Following on from yesterdays iTune Vs Winamp 5 post comes a few more iTunes horror stories.

Firstly, Dylan Greene is claiming that iTunes is the worst windows app ever. Oucho.

Secondly, The Great Metadebacle shows in detail what I meant about moving files around. That’s just not on.

I won’t post the rest (do a feedster search if you must know). Either it was a really lazy port, or it just plain sucked in the first place. I don’t know which.

Ported from OS X, iTunes is the newcomer to the windows media fight making the big noise. Are nullsoft (makers of Winamp going to sit back and take it? Apparently not. A brand new beta version of Winamp 5 has coincidentally been released. But I’ll come back to that.

First up, iTunes. The best feature has got to be the smart playlists. Being able to pick a bunch of conditions and let it pick matching files from your library is both convenient and easy. Very powerful stuff. It also, of course, looks the business. Chrome and clear blue interface makes for abundant geek drool.

The bad parts:

• The horror stories – Some rather poor behaviour has been reported on behalf of the program. And by poor I mean “unforgivable”. A default option should not change a huge bit of the filing system. That is flashing red light stuff,
• Performance – Terrible. It’s a processor and memory hog. With over 4000 files loaded into the library, it uses up 20Mb or so. That’s comparable to the rather bloated MusicMatch. The minimum processor speed is 500Mhz. For an mp3 player. It means it as well, get just over that and use a few light weight apps and the system will start hanging. There is no need for that at all,
• Can’t use m3u files – Contentious, certainly, but not allowing people to use existing playlists (especially in an open format like m3u) is going to put people off. Personally, I have 20-30 playlists. I’m not going to reconstruct them in another format,
• Smart playlists don’t go far enough – This really frustrated me, although the smart playlists are great, they don’t go near far enough. I want to be able to write compound boolean queries, not being restricted to “all” or “any” queries. Certainly an advanced feature that should be in there.
• Very poor customisation options – No skins, no plug ins, nothing. Fortunate, then, that the default skin is good enough.

And then there is Winamp. It’s embarassingly (and unexpectedly) better. Taking the best parts of winamp 2 and 3 and combining them was a work of genius, done near flawlessly:

• Lightweight – With the same 4000+ song library, the memory usage peaks at 8Mb. Much better. CPU time? Negligible; not a single performance glitch.
• Looks – A good looking default skin (certainly better than Winamp 2’s boring default), and eighteen thousand more for download, there is a look waiting for everyone,
• Plug ins – Backwards compatability has afforded the winamp team the luxury of plugins to do pretty much anything. I especially like the DSP plugins (if you don’t know, you don’t need to).
• Slider – The slide down equaliser (default skin) is also a cause of much drool. Very nice.

What did they get wrong? Not a lot. The media library search could be doing with the same compound boolean searches that iTune could use. That’s all I can think of.

The all important crash count: Winamp 0, iTunes 5. That’s in a few days.

This piece might come off as heavily biased towards Winamp 5; that’s because it’s plain better. Deal with it.

I’ll say it up front: Kill Bill is a damn good film. Tongue in cheek direction coupled with over the top kung fu scenes conspire to make you laugh and look away simultaneously; disgusted by the gratuitous amount of decapitations, yet undeniably amused by it.

And no, it wasn’t only my occasionally sick mind that thought so (anyone been around long enough to remember the rabbits? Thought not.)

The acting, dialogue and plot are suitably cheesey, the ending perfectly done, and the anime section breathtakingly done. Very bloody, yet artistic.

A definite must see film, certainly one of this year’s highlights.

As Disney films go, Finding Nemo fairs well. It’s the story of an over-protective father who loses his son. Of course, they’re both fish. This much you know from the adverts. I’m sure you can also guess that there are morals and lessons to be learned all over the place.

What you might not have realised is just how funny it is. And that, for once, Ellen Degeneres isn’t very annoying. She, shock horror, actually manages to be funny.

I don’t want to say too much more about the film, just that it’s very funny and very worth seeing.

Here’s a slightly briefer version of the random links post that got tragically wiped yesterday:

• CSS float tutorial – Can’t get your head around floats in CSS? This is the guide. Clear, concise and well illustrated; makes everything much easier,
• Unicode Applications in PHP – A guide to getting PHP applications to use unicode. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it looks quite good,
• Multibyte String Functions – Or PHP’s built-in unicode handling functions.
• Secure Shell Access Instructions – Everything you need to know about secure shell access (if you don’t know what that is, you don’t need to),
• Atom API – Mark lays out a brief history of content management APIs followed by a close look at the upcoming Atom API. A must read for anyone working with content management or syndication,
• Mozilla – The Mozilla website has been redesigned by Dave Shea (of Mezzoblue). It looks great, can’t wait for the rest,
• Death Of A Metatag – It has been done: metatags are now dead. Don’t even think about indexing them (not that anyone does anymore),
• OPML Considered H.. awful – An outline of why the OPML serialisation format is piss poor. My own experiences with it are less than pleasant,
• A 3d House In CSS – An interesting way of making art with CSS. Very clever,
• Example User Stylesheets – Pretty much what it says on the tin: examples of user stylesheets.
• PHP Scalability – An article on how scalable PHP is. If it is good enough for Scott to build Feedster, then it’s good enough for me.

Quite tech heavy; I’ll try to make the next link post a little lighter.