A Little Disappointment in Life

Recently I got a hold of a string of applications from the iTunes Apps store that just plain stink. From my perspective it wouldn't be so bad if they where free, but that's not the case.

A great example of sucking badly is TextGuru. It should be called Text-AntiTech-Counter-intuitive-Piece-of-Crap. First the reviews in the kindness light where miss-informed on the "ease of use factor," and at worst flat-out lies. It did not work as advertised which brings back my argument for trial-ware. It can certainly be done and I have no idea why it's not.

Text-Guru is supposed to allow you to "seamlessly" allow you to connect with your iPhone and move, share and edit basically any file format. Wrong. I still to this day have not been able to get the file transfer to work, despite being a pretty darn good geek, and in existing word documents you lose cut and paste functionality. The only documents that you can actually cut and paste are text files. That blows. They left out that little invaluable tidbit of information. There are a bunch of other clumsy things about the app and I'm not very happy. Why? Because if it happened once, I'd say okay, but it's happened multiple times.

Several other "Apps That Suck?" Ummmmm Chef, Pick & Choose Groceries, ATT Yellow Pages, What's On, Where and a few others but as I write, I'm just getting more upset. It's just too mind bending.

So to keep this from being a full on rant, Apple needs to do something about the process. As I said above, allow for trial-ware for goodness sake. Show little demo's movies, something. Come on this is the tech age. You can make our lives easier.

Jaye

Real Genius

I'm really pleased about the iPhone and iPod Touch 2.1 software update. So far since completing installations on several units, I have to say that none of the iPhones or Touch has crashed (as yet). Right on!

It's also notable that the apps are much snappier (with the exception of Twinkle - but that might be bad coding). They seemed to get a handle on issues like slow applications and keyboard lag. The push functionality in the MS Exchange and MobileMe is supposed to be much better. But to tell you the truth, I've been having a great MobileMe experience.

For those interested, the iPhone and iPod Touch seems faster in the backup functions and the App installs are way faster. Thank gawd. The previous backs took so long, I could microwave something and eat it and the backup would still be going. This is a true improvement.

The last thing to note is Apple Genius. This is interesting because you can select a single song and then then touch the "Genius," button and it creates a playlist based on what goes well with that particular song. And to tell you the truth, it's flat out amazing. It not only appears in you iPhone and iPod Touch, but iTunes 8 (which is awesome by the way). in iTunes, based on what you are playing it analyzes your music collection (no private data is kept on file) and compare it with what other users are listening to and then makes suggestions to you.

To be quite frank coming up with cool playlists and finding new material generally sucks. There are times I've wasted hours attempting to "discover," new music still only to come up empty. Genius has been offering some really good choices and introduced me to some things that I wasn't aware of. It's a Win - Win.

Let me know your thoughts. I look forward to hearing your experience.

Tech-On,

~ Jaye