I transitioned to MediaMonkey, and I like it. It’s also subject to some bloat, but a way better program regardless. And it warmed my heart to get away from Apple’s proprietary format. All my music is now in MP3 and can be easily migrated when necessary.
As someone who has used both Windows and OSX, I gotta say this snarky argument is stupid bullshit. Yes, “Windoze” users are definitely more interested in working on their computers instead of actually getting work done. That’s why ~91% of desktop computers run Windows.
I’ve also heard that iTunes Match is very buggy, even after a couple of years on the market.
Preach it…my email has been borked since I upgraded and the online forums are unhelpful and confusing!
No, they’d hate that because it would more than double the amount of bugs, testing, support, documentation, and user confusion. It’s a cop-out and the sort of thing I’d fire someone over.
Bull. We’re talking about two or three minor interface changes along with just not removing crap that was already there. If that more than doubles all those things, then you have some pretty crappy programmers.
Not that your primary purpose as a programmer should be to make your job easier. Your job is to make things for people to use. The fact that you would fire people for this sort of thing is exactly why most software sucks these days.
And Apple’s “we know best” attitude is pretty much behind all bashing of Apple products. Giving people some choice is not a bad thing. Cry me a river about that taking more work on your part. No one else gets to half-ass their job because it would involve more work.
You’re right that the number of user options can’t be unlimited, especially when we’re talking about complicated GUI behaviors
But… I’d be happy, for starters, just to get my old icon/app images back in iOS 7. That’s been done for ages in the desktop world.
Anyone know an answer to my question, or can point me somewhere that does? I really would like to know, for obvious reasons.
For how long? Do you give them an option for the previous version? The one before that? The one before that? Pretty soon that page is going to look pretty cluttered. And since they’re “minor interface changes,” why bother? Every feature adds to test cost, maintenance cost, and the number of bugs in the app. Do you really have to keep every feature, even if only a few people are using it? Where do you draw the line? And since every change breaks someone’s workflow, people are going to scream no matter what you do–or don’t do.
So Apple builds what they think is best, and puts it out there. So far, they’re outselling every other phone and tablet by a significant margin, so somebody must think they’re doing the right thing.
I think that the new podcast playing app is WAY more sensible than having it mixed in with music. Podcasts are a very different type of entertainment from music, and it is absolutely common sense for them to be treated separately.
I am, however, experiencing the same issue mentioned upthread with some of my podcasts getting into a “can’t be downloaded” state that they never recover from. I was assuming it was a problem on the server side… anyone know the straight dope?
(Oh, and I’m also a professional software developer, and supporting two entirely different interfaces for an app is EXTREMELY hard. Not to mention that if you should keep your previous 1.0 interface as a forever-maintained option when you switch to your 2.0 interface, well, what do you do when it’s time to switch to your 3.0 interface? Keep 1.0 AND 2.0 around forever? Etc., etc., etc.
There are definitely things that can alleviate problems like the ones you’re describing, but “any time you change something, you should also have the old version around FOREVER” is not remotely realistic.)
Straw-man fallacy!
Nobody said keep many old versions around FOREVER (except you & Timewinder). My original comment said old version & new version.
[QUOTE=Timewinder]
For how long? Do you give them an option for the previous version? The one before that? The one before that?
[/QUOTE]
You do something reasonable, like when less than 10% of your customers are using an option you can drop it. But be fair – if it’s your fancy new Ver2.0 that can’t get above 10% of your customers, then that’s the one that should be dropped in the next release.
Not if your software is properly designed, with proper isolation between the interface modules and the core function modules. But good software design is EXTREMELY hard. (And quite rare.)
P.S. I am also a professional software developer – or was, pre-retirement. One of my first tasks was converting a system (not all that well-designed) to run under that fancy new COBOL-1968.
Once you’ve implemented something, it doesn’t really matter if a different idea is conceptually more sensible.
And I’d dispute it anyway as an absolute claim. They’re similar in some respects and different in others. They’re both audio entertainment and from the point of a user they work the same.
this one really makes no sense.
Yes, that was one feature that I knew I wanted the first time I had an iPhone. Why do I have to go three levels into the settings to turn wi-fi on and off? That’s a very good new feature. I was very happy to see that it included play/volume controls and a flashlight as well.
Oh, and as of yesterday, some episodes are straight up disappearing from the Podcast app. The white space where the episode used to be is still there, though.
There are any number of historical reasons why “~91% of desktop computers run Windows.”
NONE of them is “because it’s a more intuitive, user-friendly computing environment.”
My statement is based on substantial numbers of “snarky” Windows users decrying Macs and the Mac OS because it’s difficult to get into their innards and muck about and customize things (a part of the “closed system” complaint raised here).
I completely understand that those who want to do this would prefer Windows to the Mac OS.
But the mistake these folks make is thinking that everyone else in the world is just like them. They don’t grasp that they are but a small subset of the total number of computer users. The majority of computer users do simply want to get work done on their computers, and want a computing experience that makes this easy rather than difficult.
I grant you that one’s perception of “easy” vs. “difficult” is colored by what you’re used to. But I’m regularly astounded by the hoops Windows users have to jump through to accomplish what is so easily done on the Mac. (Add to this the whole virus protection thing; Windows users accept endless pop-ups, nagging, etc. about virus protection as the price of computing, apparently. In the course of 26 years of using Macs — most of those years every single day of my life — I have never had to trouble myself in the least with this.)
And, while I don’t have a cite, I believe that objective tests of comparable tasks on both platforms have shown and would show any number of everyday things that are more easily and intuitively accomplished on the Mac OS than they are on Windows.
Y’know, I looked all through my post to see where I said Windows’ dominance is “because it’s a more intuitive, user-friendly computing environment.” Wouldn’t you know, it’s not there! Golly!
YOU are the only one who wrote that, so don’t fucking put quote marks around it like I did. I gave no potential reasons for it and that wasn’t my fucking point. My point was that if Windows was SO torturous to use, to the extent that someone spends more time “working on their computer” than on “getting work done on their computer”, it would not be SO dominant that more than 9 out of every 10 desktop PCs run Windows. If productivity was THAT much worse compared to using a Mac, Apple’s PC market share would be a hell of a lot bigger (not the majority, due to “historical reasons” like you mentioned, but more than the sub-4% it currently has).
I’m not gonna spend my time on the rest of your post because I’m on my phone and I’m already taking way too much time tapping out this post. But I said that I’ve used Windows and OSX. I CURRENTLY HAVE both Windows and OSX. Both are operating systems. That’s it. Both are basically interfaces for a user to do the shit they want to do. Neither is more intuitive or easy than the other.* You go on about being SOOooooOOOOoo sick of snarky Windows users “decrying Macs and the Mac OS” but you’re doing the same.fucking.thing. I got annoyed at those same Windows users, which was part of the reason I got a MacBook - I wanted to actually use OSX so I could have better refutations of their bullshit.
But after I got mu MacBook, the fucking Mac evangelists were SO MUCH WORSE. And they used a lot of the same bullshit that you wrote in this post. No, I’m not “soooooooooo glad I ‘switched’ from Microsoft.” No, OSX is not “SO much easier than Windows”. No, I’m not going to say “it’s so much better!” It’s a fucking OS, same as Windows. Some things I really do like how OSX does them way more than Windows. But there are other things I really prefer in Windows over OSX.
- Let’s talk about the first time my browser locked up in OSX and I realized I literally couldn’t ctrl-alt-del and I couldn’t look it up on my only computer at the time because the browser was what locked up. Fun times! Or when I wanted to take a screenshot and there’s no fucking print screen key or already-installed utility.
Many people find that they get more work done if they are able to easily customize their system to their needs, instead of having to customize their needs to the system.
A certain level of customizability is a form of user-friendliness!
And to be clear, the “no, …” answers are using quoted questions from those Mac evangelists in real life, not your post (their further reasons for thinking I’d agree with them were very similar to stuff in your post).
While all my computers are Macs, I don’t necessarily find this the case. There was a bit of a learning curve to get back in the Apple way of doing things, and I don’t automatically find them more intuitive than modern Windows systems. To be honest, I really liked Windows XP and found it a very intuitive interface. I never got the chance to play around much with Windows 7, but I hear it’s pretty darned good.
There’s some things that piss me off on the Mac and I still find unintuitive, like moving files around. I miss the tree structure that Windows gave you. Like, if I want to move anything around, I generally need two windows open to do it, instead of just being able to navigate a tree on the left side of my window and drag-and-dropping it that way. I can still accomplish the same thing if I’m in Adobe Bridge, but I’m only there if I’m filing away photos. Moving files around the system has been an annoyance for me since day one, but I prefer how OS X handles most things and, well, the virus thing. I assume one day I’ll get bit, but I’ve been surfing for years without a condom into the dark corners of the internet, and have never caught anything. Back in my XP days, even with Windows Defender, a firewall, and Kapersky (or whatever it was) running, I’d have to use utilities like Hijack This! to scrub my computer clean of crap every couple of weeks. I assume things are much better now on the Windows side, but I don’t know.
I also generally discourage people from switching over to Mac especially if they are creatures of habit and are doing it just because they heard it a “better” user experience. OS X is not a “one size fits all” solution. Some people’s brains gel better with Windows; others seem to prefer OS X, and the masochists go Linux. 
Until OS X, I personally was not big into Macs, and only owned XP machines. Then one day, I got a MacBook Pro, and it just clicked (no pun intended) with me. But I know plenty of people who hate the OS X experience, so, as I said before, different strokes.
I just wish there was some way to listen to my podcasts in goddamn order. Is that too much to ask for, Apple? Is that too goddamn hard?
Come to think of it, I could use iTunes just to manage my podcast downloads and use other software to load them onto my iPod, which puts them into “Audiobooks” but at least THEY FUCKING PLAY SEQUENTIALLY HOLY SHIT.