazing premium quality products Sony releases, every product has at least one extremely poorly thought out area. It was like there was some designer/engineer who was the son of the CEO or something, and got to work on every project.
This goes for their professional equipment as well. I worked with their cinema projectors a few years back. In theory they were better than most other solutions, but managing them were ... cumbersome. You could only access it using a special program that only ran on Windows. It was really picky with DCP's. And it was difficult to know what it was doing at all tiems. You had to say at least three hail mary's when attempting to upgrade them. At one point upgrade could only be done with a USB stick that you had to connect deep inside the projector.
But it was 4K before there were movies in 4K. They came with laser projectors early. They were ready for high frame rate from the beginning and almost never needed replacement parts fitted unlike certain other manufacturers.