Apple considered harmful?

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I was fortunate enough to win an iPod shuffle at the Christmas bash and decided to install iTunes 6 to make it work. I had installed a previous version before podcast support and used iPodder to fix that but podcasting was new and not very interesting and I gave up on it. Version 6 brought integral podcasting and the iTunes Store gave access to a lot of new podcasts. Happy days, right?

What really bugs me is that Apple seem to like annoying its Windows users - every so often iTunes advises you to update to the latest version, like today's notice to update to 6.0.4. Like Google Earth, these updates require downloading the entire installer rather than a smaller incremental update as Mozilla, Adobe and Lotus provide for their products. This is very bloody annoying - since Google employ most of the Firefox team these days (or so it seems) perhaps someone there can introduce them to incremental patches.

However, while my "patch" was downloading from Apple I came across this. No shortage of cheek in the Apple "intellectual property" department it seems. Attempting a patent on RSS should send a chill through blog hosts, RSS readers and podcasting applications. Hopefully Research in Motion will decide to put RSS into Blackberry, because once their IP lawyers really get cranked up, no patent stands in the way. Except for RIMs, naturally...

UPDATE: oops! Forgot a hat-tip to EirePreneur for the RSS story.

Comments

EWI said…
What really bugs me is that Apple seem to like annoying its Windows users - every so often iTunes advises you to update to the latest version, like today's notice to update to 6.0.4.

There are three reasons:

1) the usual bug/security updates
2) Increased/new functionality and offerings in iPods or iTunes
3) Trying to keep one step ahead of DVD Jon...
Wed Mar 08, 09:05:00 pm GMT-5
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