Blag

*See the bloatware name and shame list for alternatives and description of the problems encountered

Woo! Time for another (brief) rant at my favourite company in the world – Apple Inc.

Why are Apple developers so incapable of making a lightweight, fast and clean version of iTunes ans Quicktime?

They take forever to load, two years to install or upgrade and leave behind more debris upon uninstall that a shrapnel grenade. For f***s sake, installing a bloody antivirus program has less of an effect on your computer than iTunes/Quicktime, no joking. And why does Quicktime always crash? I bounced this idea off a couple of mates who do media/arts at uni, and the general consensus there about Quicktime on any non Mac OS computer is the same – utter crapola. Unstable, laggy, restrictive.

Ironic, their “I’m and Mac, and I’m a PC” ads.

Perhaps Microsoft should insert time delay trojans into MS Office for mac? Or maybe vulnerability exploiters when it detects a Mac user visiting their website?

To Apple’s credit, they got rid of Quick Time Task a while back.

For now, the only reason to keep iTunes is if you own an iPhone/iPod. I’d use Windows Media Player, if it’s library management weren’t so awful…

*Updated iTunes just then. Why of why does it have to restart my freakin PC? I haven’t done that in 14 days and 3 hours now… Even installing Norton, yes Norton Internet Security doesn’t require a restart. Get with the times, Apple!

Nero Burning ROM/Nero AG’s website is useless – there are news articles and mention of a Nero SDK on many the websites, but nowhere on the internet can you actually find information about it, or download it. Nero AG’s FAQ, support and corporate info are all useless waffle. All the links that ARE on Google no longer work since Nero AG took to restructuring their website every few months. Great way for attracting developers there.

…are their web designers that bored? Or are they struggling to lift their image after 3 successive bloatware releases?

At least Roxio tells you upfront that an API is not available, Gear sells their API to developers, and CDBurnerXP redirects you to their corporate website/online store. InfraRecorder and CDRTFE are the only decent open source “burners” for Windows, but are purely front ends (they are based on cdrtools) which has severe limitations and most other free burning applications have no scripting support/APIs available, without contacting corporate sales and ponying up anyway.

Edit: Decent apps with scripting support – CDRTFE, CDBurnerXP, Nero. Still waiting for a reply from Nero about their SDK, and CDBurnerXP has an known bug with the command line that keeps cropping up in tests

Time for yet another page – bloatware.

(links on the top RHS)

Or click here if your really freakin lazy.

As defined by wiktionary:

Noun

bloatware

1. (computing) Software that is overpacked with features (a result of feature creep) and therefore slow or unwieldy; software that occupies an excessive amount of memory or has a very large file size.

Name and shame list for the worst software applications developed (open-source, freeware and commercial) ever to be processed in this digital world and viable alternatives.