A miscellany today: Amazon’s Kindle for the Web, WordPress’s new Offsite Redirects feature, and a little complaint about iTunes.
- Kindle for the Web
Kindle for the Web lets you embed a chunk of a book onto a Web page. I thought it would be a fun thing to experiment with here and played with it a bit this morning but it turns out to look lousy in narrow column — it really needs a full-page width, which is hard on any page with a sidebar (i.e., gazillions of Web pages). So either I’m doing it wrong or it needs some tweaking.
- WordPress Offsite Redirects
One of the toughest choices you make as you step out onto the Web is where to put your writing. Lots of choices today, sure, from self-hosted to free or paid hosted services. But what happens if you need to move? People still need to find you, your stuff is embedded in the Web with tons of links, you’ve got some rank in Google… you don’t want to throw any of that away.This is called lock-in, and it’s how too many Web and software businesses hold onto customers — not, in other words, by real loyalty, but by inertia and inconvenience.
So super kudos to the WordPress.com team for offering a new feature that lets you move away from WordPress.com and point your incoming traffic forward to your new home. It’s not a free service (don’t know how much it costs). But the most common scenario is for someone who started a free blog at WordPress.com who’s now planning to operate it as more of a business and needs the freedom and versatility of hosting their own site. That kind of user isn’t going to mind paying a small fee, whatever it is, to hold onto the links and traffic she’s already accumulated.
As WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg said on his blog, quoting Dave Winer: “The easier you make it for people to go, the more likely they are to stay.” Indeed!
- Irksome iTunes
iTunes is now an almost-decade-old tool, one that supports an ever-wider array of Apple products, and that groans beneath the weight. What I don’t understand is why, in all this time, they haven’t fixed what I find to be the single most annoying problem with the interface, one that still trips me up nearly every day. It’s with how the search box works.Here’s the scenario:
- I type a search in the box at the upper right of the window — say, “Mountain Goats.”
- I realize I’m not finding what I’m after because the left-hand column selecter is not on my “music library” but on some playlist.
- I click “music library” at the top of the left column.
- The search term disappears from the box and so I HAVE TO TYPE IT AGAIN.
This is a recurring irritation. Surely it’s possible to keep the search term loaded and apply it to the new choice in the left-hand column? I mean, I don’t know, maybe it’s not a really simple problem, maybe it’s even a big hairy problem. But Apple has now had how many years to fix it?
Maybe there is some logical basis for viewing this as a feature and not a bug. If so, I certainly can’t see it!
Here’s a way in which the iTunes behavior you mention could be seen as featurely rather than buggy:
Imagine things are the other way, where the search string persists after you change from one playlist view to another. You’re looking at a playlist and you’ve got some text in the search box to filter it down. You find what you’re looking for and play it or move it or whatever. And then you move on to your next task: maybe you click on Library to return to your default view, or maybe you’re looking for something else. The search string persists, and the list of songs you see is filtered, *and you might not realize that it’s filtered.* You’re seeing an incomplete view of the selected playlist, and you don’t even know it.
Whichever way iTunes might behave (the current “search string vanishes” behavior, or the alternate “search string persists” behavior), there will be cases where that’s not the behavior you want. I think Apple has chosen to optimize for those cases, and decided that the inconvenience of having to retype the search string is preferable to the real confusion and anxiety of not realizing the search string is there.
I get that, Gabe — thanks. Given how often I run into this, though, I have to wonder if there aren’t a huge number of other people doing so as well. (Maybe not, of course.)
If there are, maybe it’s something we could get as a preference choice — sticky searches!
Even with ownership of my iPhone approaching 1-1/2 yrs, it is incomprehensible to me how unintuitive iTunes is. And the klugy aspects of iTunes are multiplied by 5 when there are two of us trying to manage two different iPhones with this clearly inadequate software. I try to avoid syncing if at all possible.
Email backup … The email address backup is a total failure, as my wife and I use different email systems, I on yahoo and she on gmail. iTunes does not remember which of us has which software, and, as a result, I have to change the email backup directive depending upon who synced last. So, as a matter of course, regardless of who synced last, I change the email backup directive and log in to the email. (I think I have to log in, because iTunes does not tell me that I stay logged in, and in any case the sign in is totally opaque because iTunes gives you no explanation.) Every time I do this, I get some error message that tells me that the world is about to explode, would I like to continue. After I figured out some months ago that the world was not about to explode, I let the system continue. Then, I usually get some other error message that tells me that over 5% of my contacts are about to change. In fact, the software tells me that 180 out of 180 contacts will change. Change where, change how? I say Okay. It seems my contacts, on the phone, are fine, nevertheless, even though iTunes told me that there were 180 changes about to take place.
iTunes account … iTunes keeps us logged in to whatever account was used last, so if my wife is logged into the account, and I want to sync my phone, my podcasts cannot get downloaded, so I must change the account login before syncing, too. And please, do not attempt to use the same credit card for two accounts. This is forbidden.
Applications … I run 50, my wife around 20. But when she syncs, she has to make sure that every one of her apps are checked and every one of mine are unchecked. The software has a hard time remembering whose is whose. And woe to the couple that wants to have the same app! If I try to Update a mutual app, chances are that iTunes on my iPhone wants my wifes password. So, no updates from the phone.
Never mind the online instructions, buttons and screens fail to be intuitive. Sync? Apply? What’s the difference?
As you can see, I use manual syncing, because there is no way on this green earth would I want iTunes to “do it’s thing” automatically.
It is abundantly clear to me that every employee at Apple involved with the iTunes User Experience is a long time iTunes user, because if they hired someone who had not used iTunes, this software would be improved significantly. The ease of use of all other Apple products is a stark contrast to this dinosaur. With the sheer number of new accounts moving to iPhones, I am shocked that Apple has not figured out that this software is an absolute mess.
The thing is, Ross, every person I’ve met from Apple has been pretty sharp — as we can see from what you describe (and I agree) as how relatively easy most of their products are.
So I have to assume that folks there know that iTunes is a problem. My guess is: things are moving so fast at Apple and there is so much development happening on new products that this weak link in their chain is being neglected out of a conscious prioritization choice. If that’s the case, then they’ll get around to it eventually. But I agree with you that in the meantime, the situation is pretty miserable.
Ross:
I would have thought Fast User Switching would take care of all the spousal syncing conflicts.
Scott: I totally agree as to the pain of the search problem in iTunes.
Ross:
I would have thought Fast User Switching would take care of all the spousal syncing conflicts.
Scott: I totally agree as to the pain of the search problem in iTunes.
Kindles are taking the country by storm . A Florida school system replaced their textbooks this year with Kindles. They gave each student a kindle,put the textbooks on that and still saved money!
I used WordPress Offsite Redirects for my blog. Realy, it help me to save a lot of time