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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Sunday, December 21, 2003

This is also what I'm talking about

In my discussions about inductive user interfaces, I've tried to highlight some of the innovative work Microsoft has done to make computing easier, an ongoing, long-term effort for which it gets little or no credit. Meanwhile, Apple, which has done literally nothing to advance computing beyond the tired 1980's-style desktop interface metaphor, is routinely credited with creating an operating system, OS X, that's "easier to use" than Windows. But there's so much more going on in any comparison of Windows and OS X, and I recently saw a blog posting that encapsulates another theme in this discussion, that OS X users (a relatively small, tightly-knit group that made a very conscious OS choice) are simply more technical than their Windows brethren (a user base that, literally, encompasses most of the computer-using public and is thus comprised largely of what I call "normal" people). It's a curious irony: Mac OS X advocates desperately want their OS to be doing better from a market share standpoint, but they almost always hold the audience they're trying to reach in utter contempt.

Here's a perfect example.

In PC World Magazine, Eric Dahl recently wrote about his love/hate relationship with iTunes. "My first indication that there'd be trouble came when I tried to get ITunes Music Store tracks from my work PC to my home machine," he wrote, accurately explaining what is, of course, one of the worst experiences in using this service. "I figured that since I used the same account, and the site has a record of my purchase, I could just download the tracks again at home. Nope. Though you can keep ITunes Music Store tracks on up to three computers, you can download them only once. And as our resident Mac Skeptic found out, you can't use an IPod to transfer songs, either." As Dahl notes, it's very difficult to move songs from one PC (or Mac) to another. In short, you have to be pretty technical, and know your way around both the file system and Apple's bizarre folder structure for storing these files.

Here's how one typical techy Mac-head (with the oh-so-perfectn moniker of "21st Century Digital Boy") responded to this outrage (remember: Dahl was stupid enough to point out something Apple does that isn't easy on the user): "Huh? Drag them from your local library to the iPod, take it home, then add them. I do it all the time. It isn't elegant, as such, but it works fine."

Yep, it works fine. But like all tasks, computer-based or otherwise, it only works fine if you know how to do it, and there is absolutely nothing about this procedure that is discoverable by "normal" people. And let's be clear here: When Dahl writes that you can't use the iPod to move songs back and forth between PCs, he's correct. As anyone would, Dahl assumes that if you own two PCs and an iPod, you will be able to "see" and manipulate purchased songs using the iTunes interface, and move songs from PC-to-iPod-to-second-PC. Gosh, that makes so much sense. You can't do it.

What "21st Century Digital Boy" is saying is equally correct, and you can do it. However, this is a power user task, and something that would benefit greatly from a "Purchased Music Backup Wizard," the type of tool Microsoft would create. In OS X, however, you're left on your own.

To drive this point home, let's look at all the information you'd need to understand to make this process work. I just purchased a song from iTunes Music Store (Steve Perry, "You Better Wait") and want to copy it to my iPod so I can put it on a second PC or Mac (I'll copy it to my iBook). Here's what I have to do:

1. "Drag them ["the songs"] from your local library to the iPod." Whoa, Nelly. First you have to find them. Let's back up a bit.

1a. Apple stores iTunes Music in /home/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/[artist folder]/[album folder] by default. Let's see ... Huh. No "Steve Perry" folder. Curious. Well perhaps there is a "Purchased Music" folder, that would make sense ... nope. Huh. Now what? Well, I'll spare you the tedious time I spent actually finding the damn song. For some reason it was in a subfolder called /Compilations called "Steve Perry_ Greatest Hits + Five Unreleased", which is the name of the album in which this song was found. Ah ... It's a greatest hits album. Why the heck would you want that under the artist name, right? Actually, I don't normally care where these songs are stored, to be fair. Unless of course I'm trying to undertake this exceedingly easy task. Ahem. OK, I found the song. It's called "13 You Better Wait.m4p".

2. "Drag them from your local library to the iPod." Using drag and drop, I copy the song file from the hard drive to the iPod icon on my desktop. And sure enough, if you double-click on the iPod icon, a window opens up and there it is. Did you know you could do this? I didn't. More importantly, did you know when you did this that the song can't be played back on your iPod? Silly? Yeah: On Windows-based portable audio devices, a hard drive is a hard drive: If you did this kind of shell-based file copy on the admittedly inferior Creative Nomad nx, you'd be able to play the song on the device. Oh, and you'd be able to copy the files from it normally to another PC, which you can't do in iTunes/iPod.

3. "take it home". Well, first you have to "unmount" the iPod, a curious little bit of old-school manual labor in this plug-and-play world we supposedly live in. No matter, I assume any iPod owner has figured out the aggravation in this step. So I bring it home (well, I bring it over to my iBook).

4. "then add them." By "add" he means "import" and by "them" he means the song(s). Again, you will need to understand that just plugging in your iPod and trying to synchronize on a second Mac (or PC) won't do the trick. What you really have to do is open up the iPod in hard drive mode, via the Finder or Windows Explorer, and then drag the file(s) into the iTunes window. (For people with both Macs and Windows machines, there are a few side issues here. You can't actually use an iPod to make the file transfer between Macs and PCs without a third party utility, because the supposedly identical iTunes for Windows won't read Mac-formatted iPods. However, I did purchase such a utility, the excellent MediaFour XPlay, which I believe cost about $30). For Mac to Mac, as with my iBook, it just works. So I launch iTunes and then open a Finder window for the iPod. And then I drag the file from the iPod into the iTunes window. Voila! The file is imported and will work, assuming this machine is set up on my .mac account as one of the three that can play my protected content.

5. You have to delete the file from the iPod. "21st Century Digital Boy" neatly skips over this all-important task, but let's face it: You don't want a song on there that you can't play back on the iPod. This raises a further, interesting issue: If I had synched my iPod on the iMac, I would have (temporarily) had two copies of that song on there. Anyone else see the stupidity in this?

"I do it all the time. It isn't elegant, as such, but it works fine." You have a lot of time on your hands, my friend.

Anyway.

I really like iTunes and the iPod, but this is a typical example of where Apple's UI fails its users. Granted, it was done on purpose: I'm pretty sure that the company was trying to appease the recording industry and not make this too easy. That's fine. But don't act like it is easy, just because you do it all the time. This is a typical example of a task that would benefit from inductive UI.

[ Posted at 12:33 PM | Permalink ]