As more details emerge in this massive scandal over employee non-poaching agreements, I can’t help but think of something I said to my brother a few years ago: If you don’t own a piece of the company you work for, you’re always getting screwed. It doesn’t matter if you’re a senior VP making 30 Million a year. You’re still getting a sucker’s share of the overall take.

What Jobs and Schmidt started here was absolutely atrocious. But it’s not even remotely surprising. Executives serve boards, boards serve shareholders, and shareholders always want maximum profits. That’s the inherent nature of any corporation. And if the goal is to maximize profits, you have to—by definition—minimize cost of goods sold. Which means keeping salaries as low as possible.

Like I said, if you don’t own it…

The funny thing is, though, and I may be extremely naive here, I suspect that for Jobs the motivation for this scheme in the beginning had less to do with keeping salaries low and more to do with a serious case of paranoia about being betrayed. I think when Bill Gates screwed him over so badly with Windows, Jobs became permanently scarred and was always looking for ways to prevent others from screwing him again. He wanted loyalty, and this scheme bought it for him. Later, as the practice spread through the industry, I imagine that keeping down wages became a stronger motivation for most other CEOs.

Again, probably naive of me, and still unforgivable regardless.

If you want to be sure something like this isn’t happening to you, the only choice you have is to run your own company. Otherwise, you are part of a system that is designed to pay you less than you’re worth.

One of the things I always admired about Steve Jobs was his willingness to call out things that just plain sucked.

And so here I am, saying that syncing content with iTunes just plain sucks.

Today’s example:

There’s a good review of the Jony Ive biography over on Asymco. Since I tend to think Horace is a smart guy, I figured his recommendation was reason enough to go get this book for myself. So I followed his link, on my Mac, to the iBookstore.

But just before clicking “buy” I thought to myself, “Well, I have about ten iBooks I haven’t yet read sitting on my iPad. I probably won’t get around to this for a while.” And so I decided to check and see if there were an audiobook version instead. After all, I spend lots of time walking around the city, trying to get some exercise, and it’s been ages since I listened to an audiobook, so why not?

Why not, indeed.

There on the iTunes page for the iBook, I clicked on the “related” tab and saw that there is indeed an unabridged audio version of the same book for sale, on iTunes, no less. Narrated by Simon Vance, even. Perfect. So I bought it.

And at that very moment, I screwed my chances of listening to this book on my iPhone.

You see, unlike most forms of content on iTunes, audiobooks don’t sync over iTunes Match. They also can’t be downloaded more than once. I learned this the hard way, when I turned on my iPhone and fired up the Music app, expecting to see my new audiobook downloading automatically. It wasn’t. I also couldn’t find an audiobooks tab anywhere, even in the “more” section of the Music app. Hmmm. Did they move Audiobooks to another separate app?

I search the App Store. Hundreds of audiobooks apps; none of them from Apple, none that can read files bought on iTunes. I search the Internets. Confirmed. Audiobooks are still in the Music app, though some people are having issues since the iOS 7 update. Not a good sign.

So how to get the book over there?

I know, I’ll put it into a playlist, and that playlist will sync over iTunes Match, right? Nope. Playlists with audiobook files don’t show up in iTunes Match.

Okay, I’ll open up iTunes on my iPhone, search for the audiobook, and just download it again directly on the device, right? Nope. If I want to download it again, I need to purchase it again.

Okay, fine, I’ll bite the bullet and do something I never wanted to to again—I’ll plug my iPhone into my Mac and sync the audiobook using iTunes like a barbarian. First I try to simply drag the book over to the right side of the window to manually sync it. No dice. It gives me a blue highlight, as if to say, “go ahead and drop the file here.” But then nothing happens.

Then I go to the books tab and set it to sync just audiobooks, and I get a warning telling me that since I’m using iTunes in the Cloud on this phone, syncing this one audiobook file manually will force me to erase the entire contents of my music library on the phone first. Am I sure I want to do that?

No, iTunes. I’m not sure I want to erase 50GB of music off my phone to get one audiobook.

Not one to give up so easily, I drop the audiobook file into my Dropbox, hoping I can open the Dropbox app on my iPhone, and use “open in…” to send it over to Music. Nope. (Sidenote: Downcast gallantly attempted to open the file, but couldn’t get past Apple’s DRM. “A” for effort on that one.)

And so here I am, with a 9-hour audiobook on the least-likely device I’ll ever want to use to listen to it: My 27-inch iMac.

Thanks, Eddy Cue. Bang up job you did there.

As an absolute hail Mary play, I decide to plug my iPhone back in one more time and try the manual drag and drop of the file in iTunes. This time, it starts a sync without any warnings, and I get a progress bar at the top. So far so good. My cursor beach balls for about two minutes, but it doesn’t crash. The progress bar switches over to “Finishing Update” and I’m filled with hope. And then it keeps saying “Finishing Update” for another fifteen minutes. Convinced it must still be working on it, I wait. And Wait. If I turn on the iPhone, I can see the Audiobooks tab now in music, and the Jony Ive book appears to be there. But I can’t play it. And iTunes is still “finishing.” So I wait some more.

Finally, I get impatient and try to cancel the sync. Won’t cancel. I tap the eject button in iTunes, and I get a warning telling me that the sync is still in progress. Do I want to eject anyway? No. Another five minutes.

Okay, this time, I just want to eject it. So I say yes, I do want to eject anyway. Still “finishing” but I get an additional window, no close boxes or cancel buttons, called “Syncing iPhone.” with its own independent progress bar that never shows any progress. I guess this is iTunes’ way of scaring me into not unplugging.

Another ten minutes. Remember, this is all for one audiobook. I realize the file is 250MB, but over a USB cable, what should that take? Maybe two, three minutes, tops?

Finally, I get bored and yank the Lightning cable. We’re already way past the point where any sane human being would have given up, aren’t we?

Look, if it’s all or nothing with iTunes in the Cloud, then everything you sell on iTunes has to work over the cloud. Everything. Not most things. Otherwise, if audiobooks are special and can’t be synced over iTunes in the Cloud, give me some other way to sync them without wiping out my whole library. Is that too much to ask?

And if manual sync is supposed to be the way to do that, then make sure manual sync actually works. Because it sure doesn’t seem to work as far as I can tell.

Also, let’s keep in mind that I’m more than a little savvy with this technology stuff. And so are a lot of my Twitter followers. And none of us could figure this out. If this is possible, and I’m missing it somehow, you get an F minus for usability, Eddy. There’s no way a “normal” person would have tried this many different things.

Seems pretty obvious to me, since you still sell audiobooks on the iTunes Store, that there should be an easy way to listen to books bought on your Mac on any of your iOS devices. I’m not talking about some obscure old content I bought ten years ago. I’m talking about a file I bought today, for crying out loud.

Still, third time’s a charm, right? And I want to be thorough for the sake of this post. So I give it another go. I plug in my iPhone and try the manual drag and drop in iTunes for the third time. I’m about to eat dinner, anyway, so how can it hurt? First three times I drag, it gets stuck in “preparing” to update and I have to cancel. So I quit iTunes and relaunch, drag it a fourth time, and just walk away.

Thirty minutes later when I return from dinner, the progress bar is gone. iTunes is sitting idle. I fire up the Music app on my iPhone, and sure enough, the file is sitting there. Tap it, and it starts playing. More than three hours after I purchased the thing, I can now finally listen to the Jony Ive audiobook on my device of choice.

Isn’t this the sort of thing for which we usually make fun of other companies?

My advice: Don’t ever buy an audiobook from iTunes. Or, if you do, buy it on the device where you want to listen to it, because you won’t be able to move it after the fact without wanting to punch someone.

And this is but one small example of how crappy it is trying to sync content to an iPhone from iTunes. This is no isolated incident. I don’t have the heart to tell you the one where I tried to turn off iTunes in the Cloud and go back to manual syncing all my music last year. That’s a whole day I’ll never get back.

Fix this stuff, Apple. Seriously. iTunes is a multi-billion dollar business. You should be embarrassed of how piss poor this experience is.

We all know that old expression: “A Picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, that’s an average, I think.

While submitting my 1.2 version of Fin last week, I made a last-minute decision to make a major change to my screenshot strategy.

For those who may not know, Apple allows up to five screenshots for each app on the App Store. Officially, these are supposed to be actual screenshots from the app. Just pictures of what is on the screen itself. No extra text, no pictures of the device running the app, no other fancy Photoshop tricks.

Up until now, I’ve honored Apple’s rules, despite the fact that thousands of apps blatantly disregard them. Apple often features apps that completely ignore the policy, even, so clearly this is one of those instances where the rule is not taken seriously. Still, on principle, it didn’t seem right to violate the rule myself.

You know what doesn’t sell apps? Standing on principle when it makes no sense to stand on principle. I was hampering my own app’s ability to impress potential customers, all for the sake of obeying a rule Apple clearly doesn’t enforce. That’s fairly stupid, actually.

We have so few ways to stand out when it comes to how our apps are represented on the App Store. Why not take advantage of one of the easiest ways to get the customer’s attention?

So I doctored up my screenshots with a blurred background of some people in a crowd and pictures of various iOS devices running Fin. It took a bit of time to get it looking the way I wanted, but not much. Meanwhile, the difference it makes in showing off the app is immediately evident.

The screenshots went from being a random collection of app views to telling a story about what the app can do for people. The new presentation gives the potential customer a much better feel for what it’s actually like to use the app for its intended purpose.

How this change will effect sales, it’s too early to tell. But even if sales don’t improve by a wide margin, I’m still glad I went ahead and took the time to present my app in a better light.

When I wrote my ten-part series on making your own app marketing videos, one of the first things I recommended was avoiding live footage. Take shots from the iOS Simulator, place them on top of still frames of iPhones and iPads, and animate them in Final Cut. Super easy to get professional looking results.

Live footage is very difficult to get right on a budget. Without professional lighting rigs and a good bit of expertise about how to shoot properly, the results could be devastatingly amateurish.

But there are some things that simply won’t look right in the Simulator. And the circle gesture in Fin 1.2 is one of those things. So pardon me as I talk for a moment about breaking my own rule.

First, a little background. Setting timers in most apps is actually more cumbersome than it should be. Even Apple’s own Clock app uses the UIPicker interface, which actually got worse in iOS 7, as far as ease of use goes. Fin always had common presets on the Settings screen, so you could easily get to 10, 20, 30, 45, etc. with one tap. Chances are, your performance slot is one of those presets, and if not you can at the very least pick the closest one and swipe your way up and down to the exact time you need.

But I always suspected that there was an even better way to go about setting the time. Then one day I got a message from Saul Mora, suggesting that it would be cool if you could swipe around in a circle to set the time. Bingo. Makes perfect sense. Clockwise to add time. Counterclockwise to subtract. Similar to setting an old grandfather clock.

Of course, I had no experience with custom gesture recognizers, and the math was bound to get tricky, with the ability to change the timer even after it was running, counting up vs. counting down, etc. But no matter. Once the seed of his idea hit my brain, it became obvious that this would be a great way to improve the user experience.

So I managed to figure out the code, after a few weeks of pain, and it was time to submit to the App Store. And man, was I excited. It was even better in practice than I had hoped. But I wanted to be sure people could see this new feature, as it’s yet another thing that reads poorly in a screenshot. So I decided to make a new video showing off the feature.

And then I realized that swiping in a circle would be just a little too silly looking in the simulator, with the fake finger overlay I used in the first Fin video. I needed to do some live video on this one.

The first and biggest challenge was lighting. I don’t own a professional lighting rig, so I needed to get as much natural light as possible, yet avoid heavy shadows. Fortunately, my apartment has nice large living room windows, and it’s winter, so slightly overcast days are quite common this time of year. I opened the shutters and set up a small serving table in the living room in mid afternoon.

Secondly, I needed to get the camera as steady as possible. Fortunately, I have two iKlips, one for the iPhone, one for the iPad. I could mount either device to a boom mic stand, and film the other device.

After a few test shots, I knew I could get it to look at least presentable. The trick was taking several of the exact same shots from several angles, on each device, so I’d have enough variety to change up the camera angle frequently. And to position the device so that there would be neither a reflection of the camera nor my windows showing on the screen. That took some practice, particularly with the iPhone shots, as I did those while holding the device in my hand. (The iPad I sat on a 12South Compass stand, so it was much easier to set the correct angle and forget about it.)

After shooting for about a half hour, I was confident I had the footage I needed. I uploaded the clips from both my iPhone and iPad, and I got to work in Final Cut.

Everything else I did the same way as I did for the previous Fin video. Text clips set up first to establish the pace, then the clips of the device. One interesting side note: My establishing shot of the device didn’t need to be a live one. I was just showing the ticking time, not a gesture, in that shot. So I used a Simulator shot. But I wanted it to match the look of the live footage, so I took a photo of my serving table from the living room, and compiled it with the simulator footage and an iPad device frame, to tie it together.

I also animated my live footage clips with the same Ken Burns style zooming that I used on the Simulator shots in the first Fin video. Just because my camera was stationary when I filmed the clips doesn’t mean it has to stay that way in post-production.

The end result is yet another marketing video done for the cost of a few hours of my time and equipment I already owned. And it really sells the new circle gesture way better than any screenshot could. The live footage isn’t as polished as I’d like, of course, but it gets the job done.

I encourage you to experiment with making videos for your own apps. If you can get enough natural light, and you avoid the pitfalls of a shaky camera, strong shadows, and screen reflections, you can get decent results and really impress your potential customers.

Fin 1.2 is now available on the App Store.

Apple takes the lofty route for iPad « Observatory: “But — while this spot can be seen as uplifting and inspirational, it can also be seen as incredibly pretentious. One must admit, it’s a bit of intellectual overkill for those who just want to do their email, surf and shop — which probably covers most of the tablet-buying public.”

(Via Ken Segall.)

That, in a nutshell, is exactly Apple’s problem with the iPad. People think it’s an email, surf, and shop machine. If it continues to be just that, the iPad is never going to meet Apple’s expectations. Thus, the “loftier” ad approach of the Verses series.

People raved about the Misunderstood iPhone commercial over Christmas, but I actually think these spots are much more important to Apple’s long-term future. Thanks to Apple’s misguided driving of the App Store into Crazy Eddie’s Discount Bonanza, people are losing sight of just how powerful a tablet can be. They clamor for a “bigger” iPhone, because they figure that would do just about everything they do on their iPads well enough to no longer need an iPad. And that’s certainly not good for Apple.

Sure, the message is lofty, and maybe it only appeals to Apple’s current customers. But those customers aren’t getting as much out of their iPads as they deserve. Sometimes you need to start with a lofty message to reaffirm your core values. Sometimes you have to remind people that you’re trying to improve people’s lives.

If Apple wants to continue selling iPads, it needs to carve out a space where the iPad is seen as essential to the things we want to create, not just a luxury toy for watching movies on a plane.