Barcelona Countdown

Exactly two weeks til Spain.

Seeds Of Doubt

With the introduction this week of the new Apple iPod Why-Buy and the iDoubtIt ipod-branded patent leather cases, I figured it was a good time to do a road report on the ol' ipod video and more importantly, iTunes.

It's been about a month now and overall I'm still very happy with the ipod video. In general it works very well though I have had two occassions where it refused to turn on until I plugged it up with the usb cord. I at first attributed this to unforeseen power drain. Perhaps it turned on in its case when I wasn't looking, since I don't generally remember to turn 'hold' on. But both times, as soon as the cable was plugged up, the power indicator displayed at least 3/4 power. Perhaps thats all just a fluke. Like a true mac user I keep telling myself that.

The real trouble I have stems from iTunes which, despite all the hype about Apple products being of superior design and implementation to their simpleton windows counterparts, is just a hair above shareware quality when it comes to consistency. Today's problem involved a couple of new podcasts that were supposed to be uploaded to the ipod this morning. The updates went without a hitch. The ipod did its normal update routine of showing a big "Don't touch this!" screen and iTunes did its normal temporary lockup. Once the ipod returned to the "Charging" screen I disconnected and went to work. When I got around to playing the podcasts I found out that only one of them actually made it to the ipod. The rest are in iTunes oblivion. The one that did make it, a Lonely Planet podcast about the Yucatan, was cut short during play. Only 1.5 minutes of it was on the ipod. This ended up not being the fault of the ipod nor iTunes but it did uncover flaws in iTunes later when I tried to delete the podcast from the iTunes library.

iTunes will handily remove media from the library but it doesn't understand that you might delete something because its borked, not because you don't want it. In my case, I deleted the podcast thinking I'd just update it and it would redownload. Not so. Instead iTunes refuses to admit that episode of the podcast ever existed. More important than the loss of the podcast is why these interactions are so hard. The solution was not obvious. If I were using winamp or just about any other media library application, this would be a breeze. These are the things Apple supposedly gets right but I have yet to see evidence to back that up. So, 1.5 thumbs up for the ipod. Two thumbs down for iTunes.

What If Everybody Drove The Speed Limit?

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* video and sound