As regular readers, if there are any, will know, I'm a Microsoft developer and user: but I'm also a very happy iPod Touch owner. Fighting Talk, Danny Baker, Friday Night Comedy, and loads of other great BBC Radio podcasts make me a happy commuter, the Englitina satisfies those awkward no-concertina-to-hand moments (although I can't find, and would love, an equivalent iPod low whistle and/or wooden flute simulator), and the interface is intuitive and easy to use.
Everything that is good, and stylish, and swish, and oooh, lovely, about the iPod smashes straight into a brick wall when you are forced to update its contents using the unstable train-wreck that is the iTunes software.
It's a real blot on Apple's treasured reputation for stylishness and reliability that the one Apple product that many Windows users will knowingly have most contact with is such an utter bag of spanners - even if I was considering moving to a Mac, I'd certainly seriously rethink that on the basis of the appalling iTunes 'user experience'.
A few weeks ago a reader of IT site The Register had a call from someone senior in the development of iTunes for Windows after emailing the company about iTunes: It would be nice to think that the conversation will have some effect.
Last night was a classic example. We've just bought a Brennan JB7 (of which more anon) and I'm gradually loading it with all our CDs, by the slow-but-sure method of reripping them onto my HDD at 192 bits and batch copying them over to the Brennan. On finding one particular fondly-remembered CD completely unreadable I went off and bought the MP3 version from Amazon, and was downloading that whilst simultaneously ripping another disc through Windows Media Player.
As soon as iTunes detected the download it did it's usual thing of muscling in on any MP3 traffic, fired itself up, and promptly crashed (presumably because WMP had some audio codec open, or because the net connection was busy, or because it's sulking because it's not on my primary monitor, or probably just because it's unstable rubbish).
This is a common problem with iTunes - rather than check whether there's any other media software running as it tries to start up, it just blows up and takes as many other processes out as possible as it crashes and burns. In fact every single Windows 7 crash I have had is directly related to iTunes. Every, single, one.
Updates (a 90Mb download to update a media library app????) crash on running; leaving the iPod connected during a reboot or when the machine goes into power-saving mode is a sure-fire way to triple your reboot time and precipitate a trip into Task Manager to play Bat-A-Process; and every now and then it just decides that it hates one or other of my podcast subscriptions and stops downloading it. Don't you dare shut down iTunes whilst it's halfway through downloading a podcast - Microsoft, Firefox and Adobe have all cracked seamless interrupt-and-resume downloads, whilst iTunes just sets a flag to trash and slowly reindex your library next time you start the application.
And don't get me started on the interface. A feast of randomly-functioning buttons and icons and links and chevrons and some things that just look like they should do something but don't, all rendered in a font just that irritating bit too small to comfortably read at 1600 widescreen resolution, the whole shebang decked out in grey on a grey background with grey highlights and furniture. Our new Intranet at work is getting flak from some users because they think its colour palette is a bit grey, but our Intranet makes iTunes look like a Cirque du Soleil show painted by Roy Lichtenstein whilst trying out some new extra-bright acrylics by comparison.
iPod - pretty brilliant. iTunes - upper balls-up.
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