Andy Beaumont

What’s Wrong With iTunes

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. Each is far better than its Outlook counterpart and as a whole they produce an experience that is infinitely preferable to Outlook’s combined approach. In iTunes we have an application that was originally written to do one thing and do it well - manage and play music. Over the years so much has been bolted on to iTunes that has little or nothing to do with playing or managing music that even the name iTunes now seems completely irrelevant to what the application is actually used for. iTunes is now so bloated with unwanted features that it’s not even a good music player any more, it’s a mish-mash of functionality and disparate content types. It makes Microsoft Word look clean and considered.

iTunes now manages and/or plays your TV shows, movies, audiobooks, podcasts, iOS apps and course material. It even has a shop to let you buy all this content. But most baffling of all of iTunes’ functionality is the iOS device syncing.

To manage the content on an iOS device such as an iPhone or iPad, you need to connect it to your computer and open iTunes. To copy music, photos, movies, apps and even documents on to your iPad, you have to use iTunes, even though all but one of these things have nothing to do with “tunes”. Managing any of these things through iTunes is a painful experience, made even worse by the fact that you need to have the device connected before you can access any of the settings.

To return to the ‘one thing well’ philosophy iTunes should be broken down and split into its component parts. Let iSync handle my phone syncing, surely that’s what it’s for? Let the iTunes store run in a browser instead of my music player; it is after all a website built out of normal HTML, CSS and Javascript. Let the Finder be used to manually manage content on my iOS devices, that’s how I manage content on every other device I ever need to connect to. But most of all, let iTunes be just a music player.

Deleting Unwanted Calendars from the iPhone

For future reference, this is a royal pain in the arse.

Solution here.

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. Nobody wants a tablet PC, they’re useless (I’m looking at you Crunchpad). So, I’m going to predict that Apple are going to change two games here.

The first, and widely guessed one is print media. The new device will provide beautiful seamless ways to purchase and consume magazines, books and newspapers in a digital format. This one is a fairly safe bet.

The second is TV. Media centres currently are generally the preserve of the nerd. In my entire family, I think I’m the only one who has a computer hooked up to the TV. Normal people don’t want the hassle of maintaining a computer just to watch movies or record broadcast programming. But what if they could have a touchscreen device which lets them rent the latest movies in HD through an easy, intuitive interface, and then instantly stream that movie to any TV in the house? What if this device could also let them buy content to keep, store it on the internal drive and provide a beautiful, visual way of browsing their media library? What if this device could provide TV on demand from most of the major broadcasters?

All of a sudden, we have a game changing device and Apple have taken over your living room by just making everything easy enough that your mum wants one.

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. But unfortunately Apple have decided to put a bloody great big play button on the icon for the video itself, so in attempting to drag it to my iPhone, I accidentally play the movie.

What’s the point of this play button? It wasn’t that hard in the old days to double click a video to play it, which of course would be what a user would expect to do. Reducing the number of clicks by one has made several other tasks much harder, clicking to select or to drag the video, you now have to be careful where on the icon you click.

Clicking anywhere in the green does what you’d want to it to do, select or begin a drag operation. Clicking in the red not only starts the movie playing but changes the state of the iTunes app, you are immediately taken from a position of organising your files to viewing one of them enlarged. Bonkers.

So once I manage to not click on the play movie button, I drag the movie file to my iPhone.

But this gives me a dialogue box telling me that the movie was not copied to the iPhone because the movie won’t play on the iPhone.

Hmmm. This is strange as i exported the movie from Final Cut as an H.264 encoded .mov file, I thought that’s what my iPhone required. There’s nothing here telling me why it won’t play on my iPhone or how I can make it play on the iPhone. Maybe I need to do some kind of conversion inside iTunes. The context menu here should be my friend, if iTunes can convert this movie to play on the iPhone, then surely it will be in the context menu.

Well, looking at this menu it would appear that iTunes can’t convert the movie so that it’ll play on my iPhone. It can however consolidate the movie’s tracks, whatever that means, “Get Album Artwork” (for a home movie? Why on earth is this in the context menu for a movie?) and “Apply Sort Field”, whatever that means. I’m pretty sure now that iTunes can’t convert my movie for the iPhone as it would definitely be in the context menu ahead of Get Album Artwork, but just for the hell of it, let’s have a look what’s inside that Apply Sort Field menu.

Oh right, so I can do something or other with songs from the same album as this movie is from? What the fuck?

Anyway, a little Googling revealed that actually yes, iTunes can convert for iPhone for me, it’s in the “Advanced” menu, obviously. So what’s an “Advanced” menu I hear you ask. Well I’m gad you asked me that question. Let’s take a look at the iTunes menu bar and that should tell us…

Right, so the File menu, that’s where we can find file related tasks and operations, good. The Edit menu, another nice easy one, that’s where we find editing related tasks and operations. View, again this is easy, this is where we can find tasks and operations related to the application view. These are all easy so far as they’re pretty much universal across all OS X applications. What’s next? Oooh, a Controls menu. Well, this is still pretty straightforward, everything in here is about controlling playback of iTunes media. Simple. Next up, Store. This is obviously tasks and operations concerned with the iTunes Store. Which then brings us to the Advanced menu, what could possibly be in there? If we guess based on the other menus, it should be a set of tasks and functions to do with the advanced. Hang on, that makes no sense whatsoever. We’re going to have to take a look inside.

Oh! I see! It’s a menu of things that should appear contextually but the designers couldn’t be fucking bothered. What an absolute abomination of information design the Advanced menu is. It’s even less contextual than the context menu we got when right clicking the movie file.

So…

1. Why wasn’t “Create iPod or iPhone Version” in my right click context menu?
2. Why didn’t the dialogue box that told me the movie hadn’t been copied over offer to convert it for me?
3. What the fucking hell is the Advanced menu?
4. Why didn’t my original movie play on the iPhone?
5. Why when i eventually found the Create iPod or iPhone version, did it completely fuck up the simple task of converting it to play on the iPhone by screwing the aspect ratio of the original video?

I still don’t have the movie on 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. If only The Tube wasn’t so utterly terrible, maybe if there were a viable alternative to EyeTV, Elgato might get their act together.

I don’t know if this still happens with the new Turbo264 HD, but the fact that it might is putting me off buying one.

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. Especially when one of the big new “features” of the iPod Nano is its curved screen. Dear Apple, please see graph.