I actually went through and backed everything on my Mac up yesterday so I could install the latest batch of Apple updates. Silly though it may be, I was actually quite keen to try the iTunes mini store. There seems to have been quite a lot of stress over the privacy aspects lately, but I guess I’m just not overly stressed about it.

What does bother me, however, it that it’s apparently completely unusable.

a modal error message caused by the mini store

That error dialog is modal (i.e. it won’t let me do anything until I dismiss it), and came up as a result of double clicking to start a song. Thankfully it doesn’t come up if a problem song plays automatically (i.e. as the next song in the playlist), but the problem does seem to be consistently caused by all songs with the same artist. Oh, and for those who are wondering, no, it doesn’t come up if the mini store is closed.

Now maybe this is a somewhat Australia specific problem, given that our store is still quite new and still gives these error messages in normal usage occasionally. But even if it only occurred one time in a thousand, it’s totally unacceptable for an action like playing a song to bring up some modal dialog which is, at best, peripherally related to the action. There’s a really obvious place for this error message to go in this case - into the mini store pane, which is what I hope to see happening in the next update.

I guess in the end, this reinforces the point some of the privacy guys have been making. You don’t expect playing a song in iTunes to have anything to do with the network, let alone give you back some sort of server error.

Anyway, that’s my rant for today. I’ll be turning it off and forgetting about it now.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , ,