You know, just because the Macalope defends Apple from the ridiculously dull barbs and arrows of outrageous pundits doesn’t mean he himself doesn’t have a few complaints about what Apple does, or that he’s unsympathetic to the complaints of others.
The Macalope can literally hear your eyes rolling right now. Seriously. It’s a soft “fffft” sound. Hear it? There it goes again. Well, maybe your ears aren’t as good as the horny one’s.
No, the Macalope didn’t sit down intending to pump up his “street cred” by offering a rare criticism of Apple. These are things he noticed himself and found others in our merry band of highly-satisfied customers thinking.
So, can we talk about iCloud for a minute?
On the latest edition of Back to Work, the Macalope’s pal Merlin Mann carefully raised some concerns about how iCloud syncing works in comparison to how you might think it works. For example, you’re working on a document in Pages on your iMac and you comically look up and declare with great effect, “I am late for my aeroplane ride!” because you fancy yourself a 1930’s bon vivant along the lines of the Great Gatsby.
We get that. We’re tired of it, but we get it.
Any-hoo, you grab your iPad, hop in your jalopy and make your way out to the aerodrome where you board a plane. Once in the air, you turn on your iPad to get back to that Pages document and…
Nothing.
The propellor-driven mint condition Ford 3 AT Trimotor you boarded certainly doesn’t have Wi-Fi and apparently iCloud documents, unlike iTunes media, only sync when you launch the application. That is, when it doesn’t just summarily delete them.
Photo syncing, meanwhile, also seems fraught with problems. Now, maybe all this stuff will get sorted out in short order, and maybe a lot of it will work better when we all have fast, cheap, and reliable Internet access wherever we go, but we’re not there yet. Particularly not furry beasts who roam the high plains in the twilight between myth and reality.
The other thing the Macalope’s going to talk about—and he’s not even asking this time if we can talk about it because we’re talking about it, sister—is leather.
What the heck is with the leather fetish, Apple?
As a user of the very fine BusyCal, the Macalope hadn’t even seen the Lion interface for iCal until he upgraded to iCloud and wondered if it was time to switch back to Apple’s own calendaring program. He’s still washing his eyes out with bleach. John Gruber similarly complained about the Find My Friends interface. It all leads the Macalope to wonder what kind of kinky hijinks the kids in Cupertino are into.
And how we can get them to stop foisting those hijinks on us.
These are relatively minor complaints. The good news about the iCloud bugs is that you can turn iCloud off. If you’re not as into leather as Apple is, you don’t have to use iCal (or you can download a doohicky called Lion Tweaks to remove the leather) or Find My Friends.
But this is Apple. We just expect better.
[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]