Bravo Apple! | The Coffeehouse

littleguru
<3 Seattle

Where are the iPhone OS updates (for example from 2.0 to 3.0) stored in Windows after being downloaded by iTunes? You have one guess. Exactly... how could it be otherwise: in AppData\Roaming. 277 MB! Nice, Apple! That's a lot of fun if you are in an Active Directory.

And now, who claims Windows is slow?

CannotResolveSymbol
{insert caption here}

What's worse is that they keep backups in the roaming directory too... not only is it a huge amount of data (~200 MB on my machine), but there are lots of individual files in there (about 8,000 on my machine).

I'd claim that Apple deliberately cripples their Windows software, but iTunes on Mac OS sucks too...

brichpmr

In reply to CannotResolveSymbol

#Jul 7th @ 10:04 PM

"I'd claim that Apple deliberately cripples their Windows software, but iTunes on Mac OS sucks too..."

In your opinion....I totally disagree re the Mac version...works very well on my machines.

rhm

In reply to brichpmr

#Jul 8th @ 3:22 AM

Same here. I've heard iTunes on Windows sucks, but I use it on my MacBook and it's super-fine.

Roaming profiles are a badly broken concept anyway - when apps can throw any junk they like in there and Windows has no idea of what should be copied and what shouldn't, you're bound to end up with these kinds of problems. Besides, if you're going to do that, why the hell doesn't Windows implement a more efficient synchronisation protocol between client and server (e.g. rsync) instead of just dumbly copying all the files to the client on logon and copying them all back on logoff. Dumb dumb dumb.

LeoDavidson

Haha Smiley I noticed that a while back with the iPod firmware updates, I think it was. So dumb.

Another in the long list of reasons to install iTunes in a VM to avoid infecting your real machine with Apple filth.

BTW, congrats on joining MS, Chris! (The other thread seems to have lost its "Add" button Javascript so I couldn't reply there.) I remember you were excited about going back there so it's great to see it happened. Hope you get to work on some cool stuff. Smiley

ZippyV
Fired Up

In reply to rhm

#Jul 8th @ 3:35 AM

Developers can choose to save files in 2 directories: Local or Roaming. It doesn't get any more simple than that.

AndyC

In reply to rhm

#Jul 8th @ 3:35 AM

It does use a smarter process than a dumb copy back and forth (at least since Windows XP). However it still relies on developers putting things where they are supposed to go.

giovanni
...

In reply to AndyC

#Jul 8th @ 5:30 AM

And as far as I can recall from my Unix days, you always do have some sort of local and roamind data...

Ion Todirel
buuu

> Imagine where the iPhone OS updates (for example from 2.0 to 3.0) are stored on a Windows PC after being downloaded by iTunes?
now how would you know that? did you get an iPhone? Smiley

littleguru
<3 Seattle

In reply to Ion Todirel

#Jul 8th @ 6:04 AM

nono... PaoloM gave me his old one (pre 3G). I wanted to activate it but AT&T doesn't activate them anymore. I found that out after I updated the phone to 3.0. I wonder why they don't activate the 2G phones anymore...

littleguru
<3 Seattle

In reply to AndyC

#Jul 8th @ 5:30 AM

It doesn't copy always all the stuff. Just the new things but still, imagine you have a quota on your roaming data or imagine that you have several machines. During the first sign-in you get all this stuff from your server. That could take a while!

AndyC

In reply to littleguru

#Jul 8th @ 7:20 AM

Oh believe me I know. It's a daily issue round here....

LeoDavidson

In reply to AndyC

#Jul 8th @ 7:27 AM

Indeed. Every large company I've worked for has had dog slow networks (at least for the IT staff/buildings), limited desktop HDD space (sometimes painful with big C++ builds) and severely limited network storage (a constant annoyance). Logging in to a machine that hadn't been used before was always slow, even without gratuitous data put into the roaming profile.

Despite being companies that made billions a year they were all very tight when it came to storage. Online web mail gives people more storage than any company I've worked at gave their employees... If you were lucky you'd be able to store a few hundred meg. A few gigabytes would be out of the question. We used to joke about buying a HDD ourselves and installing it into the servers if the company couldn't afford it. Smiley

Some thing storing 270MB of data in the roaming profile would cause so many unneccssary problems.

(Not that I'd ever install iTunes on a work machine, but it's still something Apple should've fixed a long time ago. They've been putting stuff there for ages.)

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to LeoDavidson

#Jul 8th @ 7:53 AM

But if I remember right, another example of a problem with iTunes, is that iTunes doesn't put your track ratings back into the mp3 files, it just keeps them in the library. Really rendering the rating system useless and proving that Apple just likes sitting in it's own sandbox and won't let any kids come in and play with it, nor do they want to leave the sandbox and play with others. It's a crappy analogy but I think it gets the point across Smiley

LeoDavidson

In reply to Harlequin

#Jul 8th @ 9:09 AM

There's a good argument for not putting track ratings into the music files: They're subjective, not objective data.

i.e. If the music file is shared by multiple people, they will not all agree on how much they like it. They'll all agree on things like the artist name, track name and publishing date though. (Well, within reason. Smiley Sometimes people disagree on what to put in those fields as well.)

(People may also want to rate files on read-only network drives or optical media, I suppose.)

As usual, I'd say the ideal would be an option about where to store the rating data. Smiley

(Personally, "nowhere" is a good answer as I've never seen the point of rating files. If something is garbage, delete it, and everything else is so dependent on mood that the rating doesn't mean much to me. Could be because I'm an "album guy" rather than a "shuffle play guy", though.)

Dodo
I'm your creativity creator™ :)

My personal opinion: All data should be Local if your not on ActiveDirectory. All data should be Roaming if you are, because you wnat your data to be always available. Though, it shouldn't store any data on your machine or personal directory, if it can be fetched from another location as often as needed at any given time. The Local or Roaming data should only contain persoanl settings and documents (or backups thereof) for your applications, the programs itself should be elsewhere (yes Google, I'm talking to you), and files from elsewhere that are always the same when downloaded should be stored in a temporary location on the local machine, scheduled for deletion on space demand, if no longer needed.

I don't know of any mainstream application that does that correctly for various annoying reasons.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to Dodo

#Jul 8th @ 4:32 PM

Firefox, prior to version 2.0 used to store the cache in Roaming too, but at least that was capped to 50MB.

AndyC

In reply to W3bbo

#Jul 8th @ 5:40 PM

Not much comfort when the maximum size of a roaming profile is 30MB (unless you completely disable quotas). Adobe (surprise surprise) are one of the worst offenders for dumping enormous amounts of rubbish in the roaming profile. To the point that I'd recommend that anyone using roaming profiles adds Appdata\Roaming\Adobe to the exclusion list as soon as they turn roaming on.