Itunes….

I know I was raving about Apple products in my last post, but iTunes is now pissing me off no end. All I want to do is add album artwork, but it won’t see my art as folder.jpg in the music folder!

Argh.

Apple Stuff

I love it. I may sounds like a fanboy, but I’m really not. I realise they have downsides, and features missing. But no other company does things quite like them. Ease of use, packaging, design. It’s all brilliant.

I just got an iPod Shuffle today. Comes in this cool little pack with it on display. I take it out of the pack, plug it into the included dock, plug it into my mac, and it just loads stuff on automagically. People complain about how they want to be able to drag and drop, or have more control. I’ve had players before that did that, and I just never ended up updating it, because it took too long to figure out what was already on there, and I couldn’t just drag my entire collection across. iTunes, for all its shortcomings, just does it for me. There were some things I wish it would do, like proper ID3 tag editing, but its work-around-able.

I might try some of the other ipod syncing solutions, just to see how they are. Foobar2000 and Mediamonkey seem to, along with Winamp. Might give Amarok a try too, when I get around to installing Ubuntu again.

But…back to Apple. I’m also getting an iPhone this week. I know it has its problems, but it seems one of the best phones on the market still. There are better specced phones (Like the N95) but they will not come close to the iPhone GUI in terms of usability and coherence between features (something which I always talk about). I looked at getting a HTC Touch Diamond, but I really cannot be bothered with Windows Mobile anymore. I’ve had it on my last two phones, and it’s awful. Unresponsive, features missing (I had to install a program to send files via Bluetooth) and everything just seemed…tacked on. It’s like Windows on PCs, actually.

For example: the calendar app and todo list seem to be entirely seperate. You can’t add tasks to one from the other. Things like birthdays randomly show up twice in the calendar. It doesn’t seem to sync properly with other calendars (although, admittedly, I haven’t really dug into that). The software to sync is awful (although in Vista it is marginally better). It just feels like an unfinished, beta product. But it’s been out for years. Even Android looks years ahead of it, and that’s not even out yet!

I was considering waiting until an Android phone was released in the UK, but after seeing the first phone, I decided against it. It looks massive and a bit ugly. Hopefully they’ll come up with some better phones soon though, because Android looks to be the future.

I’m sure I was going to add something else to this, but that’s it for now. Will update when I get the phone.

Stuff

The New Canon 5D looks amazing. Crazy resolution, brilliant low light shooting, full-frame. What’s got me looking at it more though, is the video functionality. Vincent Laforet seems really excited about it, and I can see why. Just check out what it can do. 

Related to that, some photographers and video shooters have a ridiculous amount of equipment. It makes me jealous.

Here’s hoping I can afford a 5DII at some point.

Microsoft…

Mentioned this briefly in my previous post, but I’m going to make a self-contained post too.

Microsoft seem to have no focus with what they’re doing. They have too many products on the go at once, a lot of which do similar things. I know this may be a transition period, as they are apparently removing the built in programs in Windows 7, but still, it’s confusing to end users.

Here’s an example. I have Windows Mail preinstalled with Vista. When I install Office 2007, I get Outlook installed too. Now, with these Live betas, I get another mail client! (Windows Live Mail). The same is true for calendar apps (except outlook does calendar too).

They also have Office live, which seems to provide online document storage, but then they also have Skydrive, which also seems to do a similar thing. Then they have Live Mesh, which also offers online storage. Live mesh also offers remote desktop features, when there is already a client built into Vista (although the Mesh one is different in that it’s better for accessing a computer over the internet).

Maybe I’m just not understanding their system. Maybe each product is designed for a different type of user (I know that Outlook etc is definitely designed for the business user). But it still seems very complicated, when they could be focusing on one product line that does it all.

A lot of the products seem to be in response to Google products. They have updated Hotmail and the Calendar to compete with Gmail and Google Calendar. As far as I can see though, they have 2 or 3 different Calendar apps, which seem to be seperate from each other! I don’t want to be adding something to one, and it not appear on others.

Maybe they’re also trying to compete with Apple and the MobileMe service. I’ll look into that a bit more, as I’m not 100% sure on what both services offer.

Chances are, I’ll start to understand each program a bit more when I’ve played with them a bit, and I might do a comparison between them all. But for now, it just all seems very confusing and decentralised.

I’m sure I’ve missed some other products, too.

Job Interview

So I had a job interview today. It seemed to go ok (I hope). I’ll hear back on Monday, and if I’m successful will be starting the monday after.

Writing this post from Windows Live Writer just to test it out. Checking out all the new Windows Live programs, they seem OK so far. But Microsoft really needs to focus on making one product to do each task. I currently have 3 mail clients installed from Microsoft!

Whatever...

I figured I might as well use this, even if it is for randomness.

Maddy's gone away, so I don't have much to do at the moment. I'm job searching, but until I get one, I'm just chilling out. Reading through my MCSE books and stuff, hopefully I can get that sorted this year. 

Thoughts: why do girls watch films that they know will make them cry?

Actually, it's probably the same reason I'm listening to Elliott Smith when it's reminding me of Maddy...