Thursday, December 25, 2014

Humbug - Amazon, Apple and Pottermore

In the spirit of the season, which science tells us is Scrooge before his psychotic break, a call out to Amazon, Pottermore, and Apple.

To Amazon for the increasingly common practice of merging multiple product reviews into a single listing (example, Dec 2014). This renders the reviews worse than useless — because they are now misleading. I don’t know whether this is some kind of emergent fraud that enables vendors to hide bad reviews, or whether it’s an incompetent Amazon implementation, but I’m now boycotting any product that is part of a unified listing that blends inconsistent products. You should too.

To Pottermore and Apple for the hash the two of them have made of Potter audiobooks. They’re no longer available on iTunes, and if one downloads the MP3 from Pottermore they import into iTunes as music. Thanks to Apple’s comprehensively botched iTunes 12 removal of multi-edit [1], few will be able to transform these into audiobooks that play in sequence, have the right controls, and remember their playback location when stopped. Worst customer experience of the season.

And an extra call out to Apple for removing, with iTunes 11 (2013), the ability to print iTunes Gift Certs at home. I didn’t notice this because I stayed on iTunes 10 through Dec 2013. Email delivery is the only option now. Way to go Apple.

And some people wonder where all our leisure time went.

On the Marley side of things, my gift was a minced fruit pie and it is quite delicious.

[1] Through a bug or the last act of some desperate dev, there’s a hidden way to access the old multi-edit feature. Hold option then click on Get Info. Not one in 200 will know this.

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