Please. Fix. That.

iTunes: Swiping Gestures Gone Bad

Observed as recently as iTunes 11.2.2.

The iTunes Store has a really annoying usability bug around swipe gestures. Go to the home tab of the Movies part of the store and you'll see a number of content "wells"... many of these are side-scrolling areas where you can view the movie posters. For each of those, you are able to use two-finger swipes (on a trackpad, single-finger swipes on a Magic Mouse) to scroll these left and right to view more content.

But, the very same gesture is used to navigate backward and forward through the store (similar to how it works in Safari for browser history). What makes this so bad is that the gesture does different things based on where your mouse cursor is.

Here's a screen shot to illustrate the problem a little bit:

There are three regions highlighted above:

1. This one will cause you to navigate backward to Music, since the scrolling region can't scroll to the right any further.
2. This area does not scroll, so swiping here will also make you navigate back to Music.
3. This area can scroll some more (you can see there's more content to the left), so a swipe here will scroll that region and will not navigate back to Music.

This is madenning. It means I have to pay attention to where the mouse cursor is resting any time I use these gestures. And if it is resting on a scrollable region, I need to also observe where the scroll bar position is, so I know whether the gesture will result in scrolling that area versus moving me to a different page (and even more tricky, since OS X doesn't show the scroll bar in a resting state).

Apple's Multi-Touch Gestures article documents all of them and even calls out the exception for the "Swipe to navigate" gesture:

Note: If there is horizontal content to scroll, this gesture will first scrolls (sic) to the end of content and then it will move to the next page.

So what's the solution? I would recommend following the pattern used on iPad: drop the forward/backward history navigation for the iTunes app and switch to tabs for different areas of the store or just simple forward/backward buttons if necessary. Stop doing two things with the same gesture.

I made a short video to further illustrate the problem:

(This video should be viewed full-screen so you can see what's going on a little better.)

Apple: please fix that.

iTunes: Allow streaming of full trailers and short, free videos

Recently, I was browsing the iTunes TV catalog and decided to take in a one-minute video for HBO's True Detective series. So I click on the play button in iTunes to watch the trailer. Then, a gripping 30 seconds later, it stops. Why? Because iTunes is only showing me a preview of the trailer.

Here's an illustration of the problem:

This is stupid.

There are bright folks over at Apple, but I guess they haven't figured this out. So here's a simple algorithm for iTunes to implement:

1. Is the video free?
2. Is it less than 5 minutes?

If both conditions are met, just allow the video to be shown in it's entirety without requiring the user to download it to their iTunes library.

Apple, 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.)

Chrome and Firefox: The over-reaching About box

An interesting thing is happening to the venerable "About" box found in most applications. Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome (at least certain versions; I think it's limited to the developer/beta editions for now) support checking and updating themselves from their About box.

I'm not sure this is a good thing.

I'm certain the motivation behind this is the legacy of Internet Explorer 6. IE6 was introduced to the world over ten years ago. And yet, there are still significant numbers of people using it today (particularly in China and South Korea). Sometimes, even if something is broken, people won't fix it even if fixing it is relatively easy and free. Or, perhaps they just don't know how. After all, IE6 was the default browser for Windows XP.

So, it seems the solution is to put the upgrade process right in the "About" window. Why... better yet: make it auto-update itself (Firefox 3 began auto-updating itself with minor updates — they install the next time you re-launch the browser). Remove the choice from the user to click the button to upgrade, and everything will be fine! Well, that may be an acceptable default choice for many users, but not everyone.

Personally, I'm growing more fond of Apple's App Store model — the applications you download through the store are updated through the App Store too. Instead of replicating the software update process into each and every app, it is handled by one application and the user has full control over which applications they update, and when the updates are done. And best of all, you can update several applications at once. Can you imagine if we were stuck with the old model on our phones? Where you'd have to download installation files or check for updates within each application? That would drive me nuts. The speed and simplicity of letting a software manager (App Store or whatever) manage updates for each managed application is THE FUTURE. Lets get there for our PCs/Macs too.

Until we do get there — to Google, Mozilla and other application developers who will follow their lead to remove this choice: please consider the users that would rather opt-out and would prefer to choose when to upgrade an application they use daily.

 

Applications that I've caught self-updating:

• Google Chrome (dev channel)
• Spotify
• OnLive
• Steam
• CrashPlan