venomous porridge

1. Sign up for Hulu Plus at $10/month.
2. Get cozy with your iPad, all set to watch the Louies you’ve had in your Hulu queue for the past couple weeks.
3. Discover that the Hulu Plus app has different content from hulu.com.
4. That’s right: not more content. Different content.
5. In particular, it doesn’t have Louie.
6. Or anything else that was in your queue, or much of anything current that’s worth watching, really.
7. Cancel Hulu Plus.

Look, TV executives. I get that you’re not prepared for online distribution. I get that. I mean, the Internet just got sprung on all of us a month ago — it’s not like it’s been around for forty years, in people’s homes for almost two decades, and capable of streaming high-quality video to mass audiences since, I don’t know, 2006. And I realize you have nothing to worry about, since there are no reports of hundreds of thousands of people dropping their cable subscriptions like rabid hamsters or anything.

And a television is clearly an entirely different thing from a computer — one is a box with a screen connected to a digital network, and the other is a box with a screen connected to a digital network and a keyboard (maybe) — so it makes perfect sense that you’d need different and separately-negotiated royalty and advertising structures, and these things take time to get right. Years and years and years and years, unsurprisingly.

But if I’m going to watch your shows online — which clearly doesn’t bother you since Hulu is able to exist at all — if I’m going to watch them and, more importantly, give my affluent, highly marketable attention to your ads — your obnoxious, intrusive, poorly-targeted ads — what fucking business is it of yours which device I choose to do that with?

Sirs: you are already shitting in my soup. Must you take away the spoon?

So Camera+ has been pulled from the App Store because it contained a useful but hidden feature that Apple didn’t like. Whether you agree with Apple’s motives or not, if you hadn’t bought the app yet, you can’t buy it now even if you want to. And when it comes back — if it comes back — it will be missing that feature. If you managed to download the version of Camera+ that has the forbidden feature, eventually an update will remove it and you’ll be out of luck. And it’s not the first time something like this has happened.

You can use Time Machine to resurrect old versions of apps if they’re still in your backup history, but that’s kind of fiddly, and Time Machine doesn’t maintain a permanent archive. Here’s what I do instead.

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