This American Life

I sit here in Le Flamboyant hotel in Ziguinchor (a WiFi zone) starting to download more episodes of This American Life to my computer to play on my iPod Touch.  And I have to say that it sucks.  iTunes has a crappy, absolutely crappy user interface.  It sucks.  Horribly.

Here is the conundrum I face.  I have downloaded many many episodes of This American Life and each has a unique name on iTunes which is "This American Life: (name of episode)".  There are scores and scores of them.  And I don't always know which ones I've listened to.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, I go to iTunes and type "This American Life" into the search bar and get a screen that has random albums I'm not interested in in the top two thirds of the window and the matches in the lower third.  Since I'm not interested in the top two thirds of the window I do what any (male) computer user does--I drag the window I'm interested in to make it fill most of the space so I can scroll around comfortably in my actual search results.  I find an episode that sounds like it might be intriguing.  But have I heard it before?  So I go to my "Purchased" window and scroll down.  Nope, haven't heard it before, let's download it.  So I go back to the iTunes store window and voila, the top two thirds is filled with the random albums I'm not interested in and the lower third scroll bar is reset to the top.  Screw Apple!  Screw the iTunes team and screw the iPod Touch team.  Because I have all my episodes on my iPod touch, but since the Touch doesn't do that scrolly thing where it marquees the names of songs that are too long, all I can see the damned "This American Life: ..."  Screw you, Apple!

So I go back and forth, the "Purchased" window and the "iTunes store window manually adjusting the damned slider to shrink the stupid album window so I can see the This American Life episodes. Over and over.

Then I notice under the "Artists and More" section of the wasteful upper two thirds there is a This American Life section.  So I click on it. What I get is the first of 18 pages of inefficiently laid out "This American Life: (first four characters of the episode name)".  Useless!  Damn you, Apple!  How can you guys claim to be masters of the user interface?  You are frauds!  So I mouse-over the name of the title thinking one of 2 things will happen.  Either a tooltip will appear and tell me the whole test of the field like Microsoft would do, or the full name will appear in the status bar.  Screw you, Apple!!!!  Neither one of those happens.  You assholes at Apple need to stop listening to your stupid fanbois who worship your crappy products.  My iPod Touch doesn't even have a freaking game on it?  What's wrong with you assholes?!?!?!?!

This is going to take all frickin' day long and heaps of frustration to find some nice episodes of This American Life so that I can relax and listen to it when I'm stuck in some hotel in Bissau and it's raining too hard to go out.  Ugh!!!!  You people at Apple suck!  Stop listening to your adoring fans who are more than happy to overlook the flaw after flaw after flaw you jackasses put into your products.  Did I mention that when I eventually get around to sync'ing my iPod it'll randomize the time?  Oh, I didn't mention that?  Well allow me to tell you assholes at Apple how the stupid clock on the iPod Touch works.  You sync, your time gets randomized.  Even the date!  Assholes!  And what happens when I try to change the time zone?  It doesn't take.  I tried to change it from Rabat to Dakar.  It sticks as long as I stay in Settings.  But as soon as I hit the button to go to the main button page, if I do Settings, General, Date & Time, it's back to fricking Rabat!  Can't you guys at Apple do anything right?

So back to the crappy interface on iTunes.  At the bottom, it shows "150 results" and then has a "More Results" link.  That takes me to a completely different screen full of 150 items most of which are This American Life episodes.  The thing is, that when I sort, say alphabetically, I don't get an alphabetical listing of all This American Life episodes--but rather the the alphabetical listing of the 150 it is showing.  This is STUPID!  You morons at Apple are making me waste my time doing what computers do well--sorting data!

And why can't you gray out the "Buy Book" button if I already own the book?  Is it that hard for a computer to search my purchased list and grey out the button?  Wouldn't it take a computer about 1 millisecond instead of all the damned rigmarole that I have to go through to try to make sure I don't buy the same song twice?  Damn you, Apple!!!