Wings Over Scotland

Come on. It must have been one of you, or someone you know, and it’s time to own up. Because until we deal with this serious issue and reach some sort of closure, Jobs is going to keep taking it out on the rest of us.

There’s simply no other remotely plausible explanation for the staggering hostility – no, make that absolute naked loathing – with which Apple continues to treat the hundreds of millions of customers who’ve made it so rich.

If you read the previous sorry tale of the two-day odyssey of misery that resulted when I idiotically tried to upgrade my 3rd-gen iPod Touch to iOS4.2, or indeed that of the previous three hell-spawned days it took to install iOS4.0 on it, you were probably wondering how I’d managed to escape any such traumas with my precious iPhone 4. But you can’t dodge that bullet forever.

On Sunday past, I was idling around innocently deleting a couple of apps to keep some space free on the iPhone, which was down to its last 0.6GB. Having been entirely crash-free since I bought it four months ago, the phone decided it was time to trigger Apple’s built-in customer-fucking subroutine, and locked up irretrievably mid-delete.

I left it for a considerable time to see if it would sort itself out (as can often be the case with iThings), then tried the normal shutdown, but the screen remained stubbornly frozen. Eventually the only thing left to do was the double-button emergency poweroff, which managed to get the job done. Slightly over-enthusiastically, as it turned out, because when I switched it back on again, all my apps were gone.

My 19 carefully-arranged pages had simply vanished, to be replaced by a mere three, all containing Apple’s own apps. This was obviously severely irritating, but I’d had the same thing happen to the Touch once before, and a reset followed by a sync had sorted it out. So I powered off again via the normal method, switched it back on and hit Sync.

This, of course, was a terrible mistake. The sync had no effect on the number of apps whatsoever, but what it did manage to do was back up the iPhone in its useless no-apps condition, thereby overwriting the previous backup and – I realised with blood-curdling horror – obliterating any possibility whatsoever of recovering it to its previous state.

(As the sync announced it was backing up, this possibility had suddenly occurred to me, but with almost no apps registered present the backup only took about four seconds and there wasn’t time to abort it.)

I now had an iPhone with no apps, but a whopping 16GB of its storage occupied by what was identified on the summary screen as “Other”, meaning I couldn’t even try reloading all the apps manually (which would at least have retained their data), because there wasn’t any room for them. (Due to the fact that they were in fact STILL FUCKING THERE.)

I tried a few desperate tricks involving my manual backups of the secret Application Data folders, but to no avail. Fighting back the urge to weep and/or take my trusty 7lb lump hammer to everything in a 10-foot radius, I tried manfully to come to terms with the inescapable fact that I was going to have to do a factory reset and start all over again from scratch.

Of course, Apple don’t like to make it even that simple. On iOS devices, factory-restoring automatically upgrades your firmware to the latest version whether you want it to or not, which I emphatically didn’t. (Because of the infuriatingly cretinous removal of the extra-app-pages trick.)

But I just couldn’t face restoring, then downgrading to 4.1 again, then laboriously re-creating the extra pages, before I could even get started on the awful, hideous task of reinstalling and reorganising the 800-odd apps that had been on the phone.

Also, I reasoned that leaving 4.2 in place would at least mean that I could use the seemingly genuinely useful Find My iPhone app, a security tool spitefully only enabled in 4.2 but which excellently lets you locate your phone if it gets lost or stolen, and lock or wipe it remotely in the case of the latter.

So to cut a long story about 18 hours of failed rescue attempts shorter, I restored the phone, installed iOS4.2 and downloaded Find My iPhone. Despite being abominably and contemptuously under-documented, once you’ve created a MobileMe account and logged in, it does indeed GPS-track your iPhone on any other iDevice, make it play a loud sound on command (in case you’ve just lost it down the back of the sofa), and give you the option to remotely lock it in case of theft.

Unless the thief has disabled it, of course.

Yes, in what must count as one of the most absolutely spectacularly fuckwitted design decisions in the entire history of computing, you can disable Find My iPhone from the Settings menu. You have to login with your account info and password if you want to activate it, but astonishingly – actually, we need a whole new word for the sheer inconceivable magnitude of how monumentally fucking brainless this is – you DON’T have to log in to your account to switch it back off. All you have to do is flick the toggle button.

(The actual FMI app itself even reminds you to log out when you’re done setting it up. But even if you logout in the app you remain logged into your MobileMe account – in fact, there isn’t any option anywhere to log out of it – and that’s enough to access the disable option.)

So hey, readers – if you ever steal someone’s iPhone, just make sure you go to Settings and disable Find My iPhone before they’ve noticed that it’s gone. You’re home free!

So anyway. After a day and a half of almost incalculable wretchedness and wasted time (on top of the previous day spent trying hopelessly to avoid that very thing), most of it spent watching the Apps tab in iTunes repeatedly choke and splutter and fall over and die from simply trying to list all of my 2700 or so purchased apps, I’d managed to get some semblance of my iPhone back.

(According to friends with more modest libraries the absolute most iTunes can comfortably handle on a fast modern dual-core PC is about 80, after which point this awful, worthless cuntheap of an application just collapses in a weepy epileptic fit in a corner and makes the mere act of scrolling from the top of the list to the bottom an agonising 20-minute task. And that figure’s absolutely NOT an exaggeration – it’s how long it actually takes if you’ve got 2700 apps.)

I’d lost about 250 of the previously-installed apps because there just wasn’t any practical way to cram them into the pathetic 11-page Fisher-Price travesty of an interface I was now left with thanks to iOS4.2, and of course all the save data from all of the 600 I had managed to restore to the phone – goodness knows how many hundreds of hours of play – was gone forever.

Grounds enough there alone, then, for beating the faces of Apple’s entire management to a bleeding pulp with a jagged lump of shit-covered granite. But viewers, I’m here to be constructive. It’s easy to say “Make firmware/software that isn’t a hideous broken abortion in the first place”, but I accept that it’s a lot harder to actually do that, even when you’re one of the world’s most mind-numbingly wealthy companies and could afford an army of the universe’s most skilled software engineers if you could be arsed to.

So let’s helpfully explain to the despicably incompetent user-hating fucking monkeys who make up Apple’s current internal development team some really easy ways to make your customers’ lives slightly less miserable and enraging, without giving up any of your precious insane control freakery.

1. Sensible save-data files

Is there something wrong with having separate simple save files for an app’s data? It doesn’t seem to have caused any massive security weaknesses for, say, the DS – so far as I know, nobody’s ever cracked the DRM on Nintendo’s handheld or its games by exploiting a savegame file.

So when a game (or any other app) has to save some data, is there some fucking reason you can’t just have it saved in a small file called ANGRYBIRDS.SAV in a “Saves” directory in the iTunes folder? Instead of, for example, hiding a secret “Backup” folder in the dankest depths of Windows containing (in my case) over 295,000 files all called things like this:

bd2931080a29e69b5420897da5feda30db7e8b95.mdinfo

in folders called things like this:

815dbded17f7bd8fdf12e36e0bab1c2d6e984e07

Would it hurt you SO BADLY if people could, y’know, see which files were connected to which apps and make easy backups, for use in emergencies? You know, emergencies of the sort that are clearly expected to happen on a regular enough basis for you to have built extensive (but largely useless) “Restore” options into iOS and iTunes.

I mean, Jesus Christ – most iOS apps are so small you could actually afford to save the entire app as a snapshot in the Backup folder and still take up less space. My Backup folder takes up nearly 7GB, yet is almost totally worthless.

2. ‘Make New Backup’ button

Of course, at this point in proceedings a new kind of save file might be a major undertaking, with zillions of old apps using the existing system needing to be somehow changed or otherwise catered for. So here’s a heartbreakingly simple idea – let people make non-active backups.

At the moment, iTunes just decides arbitrarily (so far as I can tell) whether or not it’s going to override your existing backup when it makes a new one. Sometimes your Preferences>Devices screen will show half-a-dozen separate backup files for the same device, sometimes there’ll just be one, and there’s no way I’ve ever found to control it – you can delete the extra files, but not rename them or copy them or anything else.

The problem here, of course, is that if something goes wrong, a good backup you could usefully have restored from can get overwritten by a useless broken one. So here’s what you do – when users sync their device normally, do whatever idiotic thing iTunes usually does. But add an option somewhere in the interface to make a “new” backup, which doesn’t overwrite the old one and then becomes the live one.

The old one then becomes, in effect, a back-up backup. iTunes leaves it the hell alone, so that if something happens to your everyday live backup you’ve got a known guaranteed working one to fall back on. Even a full iThing only takes a few minutes to back up, so it wouldn’t be an onerous task – if you wanted to be really nice you could even allow users to schedule it automatically, say at the first available sync whenever a week or more had elapsed since the last “new” backup.

(Users could still delete ones they didn’t want from Preferences>Devices, so there’d be no reason for your hard drive to get clogged with loads and loads of backups.)

At the very LEAST iTunes ought to always keep a minimum of two backups per device (leapfrogging which one gets overwritten each time), so that if one got wiped thanks to one of iOS’s frequent flakeouts you’d be sure to have at least one good chance of a working restore. Putting all the user’s eggs in a single backup basket is contemptibly stupid, and stupidly contemptuous.

3. Separate iTunes from the App Store

On the iPod/iPhone/iPad themselves, the App Store and iTunes are completely separate apps – you can’t buy music in the App Store and you can’t buy apps in iTunes. Maybe it’s time they were separate on computer as well. Trying to integrate music and apps and video and podcasts and books and everything else into one program can’t be easy to manage, and it’s bound to be contributing to its godawful slowness.

A separate App Store prog on PC/Mac could be written from the ground up and run, at a conservative estimate, 50 trillion billion times faster. iTunes is a legacy program dating back to a time when there were basically no apps at all, and it’s hardly surprising that it can’t cope with the app-heavy modern usage of things like the iPhone and iPod Touch. So why are we still having to battle with it? Let’s hope the imminent launch of the Mac App Store is a clue as to where Apple might be headed in that regard.

Just three to be going on with, then. I’ve got plenty more when you’re done, but given that in the 18 months since getting my first iPod I’ve wasted at least an entire week of my life cleaning up the wreckage of  various examples of Apple’s burning, vicious hatred of its market, and a fair while more writing about it in the hope that it’ll at least serve as some sort of therapy, I’m going to go away now and do something less exasperating, like try to teach my rats to fucking tapdance.

In the meantime, whoever you are, if you’re not going to come clean and seek forgiveness for your sins would you at least PLEASE stop fucking Steve Jobs up the arse now? It’s never too late. It’s not just one life you’re ruining.