This morning I noticed a new shortcut for iTunes on my Windows desktop (as
a result of installing a patch from Apple yesterday).
After a fleeting moment of irritation, I selected the icon, pressed the
Delete key, and subsequently entered my administrator credentials
to purge the shortcut once again. (I'm sure I deleted this shortcut before when
I originally installed iTunes back in December.)
I don't think I am alone in feeling irritated when applications like iTunes,
Adobe Reader, et al. automatically drop icons onto my desktop.
People, we aren't using Windows 95 -- or its inbred cousin, Windows Me --
anymore. At least I certainly hope not!
The days of automatically adding a shortcut for your application to the Windows
desktop should be long gone. Windows XP was released back in 2001 and I believe
that was when Microsoft issued the prescriptive guidance to stop placing shortcuts
on the desktop.
So why is it now 2012 and I still have to keep manually deleting desktop
shortcuts like iTunes and Adobe Reader?
I don't own a Mac -- and I'll probably forget to ask the next time I visit
my mother-in-law -- so I can only speculate about the experience on that operating
system. However, something tells me that neither Apple nor Adobe automatically
adds icons for its products to the Mac desktop (or whatever it is called on
that OS).
</catharsis>