Saturday, May 9, 2009

iTunes could be smarter.. even a little

Check out the screenshot above. Now let me explain. To save space on my MacBook Pro hard drive I keep all my movies (I own the DVD versions, don't stress) on an external drive that iTunes links to. What annoys me is that this dialog suits a situation where the user has changed the location of a file, but not one when an external device is missing. iTunes should detect that the file is located on a external device and then prompt the user to connect it if it isn't already. No one wants to see this dialog when they haven't touched their library for months, and while the new dialog works the same as the old, it tells them why the file cannot be played and how to fix it. I have made a mockup below of an example dialog that I believe would be more suited. It does look the same but the user knows how to fix it and that something hasn't gone wrong with their library.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey man, its so unlike you to complain about itunes.You've proved you're not a mac air head fanboy ;). I'll be joining the itunes family soon enough when i get my ipod nano to sync music. I'm hoping the experience will not irate me. Have a good one

Anonymous said...

Haha good point, I'm normally a big fan of iTunes but this is just an example of ways in which it ca be improved. Wow getting an iPod, very impressed man :) You'll love it, the current gen models are pretty sweet and syncing is effortless. Plug it in - wait - unplug it...music

Anonymous said...

cool,you should hit I'm once in a while man. We've got alot of catch-up to do :)