.omega

I’ve been thinking about getting a new phone once my current one’s been paid off… I’m on a Telia 18-month plan and it ends in about a month. I’m probably going to stay with Telia; I like their coverage… I was thinking of getting an iPhone, but like you’ve probably noticed, I’m not too happy with the Apple way of doing things. And they’re not very happy with me, either - they’re doing their absolute best to keep me using their hardware, while at the same time telling me, over and over again, that I can’t do the things I want to do. I’m a “power user”, and I’m tired of their condescending crap.

My solution: Looks like I’ll be getting a Nokia N900.

More on New phone?

Jag studerar ju vid Linnéuniversitetet i Växjö, just nu en ganska lös och flummig kurs som heter “Datorstött lärande”. Jag gillar den, mycket för att den innebär att få träffa andra lärare och diskutera olika sätt att använda datorn som hjälp i skolan.

Nu fick vi en uppgift där vi skulle skriva typ ett A4 på ämnet “elektronisk kommunikation och mänsklig närvaro”. Många skrev om specifika klassrumssituationer, hur jobbigt de tycker att det är med mobiltelefoner, och så vidare. Tanken var att vi skulle diskytera och fantisera kring för- och nackdelar, utveckling, interaktion och kommunikation, och så…

Såhär blev det för mig:

More on Uppsats på temat “elektronisk kommunikation och mänsklig närvaro”

People who’ve read my list of annoyances regarding iTunes and the iPod Touch may be wondering why the hell I still own a Touch - if I dislike it so much, why not get something else?

More on Things I like about the iPod Touch

#13: No way of checking how much space the apps take. Sure, I can check how much the apps themselves use - but not, of course, sort them by size or anything like that - in iTunes, but I can’t see, for instance, how much space my offline Spotify songs take, or if I should begin trimming my comicbook collection.

More on iPod/iTunes annoyances pt.4 - Again.

As you might’ve gathered from the last few weeks of more or less constant nagging and bitching, I’ve recently gotten an iPod Touch. Despite a number of complaints, it’s still, I fear, better than any of the alternatives, at least for now.

More on No iPhone for me…

…is still the original X-box. Not because of its admittedly mediocre game library, but because of its flexibility.

It can’t have escaped anyone’s attention that I’m kind of a geeky kind of guy. I like fiddling with things. I like taking things apart, see how they work, make my own little contribution, and then put them together again. And so the X-box was more or less made for people like me.

More on My favorite console…

#12: No power profiles. This is a small one, but annoying. When my iPod Touch is connected, as in recieving power from somewhere, I’d like it to stay on and un-autolocked. When it’s not, I’d like the autolock to kick in after about a minute. Laptops and netbooks usually have “power management profiles” of some sort. Why not the Touch?

Told you it was a small one.

Äntligen finns mitt första tryckfärdiga skötebarn att köpa. Spelet heter Evolutionens Barn, och är ett semberättarrollspel som kombinerar dystopier a’ Du sköna nya värld och Venus är Vår med actionanime a’ Ghost in the Shell och Bubblegum Crisis.

Äh, gå till spelets hemsida istället.

Och sen tar du och köper spelet. Kom igen, det kostar inte mycket. Betala efter samvete och plånbok.

Evolutionens Barn är dessutom släppt via Creative Commons Erkännandelicens, vilket i korthet betyder att man får ladda hem, modifiera, sprida, sälja, skapa fanmaterial etc helt fritt. Allt jag kräver är attribueringsrätten, dvs att du måste skriva nånstans vem som ligger bakom verket från början. Tror du att du kan trycka upp EB och gå med vinst - gör det! Gör vad du vill! Kultur ska vara fri.

#10. No shared file area, no file system access. Seriously, Apple, wtf? I know you want us to believe noone needs to access or use the computer’s actual file system anymore, instead you want us to rely on indexing and tagging, and flat motherfucking file structures. Like your hog, Itunes.

Anyways, I’m not ready to go back to your “golden days” of the Macintosh File System. Just so you get what I’m trying to say here, the MFS was Apple’s first file system, used in early Mac OS. It was non-hierarchal, or rather, it supported exactly one level of folders. This is how they want us to treat our computers in 2009: By crippling them, going back to 1984 - which, you know, is kind of fitting given that year’s political connotations. Combined with #5 (No Multitasking), which of course was a stand-out feature of good old Windows 1, 2 and 3.x… Well, it seems Apple are tryint to drag us into the future facing ass-backwards. Seriously, you fucks!

So… Why is the lack of common file area and file system access a bad thing? Well… Let’s say I find a PDF on the web. I can view it kind of OK in Safari - but I can’t save it. If I’m offline, I can’t access the file. Can I download it? Nope. Why? Because I have no file system access. Can I view the same PDF with another PDF viewer, one with a bit more bells and whistles? Nope. I can’t access the files created or used by one app in another app. If I’ve loaded a PDF into the iPod Touch by using Folders, I can’t access that file from PDF Expert. There’s no shared file area. Each piece of software has access to its own little private area, and that’s it.

And sorry, Apple, but that just fucking sucks. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it sucks wet, hairy donkeyballs.

But of course, as we all know, freedom is slavery.

#11. Bluetooth limited. OK, when 3.0 came out, people discovered the iPod Touch has bluetooth. Big whoop, since you can’t do much with it. It has A2DP support (audio sending, for instance sending music to bluetooth enabled speakers), AVRC (for using it as a remote), and PAN (Personal Area Networking). No support for wireless headets, no support for stuff like keyboards etc. Once again, Apple limits the appeal of their product by forcing all users to accept arbitrary limits.

What Apple have here, is possibly the greatest, sweetest machine I’ve come across - aside from battery life and temperature resistance, obviously - and they’ve ruined 90% of its potential by making up bullshit limitations that just makes the machine fail to live up to its full potential. The iPod Touch is a cripple, pure and simple - and the problem is APple’s software, not the hardware.

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.