mini rantage

[piranha]

since neither the paramour nor brother wanted the ipod touch the paramour won, and i'm kinda the mac person in this family, i've inherited it. which seemed convenient at the time, since my android phone has bricked itself (no, really, it wasn't me rooting it; i had in fact not rooted it if you can believe that). anyway, the phone is dead, and i've not bothered to get a new one because i don't actually use it much.

so, i figured i can use the ipod for some of the things i do like, such as listening to music when out and about among noisy people (it works great for that), and keeping my shopping list.

oy. now, that is rather more complicated than it should be. first of all there is the app store. for which one needs an apple ID. ok. the apple ID enforces a certain degree of password security, which i am all in favour of - it wants a mix of capital and lower case letters, and at least a number. fine by me; add some punctuation and i am all set.

except such a password is a royal PAIN IN THE BUTTOCKS to type on an ipod. the virtual keyboard needs me to switch from alpha to numeric for every number or punctuation symbol. and it's not the easiest thing to type on this, unless you have dainty, pointy fingers. i don't.

so i type and switch and type and switch and type, and then it tries to load the app i had searched for and chosen (a free app in this case -- why in the world does it need my password anyway?). and once it's done loading, it tells me that my password was incorrect, and i get to try again. after mistyping it twice, it asks me innocently whether i might have forgotten it and offers me a choice to cancel or reset it. NO, i've not forgotten anything, I JUST WANT TO USE A BETTER KEYBOARD! and if i cancel, then i get to start over.

this, needless to say, is not winning me over to apple's app store model. it's easier to print my shopping list. which i will proceed to do now. i refuse to change my password to something easier to type, you bastards.

Comments

[firecat]

This is why I have my iPod linked to iTunes on the Mac and I buy the apps on the Mac and then sync them to the iPod.

[piranha]

hoh boy, now i'm getting started. yes, that is of course one way to do it, and probably the best way. but for one, that means i have to fire up little resource hog itunes for it -- i listen to music through pretty much anything but itunes. for another, this ipod was originally set up and registered and whatnot by the paramour, do i want to authorize it on THIS computer as well? am i sure? do i want to zap what's on the ipod? and now it's whining at me that i am not properly synced cuz zir music ain't my music sez apple. well, actually zir music is damn well my music, especially if it's escala. i know it's all security reasoning and it's probably not bad per se, but it's aggravating me when i just wanted to quickly load a little shopping app so i could head out to do actual, you know, shopping. which i still haven't done. oh well, at least the backyard got the shit whacked out of the chest-high weeds.

i hate the app store with a passion already. see, with my ereader, i get books wherever; the internet archive, kobo.com, amazon, various european bookstores, publisher sites, individual authors, and i sideload them all myself so i can do my own library management. i like that, not only because nobody else will even do it for me, but also because i don't want them to -- i don't want any one place to know what i read. so i never sync my ereader, and i monitor my network connection to see who tries to suck info out of my machine. and to really use the ipod, i'd want to do that as well; no app store / itunes for me, thanks. i guess jailbreaking is in my near future.

but a lot of developers only make their apps available via the app store. this is great for apple and for people who want everything super-easy. but not great for distrustful geeks like me.

i guess i had more rantage in me. surprise surprise! ;)

[firecat]

:)

I can get books and music wherever, but it's definitely harder to get apps if you don't go through the itunes store. And the store definitely sucks. I would buy more from the store if I could use tabs in its interface, but noooooo.

The notepad app that comes with it might work for a shopping list.

[piranha]

i just downloaded the iOS SDK. maybe i can write up something quick that syncs my taskpaper grocery list with the ipod notes.

[not_a_sniglet]

Our ifingers are somewhat pointier but it's still a pain sometimes. We grabbed an actual hardware keyboard for it.

We still use the virtual one though.

[piranha]

it must be even more of a pain for you guys, *sigh*.

[desh]

It's a good thing I'm not a Mac person, because I only buy phones with keyboards for approximately this reason. Even in Android land, this restricts my selection rather a lot.

Even on my keyboard-phones, I use the touch screen keyboard a lot. But any time I get frustrated like you did, I can just slide out the real thing. I don't know if I'd handle it well at all if that weren't an option, so I definitely sympathize.

[piranha]

yeah, if anything, this has convinced me that i want to stick with android phones that have keyboards (the little brick is an HTC dream, and i've been very happy with the keyboard). it sucks that this narrows the options so much, but at least some companies are still producing phones with physical keyboards,

possible solution

[(Anonymous)]

Might one consider a stylus?

Re: possible solution

[piranha]

one might, but it needs to be capacitive, so i have to find one cheap locally or make one myself. and then i have to find a way to attach it intelligently -- my sugru is all dried up. :/
...
...
... well, making one was quick; just a pencil and aluminum foil will do. thanks for getting me to think along those lines.

but of course this doesn't solve having to switch keyboards, and hating the app store model.