Please. Fix. That.

iTunes Store: Don't download movies to my phone, please

iTunes now asks if you want to download the movie later.

Scenario: I'm at work and I have a date night planned with my wife. The kids will be staying home to see a movie and it's my job to find something for them to watch. "Hey, I'll find something in iTunes", he says. So I do, and I buy it. And now, the iTunes app on my phone is trying to download a HD movie to my phone.

What?

Maybe, just maybe, someone would want this to happen. Maybe they are near an Apple TV where they can play the movie back to a bigger screen. Maybe they just have to watch The Matrix again and are okay with seeing it on their phone. But surely, the majority of people buying movies on their phone would prefer to purchase it then, but view it later.

I really don't get why Apple would assume to download something of that size to my phone without asking me first. What's worse, the last time this happened, I saw no way to STOP it. I had to let it finish downloading the entire movie before I could delete it from my device.

This is easy to fix: ask the user if they want to download the media once the purchase has been made. And if you have a Mac at another location that watches for new iTunes purchases and downloads them, then it would pick up and download the content so the kids at home can see the movie without Dad having to authenticate in iTunes and download it manually.

Web: status.twitter.com

A "status" page for a high-traffic web service such as Twitter is meant to provide users with service interruption news when the main site is offline or malfunctioning in some way. What it should not do, is be offline itself.

Twitter uses a Tumblr.com blog for reporting service interruptions, and I cannot fathom why. Tumblr is a good life-blogging service, but they have had a lot of service problems over the years. I would not select Tumblr for a mission-critical aspect of my business, were I to have a business that served millions of people.

Inevitably, when Twitter has a sustained period of downtime, their status page goes down as well. This defeats the purpose of having a status page. A flood of users are directed at Tumblr when these outages occur, and Tumblr doesn't seem to be able to handle this kind of load. It seems unfair of Twitter to abuse Tumblr in this way. Tumblr is a free service— I don't know if Twitter pays them a dime for barraging them this way periodically, but I bet they don't enjoy it, one bit.

Plain and simple, Twitter should manage their own status site. They have the resources to do it. Such a site should be static in nature and should be backed by enough redundancy to keep it operating even if every Twitter user were accessing it (the resources would be a small fraction of what is necessary to operate the full Twitter service). It shouldn't be Tumblr's responsibility to report service interruptions for Twitter.

Additionally, their downtime service should include an API as well. This way, if an application is getting an error, it can ping the downtime API to let the user know what's going on. This is particularly important when Twitter has decided to bring their services back up incrementally, making their web site work again, but leaving their API disabled until later. The downtime API can be fully static as well, returning JSON data instead of HTML, that's all. It need not require any dynamic Ruby/Scala/whatever backend to do that job.

Twitter, please fix that.

Missing Lyrics in MP3s

The iTunes Music store now features lyrics on many of their songs.

Hello, dear music industry. You've come a long way. I remember the days I spent in the late nineties digitizing all my audio CDs to MP3 (or was it Ogg Vorbis at first? I can't recall). Many years ago I stopped buying CDs altogether, being a creature that craves instant gratification, and started buying my music through iTunes or other online stores where I could buy, download and play that music immediately.

There are many benefits to this, but one of the best is that a digital file can contain a lot of metadata. That is, information about the music in addition to the music itself. Things like, the name of the artist, the publisher, the year it was recorded and so forth. Why, these files can even include a picture of the album art. Fancy!

Well, one bit of metadata that is consistently missing (in my experience), is the actual song lyrics. Some audio CDs would include a copy of the song lyrics within a small pamphlet. Now, some iTunes "LP" editions include a PDF file that are the digital equivalent to that CD insert, but that isn't as accessible as storing the lyrics in the MP3 itself. iTunes even has a special tab for displaying song lyrics, and you'll see any attached lyrics when the song is played on an iPhone. This field can be populated manually— there are even apps out there that will try to do this for you, but why aren't they included by the publisher directly? There really is no reason not to.

So basically, I'd like to see the lyrics show up in this field, when I purchase a song that has vocals in it:

Please fix that.

iTunes: About that dialog for deleting a podcast episode

Update: "Fixed," I guess? No more confirmations on deleting any podcasts or episodes in iTunes 11.2.

iTunes has many, many issues, but here is one that has been around for a long time... perhaps since the introduction of podcast subscriptions in iTunes.

In iTunes (under Mac or Windows), you can subscribe to something called a "podcast". Wikipedia describes a podcast this way:

A podcast is a type of digital media consisting of an episodic series of audio files subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication or streamed online to a computer or mobile device.

Podcasts are shown in iTunes in a folder-style fashion. There is a row for each subscription and underneath each is one row for every episode:

Some of these episodes are large (particularly for video podcasts), so I will sometimes delete an episode after I'm finished with it. If you click on the episode and hit your "Delete" (or "Del" for you Windows users) key, you'll see a message like this:

I always do a bit of a double-take at this message and have to verify that I selected the right thing to delete. iTunes is here referring to a podcast episode as a "podcast". Okay, well... what does iTunes say if you want to actually delete the podcast subscription itself? Well, it says this:

Here, it refers to the subscription as the podcast and refers to individual episodes as "episodes". This seems proper to me, and the former message seems wrong. I think this could be fixed by simply changing the word "podcast" to "episode" in the first confirmation message above: "Are you sure you want to delete the selected episode from your iTunes library? This episode will also be deleted from .....".

Apple, please fix that.

(Most recently observed in iTunes 10.6.3.)

Unix: ditch the rmdir command in favor of rm

Under Unix-derived operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X, etc.), there are a pair of commands used to delete files and directories. rm is used to "remove" file(s), rmdir is used to "remove directory".

If you try to use rm to delete a directory, you get this:

$ rm directory
rm: directory: is a directory

Why is this? Why is it necessary to use rmdir to delete a directory, when rm could do that?

The real irony is that rmdir can only remove empty directories.

$ rmdir nonemptydirectory
rmdir: nonemptydirectory: Directory not empty

If you really mean to delete a directory and everything under it, you need to use this command:

$ rm -r directory

The "-r" tells the rm command to operate recursively (meaning, delete this and everything under it). Sometimes a "-f" option is also included to force deletion of files that rm would otherwise ask twice about.

All I'm saying is that rm should be able to delete an empty directory if asked. If the given directory is not empty, it would complain (unless "-r" is specified).

Pandora: Enough with the live recordings

Look, I love music. I listen to as much music as I can. But live recordings (particularly of a live venue) just aren't my thing. I don't care for the crowd cheers, the sing-alongs, the improvisation, the occasional rant-about-something-in-the-middle-of-my-famous-song. It just doesn't do it for me. When I hear a live recording of a studio track I love and is permanently etched into my brain, it borders on being painful.

I really wish Pandora would catch on to this -- I skip them every time. I can't thumb these tracks down, for fear that it will negatively affect general play for that artist. I'd love a simple preference in Pandora that would remove these from play for me.

Pandora, please fix that.

Preview: Let go of that file!

This happens all too often:

1. I receive a PDF file and open it in the Mac OS X Preview app.
2. I read the document, then decide I no longer need it. I close the Preview window (but do not exit the Preview app).
3. I move the PDF file to the trash.
4. I empty the trash.
5. I see this, and smack my forehead:

See what I did wrong? I forgot to quit the Preview app. You see, Preview likes to hang on to files it has opened, even after they've been closed. Silly user! Quit the Preview app and then empty the trash.

Apple, please fix that.

(No, I will never, ever, ever use Adobe Acrobat instead. I don't have the time to create all the Please Fix That posts for that app.)

Observed as recently as Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4.

 

Mac App Store: Swipe to navigate history

UPDATE: Fixed in OS X 10.8.

The "Swipe between pages" gesture for a mouse and trackpad (as configured through System Preferences) do not navigate forward and backward through your history in the Mac App Store (as they do for Safari). I can't tell you how many times I've tried using these gestures there to no avail.

Will it be fixed before OS X Mountain Lion is released? It's looking pretty unlikely.

Apple, please fix that.

Observed up through an including Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4.

 

iOS: Missing Modes

UPDATE: "Do Not Disturb" is available in iOS 6. Still waiting for an energy saving mode.

A while back, a highly-publicized faux pas brought some attention to the need to silence a smartphone without turning it off. Many of us carry these little noise-makers in our pockets... ready to embarrass us in any number of public situations. My iPhone is usually always switched to vibrate mode. This prevents most audible notfications. It will not, as Patron X painfully discovered, mute a scheduled alarm. So, perhaps there is a need here for some additional modes for iPhone and for mobile phones in general.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the silent switch on the side is doing the wrong thing. The existing behavior is well thought out. There are certain things that most people would want the phone to notify for, and an alarm (typically used for waking up) is one of those. I'd hate to have to remember to flip off the silent switch every night. And worse, if I did, any number of notifications arriving through the night (new email, GameCenter notices, etc., etc.) would keep me up all night long. But the silent switch silences everything, except for my wake-up alarm.

iOS (the operating system powering iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices) has this general setting called "Airplane Mode". When you enable this, it disables all of the wireless communications on the device. You can disable these individually through other settings, but this is a quick, convenient way to turn them all off at once. It also displays a helpful airplane status icon, replacing the wireless carrier icon and signal strength shown in the status bar.

I think a similar, convenient mode could be added to address this mute-my-phone problem. Perhaps, called "Do Not Disturb Mode". When enabled, it would prevent any form of audible sound from the device, including alarms. It would also prevent vibrations and incoming notices, preventing their pop-over display (they'd still be visible in the notification center you can drag down from the top of the screen). This mode would be perfect to use when reading a book. It'd also be useful when giving a presentation that's driven by your iPhone or iPad. You could also think of it as a "focus" mode where you can open up an app and get something done, without distraction from the device itself. Come to think of it, I could use such a mode on my Mac.

Another mode that I think would be helpful is an "Energy Saver Mode". I imagine this mode would ease the minds of many that want to close each app when they've returned to the home screen. Basically, it would prevent fast-app switching, by closing an application when you leave it (with one exception made for any active music-playing app). This would save power since apps wouldn't be allowed to continue running for up to 10 minutes after leaving them. Sure, app start-up time would be longer with this on, but I could see it being useful in situations where you are trying to make your battery go as long as possible. Perhaps when you want to read a book for a few hours and don't care if you aren't receiving email or push notifications or other things that chew at your battery all day.

Each of these modes (Airplane, Do Not Disturb, Energy Saver) could be combined in any way the user wants. Enabling Airplane and Energy Saver modes would be great for those long flights. Energy Saver and Do Not Disturb modes could be used together for playing that CPU-intensive game for a few hours straight without seeing popups for each incoming email.

But normal operation of an iOS device should never rely on these modes. Apple shouldn't be testing battery performance with Energy Saver mode enabled, nor should memory-hungry apps require any to be enabled for their app to run properly. An iOS device should never be that "fiddly". But such modes would be welcome for those that know to use them.

Of course, these modes could only be added by Apple — no mere app store app could influence the behavior of iOS system policies. So we're at the mercy of Apple to fix this one. While they're at it, it would be great to have more convenient access to these toggles. I'd love to see them exposed as a panel in the pull-down drawer used for notifications and other widgets (weather, stocks, etc.).

 

Twitter: Who to Follow

Update: Appears to be fixed! Thanks, Twitter.

I love the little things. Little things are easy to fix, too. Here's a little thing I found on Twitter's "Who to Follow" suggestions page:

 

(And I fixed the bug of not following @ylnt.)