Apple & a study in frustration

Half way through the insane 1.75 gigabyte download of iPhone SDK 2.2.1 (which, lets be honest, has precisely 200 megabytes of content, and 1,500 megabytes of STUFF I ALREADY HAVE; Apple’s engineers apparently have never heard of the 30-year-old concept of a “patch file”), Apple refuses the download.

I “no longer have read permssions to that URL” according to Safari. This is despite being logged-in to Apple’s developer.apple.com website. The same website that FORCE logs out everyone *at least* once an hour (because Apple’s web developer team have miserable lives, and want to share their pain with everyone else).

The same website that has given me “error: this page requires you to be logged in”-type errors trying to load … the login page (I’m not kidding, it’s 100% reproducible in Safari and in Firefox, quite easy to trigger. Seriously weak web-server code going on there).

So, let’s start that 1.75Gb download *again*. Apple: I detest you. Especially because you know the problems you cause, and build it into your marketing campaigns; it’s not cool, it’s not funny, it’s pathetic. Why can’t you employ some competent web developers? Why, when you like to call yourselves paragons of UI design, do you make the iPhone App Store have a GUI that would look “weak”, “poor”, “stupid” and “ugly” in 1999, let alone 2009? What happened?

Sigh.