2011-07-13

Apple's Mac App Store: Licensing info: needs improvement!

This post is about something specific, but the concepts are general:

When presenting a license to an end user, make it fully accessible.

What does this mean? A couple things, at least:

  1. Allow text to be selected. I'd like to be able to copy and paste either sections or the whole content to another format, for easier reading, making notes, bookmarks, etc.
  2. Make it easy to print. Sometimes, it's just easier to read things in hard-copy. Especially if one wants to take notes, read things somewhere quiet and distraction-free, or the like.

There are probably more, too. And certainly Apple has other issues with the way they do licensing. For example iTunes. Every single time an update to iTunes comes out -- or at least it seems this way to me -- the user is forced to agree to a license again.

Presumably, the license has changed only a little bit, if at all. So why do I need to read pages and pages of license agreement each time?

Well, why do I, you may be asking? Because in theory, clicking "agree" means that I have done so. If they would provide me a summary of changes, this would be so much easier to do. Better yet, stop presenting it except when it's changed, and try not to change it often.

I could go on and on, and it's not just Apple... but Apple being a company that I'm a frequent customer of, and having some poor policies in my mind, they're the top of my list right now of annoying licensing practices.

Steve Jobs or someone: Please put some attention on this, and get your lawyers to work on making this more user-friendly. Don't worry, they won't mind too much: it's more work for them. :-P