Let me repeat my refrain: This. Ain’t. Easy.

Without going into detail, my little rant about Calendar, iPhoto, Address Book, et al goes for iTunes as well. I even bought a piece of software to try to fix iTunes myriad issues (Rinse). I can’t figure out whether or not Rinse has fixed anything, to be honest, and so far, all it’s managed to do is marry the wrong album art to about 100 or so songs which previously didn’t have any imagery. Which is kind of funny, but a tad annoying. And just the fact that there’s a market for something like Rinse kind of makes my point.

The interesting thing here is that the apps aren’t outliers, they’re pretty core Apple or productivity items. We’re all outliers on some dimension, but there is common ground where you think the effort would be made. Email may be declining, but calendars, hardly. They’ve been a disaster for ever and don’t appear to be improving.

Never been an adherent of the Apple “just works” received wisdom. As a self-denominated outlier thought it might “just work” if you “just did what Apple expected you to do,” but this article is suggesting that even if you just do what might be widely expected you would, it won’t.