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August 4, 2009
The Dark Side: There's an app for that
As much as I hate to admit it, I'm installing iTunes on my PC. Ugh. I despise iTunes. iTunes 8, which I'm downloading now, is 75.5 Megs of DRM-laced malware masquerading as a useful application. There's nothing needed on the iPhone that you couldn't drag and drop onto it with Windows Explorer, but this is what we have instead - iTunes 8 - a ginormous specimen of malignant, festering bloatware.
So, I finally get this fat piece of garbage installed and it starts scanning my whole computer looking for music files so it can turn me in to the RIAA and the Apple and the Free Masons.
I hook my stupid iPhone to my PC for the first time it shows up in iTunes - miracle of miracles. So then, I got and search for the one and only app that I want - Shazam - it's a little free app that's supposed to be able to listen to a song playing and tell you what it is - which is pretty cool, if it really works. But first, I've got to create a stupid iTunes account, so I do this. Then they send me a verification link.
So I click on the verification link and it wants me to open it with something...i dunno...it's late and it was pretty confusing. Probably if you grew up on an Apple it all makes sense, but just gibberish to me and finally I can sign into the iStore and I see my stupid app - Shazam. And I try to download it and nothing happens. iTunes seems to have fallen into a coma.
I unhook my iPhone and open it up and of course the app isn't there. It's not that easy, of course. Who knows where the app is? Hung up in cyberspace somewhere. God I hate Apple. I hate iStore. I hate their whole miserable little application. A nightmare. I feel like I'm walking into meat grinder.
So, finally, I guess that I have to click on my iPhone so I do and it wants me to register it, and I politely decline. Then it wants to sync everything on the earth - my Outlook contacts, favorites in my browsers, email address phone numbers, appointments, you name it.
Now, I have very little faith that this will work out. Considering that at the AT&T store, they tried to copy the contacts from my RAZR into the iPhone and this is exactly what their machine does because they've done it twice now, on 2 different phones for me - and I got the same results both times. Their machine copies over the first phone number for each person in your cell phone and categorizes it as a "mobile" number, regardless of whether it's a home, cell, or work number. Makes no difference.
So now, my contacts are all fvcked up in my iPhone, and it wants to know if I want to "sync" my contacts. No hint as to what's about to happen here, but I'm thinking they're fixing to fvck me in a big way. As in royally. But it's late and I'm tired and there is no explanation of what it's about to do. All you know is "Sync" or "Don't Sync". This is the world of Apple. Simple. We make complicated things more simple than is possible.
I have no idea what kind of sync it's going to do. A left to right? Right to left? Both to both? Who the h3ll knows? I google it but finally I just give up and say "go". It's just spinning and spinning and who the h3ll knows what it's doing? I have no clue.
Finally, I click on the little spinning wheel to see if it's hung up or actually doing something and I see that it's smack dab in the middle of a 297.9 Meg O/S update for this stupid thing that I've had less than a week.
Like...how out of date could the sofware be? They just cut the thing out of the box on Sunday. Christ. The 300 Meg update times out when it's nearly complete and I restart it and it starts over from 0 and I think - thanks for that, Steve. Even Microsoft has figured out how to restart downloads, but not iTunes. Not in 2009, anyway.
So, finally I just sh1t-can the 300 Meg update. Like, I don't want to spend halft the night trying to update the O/S from 3.00 to 3.01 anyway. WTF?
Eventually, I figure out how to delete the stupid update from the sync. Then, I sync my ipod and it offers to turn me into Apple for about the 427th time, and I politely decline and say "don't ever ask me again and stop trying to nark on me you j@ck@ss". Then finally, it tells me it's "syncing" all my contacts. Who knows what it's doing? Finally, it says the "sync" is complete and it's safe to disconnect the iPhone and if I look outside, I should see the FBI the RIAA marching down the driveway arm-in-arm.
But instead, I look outside and they're confused about which house is mine because I don't have my street address posted anywhere and they're dragging my neighbors out of their house and beating them with trudgeons in their nightclothes by the light of a full moon.
Over the muffled screamed of my bleating neighbors, I unhook the iPhone and look at my stupid little screen and there's no Shazam app. But then I scroll to the next screen over to the right and lo-and-behold, there it is. And I run the stupid app and it wants me to "tag" music, whatever that is so I push the "tag" button and it says "listening" and I hold it up to the window so it can hear the riot next door - sirens and alarms and firemen and sheriffs...dogs barking...children crying...and above it all, the RIAA and the Apple guys beating the ever-living sh1t out of my terrified neighbors and right there in the middle of it is Steve Jobs himself and he's got my neighbor by the throat...got her pinned real good down on the asphalt in her nightgown and she's squirming and bleeding but not screaming as much now that he's got a better choke hold on her than he had before.
"There's millionaires starving out in Los Angeles," he's yelling at her. "Do you have any idea what the collision insurance is on a Lotus Elise when you live in a state full of uninsured Mexicans?!!" Like, somehow it's her fault that the musicians are behind on their Lotus payments or something. Of all the gall.
Of course, the iPhone is listening to this melee the whole time - there's an app for that, after all - and then it says "transmitting data", like I think it uploads this file to be analyzed by the super computers down in Cheyenne mountain, I think. And it comes back and says "Watts Riots?" and I put "No". Then it says "Kent State Shooting?" and I say "No". It says "Con Son Island Tiger Cages?" and I say no. Then it says "Man installing iTunes?" and I say "Yes" and turn it off so they can't track me and I yell at the neighbors to shut the h3ll up so I can sleep.
Posted by Rob Kiser on August 4, 2009 at 8:42 PM
Comments
It sucks that we want to use a really nice device that a company as liberal as Apple is building. No one ever said a free market economy is easy. My music is on my Ipod. My phone is a $ 40 Nokia from Target with no contract.
Posted by: Greg in Limerick on August 5, 2009 at 5:31 PM