Daring Fireball on the iPod Shuffle: why = and ; are “special”
Very good piece by John Gruber over at Daring Fireball about the new iPods’ lack of Firewire (not too important) and more importantly the iPod shuffle’s file formatting (which is Windows-style FAT32, not Apple’s HFS+, and can’t be formatted to the latter), which concludes:
The “it just works” factor has been one of the hallmarks of the Mac user experience since day one; using an iPod Shuffle as a disk drive forces you to be aware of arcane and bizarre file naming restrictions, and thus is utterly un-Mac-like. I’m not pointing this out to claim it’s cause for alarm, that the sky is falling, or that the iPod Shuffle “sucks”. I’m just saying it’s a little sad when Apple Computer, of all companies, tells us that punctuation such as ‘=’ and ‘;’ are “special characters”.
Good point.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- shuffle iPod at review Register The: or hate it you'll love either it (11 February 2005; score: 84.36%)
- The sole design flaw in the iPod shuffle (9 March 2005; score: 78.56%)
- The Daring Fireball linked list - let the news come to you (1 February 2005; score: 77.33%)
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March 1st, 2005 at 2:12 am
Well, it’s just a symptom of the clash of standards; these technological battles never benefit the consumer in the end; all they do is break compatibility, confuse end-users and screw over the hombrew linux types(NTFS writing, for example).
Wouldn’t it be nice if these companies had decided a single open standard to suit all these needs years ago, and stuck to them rationally? Hopeless idealism :D