Apple broke my Shuffle

You may have noticed my previous blogs about Apple's iPod Shuffle. They were not overly positive: one, two, three, four.

This may be the last blog entry about my Shuffle, as Apple broke it definitely with the update of iTunes to 8.1. They enthusiastically introduced several problems. For example, you no longer get any warning if you try to copy the same song twice several times from iTunes to the Shuffle. But the killer problem is that autofill no longer works with podcasts, even if you manually switch the setting "skip when shuffling" to off. As my shuffle has served me only to listen to podcasts, it no longer serves any electronic purpose at all, and I will henceforth use it as a clothespin for my wet laundry.

It is clear that the people who design the Shuffle are no geniuses. It all reminds me of the charming clumsiness of a two year old child who touches crayons for the first time ever without any idea how they are supposed to be used.

There is no longer any hope for even a lonely spark of sensibility in that team, so I give up on my shuffle. When a certain level of incompetence is reached, there is no use fighting against it.

How Apple managed to make their simplest device so utterly user hostile is something to brood over during long nights, but I do not think there is any better explanation than a smattering lack of small grey cells.

I do not see any reason to defend the Shuffle team at Apple. I'm fully aware of the theoretical possibility that there are individuals in the team who are clever. However, the team taken as a whole shows no sign to be brighter than an intoxicated amoeba. This may be because of lacking time, budget, bad management, bad organisation or any number of reasons. But regardless of the reasons, I would not bet on them winning a quiz against that same amoeba.

Since I bought my Shuffle last spring, I have had numerous incomprehensibilities, nonfunctionalities and unusabilities. The changes in 8.1 are not a simple incident. They fit perfectly into a larger pattern.

Unlike many other posters in these fora, I'm not complaining about Apple's disrespect for its customers. Apple is a commercial company that occasionally has to be rough towards its providers, sometimes towards its shareholders and sometimes to its customers. That is how realistic commercial companies have to work.

When it comes to the Shuffle, on the other hand, the problem is simply an unusually irrational idiocy.

Pages and iWork - any business rational?

Even though Pages is a useful application to many of us, I must admit that the business rational is still not clear to me.

It is not like Apple goes out and stresses the fact that Pages is different from MS Word as a sales argument. People coming to iWork's discussion forums are probably somewhat representative of potential customers, and the question about Word compatibility seems very important. Their perception, based on whatever information, is that this is something to replace MS Word - not to complement it. What functionality there is in Pages that singles it out as something in certain aspects much better and more attractive, hardly ever comes up.

So the conclusion is that most people want Word, but they want to pay less for it. This is of course a tricky situation for Apple's marketing department, as OpenOffice already is a 0 dollar simple version of Word. (It is also in some aspects more powerful than Word.) It is very difficult to compete with that price and still make money.

What remains for Apple is to produce a completely different product - completely different from the result of decades of evolution of word processors based on decades of customer requests.

They boldly discarded a lot of the outstanding features of AppleWorks, and instead went for something slick. The question is if it is slick enough to attract enough customers to make it a good business investment.

AdobePDFPDE700 - delete it

Setup: Mac OS X 10.5. Adobe CS4, upgraded from CS2.

Every time I printed to PDF, I got the Save As... dialogue twice. My first solution was to remove the Adobe PDF 9.0 printer. It seems silly that it would affect print to PDF within Mac OS X, but that seems to be the case.


Then, after some wild guesses and a strange error message with AdobePDFPDE700 in the print dialogue of TextEdit, I opened /Library/Printers/PPDPlugins/ and deleted the file AdobePDFPDE700.plugin.

I then opened Adobe Acrobat and went to the menu Help > Repair Acrobat Installation. In the dialogue that came up, I checked Adobe PDF Printer. (I kept the Adobe PDFViewer Safari Plugin unchecked, to keep Safari clean of Adobe interference.)

I then clicked on Continue, followed the instructions, and now everything seems to work well.

Now everything seems to work fine.