apple

Dead iPod Touch

Another day, another iPod Touch calamity. While updating one of the installed applications, gremlins attacked and icons no longer appear on my home screen.

I’m not an Apple fan-boy, I have never been, and I am unlikely to convert because my first foray into the world of Apple products has been a largely unhappy journey. iTunes, at least on Windows, is slow and often unresponsive. Backing up my iPod Touch literally takes several hours, and the version 2.0.1 update took four attempts. The music interface, while great for the Latin-alphabet world, is a pain to navigate with Chinese songs and artists. Installing and upgrading applications via the iPod Touch interface is a slow and arduous affair. While there have been some outstanding applications, the majority are uninspired and useless. You also often find two or more applications that do very similar things, but each lacking in various regards, which means you end up keeping all of these applications; the closed model of the iTunes Store discourages, and in fact prevents, modifications and extensions a la open source software.

I could keep going on for quite some time, but I’m sure others have documented the failings of the iPod Touch and the iPhone in more detail. I can overlook some bugs, but wholesale destruction of my data is unforgivable.

OK. So Apple’s released a Windows version of Safari (and I tried blogging from Safari, but it submitted a blank page, and copy and paste from Safari back to Firefox was rather buggy *not happy*), and I don’t quite like what I see. This is why I’m sticking to Firefox for at least the time being:

• Yet another look: It looks like a Mac application, feels like a Mac application and behaves like a Mac application. If I wanted to use a Mac, I’d use a Mac. (I know it’s similar to the deal with iTunes and QuickTime, but I hate both as well.)
• Font rendering is weird: It looks like they’ve copied over the font rendering from the Mac as well; compared with the Windows font rendering, the font smoothing looks uncomfortable and I’m not sure I like the character spacing. If this is what it’s like to use a Mac, this is even less reason for me to switch.
• Another new set of keyboard shortcuts: Firefox and IE keep their keyboard shortcuts relatively similar so it’s not much of a pain to switch between the two, but Safari… just realised that Ctrl+Backspace doesn’t work, and it doesn’t minimise when you go Winkey+M.
• Downloads: It downloads straight to the Desktop, or to another folder. I want to be prompted for each location.
• Plugins: It’s new so there are hardly any plugins yet.

Enough rambling for the time being, but no I’m not going to be using Safari as my everyday browser any time soon. I must agree it’s faster, but its memory footprint is far worse than Firefox (150MB in ten minutes?). I’ll keep it around, however, to test my website.