On Apple Software
As if I didn’t have enough reasons to hate that company already.
I have taken a personal vow not to use any Apple products, hardware or software. However, sometimes I have to interact with less ideologically zealous people, like my father, a “proud” owner of an iPod 5G who now sometimes curses his acquisition.
Previously, at his request, I uploaded a bunch of .m4v videos to his iPod using gtkpod. They all played correctly. This time (in Lucid), there was something funky with mountpoint permissions when I attempted to write to the iPod, so I tried to upload the new pack of videos from his Windows laptop, where he has iTunes installed. While iTunes did upload the new videos, it silently wiped the old ones without any prompts or warning messages.
I don’t know if this was some misguided attempt at customer care, or an active attack against third-party iPod software, but the fact remains: the files would have been lost if I hadn’t kept backups on my computer. Now I’ll have to re-add them.
Apple may be an easy target, but apart from all it DRM crusades, this illustrates my point: if you want to be in control of your own data, don’t use Apple products. As for me, my HTC Hero communicator doubles as a media player (with a nice UI, I should add) at the rare times I actually (gasp!) listen to music. I synchronize the music with it using Banshee, but the file storage uses no arcane filesystem conventions like the iPod/iTunes compatibility nightmare, and music files can simply be copied to the device with a file manager.
This is a DRM issue not a bug, and even if you had the music imported using iTunes if you tried to put the videos using an iTunes client from another machine it would wipe out all media from the device and replace them with the library of the new iTunes client…
It happened to me with my iPhone after formating my macbook the freshly installed iTunes wipped out everything media related including some ringtones I had created my self without backing up.
In these things apple sucks I really long for a good android phone to replace iPhone.