I gave in this week & installed iTunes, purely so I could purchase Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.  Of course as all Whedon fans who don’t live in the US now know, when you try & buy it you get this

Not. Happy Jan.

So now I’ve installed iTunes for no good reason at all!

I’m really not a fan of Apple’s client software, they tend to be bloated & they have a nasty habit of installing stuff that you weren’t expecting.  Unfortunately iTunes is no exception to this rule.  After installing it I went to my Windows Control Panel & I see this little icon there

MobileMe is Apple’s new sync application for the iPhone & iPod.  Now I don’t own an iPhone or an iPod (not through lack of *wanting* one) so I’ve got no use for this software.  I didn’t do the custom application when I installed iTunes like I normally do with new software because I was in a hurry, so there may have been an option to not install it there.  Either way, I never said to install this & I’ve got no use for it.

Removing it

Removing it is actually fairly simple.  Go to the Control Panel & click on Add/Remove programs (or whatever the Vista equivalent is).  You should see an entry for Apple Mobile Device Support. Click the remove button on that.  It may complain if you have Outlook open, but you can ignore that.

Once that’s finished (it took a surprisingly long time on my computer) refresh the control panel & the application will be gone.

Just in case you didn’t know, you can see what the new Facebook profiles are going to look like here http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php

The new layout has a lot more dependence on AJAX/Javascript and they’re clearly focusing on the news feed.  To access the application boxes & info that used to be on the profile page you need to click on one of the tabs under the person’s name.  Also the link to comment on a news item is now the word ‘Comment’ instead  of the rather ambiguous little icon it is currently.

The obvious comparison here is with FriendFeed.  The current version of Facebook doesn’t allow you to comment on items directly from the news feed, you have to go to an individual person’s profile to do that.  We can’t see whether this will be possible in the new version of Facebook because it’s not showing us the news feed yet.  When you click on the home link on the new facebook site it just reloads the profile page.  If they do allow this it will become very much a FriendFeed clone. 

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