Sour Notes

I don't remember things very well these days, for various reasons. That's why I like having the ability to jot down notes when they pop into my mind. Keeping the ideas that come to me by recording them on the fly, or using a simple note pad to keep handy information handy, is really useful to me.

Thus, I've found the iOS app Notes very useful these last few years, first on my iPod touch, and recently on my iPhone. What I really liked was the fact that every time I synced my device, my latest notes would automatically update into Apple's Mail application. Changes to old notes would similarly update onto the computer, so that new info or ideas that I had had while on the go would then be live and available when I sat down to work at the laptop.

Well, screw all that, said the increasingly clueless Apple. A few weeks ago I made the grotesque mistake of "upgrading" my macbook's operating system to OS X Yosemite, which is turning out to be perhaps the most hideously awful iteration of the Mac environment ever. And among its many abortions is the truly bizarre revision that makes Notes (now in its own separate desktop app) virtually impossible to sync. I've tried everything indicated by Apple's help documentation, short of enabling iCloud--no, I don't want you to have complete access to my devices; screw you and your shitty iCloud--and nothing will get my damn notes to update.

I don't usually agree with the plain, on the face of it, overly simplistic analysis that most folks tend to wallow in. But with Apple, all those people who say that things have really gone downhill since Steve Jobs died may be on to something. Notes was fine as it was; I would enter a note on my phone, and--bam--it would just appear there on my laptop after a sync, and I'd never have to think about it. This seems like a really simple thing to accomplish; hell, it didn't even need to be accomplished--it was already done. All they had to do was not screw it up...and sure enough, they screwed it up. Yosemite's other flaws--slow performance and memory hogging, poor visual design, program updating issues--are bad enough; screwing up a minor program like Notes, which was already perfect the way it was...well, there are reasons why I've long been off the Apple bandwagon, far enough off that I have had no inclination for a long time to buy any Mac hardware other than after market. But now I'm starting to consider the possibility of just saying screw the whole thing and finding a new computing paradigm. Windows remains dreadful, but...Linux, perhaps? Has it come to that? Maybe.

Apple used to be the greatest thing ever in computing and its associated implementations. I stayed with them through the dark days and never really wavered in my belief that their stuff was the best that was out there. But Yosemite is just plain shit, and these days Apple is looking moldy and full of worms. It may be just a matter of time before everyone concludes the thing is simply rotten to the core.