Apple is not perfect, and I know it. I’m not trying to be a Fanboy, even if some people have a hard time distinguishing between Fanboys and and people who like things that are well-designed. No real ordering for my criticism:

Podcasts

Apple supports these, and the built-in support in the iPhone is better than any other app in the AppStore out there as far as I can tell. But I’d still like it to be better. I want to be able to subscribe to podcasts and have them download in the background when there’s WiFi. This feature is clearly missing (and please don’t tell me to 24/7 run my computer for this). Why do I have to do that manually?

 photo credit: eriwst

iCloud lock-in

Steve Jobs said that iCloud’s purpose is to lock people into Apple’s ecosystem. This is not the best for the consumer, unless to turn the argument around and say it’s better for the customers to go with Apple’s products only. Apple, open up an API for external software.

Windows compatibility

Another lock-in argument is that other times, the compatibility with computers running Windows is not great. For example, if I connect to the computer of my girlfriend, copying files is kinda slow and using her printer doesn’t work instantly (which differs to using some networked printer).

Window Borders in Lion

Yay, we can now drag windows on every side to with the mouse pointer to make them bigger or smaller! Sadly, most of the OSX windows were not programmed with this in mind and have zero pixels of borders. This means while I drag the pointer over the border a very short time the icon changes and I can grab the border, but often times I don’t hit this time-window. Apple, how about adding 1px of border on the outside of the window when I hover in it’s direct surrounding, so I at least have a change of grabbing it?

AppStore

The AppStore is your only hope to make money on Apples platforms as a developer. So, if you don’t get featured, you’re most likely lost. This is a lot of power on Apples side, and it should be more obvious how to get featured in the app store other than to make great apps that Apple’s employees like. You should also get more statistical data about the usage of the AppStore, so you don’t have your marketing guys spam keywords all over the place.

AppStore Search

It would also nice, if the Appstore would rank abandon-ware and very poor software lower in searches if was was a) seldomly downloaded b) poorly rated or c) not updated for a very long time. Maybe it should even forget thing that are too bad.

Network connections in Hotels or Academic Networks

Oftentimes, I connect to Hotel networks, free WiFi networks or networks in academic institutions and it just works. About 50% of the time, it doesn’t work and there’s a lot of fiddling with network specific settings involved before I get it to run. How about making this better, as usually Windows is king here.

Next generation programming language

Apple sticks with its old programming language Objective-C without having a contender for the next decade. For example, C# with .NET 4.0 is such an advanced language, that I barely have the heart to compare them. Please don’t comment this. I know you know better than me, but Apple has no solution for stronger machines other than making the devices more competitive by making them smaller.

Contracts

The iOS ecosystem is pretty locked down, with apps having only hacks to communicate to each other. How about stealing contracts from Windows Phone and Windows 8?

Sandboxing

That being said, Sandboxing is pretty bad for app developers if you forgot some entitlements that are necessary to run the software.

Preview

Preview doesn’t always work very good if the PDF is very big. Why, Apple?

Ergonomics vs. Looks

When there’s a design decision between the looks and the ergonomics of an Apple product, the looks win out (explained by John Siracusa on Hypercritical). Apple, please give us bigger arrow keys and better mice! (And Samsung, please don’t copy the questionable design-decisions from Apple!)

iChat / Messages / Twitter

Why is Twitter not integrated into Messages? Why is iChat not integrated with the iOS messages?

Conclusion

Apple is not perfect, and this is what I criticize. I’ll try to fill this list with more that I don’t like about Apple stuff, and remove things that get better. If you have comments, please leave out the price debate, as copying companies like Samsung show that the hardware in Apple-quality cannot be done cheaper.

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As I had this effect once before and it went away magically all by itself, I thought of just waiting a bit. One hour later when I was at work, everything worked normal again. Maybe it has some connection to heat, humidity of the air, particles between moving parts that had released themselves on the ride by bike that I do when I go to work. So, if you’re having this problem, my advice is waiting a bit, and retrying over a full day till sending it back.

photo credit: JD Hancock

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Just to tell you the quick fix of this problem: goto “Windows –> Preferences –> Maven –> Installations”, and if you see there’s an Embedded Snapshot used after the last update of the plugin, click “Add…” and browse to the path of your local maven2 installation that you used before.

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So, if you’re using these plugins and know how to contact the authors, please drop them a line. I fixed the Photo Dropper and the shadows-plugins here, but don’t really have the energy to go after the flattr-plugin, as the fixes get overridden with new plugin versions, and flattr keeps them coming each month…

It’s bugging me that plugins are the reason my site doesn’t validate.

photo credit: Jesper Rønn-Jensen

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photo credit: bloody marty mix

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When the Visual Studio 2008 / 2010 designer shows you the forms and controls, it executes certain code to show them to you. When it crashes, you should look on which form it crashed and then inspect this form very closely, including all their fields.

The error can be in the constructor of the form, in the constructor of the custom controls you’re using and in the OnPaint() events of either forms and controls. Make sure you’re either encapsulating all these with try-catch-blocks so you can at least track down the problem and not have Visual Studio crash on you each time you try.

(If you know other sources of VS designer crashes, please post a comment)
photo credit: selva

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-Xms512m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:PermSize=64m
-XX:MaxPermSize=128m
 photo credit: Simon Pow

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