In November 2009, Apple launched a feature dubbed iTunes Preview, which essentially enabled people to see what music is available on iTunes from their Web browser without the need to fire up – or install – the desktop software program.
At the time, you weren’t able to actually listen to a sample of music tracks from your browser, but that changed earlier this year when Web-based audio previews were quietly added (paving the way for the imminent roll-out of iTunes.com).
This morning, Apple activated the iTunes Preview feature for iPhone / iPod Touch applications in addition.
To see this for yourself, open any direct link to an iPhone app (example) in your favorite Web browser.
You’ll notice that instead of only throwing up a dialog box prompting you to confirm that you wish to launch iTunes on your desktop, you’ll see a nice page with the app logo, price, description, screenshots, rating, reviews and more in a new window or tab.
Simultaneously, iTunes will be opened and you’ll be directed to the app’s detail page in the App Store.
All in all, this is a logical move for Apple to make: the prior way links to iPhone apps were handled wasn’t particularly user-friendly. You still get the option to confirm that you want to open iTunes or do nothing when you click a link to download or purchase apps, but at least now you’ll also get a nice overview of what an app is all about and how other users are liking it.
Next up: iTunes Preview for video content?
(Hat tip to Gerry Cardinal III)
Lol. And I thought it was always there
Funny you thought that too…
Still missing:
Search
App Store home page
etc.
Sweet! It open in my browser alright, but it also opens the app in iTunes.
Well yea, that way if you like it, itunes is ready to go.
Annoying to me, if its a preview, then dont do anything else.
Agreed, it shouldn’t open up iTunes as well, that makes this feature completely worthless. Because you’re not “previewing” it anymore, you’re in iTunes within a few seconds automatically. Instead what Apple should do is NOT open iTunes, but make every single link on that page fire up iTunes and go straight to that app.
Read the article again. It says that’s the expected behaviour.
It asks you first! And, you can stop it in the future. What exactly is the complaint?
Now they just need to ‘fix’ the appstore to make it user friendly. 140,000 + apps apparently … but no way to find them easily. Being able to filter them by rating would be a start!
Agreed. The ability to sort by name, price, date, rating. This should all be built-in.
And with this, opening simultaneously a browser tab and itunes is a joke. Seriously, what the point in doing both?
Silly me. From the headline I thought they would let play with a demo version in the browser.
But wait, that would require flash …
“But wait, that would require flash …”
No it wouldn’t, it’d require an embedded iPhone OS runtime.
Oh.. wait. You were just being facetious.
It’s call a joke, dumbass.
But wait, no, it wouldn’t. Web applications are built with html5 these days grampa
and the best part is, these aren’t web apps. so you do need an iphone os emulator.
Sweet. Like this feature.
And Adobe Flash???
Welcome Google, please index the crap out of iTunes apps, and help developers expose their hardwork thru a smarter search. iTunes search is almost like a graduate school project, primitive as web0.1!
(BTW, iTunes Web still doesn’t expose the app keywords as set by developers – that’ll be sweet to expose)
No actually it would not, as it would it enabled wealthy (corporate) developers to buy all the advertising they need to sell their apps. It would quickly and immediately put every aspiring developer out to pasture.
BAD idea.
I’m sorry the markets are so insulting to under-capitalised development projects. Because ofcourse, the top grossing apps on the iPhone today are developed by free-lance one-timers…
Web developers have access to the catalog images and links for a long time with published API from Apple (see example here http://www.apptoday.com). The news is that Apple is slowly moving iTunes to the web interface, piece by piece. I see iTunes eventually become just another HTML5 page
“You still get the option to confirm that you want to open iTunes or do nothing when you click a link..”
I don’t ever get the option to do nothing (or a confirm dialogue) upon clicking an iTunes link. It always just automatically opens iTune when I click on the link.. I hate this behaviour.
Maybe its a PC/Mac thing?
Can anyone else confirm this?
I tried using http://www.apptoday.com, on a Mac, it opens a web pages then opens iTunes if it detects it. on a PC, it does the same thing, but on some broswer/OS (FireFox with Vista) it asks you if you want to open iTunes.
I think it is a good idea. Often when people click on a media link, they just want to see details of the App, they may not using the computer that is doing the sync to the iPod or the iPhone.
Exactly!
“prompting you to confirm that you wish to launch iTunes on your desktop”
It NEVER prompts me to comfirm this – EVER. It’s an absolutue pet hate of mine when iTune does this when I click on a link – especially when people hide the actual url with a flippin’ url shortener.
I just clicked that link above and it did indeed show the web version of the app details – but simultaneously opened iTunes to show the same info – what was the point in that??
Show me the web version and if I want to buy it, *I* will open iTunes thank you very much Mr. Jobs.
grrrr
/rant
I heard about an iTunes store called the World Wide Web where you can download all kinds of cool apps without ever having to hand over your credit card to Apple.
All I can see is WOW! Now that’s progress.
so 90’s i guess
Although I never was able to get it to work (although to be fair, I only spent a few moments looking), I think that this is a good idea.
I will have thought this is a no-brainer. Even then going through 140,000 apps and more to come, is a chore.
If you guys really think ipad.com is worth a million dollars to apple, then how much do you think i-pad.com is worth?
You can buy it right now for only $3250.
i-phone.com, i-pod.com is not owned by apple…so i guess apple doesn’t want i-pad.com either!
iphone.com, ipod.com, ipad.com …these domain names do not get that much traffic…check the alexa ranking.
I personally think these domains are not worth that much to apple…apple don’t care…they know people will end up at apple.com
until you get sued for obvious trademark infringment, not using the domains for anything and basically blackmailing Apple to buy from you. Good luck with that.
Lots of people do that… look at how many versions of “google.com” Google owns (weird versions with, like, 36 of the letter “o”, but not 37… gooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com)
Kinda dodgy, but it’s an industry unto itself.
Looks like they are scraped articles in which he inserted iPad into as noone was writing articles that far back with the term iPad.
What I don’t get is why does it automatically open iTunes. I like the preview page idea, however, I would think that the intent was to not have to also open iTunes. As it is now, if I click on an app preview link, I get two windows containing almost the exact same info. One in a web browser and one in iTunes. Maybe I just don’t understand the intent.
I don’t have iTunes installed on my desktop PC and the behavior is as described, only opening up the preview in my browser. On my laptop, where I do have iTunes installed, the behavior is still to only open the preview in my browser (Firefox) so I don’t know why yours is automatically launching iTunes.
Apple is always up to something interesting =)
well, now all Apple needs to do is DISABLE AUTOMATIC iTunes launch. What a BS is this. If I want iTunes open, I’ll open it, if not, then please don’t make choices for me. Thank you!
shutup.css is a custom user stylesheet that can be applied to your browser to hide comments on many popular web sites without user intervention.
Preview in browser is great but how do did you find that app in the first place? Where is the “preview apps” homepage or search? I seriously can’t figure out how to go from that page to search for and preview other apps. Every click tries to launch or download iTunes. Wow what great feature but just fucking terrible navigation unless it only works if you have itunes installed which, uh, also makes it pointless.
Wow that was like way cool dude.
RT
http://www.web-privacy.cz.tc
WHO GIVES A FLYING FART? THEY ARE ALL SHITTY “APPS”!
I predict being able to run iPhone apps on Android & Win OS. If HTML5, I’m cool with that. When? 2011
That’s really helpful for the testing process. I never one which app is worth buying from that dumb little info page they give you.
This is my fav iphone app right now.
http://www.shareboggle.com/t-1-19-10-gtaiphone.html
i guess this is cool. i don’t know how you managed to turn it into an article though.
This is not at all what I thought it was. I was hoping you could actually play with the app to see if it was something you wanted to buy. You know…. preview the app. Weak.
Piece-of-kaka.
safras
It is strange that this wasn’t implemented in the early days, previewing music is the status quo for the interwebs.
Still just pictures? Still not good enough.
There are too many worthless apps with good screen-shots. Either their interface fails compared to the equivalent website interface, or they don’t really do what they claim, or they do it so poorly that it’s not worthwhile.
Apple’s app store lets weak developers build lame software and make money by relying on the fact that most people are gullible enough to pay for something without knowing what they’re getting.
The way to weed out all these crap-app profiteers is to let users try before they buy. Apple needs to give users the option to try apps for 30 minutes – or better yet, any time limit, at the discretion of the developer.
At least some developers are smart enough to make up for the app store’s shortcomings by offering free preview apps to give users some idea of what their for-sale apps can do.