iTunes 9.0.1 bows to mini player complaints

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 23 September 2009 05:32

IT Industry - Development

The arrival of iTunes 9.0 was accompanied by more grumbles than usual, but here comes iTunes 9.0.1 to smooth things over. There are also fresh updates to Apple's music software and HP printer drivers.

One of the most common complaints about iTunes 9 concerned a change in the behaviour of the zoom button. Previously used to toggle between the regular iTunes window and the mini player, iTunes 9 changed it to zoom the window. Option-zoom gave the mini player.

People who use the mini player took exception, and some of those that don't  weren't happy either as the zoom button's behaviour wasn't consistent with other applications.

The 'correct' operation is to toggle the window between its user-selected (or default) size, and whatever size is necessary to accommodate its contents while staying within the bounds of the screen and avoiding the Dock. Some applications (eg TextEdit) use it to make the window fill the screen.

iTunes 9 did neither. Instead, it zoomed and moved the window so it was centred with a little space on all four sides of the screen.

iTunes 9.0.1 reverses the operation of zoom (once again shows the mini player) and option-zoom (toggles the window size in iTunes 9 style).

The trouble is, option-zoom still doesn't work correctly. If you're looking at the iTunes Store on a 1920 x 1200 display, the resulting window size is wider than necessary to display the content, and not as tall as it could be.

Talking of the iTunes Store, Apple claims iTunes 9.0.1 resolves issues browsing the iTunes Store. It is not yet clear what issues have been fixed, but user complaints included being told that they could not browse the store without also installing the latest version of Safari, even though that browser was already installed.

What else has changed in iTunes, and what are the other new updates from Apple? See page 2.