Major Apple applications have become inscrutable and frustrating.
- iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks, and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to the store. Once there, the integration with the stuff I've bought is unclear (especially for video content). I once got extremely confused watching a series, not realizing that one particular view of the episodes were ordered by POPULARITY, not in chronological order. And ratings! I get the 0-5 star rating system. Then they added the heart icon for -- uhh -- something. Why not just use the existing rating system? Why do I have to rate things again for a different purpose?
- Podcasts have become very confusing. I want to be able to control what is physically present on my devices, to control data usage on my phone, and space usage on all devices. They've intentionally made that difficult.
- Photos is a disaster. There are many different organization paradigms, and it is unclear why some of my recent photos appear in some of them but not others. What are the differences among events and photo stream? Why do some pictures show up in the by-date organization but not photo stream? What's in the cloud? When does it sync with my phone? Why is it easy to sync with my phone by cable but not IP?
If current trends continue, my beautiful Mac hardware will be nothing but a boot loader for VMWare and Linux.
I totally agree with you on Photos. Everything about it is overly complicated. It should be a simple as take photo, it's on my phone, automatically added to my computer and in the cloud. Edit/delete anywhere. At least they got rid of the Camera Roll.
If I do plug my iPhone into the computer, I should be able to drag and drop photos from my phone through Finder. No application needed. I miss the old iPod Classic and it's external hard drive functions.
"If I do plug my iPhone into the computer, I should be able to drag and drop..."
This may sound petty, but this is the biggest reason I don't use an iPhone. Smartphones are more than consumption devices. They are tiny computers and I want the flexibility of using a tiny computer.
Photos works exactly the way you seem to want it to on my devices. I take a photo and it appears on all devices. I delete a photo and it's deleted everywhere. Likewise for edits. You sound like you're talking about iPhoto.
If you don't want to use photos, you can use Image Capture, which is part of OSX and gives you exactly the drag and drop functions you want.
There are two photo apps? Seriously, I'm not aware of this. I'm talking about "Photos" whose logo is eight ovals of color arranged in a circle. (The fact that this confusion is even possible is part of the problem.)
My experience is that I take a photo on my phone. It shows up in some albums that seem to have recent content but not others. The time lags are unpredictable, so I have taken to syncing manually.
Photos had been exactly what I'm looking for in a photo management app. It's rock solid, I have all my photos available on all my devices, all of which update almost instantly. It was a total mess before, with fragmentation between iPhoto and Aperture, but this new solution actually seems to work really well and seems to be well received.
Everyone has a different experience but mine has literally been: take photo on iPad or iPhone, it appears on every device - including the Mac and Apple TV - almost instantly
As for Podcasts, I view many of Apple's apps as "starter apps". If you have outgrown what you can do or want to be able to do, that's what 3rd party apps are for. Power users like us make up a far smaller number of overall users than we think, so apps are intentionally designed to be simple, as opposed to restricted. If you want granular control, check out Overcast or Pocket Casts.
The iTunes Store itself is still ok, but Apple Music is a shitshow. The Music app has been so badly nerfed that I can't rely on it for a daily commute on the tube.
I really don't use any Apple software on my rMBP except for the OS... and even there improper handling of Bluetooth and WiFi are unacceptable. I went with another macbook because I love the touchpad, and like an all-metal case. That said, I paid through the nose for something with an OS update that's simply unreliable.
It will be the last Apple product I buy for a long time, and TBH, if Ubuntu comes out with a good experience on Apple hardware, I'd probably switch the OS out.
Part of it is most of the linux friendly laptops I don't like... There's a few points.. one, I like a larger touchpad, with whole-pad clicking... other than the chromebooks, and my logitech htpc keyboard I haven't seen this (I also don't like the region based right-click)... The touchpad is a huge issue for me.
Second, I REALLY don't like either the Fn button being in the corner (muscle memory), or anything obstructing the right shift (again muscle memory). As it is, I hate most laptop keyboards.
Third is the display, I actually really like the retina display itself, and it allows for scaling VMs very nicely. Probably the closest in terms of hardware to MBP would be some of the Asus and Acer ultrabooks, which I'm not entirely opposed to, but then it's still hit and miss on hardware support.
What I would love would be for Ubuntu, or someone much more familiar with their installers to create an installer that would just detect that it's apple hardware, and make it all just work... that would include bluetooth, wifi, proper touchpad drivers/configured in the box.
I really like my rMBP hardware wise... but going to something with different headaches won't exactly be better.
My only issue with GM is the portability. I work out frequently, and lugging around a large smartphone isn't the best scenario for simply listening to music.
I'm looking into getting a smaller MP3 player and putting my GM library on that to achieve the level of portability I need for my music.
What really gets me is that some scrappy start-up tried to launch a service like that in the 00's and got totally burned by the labels because it was not 'fair use' but now google does it it is ok.
I think you're thinking of my.mp3.com. They bought a bunch of CDs, ripped them, customers used a desktop application to "fingerprint" a CD they had that would grant them access to the mp3s the company created. They lost in the court because by ripping the CDs they bought, they were offering a service based on copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holders. While the opportunities for abuse with the "fingerprinting" scheme are obvious, that's not what got them in trouble.
There were then and are now music "locker" systems where every track you can play is from a file you created and uploaded and only your account can access. That's what Google Music is doing (for music you add, not the subscription service or tracks you buy in their store). In so doing you may have violated some copyrights but the operators of the locker system played not part in it. And if they act upon DMCA takedown notices (assuming they operate in the U.S.), they're protected from prosecution under the Safe Harbor provisions of the law.
It's inefficient for such locker systems to have X copies of the same song, one for each person who uploaded it, but I assume more modern storage systems can use lower level deduplication to reduced the space needed while still presenting each user with their "own" copy.
That may very well be the one. I'm a bit hazy on the details because this happened right at the moment camarades.com took off and I had a lot on my plate at the time.
Saying it was fair use is begging the question. It's not obvious that showing I own a CD at one point means I get online access to files ripped off an equivalent CD forever.
Not really. It required you to have the files to be allowed to stream them back to yourself, the most essential functionality was de-duplication + streaming of content that you already had while you were on the move.
And if you own a CD at some point nothing stops you from ripping it and selling the original (that's still illegal, but you could do it) so it's impossible to check.
I don't see why google should get a free pass on this, it seems to have to do with size rather than with the technology or the law.
You might consider an Android Wear device. I don't have personal experience with this (I mostly work out on a stationary bike with Netflix), but in theory you can copy up to 4GB of music to the watch and play it back via Bluetooth headphones without the need for a phone.
spotify is pretty crappy (experiences on android):
* they broke google maps for about 3 months. Originally, when google maps needed to give audio directions, music would pause. It worked. Some moron decided, instead, to make the audio keep playing but make it quieter while google maps was giving audio directions. What he or she actually did is to mute google maps. This persisted for 3 months while assholes there made excuses (how fucking hard is git revert) and claimed bluetooth audio wasn't supported and therefore customers had no grounds for complaint. What was particularly frustrating across the 100 page support threads was the fact that this bug was so obvious that clearly not a single employee uses the android app or gives a damn about the experience.
* spotify added a moronic "control spotify from other devices" feature. What this does in reality is this: listen to spotify on your way to work. At work, set your phone down and start listening to spotify on your computer. The next time you get a txt or interact with your phone (ie enter your pin into the lock screen), the spotify session that's been lurking steals control of your mac and jumps back to whatever you'd been listening to hours ago on your phone. The cure is to always leave spotify in offline mode and/or kill the task when you're done listening to it.
* listening to files you own -- eg a concert recording unavailable in spotify -- while theoretically supported, is just janky.
* If you make the mistake of allowing spotify to go online on your phone, it eats battery life.
* there's a long list of other bugs, but I now wait at least 3 months before installing any updates and archive previous apks so that I can revert their idiocy. I really need to get on figuring out how to import their playlists into something better.
Holy crap yeah, I don't know what other app was put together so poorly as Spotify. It wakelocks like hell, it crashes constantly, none of the menu items make sense, AND aren't consistent with where you are in playing songs, it seems totally random as to whether songs show up in your queue or disappear, your history sometimes stores albums and sometimes songs, it goes on and on. I use spotify mostly as just a grooveshark replacement, but as soon as my trial is up I'm ditching the fucking thing.
2/ this is the single best feature of spotify vs the others, I love plugin my android smartphone in my audio system, and to control the music from my ipad, computer. The problem you talk about never happens to me, it shows a popup about if I want to continue here, but only if I go into the app.
3/ I had no problem with that, but it would be better if it uploaded the music to listen on other devices, this is the major pain point about spotify.
4/ what ? only if you ask some playlist to be synchronized it download them and then stop, or are you talking about the fact that it shows the currently playing song on others devices, just swipe out the app, but I am not sure it consume a lot.
5/ I didn't had a lot of problem with the android app
Spotify's approach to customer engagement and accountability is a little better than Apple's in that they have a product support forum. But their contempt for the customer seems to be about the same WRT to removing features on a whim.
They removed a deal-breaker feature a couple of years ago (filter a list for a song) and have only just managed to put it back, only half working, now. I don't know how bad iTunes has got (haven't used it in 5 years) but I can't recommend Spotify as a replacement.
If anyone does have any suggestions, I'd be very glad to read them!
After you've tapped a track in the main list of tracks to start it playing, tap the skinny "playing" bit at the very bottom. It should pop up the full screen player. Is the shuffle icon selected (green)?
I had the same issue a while back and I was infuriated at myself for not figuring out the solution.
Yes. Switched to iPhone. I like the access to the filesystem, available on some Android phones, but the iPhone is a superior product in my opinion. The two main advantages are 1) not having to care about which kind of memory an app is sitting in, and 2) voice control. I also find the iPhone less buggy overall, but I haven't used Android in about a year.
>If current trends continue, my beautiful Mac hardware will be nothing but a boot loader for VMWare and Linux.
Your whole post is a pretty good troll but I'll bite anyway. Tell me, what do you plan on replacing iTunes and Photos with under Linux? From what I've seen, there's nothing there that even comes close to functionality of iTunes or Photos.
And why even run Linux in a VM? Why not boot it? Why not sell MBP and just buy a Lenovo?
I don't know what I'd use instead, I gave up Linux-only years ago, and now use a Linux VM for development, Mac for everything else. Also, networking through the Mac is still simpler, at least for now. I know that Linux has some media apps, but I use them so little that I really can't compare. However, my sense is that Linux apps get better over time, and Apple apps are definitely getting worse. If current trends continue, the lines will cross.
I like digikam. It mirrors the internal photo albums with directories on the disk, so if you want tot browse tour photo's directly, you can still find them easily. Things like labels, comments and ratings are all stored in a little database file. You can view by album, but also by date or use custom filters.
- iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks, and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to the store. Once there, the integration with the stuff I've bought is unclear (especially for video content). I once got extremely confused watching a series, not realizing that one particular view of the episodes were ordered by POPULARITY, not in chronological order. And ratings! I get the 0-5 star rating system. Then they added the heart icon for -- uhh -- something. Why not just use the existing rating system? Why do I have to rate things again for a different purpose?
- Podcasts have become very confusing. I want to be able to control what is physically present on my devices, to control data usage on my phone, and space usage on all devices. They've intentionally made that difficult.
- Photos is a disaster. There are many different organization paradigms, and it is unclear why some of my recent photos appear in some of them but not others. What are the differences among events and photo stream? Why do some pictures show up in the by-date organization but not photo stream? What's in the cloud? When does it sync with my phone? Why is it easy to sync with my phone by cable but not IP?
If current trends continue, my beautiful Mac hardware will be nothing but a boot loader for VMWare and Linux.