Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

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Being forced to use iTunes to sync Music, Podcasts and Audiobooks (and play position!) is the most ridiculous and non-Apple user experience I've ever seen of any Apple product.

It gets especially bad once you add multiple iDevices and use them for the same purpose over different time spans.

Example: If I get home and want to continue listening to the current podcast on the iPad, I have to first sync my iPhone and then the iPad.

And if, on the next day, I want to finish the podcast on the iPhone, I have to remember to sync both devices again (iPad first) or I'll have to use the awful time slider on the iPhone to find the correct play position again.

Same goes for Audiobooks where it's even worse due to their length and sometimes more monotonous content (makes it harder to find the correct play position, or might spoil the content if you are really unlucky and skip ahead too far).

And don't get me started about the fact that at least my iTunes install insists on either installing all new iPhone-apps on my iPad or deleting all apps I installed directly from the App Store on the device, depending on how the checkbox is set.

This ugly mess has to end.

It worked "ok" (wireless podcast sync would always have been nice) while we had only one device. It became totally broken once we had multiple devices.

Yeah - what a luxury issue to have, but it's still totally non-apple and doesn't at all match their usually very slick user experience.

> "awful time slider"

awful? I think it's fairly clever, myself.

... you do know that when you touch to 'grab' the nubbin, you can slide your finger down the face of the device a bit, and then when you slide left or right it scrubs more slowly, based on how far down the device you slid?

Did not know that. Thanks for the tip.

I actually only recently learned about it.

Which makes me wonder if someone "stumbled" upon that, or there is a secret iPhone user's manual that only special people receive.

In hindsight, I think that a more "audio scrobber" motion, akin to the way the iPod wheel works, would have been a ton more intuitive.

They demoed it quite prominently onstage when they introduced it, and the screen says "Hi-Speed Scrubbing" when you start scrubbing (and changes as you move down). It's not the most discoverable feature ever, but it's not a hidden Easter egg.

for serious audiobook use, it's pretty crude.

Worse, if I download podcasts on the phone from e.g. iTunes U, they tend to get removed when I sync. I like a lot of what iTunes does but the implementation (especially on Windows) has always been touch-and-go. I'm honestly not sure what their motivation would be to improve the product other than to add more potential revenue streams, but I'm glad that they may be trying.

ITunes has a golden path of buy content through ITunes synch with one device(or at least one device per person). Pretty much any thing that deviates from this one use case is painful and annoying.

Wouldn't that would be pretty much entirely fixed by login-based wireless sync and cloud storage?

Or are there issues with those services, too?

That's what I want. It doesn't even have to be cloud storage. I don't need my music in the cloud - I can sync that to the device directly.

But I want my internet connected mobile always-on device to be capable of a) checking for new podcast episodes over the air and b) wirelessly synchronizing the play position of various files across devices. Both operations are /trivial/.

I'm even willing to pay a small subscription fee for this.

I'm a really heavy podcast and audiobook listener. For me there is value in being able to come home, turning on my ipad and continuing to listen to my podcast where I left off on the iphone.

Or arriving at home and having the latest video podcasts already downloaded to the iPad without having to manually connect it to the PC (but after the iPhone or I'll lose the play position).

Or being able to listen to the newest episode of a podcast even though it came out after I left home.

That last one, I can already do in theory. It involves starting the itunes app on the iPhone and manually searching for the podcast, checking whether the latest episode has arrived.

Of course this is limited to podcasts actually on iTunes (no manual RSS download) and it sometimes seems to download the episode independently of the existing itunes subscription at which point I have two identical episodes the next time I connect the iPhone. No syncing of play position in that case.

What pains me the most is that I certainly have the ability to fix this on my own by writing my own podcast syncing code, but on a non-jailbroken device I don't get write-access to the itunes library and even if I could get it, it probably wouldn't sync back to the PC.

To use the common open source "I scratched an itch" metaphor: It's itching like mad, I have the ability to scratch and the needed tools, but no permission to actually do it and the itch scratching licensing board doesn't recognize my itch as something worthy of their scratching.

This is infuriating.

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