...after having seen the nth Frothing Mac Advocacy Zealot's blog this month (and the nth Jeez-Why-Are-These-Apple-Fans-So-Freaking-Bitchy blog), I can't help feeling all this advocacy is letting the side down a bit.
I can see why it happens, from the moderately creditable (sense of fun, quirkiness, desire to defend one's own 'tribe') to the moderately discreditable (fashion victim, desire to cover uneasiness about money spent on computer by talking it up, desire to attack the other 'tribe').
I love my Mac. Sometimes this love is expressed through gritted teeth and beneath madder-than-usual hair, but that's actually recognisably-similar to how I loved all my other computers (all PCs), and a lot of it's down to how computers are such ambitious devices, seductively promising to organise and collect our entire world into one tidy box, so that when they inevitably fail we feel mildly betrayed.
I really don't get all the 'This Computer Will Change Your Life And Suddenly Computers Will Make Sense' side of Mac advocacy. As a switcher (December last year), I found a steep learning curve in some areas, quite a lot of recognisable similarities, and some things seemed better while others seemed worse. Many of those 'worse's I accepted philosophically as to do with my growing up on a different OS, and if I couldn't live with them, I found workarounds.
One of the motivations to start this blog was to have a place to post the essay on 'Ten Things I Prefer on Windows...and Ten Things I Prefer on the Mac' that I desultorily started writing about three months ago after the last time I read one too many advocacy-zealot blogs. I'm not sure if it's finished, because I keep adding to it and taking things out as I find things out (for example, I took out the bit about viewing a PDF in a webpage being more difficult on a Mac once I realised you actually can zoom, just not with CMD+ as with webpages).
The immediate cause of my taking it up again was reading various advocacy zealots going after some marketing type working at a law firm. He'd essentially been sold a whole bundle of unrealistic expectations (This Computer Will Change Your Life/You Will Never Need To Pick Up A Computer Book Again/Lo The Mouse Will Become Even As An Extension Of Your Hand). As one might expect, these expectations didn't come true, and the man went through a lot of grief trying to get his (now Mac) Microsoft tools to work with the Microsoft tools and Microsoft tool-users already in place in his office. So he started a blog entry to vent his pain at these expectations not being met. It's very reminiscent of the amusing video 'Mac Killed My Inner Child' in some ways. I started reading it thinking 'well, he is a bit of a twit, especially for somebody whose job is advising people about technology', and when I finished reading it I clicked on the 'rebuttal' a Mac fan came up with, and ended up thinking, 'well, maybe the man had a point. Is it unreasonable to want not to keep bashing his head against something he finds uncomfortable to use?' It used to be IT departments for mainframes and PCs that told us it was our duty to adapt to the machine. Now it's Apple fanboys.
Somebody (the chap who does Designtechnica, I think) once mentioned in a podcast that if Mac advocacy goes too far people will just start edging away from us in public places, as with the person who thinks we need to know all about their religion or mail-order business or political party.
I feel that maybe we ought to try to be nicer than we would otherwise be: more mature, considered, reasonable and accepting. If we try to meet criticism of the Mac that way, rather than sputtering, 'but it just is better!', the long-term effects can only improve. We want something from mainstream society and mainstream tech-support departments, after all. We want ordinary people to think 'that's interesting' and we want tech-support departments to think 'oh, they've got a Mac, let me just look that up'.
The less we can get other people to think 'Go Away', the better.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
iTunes 7.0 Annoyances
The first time I saw iTunes 7 I was quite impressed. Device management feels more integrated: it's much easier to see which of your sources is an iPod or CD than it used to be in the last major version, and there's a lot more detail about managing your iPod than there used to be.
The downside to this is that your Library is over-managed. I want to have a library called 'Library', not 'Music', thanks. Aside from anything else, most of my library is spoken-word: audiobooks, radio plays and serials, podcasts etc. It was quite disconcerting to have all this suddenly dumped into Music, and find it's much, much harder to see what's on your iPod.
I actually took the trouble to visit an Apple Retail Store recently (I'm in Ipswich, UK, so that means the easiest one to get to is in London, so it took me the better part of three hours in travel there and back) at least partly in order to go to a presentation on iPod/iTunes, which I naively thought might give me some tips on moving up one major version, after all there are no books available yet on 7.0.
It wasn't a completely wasted trip, as I also picked up a Belkin Stereo Voice Recorder and had the chance to test it immediately and see it works with my nano, but the presentation was an utter waste of time. No reflection on the nice lady giving the talk, but it was essentially a slideshow reiterating all the things in the advert and playing clips. It was on the level of 'this is a pop song, and you can fit x many songs on your iPod' (plays pop song over the talk) 'and this is an audiobook about John F. Kennedy' (plays clip of audiobook about John F. Kennedy for five minutes). Yes, iTunes/iTunes Store/iPod are an amazing technical and marketing achievement, but I already knew that.
In fact, I went up to her and asked her a simple question after the talk, and she did not understand it. What I actually wanted to know is, 'how do I get a different view of my podcasts so that it's a listing of tracks rather than a listing of subscriptions?' She carefully explained that I use the Podcasts tab to manage my podcasts, and I actually thought 'maybe there's a context menu or view I didn't realise was there', which would actually be quite helpful. So I went home and checked--nope.
At the moment, I'm moving a long audiobook from cassette to my 4Gb nano (using high-quality stereo and compressing it later). This shouldn't be a huge problem; after every few tapes, take the nano upstairs and dump the contents into iTunes.
Right.
The iPod management that is now built into iTunes seems impressively detailed until you look at it. It now tells me what's synchronised but not where the space is going. The 'other' tab is getting bigger and bigger, and when I look at where that space is going in the Finder shell I see 4 16k files (contacts/calendar). If I try to look in iTunes, it tells me that the 'other' tab is taking up over 1Gb. My best guess is that I need to reclaim the blank space that was taken up by the rather large WAV files, but it's not obvious how to do that. I know it's not the files in the Voice Memos playlist, because I don't synchronise that.
It's probably possible to sort all this out eventually, but since they've put a lot of effort into device management, it's a Huge Nagging Pain to find that one cannot effectively use all this to find out what's on there, what's taking up the space, and which old-no-longer-available podcasts are throwing error messages because they became unavailable since I synched the iPod.
The whole feel of this is that they've spent a huge amount of time and effort sorting out the Store's integration, but management of your own content is lagging behind. This is probably true because it's a subsidised device (like a printer or mobile phone (they sell it cheaper than it would naturally be and make money on consumables/calls/songs).
I've ripped a lot of my audiobooks as MP3s, and I don't appreciate them being considered 'Music'. Even AAC audiobooks ripped by the user seem to need to be re-imported to turn up on the audiobook tab. What kind of content you have appears to be respected if it's a download from their Store, but it feels as if your own content (CD/cassette rips, radio recordings etc) has become a bit of an afterthought.
PS. If anyone has any constructive comments about useful things I'm missing, please tell me (Mac-only, thanks)! Particularly if I'm having a brain-free day and there's some Perfectly Obvious Thing I somehow failed to notice.
The downside to this is that your Library is over-managed. I want to have a library called 'Library', not 'Music', thanks. Aside from anything else, most of my library is spoken-word: audiobooks, radio plays and serials, podcasts etc. It was quite disconcerting to have all this suddenly dumped into Music, and find it's much, much harder to see what's on your iPod.
I actually took the trouble to visit an Apple Retail Store recently (I'm in Ipswich, UK, so that means the easiest one to get to is in London, so it took me the better part of three hours in travel there and back) at least partly in order to go to a presentation on iPod/iTunes, which I naively thought might give me some tips on moving up one major version, after all there are no books available yet on 7.0.
It wasn't a completely wasted trip, as I also picked up a Belkin Stereo Voice Recorder and had the chance to test it immediately and see it works with my nano, but the presentation was an utter waste of time. No reflection on the nice lady giving the talk, but it was essentially a slideshow reiterating all the things in the advert and playing clips. It was on the level of 'this is a pop song, and you can fit x many songs on your iPod' (plays pop song over the talk) 'and this is an audiobook about John F. Kennedy' (plays clip of audiobook about John F. Kennedy for five minutes). Yes, iTunes/iTunes Store/iPod are an amazing technical and marketing achievement, but I already knew that.
In fact, I went up to her and asked her a simple question after the talk, and she did not understand it. What I actually wanted to know is, 'how do I get a different view of my podcasts so that it's a listing of tracks rather than a listing of subscriptions?' She carefully explained that I use the Podcasts tab to manage my podcasts, and I actually thought 'maybe there's a context menu or view I didn't realise was there', which would actually be quite helpful. So I went home and checked--nope.
At the moment, I'm moving a long audiobook from cassette to my 4Gb nano (using high-quality stereo and compressing it later). This shouldn't be a huge problem; after every few tapes, take the nano upstairs and dump the contents into iTunes.
Right.
The iPod management that is now built into iTunes seems impressively detailed until you look at it. It now tells me what's synchronised but not where the space is going. The 'other' tab is getting bigger and bigger, and when I look at where that space is going in the Finder shell I see 4 16k files (contacts/calendar). If I try to look in iTunes, it tells me that the 'other' tab is taking up over 1Gb. My best guess is that I need to reclaim the blank space that was taken up by the rather large WAV files, but it's not obvious how to do that. I know it's not the files in the Voice Memos playlist, because I don't synchronise that.
It's probably possible to sort all this out eventually, but since they've put a lot of effort into device management, it's a Huge Nagging Pain to find that one cannot effectively use all this to find out what's on there, what's taking up the space, and which old-no-longer-available podcasts are throwing error messages because they became unavailable since I synched the iPod.
The whole feel of this is that they've spent a huge amount of time and effort sorting out the Store's integration, but management of your own content is lagging behind. This is probably true because it's a subsidised device (like a printer or mobile phone (they sell it cheaper than it would naturally be and make money on consumables/calls/songs).
I've ripped a lot of my audiobooks as MP3s, and I don't appreciate them being considered 'Music'. Even AAC audiobooks ripped by the user seem to need to be re-imported to turn up on the audiobook tab. What kind of content you have appears to be respected if it's a download from their Store, but it feels as if your own content (CD/cassette rips, radio recordings etc) has become a bit of an afterthought.
PS. If anyone has any constructive comments about useful things I'm missing, please tell me (Mac-only, thanks)! Particularly if I'm having a brain-free day and there's some Perfectly Obvious Thing I somehow failed to notice.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Cannot believe how hard it is to think of a blog-name
It's distinctly lowering that I cannot think of a single pun or amusing saying which is one-word-long, punchy, pretty, and incontrovertibly my own. I hope that this is because I drew a mental blank when put on the spot with 'think of a name for your blog', rather than that I have never come up with a single non-verbose witticism in my entire life.
I started going through several bizarre-and-interesting words which I thought had a chance of not having been thought of already. They had been. ('Octothorp', for example, isn't in the Shorter Oxford but evidently that one was taken).
Most of my favourite t-shirt slogans turned out to be Too Many Words, so I turned to the Jargon File. Many of their obscure-but-interesting words were too long, or had already been done. Including 'dogcow' and 'moof'.
Did Clarus start a line of Confused Animals, though? I started thinking up a 'mogcow'. It stretches out in fields, waiting for milk with a thoughtful expression, because it has never quite worked out whether it's waiting for a bowl of milk or to be milked. A slow, rather soothing rumbling arises from its tired body. This could be something to do with its complicated digestive system, or a purr. Its colouration could be described as Friesian, or British Standard Moggy. In inclement weather, it curls up. And, of course, its name is 'Claw-Us' and it goes 'mewf!' (Yes, I realise this breaks the pun a bit, but it's what you get after having been sitting here for twenty minutes typing non-existent words into Blogger and finding it's already got a blog for all of them...)
The pity is, I cannot come up with a nice little cartoon for this, even if I can visualise it quite well. In the first paragraph, I managed to draw a blank, but doubt my artistic abilities can carry me much beyond that.
I started going through several bizarre-and-interesting words which I thought had a chance of not having been thought of already. They had been. ('Octothorp', for example, isn't in the Shorter Oxford but evidently that one was taken).
Most of my favourite t-shirt slogans turned out to be Too Many Words, so I turned to the Jargon File. Many of their obscure-but-interesting words were too long, or had already been done. Including 'dogcow' and 'moof'.
Did Clarus start a line of Confused Animals, though? I started thinking up a 'mogcow'. It stretches out in fields, waiting for milk with a thoughtful expression, because it has never quite worked out whether it's waiting for a bowl of milk or to be milked. A slow, rather soothing rumbling arises from its tired body. This could be something to do with its complicated digestive system, or a purr. Its colouration could be described as Friesian, or British Standard Moggy. In inclement weather, it curls up. And, of course, its name is 'Claw-Us' and it goes 'mewf!' (Yes, I realise this breaks the pun a bit, but it's what you get after having been sitting here for twenty minutes typing non-existent words into Blogger and finding it's already got a blog for all of them...)
The pity is, I cannot come up with a nice little cartoon for this, even if I can visualise it quite well. In the first paragraph, I managed to draw a blank, but doubt my artistic abilities can carry me much beyond that.
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