I HATE iTunes!

Now don't get me wrong: I adore my iPad and I truly love many of my apps too. BUT ... I hate, loathe, despise and DETEST iTunes. It is one of the most convoluted, un-user friendly pieces of software I have ever had the misfortune to be compelled to use. 

I actually wouldn't use it if it were a mere matter of managing music; there are better alternatives. But I like to manage my apps and nothing else does that (at least not if you're not jail broken). I like them organised in folders and backed up for safety's sake, and I don't want to be re-downloading things. Today I finally got around to transferring purchases (I'd naively thought that backing up was enough; it's not), updating overdue apps, and the dreaded sync. 

That's where things didn't go quite right. On the bright side, I now have over five gigs of free space ... on the other hand, I have somehow deleted four gigs of apps and unfortunately have no idea which ones they were. Maybe a forced purge (followed by a forced reorganization) isn't such a terrible thing. I could probably stand to purge a lot more yet, particularly in my games section. And miraculously, even though Kindle, my pdf (Perfect Reader) and comic book (Comic Flow) apps were deleted at one point, when I put them back on, somehow all my books were still there! But it wasn't how I was planning to spend my day. 

A nice, friendly software would make it easy for me to arrange and rearrange to my heart's content. It would make it easy for me to sort my apps by date installed or uninstalled. It would let me search my collection of apps (now perilously close to 1000) in multiple ways. Maybe it would even give me little screenshot previews to refresh my memory of what exactly an app does. But that software doesn't exist; it certainly isn't iTunes. 

And I don't hold out much hope for improvements. Apple does hardware very well; software - not so much. They haven't been especially concerned with customer satisfaction with iTunes in the past, so I don't expect the trend to change in the future. Everything is going off to the Cloud anyway these days. But I don't want to worry about things disappearing or not being available for whatever reason, or extra downloading charges. I want to rely on me - not the nebula. So unfortunately for the foreseeable future I guess I will have to make an uneasy peace with iTunes and hope it doesn't decide to delete or rearrange too many things without my input.