itunes, again

Apple’s iTunes, on the Apple Mac, has multiple examples of poor user interface design. For example, when scrolling through podcasts on my iPod, the scrollbar for podcasts is inside a region scrolled by the scrollbar for episodes. The puck for the inner region is often scrolled off–screen. The two lists’ scrolling should be entirely independent.

Another silliness is stopping downloading podcasts because it decides I’ve not listened to enough episodes for a while. By unsubscribing to subscribed podcasts without user intervention, Apple presume they know more about a user’s listening preferences than the user, a non–sequitor; they presume that not listening to a podcast series means it’ll never be wanted, another non–sequitor; and they clearly don’t understanding the concept of reference material.

But now this Apple design flaw has got particularly silly. Just now, while listening to a podcast, I told iTunes to refresh all podcasts. It decided that some podcasts were to be ignored because “I hadn’t listened to episodes for a while”. This included the one I was listening to at the time.

Apple, iTunes is broken. Please fix it.