One of the iPhone apps I have been testing is called TV Forecast and it is supposed to let you know when a TV program is due to be shown.

This is a relatively easy app to test as you can check when it thinks a TV program is on against any TV guide that is around. The first programme I tried was a program that is currently being broadcast and has been on for the last 3 months, every Saturday and Sunday. I’ve just checked and TV Forecast only shows the Sunday edition of the show, it completely missed about the Saturday edition. Next I tried a programme that is only broadcast on Sunday and this time it did show the correct date and time.

I then tried an old TV programme that hasn’t been broadcast for years as far as I can tell and TV Forecast did have ‘TBA’ against it, so that was OK. Lastly I entered the name of a soap that is broadcast 4 times a week, including the day I added it to TV Forecast to search for. That also was displayed ‘TBA’ against it. So not only did it not inform the user that it was on that very day but also didn’t notice that it was broadcast 3 other times in the following week. Where a TV programme is marked as ‘TBA’ then it is displayed on a screen in a section labelled ‘To Be Announced’. Programmes where it has found a broadcast date and time and has displayed it for the user then these programmes are displayed in a separate section.

I have just re-run this app and all 4 programmes, that is including the two that it found or partially found, are now all displayed with ‘TBA’ against them, so it has lost all knowledge of the programmes that it did have dates and times for, and yes there was an internet connection.

This app is just hopeless and hasn’t been tested very well at all.

iTrain is an app that allows you to search for trains times between cities of Europe.

There is a date and time section of the screen which the user can change, which I assume to be how the user lets the app what date and time to search by. I have entered a departure and destination city and clicked on the Search control but nothing ever happens. The 3G or Wi-fi icon spins away for a while and then after about 5 seconds that stops as if it has finished searching for train times. Maybe it has, it’s just forgotten to display any of its found data, or maybe it couldn’t find any train times at all and gave up in disgust. If that was the case it could have informed the user, or done something to make the user think that something has happened.

I have no doubt I was ‘running it all wrong’ and the developer would probably be able to give me a demo of his product that was super smooth and the app then displayed numerous relevant train times, or maybe not. Maybe it never has worked and never will. I wonder if I paid for that app? If so how do I go about getting a refund from Apple? (Not sure if Apple believes in that kinda thing. Ed).

More iTunes trouble. iTunes didn’t like my iTunesmusic folder the other day, it had an exclamation mark against all tracks which means it couldn’t find any of them, gulp. When I checked the folder they were all there so nothing was actually lost.

I tried re-adding the same folder back into iTunes. The music folder was m:\itunesmusic, so I added the same folder back into iTunes to try and freshen up the iTunes music links. Now I hoped that it would reset the pointers to all of the tracks it thought was lost. It did actually do that for about the first 1,000 tracks but also added the same 1,000 tracks a second time, which gave me 1,000 tracks duplicated. Great. But what about all of the remaining tracks, how do I get them refreshed and without duplicates. Dunno. Thought about this for a couple of days and didn’t let the iPod or iPhone anywhere near iTunes in case they got sync’d with a very upset iTunes.

Eventually I convinced myself that it must be something to do with adding the iTunesmusic folder back into itself. My backup of the iTunesmusic folder I have on my K: drive and that hasn’t worked for several weeks, in fact XP wants to format the darn thing but I wasn’t convinced so I connected that to my Vista PC and of course all the backup music files could be seen. I created a new music library on iTunes on the Vista PC, set its music folder to a blank D: drive and added the music folder from the K: drive, which confusingly appeared as the L: drive on Vista.

The question was will it load more than 1,000 tracks? Yes it did, which sorta proves that the original problem was adding the iTunesmusic folder back into itself. I had to stop the music load on the Vista PC as the destination drive was only 200GB and the K:/L: drive where I was loading the music from had 280gb of music. I stopped when it had imported about 20,000 tracks.

The M: drive on the XP machine was also full of about 280GB of music so I needed a drive of at least that size to set a new music folder to on the XP machine and the only drives I had which were big enough were the M: and K:/L: drives. I bit the bullet and did a quick format of the K: drive and set a new iTunesmusic folder to that drive and did another add folder to iTunes but this time from the M: drive. And guess what happened? The same 1,000 tracks copy and stop problem. Hmmm..there must be something buried in the iTunes world that’s stopping this working correctly, so I uninstalled all things iTunes, rebooted and reinstalled iTunes and had another go at adding the M: drive music to the iTunesmusic folder on the K: drive. It happened again, 1,000 tracks copied and that’s it.

OK, I’ve given up on the XP machine, I’ll move the whole lot with both drives onto the Vista machine.