jr conlin's ink stained banana

Having been raised on a farm, I'll point out that #2 (pun intended) might not be so pleasant when mucking out the barn, too.

Mine always say "you will be sent to jail by the testimony of a small child." What's up with THAT? :)

There is actually a good reason for the need of using iTunes to put photos on the iPod. Unlike the smaller content (calendars and notes), photos can be quite large. iTunes "optimizes" the photos (ie. shrink them down to the exact resolution of that iPod screen) before transferring it over to the iPod. Hence, saving you the questions like "how come you put 100 10-megapixel pictures on my iPod and ate up all my space?" or "how come my pictures take so long to load on my iPod?"

iTunes is the single worst music-related program I've ever used. It's slow, it crashes all the time, and it's completely unintuitive to use. I'm stunned when people call it "easy".

Mookie: Uhm, then how come my Archos 605, Creative Zen, and pretty much every other freaking device was able to create thumbnails of images loaded to it and store and display those? I'll also call BS on the "do it to save space" thing. It's not. iTunes is simply creating a database of images it strings together often at worse compression than simply storing compressed lossy JPGs, plus, there's the option to store full sized images onto the device.

Sorry, not buying it. It's a defective design decision.

The majority of iPod owners who want to sync photographs probably use one computer, keep all of their photos in iPhoto (or Adobe whateveritis that's supported on Windows, or in my case Aperture) or in a folder structure. iTunes is optimised for this use case, and unfortunately for you just doesn't support your use case.

The iPod takes advantage of iTunes to delivery it things that reduce CPU/memory usage, and that's what it's doing with the photos. The iPhone/iPod touch are smarter with regards to displaying high resolution images, but then they have more memory and somewhat beefier CPUs. (Given that the iPhone/iPod touch do not show up as mass storage, I'm sure you'd just dismiss them right here though.)

As to iTunes crashing? In the last 2 years (the time my current CrashReporter directory covers), iTunes hasn't, on my machine at least.

But yes, I'd say easy. As would most of the "novice" computer users I know.

Can't you just have him create a new folder in iphoto, dumped the photos you want in it, then sync to that folder?

We're talking about building thumbnails from images. This is a known and fairly well resolved issue of taking pixel samples, something that involves grabbing every X pixel.
Down converting images is a one time penalty. If the user understands what the device is doing (it tells him) they can be fairly forgiving about not seeing their images instantly. If they want faster/better thumbnails, they could use iTunes to prebuild the thumbnails.

The problem is that iTunes forces you to go from PC to iPod, meaning that if I didn't give my dad the originals on his iPod, he'd lose them next time he "synced" to his main computer. (Even now he's got the risk of that happening, but at least there's a recovery path.) But by doing that I may have confused things even worse. Now he's got a directory of photos on his iPod, but if he were to copy a new photo into that directory, it wouldn't show up when he browsed it on his iPod.

Seriously, my PHONE is smarter than that. Having that database restricted to being built via an external program is retarded beyond words.

I'm having difficulty seeing why people are condemned as having "questionable reasoning skills" because the device they (most likely) purchased to play music doesn't sync photos the way *you* think it should.

In this case, the device wasn't purchased to play music. It was purchased to play audiobooks. When the photo feature was discovered, it was burdensome to add photos when compared with other similar players.

My opinion is that the iPod doesn't live up to it's claim of being either simple or elegant. It forces the user to think too hard about things like this when there's really no need to.

Your post sounded like you were accusing all iPod owners of questionable reasoning skills. I didn't realize you only meant your dad. Oh wait, he also didn't buy it for photos.

As for my iPod, it seems pretty simple. I told iTunes once what directory contained the photos I want on my iPod and I've not had to touch it since. Would it be cooler if it *also* allowed me to drop photos directly? Sure. But I doubt that I'd trade the existing method to get that.

Nah, the iPod was a gift for my Dad (meaning that if anyone definitely has questionable reasoning skills it would be myself and my brother for getting it for him).

As for the iPod in general, I am absolutely not a fan of the beasts. There are other, better, more affordable choices (which I did try my best to suggest), however I was roundly outvoted by friends and family members who swore that iPods were the greatest devices ever created, even if they had never used another type of device.

Bitter? Me? What ever gives you that idea?

good job jr. you started a war :)

i agree, ipods are definitely not the greatest things ever created (spoken from a guy who has one half a dozen of these things). and i agree, itunes is not the best music management program in the world (though, i have not had mine crash ever — i do run the mac version, not the windows version).

but, somehow the two, together seem to make a decent pair that no one has replicated on such a scale that apple has. creative's programs are craptacular. archos has a program for media management? yea, i know, usb mass storage is nice and all, but still it's a bitch to manage after a while.

This was my list of criteria for a PMP:

1. Could handle non-DRM AAC-encoded files. Like it or not, I have thirty-some GB of music in this format and I'm not transcoding it if I can avoid it.

2. Can sync in some way on a Mac.

3. Unicode ID3 support (I didn't even realize this was going to be a problem).

#1 pretty much eliminates everything but the iPod, Zune and some of the Sansas. #2 and #3 eliminate the Zune, and I learned the hard way that the Sansas have issues with #1 and #3. I have come to hate Apple, but like it or not they're the only ones making a player I can use. Thankfully it was much easier to replace the battery in my 3G ipod than have to buy a new one and hassle with Apple some more.

ipods are pretty

alice: heh, your AAC problem is my WMV problem. MP3 is universal, but it's hard to get the track to come out well.

jr I saw this and thought of you

Wow.

Glad to see Apple finding a positive spin on that problem.