Apple Ipod sucks.

Post #387,598 by hnick 3/16/14 3:57:57 PM Reply	Apple Ipod sucks. I just bought my wife an Ipod touch (16gb). The fucker does not come with a manual. I got the thing hooked to my wife's pc and loaded the necessary music (she teaches Zumba)but it will not sync the playlists, and I am having a hell of a time getting the bluetooth to sync with the Bose bluetooth speakers we got for her. The screen is totally unintuitive and I can't figure out how to get to a basic setup menu. The online help is useless. According to what they have published, I should be able to make playlists on Itunes and sync and everything should be good. The music transfers, the playlists do not.
Post #387,599 by Another Scott 3/16/14 4:05:25 PM Reply	Nothing about it is "intuitive". It's a learned skill. J almost tears her hair out whenever she gets a new iPod due to issues like this. I feel for you. Does this help? http://smallbusiness...-touch-43499.html Good luck. Cheers, Scott.
Post #387,632 by hnick 3/17/14 5:40:49 AM Reply	Finally got it. I've only been designing software for 35 years or so, but I can't help the feeling that this is a really poorly designed product. Settings are set to default values so the wretched thing does NOT work as expected. It's been a waste of half a weekend, but I don't have to look at the fucker again until my wife screws it up again. meh.
Post #387,633 by pwhysall 3/17/14 5:50:02 AM Reply	You said it. You've been designing software for 35 years. Software design and user interface design are two completely different disciplines. Unless you mean you're an interface designer, in which case carry on. It's like the difference/overlap between a civil engineer and an architect. The two fields are complementary, but the intersection is smaller than you may think. Apple kit is as successful as it is because it's well designed - from the box to the first run to the integration with your Mac. Your experience is unfortunate, but it's an outlier.
Post #387,634 by hnick 3/17/14 6:12:44 AM Reply	It's been a mix. I've done user interface, machine level embedded, protocol stacks, and GUI stuff. I think I have pretty fair expectations of how things should work. Just my opinion of course...
Post #387,635 by Another Scott 3/17/14 6:29:53 AM Reply	"iTunes sync Playlists" has 274,000 hits on Google. It's not just you. If it worked as easily as Apple thinks it does, it wouldn't be as popular a topic - it would "just work". Oh, and you're being entirely too reasonable in this forum. ;-) Cheers, Scott.
Post #387,675 by pwhysall 3/18/14 2:51:11 AM Reply	There are 700M iDevice users Come on. Let's be pragmatic here. 274K hits on Google is statistical noise. It does work as easily as Apple thinks it does, but nothing's perfect. "It Just Works" is a slogan. It's like "Coke Adds Life" or "The Ultimate Driving Machine". Pretending that iTunes/iDevice is some horribly flawed monstrosity that only ever works by accident is not far from "This will be the year of Linux on the Desktop!". For the vast, vast majority of their users, Apple kit works exactly as advertised, and they've got the ~$140B to prove it.
Post #387,679 by hnick 3/18/14 6:03:09 AM Reply	They're getting worse I had an older Ipod classic which was fairly intuitive to use and had a real hard disk in it. Construction was shit. The battery went bad. When I went to replace it, the case was difficult to open, the battery was glued to the back of the case, OVER the cheesy bands that they use for control wiring and prying the battery off the case broke the wiring. But while it was alive it worked fairly intuitively, and the documentation was both available and readable. This piece of shit appears to skip songs in the playlist for no apparent reason, there is little rhyme or reason to getting around in the menus, the (online) "manual" keeps veering off to iPhones rather than Ipods. Getting it to do anything at all is a major victory. We've only got about $600 in a sound system for her Zumba class. Bose was nice enough to include a printed manual. Apple? You joke. They couldn't be bothered to fall at 9.8 m/sec2 in a standard gravitational field.
Post #387,682 by crazy 3/18/14 8:39:05 AM Reply	Physical design was on purpose You weren't supposed to open the case. You weren't supposed to replace the battery. Any internal wiring hacks were never to be exposed to the end user. When it failed, you were supposed to replace the entire unit for additional Apple profit. Any observations based on doing exactly opposite what the designers intended are meaningless. Sorry. BTW: I've despised all Apple interface choices from day 1, the original MAC, the iPod, and the iPhone. I spent quite a while trying, resetting my brain, making them my sole devices, etc. But I'm an outlier. I don't count. They work well for their target market.
Post #387,680 by Another Scott 3/18/14 7:15:57 AM Reply	Heh. Only 50k hits for "TwbtyoLotD". ;-)
Post #387,699 by folkert 3/18/14 6:43:58 PM Reply	I've had LotD for many years. But as PW likes to point out... I'm not the target audience for that shit. -- greg@gregfolkert.net "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." --Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Post #387,673 by static 3/18/14 1:20:38 AM Reply	They don't have a 100% hit-rate, though. It's an extreme example, but the "puck" mouse from a number of years ago was a piece of horrible interface design. The thing was round. Yes, I've used one, when there was no alternative. Wade. Just Add Story http://justaddstory.wordpress.com/
Post #387,621 by a6l6e6x 3/16/14 8:28:10 PM Reply	So you want to RTFM? :) Try here: http://support.apple...anuals/#ipodtouch My wife has an ancient iPod Touch (possibly gen 2) and uses it when her iPad-2 isn't handy. She loves them both after being beat in to submission to learn Apple's ways. Come to the dark side! :) Alex ÂThere is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.Â -- Isaac Asimov
Post #387,622 by static 3/16/14 9:02:04 PM Reply	Bluetooth. The speakers' own documentation will be better for figuring out how to setup Bluetooth from the iPod. Actually I wonder why Apple have decided to spurn NFC. My external speakers have NFC+Bluetooth as does my phone and the hookup was stupidly easy: Turn on NFC, tap phone against NFC logo on device, touch OK on the screen. Wade. Just Add Story http://justaddstory.wordpress.com/
Post #387,625 by malraux 3/16/14 9:22:23 PM Reply	Are they different than iPhones now? The last iPod Touch I had was just like an iPhone, which has a setup icon on the main screen. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #387,628 by static 3/16/14 9:44:13 PM Reply	I've seen people fail to see that icon... Just Add Story http://justaddstory.wordpress.com/
Post #387,630 by pwhysall 3/17/14 2:29:24 AM Reply	Not just in computers... ...every year, I help run a beer festival. (shock! horror!) We have a tap room and a main room, and to avoid jams (and the spillage of precious, precious beer), we have a one-way system through the tap room. The signs for this are literally half a metre high (this is in a church hall, so a main room probably about the size of a basketball court, with a three metre ceiling) and say simply "TAP ROOM" and "NO ENTRY". (For the avoidance of doubt, everyone who goes to a beer festival knows what a tap room is; even the worst drunkenlogic can figure out that if there's no beer in HERE, there must be beer in THERE) And people still ask where the tap room is, and walk in through the out door. I will be advocating for making these signs bigger this year. And possibly audible. Probably explosives. And fireworks. And dancing girls.
Post #387,631 by static 3/17/14 4:22:58 AM Reply	Hand out badges. Very large badges. With the simple text "Ask Me About The Beer Signs". Hand them out to people caught ignoring the signs and insist they wear them. Then charge them 20% higher on their beer. People remember when their friends are given opportunity to embarrass them. Wade. Just Add Story http://justaddstory.wordpress.com/

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