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iTunes will never work well

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Re: iTunes will never work well

#351

Post by yoz-y »

agentgt wrote: post #307

Almost every cloud music app I have used has issues with the concept of a "queue" or playing a snippet of something while I am in the middle of a playlist. Spotify, Mog , rdio, and itunes seems to never do what I want when it comes to "just checking out a song while other songs are playing". Lets say you have enqueued up a bunch of songs on Spotify or perhaps have a really good shuffled playlist god forbid you accide…

I really liked queueing in the original Amarok. iTunes kind of halfway gets it right with the concept of Up Next. However it seems now that in iTunes 12 it is no longer possible to queue an album at the end if there is nothing in the queue at all. I'd prefer if the action of playing an album did "put it in queue & play"

Re: iTunes will never work well

#352

Post by Grishnakh »

gregn wrote: post #337

Saying "iTunes will never work well" is like saying the sky is blue. Why would anyone need a kitchen sink to copy an audio file to their device? Oh, wait, unless there is manufacturer locks, and controls put in place to steer consumers' capital flow. Oh yeah, that's why. From that perspective I would say iTunes is a smashing success. And this negative social virus has spread like gang-busters spawning countless imita…

I can easily copy files to my Android phone with the simple "adb" command-line utility. Or, I can copy them onto an SDcard any way I please, and insert the card into my phone.

iTunes is definitely a smashing success, thanks to gullible suckers who happily buy anything that Apple shovels at them.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#353

Post by Razengan »

Razengan wrote: post #142
Razengan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all of their stuff is terrible. As a PC-only user since the days of DOS up till Windows 8, and having used Windows 10 after jumping ship to Macs a few hours ago, macOS has demonstrably more discoverability than Windows. One example: Just click on the Help menu, in any app, and type something like "show" or "find" or any other operation, and it will show you all the menu items which have that word in their name. Tha…

Oops, years, not hours. I should proofread.

Also, to be specific, the standard menus and searching etc. come with AppKit, which is part of Cocoa.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#354

Post by Grishnakh »

spronkey wrote: post #242
threeseed wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Photos stores its library in your Pictures directory. You can back it up entirely to any drive. Or if you want individual photos just use the Export/Save menu option. b) Almost every app bar a few older ones can be made full screen. Unless I am confused there will be no black bar at the bottom. I definitely can't see it. c) You can do basic side/side tiling if your apps are full screen. Most people aren't clamorin…

Please. Don't try to defend Photos.app, it's an abysmal piece of junk. It breaks UI metaphors. Saving its library to your pictures directory? Sure. But it's a royal pain if I don't want to store those pictures on a Mac. Which wouldn't be such an issue if Apple let you upgrade the storage. But no, you can't do that. So buy iCloud and shut the hell up, right? I find myself wondering daily, how the hell have Apple dropp…

>Which wouldn't be such an issue if Apple let you upgrade the storage. But no, you can't do that. So buy iCloud and shut the hell up, right?

>I find myself wondering daily, how the hell have Apple dropped the ball so badly, and how on earth have they not been steamrolled by Microsoft.

Because there's legions of gullible suckers who'll line up to buy the latest iDevice and then believe everything Apple tells them, whether it's "you're holding it wrong" or "you don't need to copy music files to your phone, just buy them again on iTunes" or "you don't need a headphone jack, just buy a new pair of Bluetooth headphones from Beats for $$$".

Re: iTunes will never work well

#355

Post by [deleted] »

douche wrote: post #163
dietrichepp wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal pet peeve is getting back to the map after clicking "explore food and drinks near you". There's an arrow at the top left, but it disappears once you scroll, and you might be on a different screen.

On Android, there's a physical back button on the phone, which makes this all so much easier.

[deleted]

Re: iTunes will never work well

#356

Post by Natanael_L »

flukus wrote: post #74
madeofpalk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every feature needs to be immediately discoverable. The default and 'main' way of zooming is the (un)pinch gesture. Take keyboard shortcuts - they're EXTREMELY undiscoverable, but they're not required for most operations, it's more of a power-user feature.

Most programs will list the keyboard shortcut against the menu item for the same feature, that makes them discoverable.

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V works in Android too, among many other classical shortcuts. Try it with a Bluetooth keyboard or over USB-OTG. How about that for undiscoverable in a mobile OS? :)

Re: iTunes will never work well

#357

Post by Natanael_L »

lake99 wrote: post #214
flukus wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're probably outside the 95th percentile on that one In what way? If you mean one handed usage, it's pretty common here when people are standing on public transport, you need to hold on with one hand. If you mean the infrequency I need it, take a look through you're list of installed apps and tell me how many require zooming? Almost all are designed specifically to avoid it.

I agree with all you have written, but there is a way to zoom in or out without using your other hand: use your lips. "Muaa" zooms out, and "auum" zooms in. This will make public transport journeys more interesting (for the others).

I'm not that close with my phone, though.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#358

Post by wang_li »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #239
tomasandrle wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Hopefuly "a bunch" could be reduced to just two: Apple Music client and iPhone sync app. The rest would be removed without a replacement (on Windows). The headphone jack removal shows that Apple is willing to make people angry about some things for a long term benefit and iTunes is imho a good candidate for the next "act of courage", heh.

Could they drop the iPhone sync app completely? These days the iPhone should be able to do all the syncing it needs directly against the internet.

> These days the iPhone should be able to do all the syncing it needs directly against the internet.

If Apple provided a documented set of APIs to allow me to setup my own server then this would make sense. As it is, I see no reason why apple should hold my backups on their systems, why they should have any involvement with my syncing of data to my phone.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#359

Post by ChoGGi »

cmiller1 wrote: post #312
dTal wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an SSH password once with a # character in it. I tried to log in from a friend's Macbook and was forced to ask him how to type this. Apparently it was Option-3. Completely unmarked. Astonishing. But hey, at least you can type §.

Huh? I have a Macbook Pro and a Microsoft keyboard on an old Win XP box right next to each other right now and they both, clearly labeled, have # above the "3" for shift-3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_American_keyboards...

"The # symbol is replaced by the £ symbol (as on PC keyboards); the # is available by pressing ⌥ Option+3

More recent Apple British keyboards move the backquote/~ key to the left of the Z key and replace it with a section sign (§) and a plus-minus sign (±) respectively.

The Enter key spans two rows and is shaped similarly to the Enter key of many ISO PC keyboards."

Re: iTunes will never work well

#360

Post by thenewwazoo »

rsfinn wrote: post #336
twhb wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of, Apple is to blame for the absolute worst case of discoverability I've ever encountered: getting the iOS App Store app to list all apps labeled "Essentials". Dug around, couldn't find it. Googled it, found a few forum threads where everybody concluded it couldn't be done. Went into an Apple store, gave an employee a few minutes to figure it out, and he gave up. And yet, it's possible. Rather than just tel…

Perhaps the App Store has been upgraded in the last 10 hours, but I too simply typed "essentials" into the search bar and it worked fine (on both iOS and Mac, as well as iTunes). Didn't even need to put it in quotes. Perhaps actually doing the text search is the barrier you mean? Were you looking for an item labeled "Essentials" in the Quick Links section? I agree that would be preferable, but it's not like doing a s…

For my part, my surprise comes from the fact that I have to use the free-text search UI to list matches for a tag, and whether it matches free text or a tag is completely opaque. It is hostile UI when I can filter on "Games" in the category list, and search for "Angry Birds" by free text, and yet tags live in a nebulous nowhere-space. If I wanted to find apps titled " Essentials", I'd be pretty annoyed to find them disappear behind an unexpected magic keyword-to-tag search.

In this case, there is no good place to put tag search because tags aren't first-class citizens.

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