This Is Your Solution Apple?

Really apple this is what you came up with when asked to write an app for media streaming from iTunes. i am so irritated by the craptastic state of this app it is hard for me to form sentences.

so i have an iPad and i have a mac with iTunes that has all my media in it. i can not fit all of that media on my iPad so the obvious solution is to stream it from my mac to my iPad so i can view it in comfort at my leisure. i use Airvideo because it is easy and a very well written app. when iOS 4.3 was released i was super excited because they had said there would be iTunes library sharing for all iOS devices. i was hoping it would be a sleeker version of what Airvideo does built into the video app on the iPad. however i have never been more disappointed in an apple written product in my life.

first of all when you open it the library looks like this.

Please explain to me the organizational paradigm where season 3 of Seinfeld goes next to freaks and geeks and also season 5 of scrubs? i have never seen anything like this. it is quite possibly the biggest clusterfuck of nonsense i have ever seen. how does this code exist. this is how i assume the code is written:

<(are you sure, that seems kind of silly)>

i honestly have no idea who wrote this code but they need to get slapped in the face......really hard.

so it gets worse...much much worse. once you finally find the season of the show you want to watch it opens up to let you view the episodes. logical except this is what you get.

I do not know if anyone knows that much about the office, but Branch Wars most certainly does not come before Fun Run. who the fuck is in charge of this seriously. so not only are the seasons and shows out of order but the episodes are a clusterfuck as well. moving on, one would just think they could muster through and just find the episode they want, knowing of course exactly what order the season goes in. but no.......it seriously gets worse. not only are the episodes jumbled but the app does not even load all the episodes you have in your library. from my experience it shows a maximum of 16 episodes from a show. also it does not pick the first 16 episodes, it just picks 16 random episodes and displays them in a random order. 

this is what you get at the bottom.

so given no choice because the episode i want is for some stupid reason not being displayed i touch get more episodes, maybe that will just load the rest of them. maybe it is a cache issue and it only loads a certain amount. so lets touch that and see what happens. you are seriously not going to believe where it takes you.

Yep, thats right, it takes you out of the app and into the iTunes store to view episodes one can buy. this is such a pathetically designed app am having trouble finding adjectives severe enough to accurately portray how i feel about it. honestly it makes me want to find the human who programmed this and shove something pointy into his left eyeball. i do not understand how this can exist. i honestly can not understand how it has not been patched yet. i really do not understand how there is not a larger uproar over this steaming pile of feces that is this application.

in conclusion all i want to say is FUCKING FIX THIS SHIT. i am tired of this existing in the state it is. 

ok i feel moderately better. :D

WWDC?

Some words on WWDC 2010. As I sit back and reflect on the keynote this past Monday, I begin to realize just how disappointed I am. Granted the new iPhone 4 looks fantastic, and the technology they added to this new phone is really quite impressive. However there are a few things I have on my mind that I think should have happened but did not.



10.7?
Apples next big cat should have made at least a Preview or a mention. This is the developers conference after all. In the past it has almost always been the event that apple uses to show a sneak peek of the new Mac os. I was a little disappointment their wasn't even a slide hinting at them working on it.

MobileMe?
I have recently posted about my opinions of the current MobileMe set of functions. So really all I have to say is that it is still way over priced for the limited functionality it gives it's prescribers. I really had hoped for any kind of iTunes streaming, cheaper price....really anything would have been nice.



AppleTV?
Apparently it is still a hobby, how unfortunate. Apple concedes victory to google.



Mac Pro?
From what I understand the new i7 chips would seriously upgrade the performance in those machines. I may be wrong, but they have not made a very big deal about their top of the line Mac in a while.


MacBook Air?
Still a joke of a product in my opinion, but it would have been nice to see something about it this year. It was quietly updated earlier this year, but it doesn't seem like that was enough. Even though I have had countless conversations with my cousin about how they should just remove that laptop all together, it is over priced and under powered.

Overall this years WWDC was all about the iOS and the new iPhone. I had just hoped for a lot more. However I always want a 4 hour keynote anyway, and they always keep it under 2. I just hope they quietly release some stuff over the next few months, or even have a special keynote for some of the stuff I mentioned. Either way this years WWDC was just meh. There is always next year.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Magazine Prices?

So reading on this ipad is amazing. However the price I have to pay is not. I really want to get popular science and time. But both cost $4.99 an issue. AN ISSUE. I mean come on. Give me a years subscription for 30 or something. $4.99 is way to expensive for a magazine issue in my opinion. I was really hoping to be able to read magazines and comics on this device, but now I find myself realizing just how poor I am, lol. Even comics are around 5 dollars. I guess this is how much these things would cost in the real world so it makes sense. However most magazines like popsci have a yearly subscription service for a drastically lower price then it would cost to purchase each in the store. I really hope they bring that kind of service to the app store, because then I will actualy start buying magazines. As for comics, I really want marvel to bring their online service price of $59.99 yearly price to view thousands of comics online. Why don't they bring that to the iPad? Clearly it is because people will buy the comics regardless. Overall the whole comic and magazine trend on the iPad is disappointing to me. Hopefully things change in the future.

Update: wired came out and said today that they would be releasing a subscription service in the fall. Let's hope the rest of the magazine companies follow their example.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Some Thoughts on MobileMe

Now that I have an iPad, iPhone, and two macs I am realizing just how difficult it is to keep all of my data synced together and accurate across all the devices. For instance if I change a calendar date on my iPhone in order to get everything synced to that change, I need to sync my iPhone to my MacBook, then sync it to my iPad and then send the info to the iMac. It might not seem like a big deal, but over time it starts to get really monotonous having to sync and re-sync all these devices manually. This is where MobileMe comes into the picture, it automatically syncs data across all of my devices. Plus the find me feature for the iPhone is really cool. Almost is reason enough to get the service alone. The only bad thing is it cost $99 per year. Kind of a ridiculous price for convenience. I did have the service a while back because I was opted in for a cheaper rate for some reason by apple. So I had it for a year, and I did like it I just really had no use for it at the time. The only real big issue I remember having was the photo sync feature in iPhoto. It almost never worked and when it did it usually resulted in corruption of my files. Now this might be because my iPhoto is continually acting up( I think I may have corrupted a library file or something). But the online viewing experience was phenomenal. I used to put my college photos on the web so my family could view them. But overall I was happy with the service.

It just seems like MobileMe is kind a simple solution to some of the issues that arise while having multiple mobile apple products. It is a good attempt but the service needs to become way more extensive in order to compete with the new droid syncing and streaming services and the new Microsoft kin project. I have hope for the service improving in the future because since apple is selling more ipads then they are selling macs, I think this service is going to become extremely vital to their product line.

Speculation part: rumors have it that apple is planning on releasing a streaming function for iTunes. Now if they add this to MobileMe then that is reason enough for me to buy the service.

Update: i am just going to wait until WWDC to see if they improve the service. i am assuming they are going to since they pretty much need to in order to stay relevant. than i might buy it.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

iPad Blogging

Being my first blog post from my brand new iPad I am still getting used to this soft keyboard. It is actually very nice to use. One of my original peeves was the non tactile feeling and sound. Well with the clicking that I have turned on it actually satisfies the sound need. The feeling though is still kind of odd, but is something I have no problem getting used to. The keyboard is very spacious and I make very little mistakes. Since I don't actually use the standered way of typing on a regular keyboard. I usually just stare at the keys anyway, with the soft keyboard I am required to stare at the keyboard. So my typing speed has transferred. Also the auto correct works rather well. More reviews to come soon. I plan on blogging a lot more often now that I have an app that makes it so much easier.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad