Stop iTunes Software Updates

By fletch Thursday, February 11th, 2010

There is one single reason I work with OS X and not Windows.

When you sit in front of a computer all day it needs to be a nice environment to work in and OS X is. In fact I think it’s the best operating system I’ve ever used, it definitely seems to be the most sensible GUI that’s available if nothing else and I love having access to the UNIX command line.

Having a “nice computer” is as important as having a good chair or a nice office or living in a nice house – anywhere you spend a lot of time needs to be right for you, and OS X is definitely right for me.

It’s built on top of BSD UNIX so I can access the terminal and do powerful geek things (oooh) but the GUI makes my every day shit so easy and quick that 90% of the time I can completely forget about the guts of it and just focus on getting things done.

Send an email, browse the web, ssh to a device, expose over to something else, edit a document. Whatever.

There are occasionally days where I only have access to Windows and they’re horrible. They’re less productive, I’m in less of a good mood, I get frustrated – WHY does it DO THIS?! – ARRAGH – but you know this because you’ve used Windows too.

The most annoying thing is the way it handles application priority and focus.

One minute you’re writing an email to your girlfriend and then the next you’re a keystroke away from telling your CIO what you’d like to do to him when you get home because his MSN window popped up and all of a sudden you’re typing a reply to him.

How many times have I been doing something on the web, thought “I’ll open this application” then alt-tabbed back to the browser, only to have the application open in the background and then take pop up in front of my web browser like “hello! I’m here!”.

I know you’re here, I fucking asked you to open then told another program to go in front of you. I hadn’t FINISHED with that program, WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU ON TOP OF IT!

Volcanically infuriating.

Anyway I’m not here to bash Windows, I’m here to bash OS X, because a few things have recently crept into my beloved operating system that I don’t like much at all.

The most Microsoft of all of these things is what I’ve snappily labeled the incredibly annoying iTunes media-key binding annoyance.

What happens is that iTunes sits there like some kind pervert permanently watching for action on any of the media keys on your macbook. So if you’re running some other application, like Spotify, and you hit “pause” to stop the tunes then both Spotify AND iTunes will react to your keypress.

This has the result of pausing the music in Spotify but also *starting* music in iTunes. Insane.

There’s no easy way to remedy this either, and just for good measure even if iTunes isn’t running when you hit pause it will purposely START running and START playing you a tune! Nonsense!

What Apple are essentially saying is that the physical keys on the keyboard are iTunes keys, reserved only for that application. Fuck. That. And. Fuck. You.

Right, so there’s only one fix for this, uninstall iTunes. You don’t need it, be brave, you will never look back.

I replaced iTunes with the open source Songbird, which is pretty much the same. It still syncs my ipod, playlists, has the 7digital music store (which is DRM free by the way!) and it’s actually a bit faster when browsing a really big library (13K+ songs).

I thought order had been restored. I could press any keys I liked and only applications that were open would respond. Imagine that! A world where your computer does just what you ask it to do and no more.

Then I hit this other problem.

Every time software update ran, it tried to install iTunes.

“You have a software update!!! it’s iTunes!!! We noticed you didn’t have it. HERE IT IS”

I didn’t want it. I was frustrated again. Apple were starting to dictate what I could and could not have on my machine! I was indignant with rage (again).

That was until I found out something about Software Update that I had never noticed before, an “ignore” option!

This has restored a bit of my faith but it’s still annoying to see Apple going in this direction, OS X is awesome but you don’t buy a £1500 laptop to be dictated to.

I now present to you, how to stop iTunes from taking over your universe:

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Hello! Fletch.cx has been going since 1999 in one form or another, yep incredible, when will it end? For more of my bullshit see last.fm, lluckj.com, facebook and if you really want a constant avalanche of musings, observations and lies then follow me on twitter..