Even though I've been using a few different media players/managers over the years, I was forced to install iTunes so that my PC could talk to my iPhone. After such a stunning user experience on the iPhone, I guess I was expecting the same from iTunes. Wow. Not.
The music selection, while vast, is full of gaping wholes. Putting together a playlist for a reunion revealed that there were no Housemartins albums and -much more shockingly- no AC/DC ones. No AC/DC? Really? While not my favorite band, they're not exactly obscure...
Horrendously bloated (64.1 MB download, 100MB+ while running in memory), slow to install, slow to launch, slow to everything. Primitive music recommendation/discovery system. No mini-player mode. No all-you-can-eat-for-a-monthly-fee plan. Keeps on trying to trick me into installing Safari. Crashed at least three times. YUCK!
Most shockingly for an Apple product, though, was the terrible usability, or lack thereof. I wanted to transfer some pics from my PC onto my iPhone. Could NOT figure it out. The help file was no help at all, and I had to resort to a Google search for instructions, which were not obvious (though ultimately successful). How come no-one else is complaining about this? I don't know... maybe it's because my brain isn't wired for the Mac (i.e., where iTunes was born and ported from). Didn't seem to stop me from the loving the iPhone, though...
I just can't reconcile the fact that the iPhone and iTunes came from the same company. Definitely not from the same design team, I am sure.

Ah-HA!
I knew it.
I've had a blog post draft kicking around for a while entitled "The spreadsheet people are among us." Basically, I believe that there are millions of people using Excel to capture their findings when researching complex purchase decisions, but we're all too ashamed to fess up to our anal retentiveness to talk about it publicly. And now there's proof!
I recently upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 (better late than never...). Upon firing up the "new" Excel, I noticed this:
Apparently, Microsoft's research revealed that so many people were using Excel to gather information for making complex decisions that they put the official anal-retentive cell formatting colour scheme right smack in the middle of the main, default toolbar/ribbon.
Having used ChoiceBot for over a year now, I can't imagine using an app that doesn't actually do anything with my colour-coding, though. That would be kind of like using a pen and graph paper instead of a spreadsheet program to work on a bunch of numbers.
Irony... get it?
Posted on April 28, 2009 at 02:12 PM in General tech commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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