There are times that I wonder if those that design software actually ever use it? I usually lay this charge against Microsoft, but last night Apple in their wisdom really annoyed me.
I have a very poor internet connection and as a result if I download any big files I generally try and do it overnight, partly as these downloads take so long and mainly that if I am downloading files, it sucks up my bandwidth making the internet unusable for anything else.
So last night I set iTunes on my iMac to download a HD episode of Doctor Who and a couple of very large iPad Apps. About 2-3GB of data.
I went to bed, came down this morning to find a message from iTunes asking me if I wanted to download the latest version. Well I do have this setup in preferences, so that iTunes checks for updates.
So what’s the problem?
Well due to this unanswered dialogue (I was asleep in bed) iTunes had stopped downloading my downloads. It was waiting for me to say yes or no to downloading the new version of iTunes!
As a result I had only downloaded one of my downloads, all the rest were waiting…
Why can’t iTunes continue to download the files in the background, why does it have to wait until I answer the dialogue box?
In my mind this is poor design. If I decide that I do want to update iTunes, I can always stop the downloads, in fact I would probably want to finish them first before updating. So iTunes should really keep downloading even if it is asking me if I want to update.
So the end result is that I have to turn off “checking for updates” so this doesn’t happen again.
