Earlier this week I had to leave TheApartment really quickly. I was catching a ride with TheWife and she'd be dropping me at the Post Office so I could check our PO Box. The thing is, I'd be walking back and I wanted to listen to the latest Democracy Now podcast--so I pull up iTunes and dock my iPod. I have ten minutes to DL the cast and dump it onto my iPod--sounds easy? Not quite.
I go to click on the "Podcasts" in iTunes and I then move to click on "Democracy Now" only to see my podcasts disappear and be replaced by the contents of my iPod. OK, didn't need that to happen! I again click on "podcasts" and then control-click on "Democracy Now". Then I click on "Update Podcast" and watch as the cast slowly DLs.
A few minutes later, I notice that it's at about three-quarters downloaded. SWEET, this will work out fine. Suddenly, I notice that my IP has reset. My stupid cable broadband connection may be wicked-fast, but it cuts out randomly. I switch back to iTunes to find that it's stopped downloading the DN cast. I click "get" next to that day's podcast. It starts to download THE WHOLE THING again.
What brainiac designed iTunes, anyway? Why is it that it iTunes can't pause a download when a connection is interupted and resume it once the connection is restored? This is idiotic. So, I DL the entire cast again and make TheWife leave a few minutes later than she had wanted to. Not the end of the world, but there is no reason for iTunes to do the following:
1) automatically display the iPod contents upon mounting of the iPod
2) not be able to pick up an interupted podcast download where it left off.
Oh and another thing I noticed that is fricken idiotic is that iTunes will decide on its own to stop updating podcasts because it thinks you haven't listened to them in a while.
WTF is this??? Why does iTunes have to think so much? First off, it's none of its business whether or not I listen to podcasts I download. Second, if it is so smart, why doesn't it ask my iPod if I've listened to my downloaded podcasts? However, this second issue is not important to me--I don't want iTunes to be thinking about my podcasts more than I do.
OK, now for some more bitchin' regarding the iPod. When the hell are we going to see a firmware update??? I am SICK and tired of having to back up my video every 30-60 seconds for the first 5-15 minutes of my videos. This is ABSURD--Apple should issue an update that will pull out the bits of code that screwed things up. The only FW update I'll install after this will be one that actually makes noticable improvements!!
Here's an iTunes/iPod combo-bitch: I want to be able to control-click (right click for you PC-heads out there) on a media file and see a popup menu that includes the option to "send to (your iPod name)". By this I don't mean a simple file transfer--I want it to put the mp3/4 on my iPod in a way that it can be played. Because I hate iTunes so much I'd really love to avoid using it entirely.
Before I conclude, I'd like to also ask when Apple is going to change the name of their stupid application to something that reflects a less music-centered function. Hell, I dump 20-30 gigs of music on my iPod and I'm done. Most of the other 20 gigs of data is either video or podcasts--so much for the "tunes" in "iTunes." How about iMedia? Or iMultimedia? Or even iMulti?
The same goes for their stupid iTunes Music Store. Talk about an uninspired name. Might as well buy liquor from "a soda shop" or a car from a place with skateboards in its name.
Plus, it seems really stupid to me that I can't access the iTMS through a browser instead of iTunes. Hell, if I could access it through Firefox I might actually go there more often (or at all).
For all of Apple's leaps forward in popularity, I wonder if they're forgetting what kept them in the shadows for so long--listening to and caring about what their customers want and like.
Yep, they're becoming an awful lot like Micro$oft!
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