Please. Fix. That.

iOS: Mail's "Load All Images" button

This has been fixed! Option to load images is at the top of the message.

Observed in iOS 8 (β 3).

I typically configure my email apps to not automatically load images. On occasion a spam message gets through the winding maze of spam filters put in front of them and I'd rather not reward the sender with any kind of verification that their arrow met it's mark.

When I do want to look at the images in an email message, I click a button to do it. For the Apple Mail app, that button is at the top-right corner of the window. Load Images, it says, and that's what it does. For iOS, you get a message with images and it just looks kind of broken. Large patches of the email are missing content and with no explanation to be seen... not until you scroll aaall the way to the bottom. Ah, there it is:

...a "button" to load images for this message. OK. Tap. Now, scroll aaall the way back to the top and start reading again with the context of the images.

Why is this button at the bottom? If there are suppressed images, shouldn't I be given the choice to display them at the top of the message? Maybe like this:

Ah, better.

Apple: 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.

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.)

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.

 

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.)

Apple Developer Login: Stop preventing paste

UPDATE: Apple has changed their login form quite a bit and it no longer prevents pasting into the password field. But, other sites out there still employ this tactic for some reason. So to counter that, you can install a Safari browser extension that fixes it for them too.

When you go to sign in to the Apple Developer web site, and navigate to login. You get this little innocuous login form. But unlike most login forms on the web, this one hates you. It won't let you paste anything into the password field. Some developer at Apple, in their infinite wisdom has decided to prevent such a thing.

You can see in the screenshot here taken from the HTML source for the page, they capture and prevent the "onpaste" event (and needlessly blocks cut and copy, which the browser already prevents) for that field.

I'm at a loss as to why they do this. Is there a security benefit I'm missing? If so, why does NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD do this? I'm sorry, but some of my passwords are lengthy and generated and I can't remember them. So, I often copy the value from my password management tool (1Password) and paste it into the password field. Except here, I cannot¹. Is Apple trying to encourage short, memorable passwords that can be typed easily? Are they trying to discourage the user from copying passwords to the system clipboard? Cause they didn't prevent that; they prevented populating the value already on the clipboard into the password field. And that's not helping anybody.

Please fix that.

 

¹ YES. I realize the 1Password Safari extension can be used to populate the fields properly, but that still doesn't excuse breaking the expected and accepted behavior of a simple login form.

iTunes: Auto-reloading over playing previews

Update: Appears to be fixed as of iTunes 10.6 (possibly earlier).

Lets say you want to try out some music on iTunes. Thanks to recent licensing by Apple, you can now preview to up to 90 seconds of a song in the store before you buy. So, you pull up one of the albums and click the "Preview All" link (another recent, welcome feature) to preview all of the tracks. Why, with a 10 track album, you can now listen for 15 minutes for free! So, with that playing, you hide the iTunes window and switch back to your work.

Several minutes in (lets say 10), one of the tracks catches your attention and you switch back to iTunes to see which track is playing. But when you do, iTunes reloads the page you were looking at, stopping your music preview. So now, you don't know which track had been playing or where to start playing from again.

It seems that iTunes wants to forcibly reload whatever store view it is showing after 10 minutes. So, if you've started previewing music and 9 minutes later switch back to iTunes, it won't reload; but if you switch back to it 10 minutes and 1 second later, it will. Leaving the hidden iTunes app completely alone (by either not switching back to it) for longer than 10 minutes will not interrupt your playing preview.

I've noticed this behavior only happens when the app is hidden for more than 10 minutes. If you have the window visible and just switch away from it for 10 minutes and switch back to it, it doesn't reload. It also happens if you "shrink" the iTunes window to the mini-player form and restore iTunes after 10 minutes. Interestingly enough, it doesn't happen when you minimize iTunes and restore it after 10 minutes.

I think one simple fix here is that iTunes should not reload when music is being previewed. Or, simply don't reload any view of the music store, period! My guess is this reloading function was added mostly to benefit the "Ping" feature of iTunes which by nature has more dynamic content and could benefit from semi-automatic reloads like this. But there's a problem there too: if you started writing a comment to post, but then hide iTunes without posting it and come back 10+ minutes later — POOF! — the comment you wrote is gone.

My thanks to Walt Grayson who brought this annoyance to our attention.

(Observed in iTunes 10.2.2.)

Netflix iOS App: Scrolling pain

Noted on December 17, 2011 that scrolling all better now. A scrollbar also appears while scrolling. Thanks, Netflix!

Fire up the Netflix app on your iPhone or iPad and go to the home view. Now, try flicking that list up to scroll to the bottom. Feel that? It's like flicking through mud. It's like having an Android simulator on my iPhone.

Now, I know the Netflix UI here is mostly a web app. Maybe there isn't a good way to solve this problem for a web app like this and make it behave like a native app would. But as it is, it's downright painful to use. Another problem that comes from this design decision is that there is no scrollbar to indicate where you are within a list.

These are glaring usability flaws affecting typical use of the app. If I were Netflix, I'd build a native iOS app instead. Don't cut corners on building a flagship app that brings millions of subscribers and potential customers to your business.

Also, please bring back the DVD queue management features.

(Last observed in version 1.2.1.)

iPad: No way to disable Calendar alerts

UPDATE: This has been addressed in iOS 5 with the introduction of the iOS Notification Center preferences. You can now disable alerts for Calendars in general!

I've searched high and low for a way to disable Calendar alerts on my iPad but have come up empty handed. So, time for a new post!

There doesn't seem to be a way to disable these alerts. You can disable the alert sound (through Settings → General → Sounds) but you will still get an alert window to remind you of the same event that you were just reminded of on your computer and iPhone.

Observed in iOS 4.3.1 (and presumably, every version prior).