After a very frustrating experience today, I discovered that current iTunes can’t sync Apple’s own videos to the iPad. A classic example of Apple’s refusal to test their own software – this bug would have been immediately obvious if Apple had a QA department.
To view iTunes U stuff on the iPad, you expect to:
- Plug-in the iPad
- Run iTunes
- Go to the “iTunes U” tab on the iPad page in iTunes
- Set “Sync iTunes U” to “yes”
- Go! (click Apply … or click the Sync button)
In practice, iTunes wipes all the iTunes U content from your iPad (why? I have no idea – it did a popup to say it was going to do so, but didn’t give any explanation for this) and thne it refuses to put any content (new or old) on there. You can manually select videos, or select them all, or check the “Automatically include” box. That last one is unlikely to work, though unless you’re careful – by default, it only selects “UNPLAYED items” (bad GUI design from Apple).
Instead, by trial and error, I found you need to:
- Plug-in the iPad
- Run iTunes
- Go to iTunes U on your mac / PC
- Drag/drop any videos you want on the iPad straight to the iPad on the left-hand navbar
This is a better UI – you just “do what you want”, and don’t mess around with the much slower and harder to use “sync” feature in iTunes (which can take literally hours – change one item, and it insists on backing up your iPad, then checking every single new app / song / etc).
But if it’s the only one that works, why include the old UI at all?