Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday

I'm going to try to start a new regular feature for most Fridays. Others do Friday Cat Blogging, but seeing that I'm terribly allergic to the cute little beasts, I will have to try something else.

My idea is Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday, in which I point out an annoying Apple "bug" and encourage all of my readers (Yes, you!) to report that bug (or some other bug you are inspired by) to Apple. If enough of us squeak, they might fix it.

I've been doing this on my own for a long time. For instance, I've issued bug reports about:

• #3418488: Safari, please detect if a page has an RSS feed available (fixed!)
• #3460492: Please add PDF viewing directly to Safari (fixed!)
• #3568756: iTunes needs a way to store cover art in external files (I hate having to embed image data into every song file in an album; wastes precious iPod space!)
• #4146413: System needs to look inside files to find metadata (see "man 5 magic" at the command line)

But today, I'm going report, and encourage others to report, the following annoyance. You insert a CD into iTunes, and the GraceNote/CDDB database has more than one data entry. You have to choose which one you want -- but the information Apple presents isn't enough to make an informed choice. Daniel J. Wilson (Membranophonist) wrote a good explanation of this — He even provides a mockup on how to solve it.

So here's my suggestion. If you are a member of Apple Developer Connection, log in here. If you are not, go to this page. In your own words, describe the problem and offer a solution.

Who knows, we might have an impact. (I just submitted mine; bug #4214525.)

Feel free to leave suggestions for future editions of Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday in the comments.