Bug of the moment 2006-12-18
Regular readers will have noticed that this has almost become a blog on the What-Not-To-Dos of software design. Something that surprised me quite a bit was when I noticed a default Mail rule that opened a sheet taller than the screen. OK, someone forgot to test this. But what worries me more is that iTunes cannot deal with 1024×768 screens:
Now, bear in mind that the highest resolution of any iBook is 1024×768, and they were still current until 2006! All CRT iMacs were 1024×768, as were the original “potted plant” (flat panel) iMacs. Apparently Apple have never tried running iTunes 6 (as shipped on the Tiger DVD) on a single 1024×768 machine.
In my case, I had resized the window slightly and the arrow was pointing at the eject button. Without thinking, I had tried to click that button to make the not-quite-MiniStore go away; my iMac is slot-loading, so nothing happened, and I just cursed iTunes for not working. Further attempts as time went by still proved futile in ridding it of that annoying MiniStore pane.
Eventually I realised that it was pointing at the wrong button, and that you could resize the window to have it point at any button at all:
Note that without a giant arrow pointing in the direction of button bar, it would not be apparent that any of the buttons would switch it off. Sometimes I really cannot fathom what Apple are thinking. Given that the above pictures are from iTunes 6, I installed iTunes 7 to see if it had improved:
In a sense, it has – Apple have scrapped the ambiguous arrow, but also threw out the button that toggles the pane, making it hard to discover how to get rid of it at all! And it still doesn’t fit into the space provided. Note that in both cases (iTunes 6 and 7) I deleted my iTunes settings to ensure that I got the default window position and size.
This is how you are meant to get rid of that pane:
Obvious, eh? Especially since I am asking to hide the MiniStore that technically I never opened to begin with. Weird.
iTunes 7 (7.0.2, latest version at the time of writing) also has a peculiar bug with its window alpha behaviour, where resizing the window to a narrow width breaks the appearance of the top-right, bottom-right and bottom-left corners:
Moving the window triggers the appearance to correct itself, however.
Posted 18th December 2006 – Comments and questions?