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Apple Has Ruined Its Podcasts App (slate.com)
Mike Pesca, host of Slate's daily podcast The Gist, writes about the recent interface changes to Apple's Podcasts app (condensed): Up until two months ago, the Apple Podcasts app was the only podcasting app I used. It gave me a nice, workable list of the shows I liked; let me know when those shows were updated; played the shows easily and without glitches; and offered the option of listening in double speed. I knew where everything was, and I thought of its shortcomings not as features the app was lacking but more like things one simply could not do with a podcast. If the Apple Podcast app wasn't great for sharing podcasts via email or text -- and it was not -- I told myself, "That just must be something that's hard for a podcast app to execute." I figured the best a podcasting app could do was to facilitate sharing the feed of a show, rather than the specific episode I was listening to. I never dared dream I could send a specific time within that episode. What sorcery is that? But sometime in the past few months, the Apple app began to fail me. Of my four basic requirements, three suffered. The list of the shows I listened to was now incomplete. There was no longer a number denoting how many episodes of each show I had on the app. The list of unplayed episodes had melded into the list of played episodes. I was offered the opportunity to browse my "Library," but access to any "card catalog" or "Dewey Decimal System" proved elusive. Apple kept pushing me toward my "recently updated" shows, but these weren't the offerings most useful to me every time I checked back in.
I agree with the statements about Apple's podcasts app - the shortcomings made me finally switch to the frequently recommended "overcast" app and after a few days of it I'm regretting not switching sooner
-a.e.mossberg
You think that's all the ruined. How about the Music App which has gone to hell since 8.3 was released. This is what pisses me off the most
For the past couple of years I have noticed that many pieces of software and websites are "improved" to the point where they become unusable.
Here is a useful hint. If you have an established popular product, web or software, and someone comes along suggesting a "refresh because it is getting stale" Fire them. have them escorted from premises as soon as possible. (With a few swift kicks if possible.) These people serve no useful purpose, and waste valuable oxygen. A refreshed, modern interface will NOT bring new users to your product, but the features that you thought were unimportant, and removed will drive some of your current users away.
Looking at you Slashdot.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
1. It now defaults to polling every hour on the hour and if it doesn't reply at that time it gets confused. I had to manually reset every thing to checking once a week (for weekly podcasts) or every day (for anything else).
2. It tries to Sync everything. The overhead on this is a nightmare. It's like "are you sure you have the rights to view that ... how about now, did they expire ... oops it says you don't have this (thing you listened to already) let me download it again".
3. You have to both Subscribe and get Notifications. It forgets these whenever it patches itself. It assumes if you haven't listened to the podcast in a couple of days that you don't every want to listen to that podcast ... when instead it's like a music podcast and it will still be music in a week or a month.
Somebody trying to impose IP rights really really messed up. They should be fired and sent to a Greenland Ice Research station with only tropical shirts and shorts.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And to make /. postings with bad grammar!
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What decade are you living in? Why wouldn't you want your phone to automatically download podcasts you subscribe to?
Windows, Google Applications, General applications, Android, iOS - UI developers and UI managers or UX or whatever they call themselves, they seem to get it right in one or two iterations and after that, for the most part they are *NO LONGER NEEDED* but management keep these huge teams on and they need to 'fiddle' to justify existence.
I've whined, easily 100 times across the internet about this, but people just endure it, they don't lose customers due to it, unless it's a particularly egregious screw up unfortunately.
We're looking at apps with flat colours, no dividing lines, no shading, weird animations, massive massive amounts of white space, no coloured icons, no *GODDAMN LABELLING OF ICONS*, etc. Many of those "gaudy!" things, help you easily identify what you're doing or about to do. While you may still get used to doing things with the app, I find often, I will hesitate for one fraction of a second, maybe even just .2 seconds when I'm clicking unlabeled, uncoloured icons, every.single.time, because my brain has to confirm it's right.
Problem is, when I do these functions thousands or tens of thousands of times a year, they're wasting my damn time.
and, boy, oh BOY am I glad I no longer work in first level technical support. I would be horrendously angry over the past 5-10 years, IMMENSELY so. Being able to describe the GREEN SQUARE icon on the left, in the BOX next to the RED CIRCLE ICON and the icon is LABELLED "GO" is vastly easier than: ..white, like all the other icons, it's going from right to left, yeah it's kind of in the middle of nothing, it's up the top left, no the other top left, no really sir it IS there. You say it isn't? Can you describe what you see? Lots of white eh, any words? No words oh........ what icons are there? ... yes .. an odd shape ok put your mouse over it so we can get the tooltip name for it,......... oh you're on a touchscreen ....... ok ..well ummm "
"No, click the arrow, yes, it's
Seriously these changes are mind-bogglingly bad for end users and first level support, but as we all know, saves them money having a translation team, doesn't it?
I loathe it.
I'll admit this had never even occurred to me until my grandmother started developing glaucoma and other visual issues. She's legally blind now, but perhaps clearer UIs would have enabled her to learn podcasts/audiobooks while she still had some decent sight.