It’s kind of a guilty pleasure, but I can’t help it — I love reading Dave Winer when he gets on a rant (except maybe when it involves Adam Curry and the origins of podcasting). His latest is on iTunes, and having used it before with both Windows and Mac, I have to agree. Dave’s rant was apparently sparked by this post by Rex Hammock on his blog.
“The user interface on iTunes is awful. It’s the worst piece of crap I’ve ever used. People would tell me when I was a Windows user that it was because the Windows version of iTunes is crap but the Mac version is easy. Well, both programs are head-up-butt impossible to figure out. The user model makes no sense. When is something on the iPod? How many copies of the music do I have? Where the fcuk are they? How do you delete something? Is it really gone? Why does it wipe out the contents of the iPod when I don’t say it’s okay to? What did I do wrong? I swear, I have no idea, and I’m a professional software designer. What about the poor schnook who is just a user?”
Rob Hyndman says he has dumped iTunes as well, mostly because it’s a pain to use in a networked environment (memo to Apple: this is a big problem, and likely to get bigger). And David Berlind at ZDNet has some thoughts on the DRM issue as well.