Simon Fell > Its just code > iMS

Friday, May 2, 2003

iMS
I Installed iTunes4 and had a look around the iTunes Music Store. I found the selection available to be disappointing, I looked in the electronica section and was initially hopeful given the list of artists, but then most of the artists only have a single offering (e.g. the only Orbital offering is The Middle of Nowhere). Tim Bray has some interesting comments on how iMS works. I suspect one of the reasons they used a new protocol and not mime type dispatching, is that in Safari the list of applications that can be automatically launched from a mime-type mapping is hard coded and not adjustable (the mappings are adjustable, getting Safari to launch the app is not).