Please stop. Plugging in my iPod is not an appropriate time for you to be plugging MobileMe. iTunes should never display an ad when I sync my device.

Never mind that I’m already a .Mac user and you damn well know it; I just haven’t enabled it on my iPod Touch, because the sync is still broken and your servers go offline at random intervals. I don’t want to hose my email, bookmarks, calendar, and contacts by syncing them through an unreliable service.

[speaking of which, plugging in an iPod Touch does not trigger a sync; you have to hit the button manually. WTF?]

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How do I shut off the obnoxious (and inconsistently unavailable) “live preview” of images when I drag them out of Safari? It’s really difficult to drag them into a folder when the mouse cursor (you know, the part that determines where you’re dragging to) is hidden somewhere under the oh-so-spiffy translucent copy of the image.

When I upgraded to iTunes 8.0 and turned on the new Genius feature, I discovered that the US iTunes Store has acquired a rather large catalog of J-Pop, including a significant subset of the various Hello!Project groups’ albums and singles. The iTunes Genius analyzed my collection and gleefully pointed out all of the songs that would be perfect for me.

All of which I already owned. In many cases, it was pointing to the exact same song, from the exact same album. Why? Because the purchased albums have metadata that’s written with kanji and kana, and the iTunes versions are all romanized. Er, mostly romanized. Okay, inconsistently romanized. Album and song titles are usually romanized, artist names are all over the map: kana-ized, Hepburn-romanized, Kunrei-romanized, last-name-first, first-name-first, capitalization and white-space optional; fortunately they seem to stick with the same version for multiple albums.

This makes searching entertaining, but this is a big deal, because all of this stuff is at standard iTunes pricing, which is a helluva lot cheaper than import CDs, and just over half the price of the same tracks in the Japanese iTunes Store.

The Japanese store is the source of the peculiar partial romanization, by the way, and in fact when you view it from the US, all of the navigation is translated as well. I remember that when the store first launched, everything was in Japanese, including song titles, so I’m wondering if they’re geographically localizing not just the menus, but also the song metadata. The search system seems to handle pretty much anything you throw at it, so I wonder if Apple was seeing so many American purchases from the Japanese store through gift cards that they went out of their way to accommodate them, first through romanizing the interface, then through importing popular content.

There are some indexing oddities. If you search for “nakazawa yuuko” in the US store, you’ll get her most recent EP and a stub link that should lead to her audiobooks, but that only works if you’re on the Japanese store. I’m guessing that the stores all talk to each other internally, sharing indexes and content, with flags to indicate what content is importable. Given the price difference, new releases are unlikely to show up for a while.

…I thought when Apple said that the new iPod Touch was “available immediately in Apple retail stores”, that meant they’d, y’know, have them, at least as display models. Instead, the Valley Fair store had large displays of the older model, at its full (higher) retail price. Old Nano, too.

I wasn’t going to buy one today, but it would have been nice to take a look.

Way to win hearts and minds, you spoiled little children.

In every Apple retail store is a so-called "Genius Bar" -- a technical support station, the purpose of which is to offer help and support for Apple products.

You can use Apple's helpful online booking system (no registration required) to reserve time slots at the Genius Bar. There are currently 217 Apple stores in seven countries, giving us plenty of slots to book. We want as many people as possible to book slots this Friday and Saturday. Why not book more than one? Having lots of slots booked will get Apple's attention and ensure that the Geniuses have done their homework.

Head over to your local Apple Store at your designated time. Be sure to get a business card from your Genius first and then politely ask them the questions. For each question, give them a score between 1 and 32, with 1 being a really bad answer, and 32 being an answer that really showed insight into the restrictive practices of the iPhone.

In other words, “we’re not Apple customers, and we’re not even going to pretend to be; we just want to fuck up a real customer’s day and annoy people who’d rather be solving actual problems”. This is right up there with Barlow’s asshatted dancing protest outside the Republican National Convention in 2004.

$20 says that the Neo FreeRunner, which you think will someday surpass the iPhone and all others, will be about as successful in the marketplace as the Hurd.

Precisely because the FreeRunner is, as you say, “supported by a worldwide community of people rather than a single greedy, dishonest and secretive entity.”

[Update: Ouch. Also, ouch. Second-rate hardware is acceptable on an early dev model that you don’t intend to actually sell to users, but when even the “improved” UI is crap, that “worldwide community” has a lot of focused, carefully directed, market-driven development and testing ahead of it. Oh, wait, that’s the boring work people want to get paid for. Never mind.]

Please make the iPhone screen at least twice as large (4x6 good, 5x7.5 better), add a stylus, and come up with a name that doesn’t piss off Jobs by sounding too much like “tablet” or “Newton”. Maybe iSlab, iSurf, iCanHazTouchscreen, iFinallyhavethetechtomakethiswork; something like that.

Crank up the CPU a little, though, because I found Japanese text input rather sluggish on a friend’s original iPhone.

Why does plugging in an external drive that’s explicitly marked “do not index” cause the indexing service to take over the CPU for more than a minute?