Album Covers and iTunes

iTunes used to be a great program. A single place to both organize your music and do your music shopping (i'm old enough to remember when being able to buy any song as a $.99 single was transformative), it served its need and served it well. However, as time has passed it's become a hopelessly bloated, unusable mess. A function of trying to do too many things, it's lost the simplicity of the best Apple products. There are many things to complain about (why force installation of Quick Time with iTunes? Why shove Genius down our throats? I don't want you do download my "safe browsing data"! etc.) Today, however, I'm going to focus on a small thing: album covers.

It's no secret that i'm a music geek. I love learning everything about the songs that I listen to, and I enjoy having an album cover with my music. In fact, one of the things I loved about the iPhone was that you could easily display the album cover for all of your music. One right-click later and voilà: there was your cover! But somewhere along the way, iTunes got confused. Now when you download an album cover, it's frequently only for one song, not for the entire album. Or the cover is attached to the album, not the song, so it doesn't port over to your iPhone. Why not? I can see it in iTunes and i've "synched" the two devices! Are these not two apple products? Makes me wonder what else isn't being synched. And in perhaps the most frustrating part of all, you can't directly copy album covers onto your iPhone! You need to download the album cover, make sure that it's attached individually to every song on an album, and then you need to reimport your songs to your iPhone! And even that's not guaranteed to work! The end result: I have perhaps half of my music collection that displays that annoying "generic album cover" on my iPhone with no easy way for me to remedy the situation.

If you buy your music through the Apple Store, then you'll have none of these problems. And I suspect that that's the real culprit behind iTunes disintegrating utility: their focus on pushing you to buy stuff through them to the exclusion of supporting all of the other ways you can get music (download from other sides, burning music from actual CDs, etc.)

In my next rant, i'll go off on how poorly the UX is in both iTunes and the iPhone with podcasts. Until then, feel free to use my soapbox - i'll leave it right here for you in the comments.

How Much Coffee Should I Drink?

I'm picking up this app today: How to Optimize your Caffeine Intake

Why Big Companies Die

I found truth in this article by Peggy Noonan. She makes two basic points. One is from Steve Jobs:

[Jobs] has a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.”

Noonan adds "accountants and the money men" to Jobs' theory:

...[they] search the firm high and low to find new and ingenious ways to cut costs or even eliminate paying taxes. The activities of these people further dispirit the creators, the product engineers and designers, and also crimp the firm’s ability to add value to its customers. But because the accountants appear to be adding to the firm’s short-term profitability, as a class they are also celebrated and well-rewarded, even as their activities systematically kill the firm’s future.

When the people that do the work aren't valued, then the products suffer, and what is a company without it's products? It's why I think Agile Scrum is such an effective software development process; by pushing decisions down to the lowest possible level, you let people who are actually informed about the subjects (the "boots on the ground") make informed decisions rather than choosing directions based on executive summaries or spreadsheets. While you have to be careful to keep the focus on the customer (don't let the Inmates Run the Asylum), Jobs demonstrated that keeping a company's focus on adding customer value - another goal of Agile Scrum - is a path to continued success.

Apple Rant

So there are many small things that bug me about the way that Apple does business, but one of the biggest is the stoopid way that the iTunes Store handles the voluminous number of changes that they are always making to their terms and conditions. Here's how it works:

1. I decide I want a new application for my iPhone (today, it's a nifty Intercall app that will store all of my confusing numbers and codes for me), so I search for, find, and indicate that i'd like to download the application.
2. I am prompted for and enter my password.
3. The app starts to download. It's only now that the iTunes Store realizes that they made some absurd changes to their Terms and Conditions that I have to approve before I can make my purchase. Note that these changes today involve the iPad and the iBookstore, NEITHER OF WHICH I OWN OR USE.

So now I have to back out of my purchase, approve these meaningless changes, then go through the entire purchase process again, even going so far as to reenter my password . This is the antithesis of user friendly, and i'm surprised that Apple, who has a justified reputation of producing crisp and clean user interactions, continually allows this to happen.

Phew. End of rant. Thanks for listening.