Sometimes stuff on the Mac or iThings is truly brilliant and intuitive.
And other times …. Well.
Example:
I’ve got a sound file that’s been my alarm tone on every device that does alarms since the Win95 days. It amuses me. It amuses John Wilson when we share a room at Presentation Summit. It’s one of my Japanese "daughters" kids screaming “WAKE UP!” in Japanese.
On every moderatelysmart phone I’ve had so far, it’s been easy to move sound files onto the phone to use as ringtones.
Typically, the phone’s Windows software has some kind of file manager you can use to move your sound file to the phone. Then you pick the file as your ring or alarm tone and you're done
Heck, even on my wife's old NoKia Brainless, you could at least use the built in voice recorder to record a sound and pick it as your ring tone.
On the iPhone … OMG. If I didn’t like the thing for other reasons, I’d have to crush it.
I wanted to use the same sound file as always on it. I found out how you go about this:
You stare at it for a while and realize that you have no IDEA how to move files to it.
You look on the interwebs and find that there IS a way of doing it. It needs iTunes. Luckily, you already have that because you need it to synch the phone with Outlook. But if not, you spend the time to download and install and update and yadayada.
You fire it up and … huh? The thing they described on the web site doesn’t seem to be there. More staring. Finally, you realize that on the pane in question, there’s not one, not two but THREE different scrollbars. If you use the outermost one, you are rewarded with The Voila Experience.
Sort of. But not yet because you’re not sure which app to drag the file into. More interwebulating. It seems you need Garage Band to convert sounds to ringtones. So you go to download that. Or try to. And finally, after five or twenty tries when the download times out, you finally get it installed. Then back into iTunes to get the sound dropped into Garage Band so you can open it and convert.
And soon you realize why some of the other stuff is so intuitive. It's because they sucked all the intuitive out of Garage Band and used it elsewhere. You want to open your pathetic little file and just save it, do you? You fool. That’s not how we DO things on this planet.
No, you have to start a new project and record yourself cursing Jobs or use one of the (admittedly pretty cool) built-in instruments … anything that’s built-in so as to put something, anything into the project. NOW you can switch to the track editor and stumble around trying to remember where in HELL the thingie that let you add drumbeats and other pre-recorded stuff went. And finally …. FINALLY … there’s your sound file, the one you dragged in how many hours ago was it?
Drop it onto the track editor, move it around … cool thing, the track editor. There IS a bit of intuitive left in here after all. Delete the dummy sound you had to record just to GET to the track editor and save your ..
Save your …?
Well no. There’s no save, there is only go back to My Sounds. Ah.
But it autosaved for you.
But if IT does the save, how do you …
Ah. If you hold down the sound’s icon … press and hold … and note that there’s no help, no hint, no tooltips here … you get to a place where you can mail or facebook or airwhatever OR SAVE AS RINGTONE.
And now … NOW … we can go into the sound choices for ringtones ‘n stuff and our new sound is there. And it works. In only 573 steps more than it would have taken on the dumbest smartphone out there.
Thank god it was so INTUITIVE.
