Apple updates iTunes and other Apple ramblings

Apple Releases iTunes 9.2.1 and iOS 4.0.1

After all the iPhone 4 antennagate drama, Apple finally sends out news about their latest iTunes and iOS release. As you can see in the screenshot on the left, the iOS update only has one update, being this: “Improves the formula to determine how many bars of signal strength to display.” Sounds pretty straightforward, so I'd skip the explaining part. Whether it contains unicorn dust or other magical potion is beyond the update text.

iTunes, on the other hand, sports tons of features including the part where they disable third-party plugins which are “too old” to handle. By third-party plugins might mean plugins coming from iLike or Get Lyrical. It also addresses issues with drag-n-drop features, performance drop when syncing to some devices, and upgrading to iOS 4 with encrypted backups (which I personally encountered, dang it).

I dreamt last night that the next release will have the ability to dual-boot the iPhone to Android and committing suicide by drinking Kool-Aid while cooking itself in an Android-controlled microwave oven. And then a new iPhone gets presented by Steve Jobs the next day.

iTunes Insights from an ex-Mac Developer

My very first released-to-the-market application was my old baby, Bandwagon – an iTunes-only backup tool that doesn't only backup your media files, but also album books as well as preferences and play counts and changes. As of this time, Bandwagon is being replaced by Insync, an all-purpose backup tool which I previously covered due to the company being noticed by the great Techcrunch. If you want to see its full feature-set (which is kinda useless now because the project got shelved / terminated / ), you can view the old website via archive.org.

The reason why project Bandwagon got shelved is, among other reasons, the lack of a developer-friendly API where you could pick songs in a consistent manner, and read their properties. Applescript developers might argue this is not the case, but in all seriousness, Applescript sucks the life out of an event-heavy type of application, like backup systems. It crashes, it hangs, and it hosts monsters non-developers won't want to know about. My biggest frustration is asynchronous database access to iTunes, as well as notification APIs for changed or just-added media. The bottomline is iTunes isn't the most developer-friendly program you could ever work on making a third-party tool with.

And still, there's no good backup tool currently in the market that could match Bandwagon's implementation (search-based backup and restore, backup rules, event-based and automatic backup, backup to the cloud, smart updates, etc.), and even if you search Google, there's no dedicated iTunes backup utility out there. This is the case, in my opinion, because of Apple's typical treatment of their developers: that they don't know enough stuff and they might just ruin everything (winks at Windows and Linux developers).

Rumored iTunes Cloud

So maybe, the news about Apple's purchase of Lala.com will hopefully remove all the I-lost-my-music-and-I-can't-download-everything-I-purchased problems. Everybody's hoping that this is the case, but in my opinion, it won't be because they already have the infrastructure to query what an iTunes account owner has purchased, whether iPhone apps or TV Show season downloads, and still just managed coming up with a half-arsed solution that is “Store Menu → Check for available downloads”. Lala.com, only handles streaming, which means, in my opinion, will only address portability of an account's library with the requirement of having a a very fast internet connection.

On the other side of the music store pool is Android's Market where everything you purchase is listed in a website / web interface, and be assured your purchases can be re-downloaded to any Android device you own. That, in itself, is cloud-based backup, as well as search- and target-based restore.

For a company who claims they make things easier for users, Apple now has to face Google's Android which is a loud objection to Apple's “I'm easy” mantra. If Apple can't make things any easier for users, at least it should loosen-up to developers so they could help its users.

iPhone 4 is the best (?)

I chatted with a developer and technologist friend last Monday night and he told me that the iPhone 4 could be the best phone out there. I told him it could be the best gadget that ever existed, but it's a crappy phone. There's a difference there because you call a gadget a good phone because it handles calls and call workflows well. My iPhone 3G might be handling my calls well, but the sheer length of time accessing my contacts as well as the error-prone onscreen keyboard and the iChat-interface-forced SMS feature makes it levels inferior to just using my old Motorola clamshell. The screen is meant for dynamic buttons, and what could be left on a keypad are alphanumeric and punctuation buttons, as well as basic control buttons for going to home, power / unlock, answering (I hate that I have to slide the screen lock just to answer calls in my iPhone), and finishing a call.

But that's just me being the typical geek.

iOS Update Screenshot captured by author.

Comic clipped from theOatmeal.com's "What's it like to own an Apple product", used under fair use.

Bandwagon application screenshot courtesy of Xackup Inc., used under fair use.

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