Expected behaviour is an important aspect of software design. iTunes has often been criticised for having a sync system that’s opaque and too readily insistent on deleting data. Apple’s dialog boxes rarely help, providing warnings that are indecipherable, even to people who’ve written about the company for years.

One of the biggest criticisms about iOS has been the manner in which apps are removed from a device during a sync if they’re no longer in iTunes, which of course takes app data with it. “Boom,” as Steve Jobs would have once said. However, this action through to iTunes 10 did at least provide the means to ‘rescue’ such apps, with the dialog box pictured below. The text within notes that purchased items are on a device, but not present in the iTunes Library. You get two options: Transfer copies the items back to iTunes; Don’t Transfer deletes them from the device.

Curiously, iTunes 11 leaves the dialog box in place but also does not—with my hardware—perform the Don’t Transfer action. Space is seemingly made on the device, ready for deleting various apps, but the deletion then does not occur. I’ve no idea if this is a bug or intentional. In a sense, having iTunes now work like this could be a good thing—less chance of accidentally removing an app through having deleted it in iTunes. The dialog box, though, suggests it’s another bug—one of many I’ve found in iTunes 11 now I’ve been using it for a while. From a personal standpoint, I’d quite like Don’t Transfer working again, because I used it for app management—it’s much faster to remove a few dozen apps from a device by deleting them from iTunes and doing a sync than by zapping them one at a time on the iOS device itself.

Update: As of iTunes 11.0.1, I’m finding that this dialog box no longer appears. It looks like the bug here was therefore the dialog box and not the syncing, and the app-removal feature has itself been removed. As per the article, I’m in two minds about this: for me, this will make app management harder, but for the general punter, it doesn’t really make sense to remove an app from a device if it’s not in the iTunes library on their PC or Mac. Also, it looks like the system has some intelligence—when I was playing around with it earlier today, it transfers to the computer updated apps that are in the library but not apps that aren’t.

If you’ve been reading Revert to Saved over the past week or so, you’ll know I’ve been releasing music again, for the first time in a long while. Now, hot on the heels of singles Betrayed and Fever comes Listen To Me, my first new album in (gulp) seven years.

I’ve never been much cop at marketing—I’ve in my time written a lot of songs but never really known what to do with them, bar giving long-suffering friends yet more tapes/CDRs. Now, though, the web’s gotten to the point where it’s astonishingly easy to get music out there. I’ve been hugely impressed with Bandcamp when buying albums from the likes of 4mat and Chipzel, and so I figured I’d give that site a go myself.

On my new album, there are 15 tracks in all, and I’ve gone for a ‘couple of cheap pints’ as the price tag (four quid). Tracks can be downloaded in MP3, FLAC or “just about any other format you could possibly desire”, according to Bandcamp—and streaming is free.

Music’s for me one of those oddly personal things—probably more so than much of the writing I do—and it’s therefore quite odd after so much time to see it finally out there, away from the confines of my computer and my own ears. I am, however, really excited about the album and proud of it, and so I very much hope you enjoy Listen To Me.

(And regular readers, don’t worry—I’m sure I’ll be back to grumbling about all things tech next week!)

Last week, I released my first new music in a number of years, and I’ve today followed this up with a second ‘single’, Fever. A journo chum of mine said:

I could easily have been dancing to that at a nightclub in Hull circa 1981. Catchy riff as well.

So make of that what you will. As with my previous release, this one’s currently using Bandcamp’s ‘pay what you want’ model, so you can grab it for free if you like. The Project Noise website has also had an overhaul, as has this one—what a pity none of this stuff is a paying gig!

Anyway, please enjoy the new music. More coming later this week, in the form of the 15-track album, Listen To Me.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might correctly surmise that I spend the bulk of my time immersed in technology, mostly writing about it (and, often, complaining about it). But time was I tended to be rather prolific when it came to music. Earlier this year, I realised it was 2005 when I released my last album, and I decided to ensure I got my new one (in progress for a long time) out the door by the end of the year.

It looks like I’m just going to squeak that deadline, and I’m very happy and proud to say the first fruits of said labour are now live, in the form of Betrayed, a free single you can download from my new Bandcamp page. There’s also a freebie remix of the track lurking.

To grab the single, click/tap ‘Buy now’, name your price (from zero, but if any rich eccentrics are out there and want to fund the next album, feel free!), and you’ll get lovely 320 kbps MP3s fired across the internet to your downloads folder. Next week, another single and a new 15-track album. And with a following wind, especially if I manage to sell the odd album or two, more music should follow rather more quickly next time round!

(Also, there’s currently an additional ‘preview’ track, Up For Hire, available for free via the Project Noise website. Grab that soon, though, because the site will be updated when the album goes live.)

I decided iTunes 10 was a big pile of junk, in part because it regularly couldn’t see iOS devices on the network over Wi-Fi. The devices weren’t especially hidden, given that other apps and services could see them—it was just iTunes that was being stupid. Well, iTunes 11 arrived today and it’s same-old, same-old. The two iPads in the house were picked up, but the iPhone was not, which was just great. And by ‘great’, I mean ‘good grief, Apple, is it really that difficult to get this rather important aspect of your software right?’

Anyway, the old tried-and-tested means of getting Wi-Fi sync working again, at least temporarily, seemed to do the job. The method is as follows:

• Connect your device to your Mac, like some kind of idiot living in 2005.
• Hope that iTunes at this point actually recognises the damn thing.
• Uncheck ‘Sync with this [device] over Wi-Fi’.
• Click Apply.
• Check ‘Sync with this [device] over Wi-Fi’, laughing internally and ironically about all those old ‘Microsoft car’ jokes.
• Click Apply.
• Unplug your device, while hoping iTunes won’t immediately forget it exists.

If the second step doesn’t work for you, try rebooting everything. If that doesn’t work for you, I strongly recommend making voodoo dolls of the iTunes engineering team and stabbing them with pins. There’s only a very remote chance this will have the desired effect of them feeling your tech pain first-hand, but it’s got to be worth a go.