Day: 13 April 2012

Fix Radar or GTFO ⇥

We need to talk. We love your software, we really do. Or maybe we don’t but we want to tell you why so you can try to improve it. We are developers ourselves and we know how hard it is to write software, to find and fix bugs, to know what your users want from your software. We want to file bug reports and feature requests for every bug we find or feature we think of. As a community we want you to know what is important to us, in a way that doesn’t require you to trawl through countless blogs and tweets. Unfortunately you’re making it so incredibly hard to do so.

Finally: an internet petition I can get behind.

iTunes’ Ball and Chain: Windows ⇥

Yours truly:

Buying music in one app, using another to play it, and a third to put it on your devices is convoluted at best. Using iTunes in the cloud, you could eliminate the third step, but you would need to download hundred-megabyte-plus content multiple times, which is even slower. This is without even considering the Windows version.

Note that I only mentioned how much of a headache this would be on the Mac. Could you imagine porting all of these to Windows? Allen Pike can:

Except that they can’t split iTunes into multiple apps because many, if not most iOS users are on Windows. iTunes is Apple’s one and only foothold on Windows, so it needs to support everything an iOS device owner could need to do with their device. Can you imagine the support hurricane it would cause if Windows users suddenly needed to download, install, and use 3-4 different apps to sync and manage their media on their iPhone? It’s completely out of the question.

John Gruber linked to the above article, and added his own commentary:

Just tossing an idea out there, but what if Apple broke iTunes apart into several smaller apps on Mountain Lion (iOS-style), and kept the monolithic iTunes for legacy users on older versions of Mac OS X (Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard) and Windows?

I still believe it would be a mess for Mac users. Managing reminders in one app and email in another makes sense. They’re totally different ideas, and the only reason they were lumped together pre-Mountain Lion is because Notes used IMAP to sync. iTunes is a different beast—everything it does is related, from buying media, to syncing it, and finally to playing it. The only slight anomaly is the App Store, but that’s related on a syncing level.

I Lost Access to My Google Account Today ⇥

Ehsan Akhgari doesn’t know why he lost his account, but he did:

We’ve all (yours truly included) heard about the importance of owning your digital data, the downsides of vendor lock-in, and how if you’re being provided a free service, you’re the product, not the customer.

Google may have a way to export your data, but it only works if you have access to your account.