Sorry for mentioning this over and over again, but it's just really pissing me off.
Situation: I manually manage everything on my iPod: both music and TV shows. TV shows that I encoded myself specifically for iPod, which cost me a great many hours of CPU time. Now, I want to sync ONLY MY MUSIC so I can make playlist folders again. I *triplechecked that I only selected to sync my music, and not my TV shows, but * ITUNES decides to erase my entire iPod anyway. This is not user error, this is Apple being retarded. Now I have to re-encode hours worth of series, which will take days. If Apple was more flexible they'd perhaps consider to support video codecs that normal people use, but that wouldn't be Apple. It has to be done their own way, in their own format...
I am beyond pissed off. I was considering buying an iPhone after my trip, because I felt it was better than its Android competitors. I still feel this way: the iPhone is a great device. I'm not buying it, though. From now on I am boycotting everything Apple. The inflexibility of their products simply does not agree with me. I know I'm in the minority here, but I'm quite used to that. The image of Apple in my mind is forever linked what negative emotions and bad feelings. Developing for the iPhone and trying to deal with iTunes leaves no doubt in my mind: avoid Apple products.
Oh, and since I'm ranting about shitty software anyway, here's another piece of shit that deserves some trolling: OpenOffice. I've been working with OO Impress a lot recently, cause I don't have MS Office on the Macbook at work, and I need to port presentations back and forth between Windows and MacOS. OpenOffice seems the logical choice, but damn is it shit. I'm a big fan of Java and of open-source applications, but OpenOffice is the ultimate example that open source does not always have great results. It's slow, illogical and counter-intuitive. And it's slow. I know the counter-intuitive part comes from the fact that I'm used to MS Office, but damn. Tell me why, OpenOffice, why do I have to change a global system setting to change the color of a hyperlink in my presentation? Don't you think that's slightly retarded? I know everyone will say "well, it's open-source, why don't you fix it?". Why should I? Powerpoint is better. It does everything I want, and it's much faster. I urge everyone to just get a good MS Office XP license (anything newer or older is worse). It's absolutely worth the money.
I'm a bit surprised at myself for recommending Microsoft stuff. Usually I'm a Google fanboy, but in this case I think Microsoft's products are more comfortable to use (at least the Office suite). I had similar experiences with IDEs, Apple's XCode being utterly abysmal and Eclipse my long-time favorite. By chace I installed MS Visual Studio Express C# today, expecting to get an XCode experience that would piss me off, but in fact Visual Studio impressed me a lot. It's fast, easy to understand, and makes good use of the screen space. It's certainly on par with Eclipse (based on my first impressions).
To summarize: Apple is shit, and don't forget that.