RE: 7. The Mystery Check Box

I started finding these useful for my Apple TV. If I have an entire season of a TV, along with a bunch of movies, on my Apple TV, there is just not enough room. So, I uncheck the later part of a season of a television show. PC World might hate the checkboxes, but I have grown to rely on them and hope they never ever ever never disappear.

PC World needs to get a clue. No EBOOKS? Most users couldn't care less about reading books from their iTunes UI. This is just stupid complaint for the sake of complaining. You don't like it, go use Windows Media player for a while again then come back and tell us how bad iTunes sucks.

To be fair, I have written the most scathing rants about something that I knew, in my heart-of-hearts, was small potatoes. And I also think it's fair that a lot of these kinds of perceptions are based on expectation. When you're accustomed to the way Product X goes about its business, it's easy to find fault with Product Y — not because it's inherently awful but rather because it's not the way you expect things to work.

For example, the Watch folders thing. I can create Watch folders with Automator but I rarely do because I'm pretty disorganized and find it just as easy to drag stuff where I need it. But those people who are more organized, who tend to use a lot of Watch folders, may find this a real issue — particularly if another program they use does things that way.

So, it's not ignorance. Ignorant people don't work at places like PC World. It's just different.

Sure, Vista SP 1 is that huge, but what about 10.5.4 Combo updater? Pretty big download for a non service pack.

I do agree, why does Apple decide to make iTunes/Quicktime reinstall everytime there's an iTunes update? If QT wasn't updated, no need to reinstall.

It has to do with the relationship between iTunes and QuickTime and the OS. The core capabilities of QuickTime are built into OS X. They're not in Windows. iTunes depends on QuickTime to work a lot of its magic. On a Mac, it can do some of that with the QuickTime components that exist within the current version of QT and OS X. You don't have that luxury on a PC so it means that your QuickTime install has to change more often.

Now if Microsoft were to build a QuickTime layer into Windows...

Cheers Chris,

But if I do that, it also won't copy my music to the iTunes folder which I want it to do.

Didn't you read the article? Of course you can. I just did.

Seriously, okay, it's kind of a low blow, but having to download entire applications instead of patches is hardly unknown in either the Mac or Windows world. And, as I said, it's only 60MB. The "hey, there are people out here on dial-up" point is reaching. If you're on dial-up, you're likely not updating your other Windows apps either—certainly not Service Pack or Window Media Player releases. Dial-up is a pain, but it's hardly fair to slap Apple around for it when there are plenty of examples where Windows makes dial-up far more untenable.