I recently got myself an iPod Touch. Not to play music, mind you – my Nokia does that at a lower cost in battery. NO, I got a Touch for the apps. However, the process of using, handling, installing stuff on the Touch has left me less than happy.
So, this is me complaining:
#1. Locked into iTunes. I fucking HATE lock-in crap. Even if iTunes had been a competent piece of software and available in Linux, I’d still hate it. Why? Because there’s no choice. If you got an iPod Touch, you use iTunes. Period. regardless of wether or not iTunes actually does what you want it to…
#2. Itunes for Windows is crap. It’s slow, cumbersom, bloated as hell. Can’t speak for the Mac version, haven’t tried it, but this is just simply crap. It crashes as soon as you try to do more than one thing at a time (feels like Goddamn windows 3.1), it hangs, it behaves badly in virtually every way I can imagine it to. Expect more on this.
#3. Restricted development. As a software developer, I like tinkering with stuff. Unfortunately, I’ll need a Mac to develop for the iPod Touch/Iphone, since Apple are monopolistic assholes. Seriously.
#4. Restricted streaming. You can stream music from one iTunes to another – but not to a Touch or Iphone. Why? No good reason whatsoever. In fact, no reason whatsoever, good or otherwise. You need third-party software (like SimplifyMedia, which eats up 10% of the CPU – WHEN FUCKING IDLE). And also, there’s no way to sync libraries – you can’t for instance, have a music-serving server and then use a client computer to put that music on your iPhone. Apple are the kings of mindless, arbitrary restrictions.
#5. No multitasking. Despite having arguably the best kernel in the world for multitasking, especially when considering the machine’s size, there’s no multitasking. One app at a time, that’s the rule. Once again, we’re back in fucking Win3.1-ville.
#6. No scripting or programming languages on the machine itself. No python, basic, OPL, c++, java or whatever – nothing. They claim security and stability; that obviously wasn’t a concern when they built iTunes (se #2).
#7. No Flash. Seriously, they’re trying to market this thing as a mobile surfing device, yet have no support for Flash? Once again, arbitrary restrictions.
#8. Extremely bad support for multiple computers. Noone at Apple considers it possibly that one person might have more than one computer or, indeed, more than one OS on a single computer. So; there’s no way to share iTunes library, for instance. And if you have a Touch, with a lot of apps on it, and try to sync it with a secondary system – even if that system has exactly the same apps thet are on the Touch in question – it scrambles the order of those apps when Syncing. As in, I got X, Y and Z on my touch. I’ve carefully ordered them as Z, Y and X. I got a PC with X, Y and Z. I sync. Now, the order is Y, Z, X. Marvellous.
#9. No selective backup. I can’t choose to make a backup of only the data for one or two apps – backup is all or nothing, with absolutely NO way to check what made it into the backup and what didn’t.
I still use the machine, and I still kind of like it. But there are just enough crap to have to deal with on a daily basis to keep me from becoming a real advocate.
Expect this list to grow.
It ought to work to mount your server music folder on your client and having an alias/link in the iTunes Music folder that goes to that volume (which will have the same name every time you mount it).
I link my iTunes Music folder into my Dropbox folder.