Cory Doctorow is fuming at Apple once again as they apparantly broke one of his favourite apps (iPod Download) with their latest iTunes upgrade.

If you’re an iPod user, you would have done well to have availed yourself of iPod Download, an OS X app that made it easy to move your music from your iPod to your Mac. Of course, Apple hated that poor little app, so it was sometimes hard to find, as Apple devoted expensive laywer-hours to shutting down all the sites that were hosting copies of it. Of course, there’s more dough where that came from — they’ll just pass the cost on to you in your next iPod.

As it turns out, you’re shit-outta-luck even if you managed to snag a copy. That’s because Apple just devoted some expensive engineering hours to updating iTunes to version 4.7, with the “improvement” of breaking iPod Download. That’s right — Apple’s spending money seeing to it that features are removed from your iPod. Thanks a whole lot, Apple.

Even though in general distrust large companies I do think that they might have a valid reason this time. They just released the new iPod Photo together with a new version of iTunes. My suspicion is that they changed the format of the XML file they use to keep track on tracks on the iPod, so obviously an app that isn’t supported by Apple would break as well.

Let’s see how long it takes for the developers to come up with a fix, if I am right it shouldn’t take too long.

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.