vi sucks!
Why can’t you copy directly to an iPod?
No way – it’s emacs that sucks! 
You can.
As with just about all other software out there, people’s hatred often comes from misunderstanding. I heard someone grousing the other day about how he’d never buy a Mac because you can’t use a two-button mouse with it. I explained that you’ve been able to use a two-button (or more) mouse with a Mac for over a decade. Most of them SHIP with two-button mice, for goodness’ sake.
The same is true with iPods. Someone isn’t aware of all of the functionality and tells a friend. Next thing you know, half the planet thinks it only works with iTunes software, and that you can only buy the music from Apple, and that you can’t copy songs from the iTunes store onto other MP3 players, and even that it only works with proprietary funky file formats – all of which are false.
I’ve never owned a Zune, so I’m sure a lot of what I “know” about it isn’t true either, but I admit that freely and don’t get into iPod vs. Zune debates (except to dispel ignorance).
I think iTunes is great. It runs flawlessly on my 3 year old Mac. I’ve never had a single problem with it.
Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t with iTunes, but with (dare I say it) Windows?
Some of us have real computers.
I haven’t had any significant problems with the iPod or iTunes, either on Windows or the Mac. Works fine, lasts a long time.
My major complaint is that there isn’t a non-broken cross-platform file system that is supported by both the Mac and Windows. You shouldn’t have to format the iPod, or other storage devices, for either the Mac or Windows.
Quicktime always ignores those “do you want to” and assumes that you really meant “yes.”
I’ve never installed iTunes without having Quicktime icons everywhere (despite the fact that I said “don’t do that”) and Quicktime insert itself as my defaults (despite the fact I said “No, I don’t want that.”)
I haven’t put iTunes on my new machine - I probably will. I have a lot of music I bought there, years ago, that I still like and want to hear again. But I really hate dealing with iTunes.
No.
The problem is with Apple’s developers, who port their development tools (and the apps they’re writing) to Windows without really understanding the Windows interface guidelines. Not only do they get look & feel wrong in many places, but they’re also using horribly de-optimized UI elements just because “that’s how it’s done on a Mac”. They also take “shortcuts” to avoid having to learn how to develop Windows software, at the expense of consuming more resources on the target platform.
The point I raised earlier about the rating star icons requiring OpenGL is a good example of this. It’s a non-standard UI widget, so you have to roll your own. In Windows, a sane person would use a simple bitblt() to render the icon graphics over the grid. In iTunes for OSX, I’m sure it uses some standard Mac-ish UI library call to accomplish the same thing. But in iTunes for Windows, instead of using a simple bitblt() call it uses a convoluted stack of libraries that includes a call out to OpenGL so that it can be implemented exactly the same way it was on the Mac. Suddenly, a widget that should be easy as pie now takes a measurable amount of time and significant memory if you’re not on a screaming fast machine.
ETA: clarified stuff
FooBar (2.71 MB installer) and my 2 gig with microSD expansion slot Sansa (30 bucks) with some Senneheisers thrown in for good measure (25 bucks) kicks any iPod any day of the week.
I can’t help but think Stugeon’s Second Law factors into this somehow.
iTunes belongs in the 90% of the field that is utter crap. A lot of people (maybe the majority, as you say) don’t have a problem with it because seeking out the 10% of non-crap is a bit of work.
When a shinier piece of crap floats out of the pipe, it really stands out, people get excited over it, and it’s easy to forget that it’s crap. They like it because it’s shiny, because it’s well-marketed, and because some rich dude in a mock turtleneck tell them it’s lickable.
Sure, okay, it’s lickable I guess. If you like to lick crap. Some of us don’t particularly enjoy that sort of thing, but to each their own.
You could take this exact sentance, swap the words “Apple” and “Windows” and it would be just as correct. So that hardly makes Apple the antichrist.
IE is already screwed up; use a W3 standards-compliant browser. And you can change file associations back pretty easily in Windows; iTunes is hardly the only program that does this.
As for iTunes itself, my experience is that it works much, much better on OS X than on Windows, and uses a small fraction of system resources. Then again, that seems to be the case of nearly any software that spans both programs; I find that MS Office also functions much quicker and more cleanly on my 3.5 year old G4 PowerBook than on my 1 year old high end Dell workstation running WinXP. I’m morally certain that if I could get Pro/ENGINEER to run on a Mac that it wouldn’t crash nearly as much as it dies on any XP box. (It was far more stable back when I was working on SGI hardware.)
As for “screaming machines running DOS 25.4”–I shudder with the horror. DOS was such a limited OS and glomming on new capabilities or writing drivers for new hardware specifications was such a painful process that it still makes me ill to think of it. Once I discovered Unix–as cobbled together and weak as it was backintheday–I did all of the coding I could on a Unix server and only went over to a DOS/Win 3.x box when I needed to deal with GUIs or other platform-specific issues. If I didn’t have an OS X machine I’d be running FreeBSD 7 or DragonFly BSD.
Stranger
OR… it’s part of the 10% that isn’t crap, and lots of people use it because it’s a decent product at the right price (free); and there is a small number of people who don’t like it either because their computers are unusual in some way (because god knows that every good program always works properly for everyone all the time), or it just isn’t to their taste.
That’s no more correct than saying that:[ul]
[li]Windows Media Center is utter crap[/li][li]Windows is utter crap[/li][li]Excel is utter crap[/li][li]Notepad is utter crap[/li][li]NetBSD is utter crap[/ul] [/li]and so forth and so on
They all have their flaws, and may not be perfect for 100.0000% of the population, but in general they are reasonably OK for their intended purpose for a reasonably large proportion of the target market. Compared to real abominations like RealPlayer circa 1999 (extra sponsored full of shite-ware crashy no worky version) iTunes is pretty good.
I think the issue here is that a program which is (functionally) basically a file manager is 80 meg.
On the Mac, it’s 130Meg, of which the program itself is 31Meg and all the localization crap and icons are 90Meg. So, most of the file size you are seeing is all the zillions of languages is supports. Probably not unexpected these days.
I never called Apple the antichrist. And I hardly love Microsoft.
I just can’t stand Apple fanboyism. Enough people dislike Windows such that the people who do like MS products tend to have very good reasons for doing so.
Compared to anything, ca-1999 RealPlayer is crap.
Compared to a good media player, say, Winamp v2.x or v5.0, or the afore-mentioned FooBar, iTunes is a bloated chunk of turd.
You say that like it’s gotten better. I installed it again a while ago (I know, I know, but when you have a .rm file you don’t have many options) and it took me a while to find the damn player beneath all the sponsorship crap and advertisements.
Undoubtedly. Still, shouldn’t this be worked out FIRST before you unleash it on the consumer public?
I would suspect that the Windows user space is big enough that it’s impossible to test every combination of Hardware and Software. Apple probably shoots for 99%, which leaves millions of possible problems. Look at Vista - Microsoft tested the crap out of it for years, and it was (is?) still a dog.