This will be of interest to you if you use

  • an iPhone or iPod
  • with iBooks
  • and any app which puts a bar at the top – I think that would be tethering or anything that uses a mic in the background

I like iBooks – I prefer the way it works, in general, to Kindle, with more options for how the text is handled.

And I love the superb Inception app (the app from the film), which plays gentle ambient music and plays with the sounds around you using the mic.

However, when it runs in the background, a red bar appears at the top of the page – this is an apple insistence, presumably so you know the mic’s being used, but this pushes everything else down a bit. It’s a bit clumsy just shoving everything down the page, but not generally an issue.

However, in iBooks, the footer stays where it is and the app chops off the bottom of the last line of each page, or, in some circumstances, the entire line.

As you can imagine, it makes the two apps incompatible and unusuable. The app developers replied to my tweet, explaining it’s not something they can control.

I like to read while using the Inception app in the background; but that’s not possible using iBooks and means I won’t buy from apple iBooks again while this bug exists.

I’ve sent feedback to Apple; but if lots of million people asking them to fix the alarm bug falls on deaf ears, I can’t imagine my feedback email will even be read by anyone.

Update

I got a reply from Apple:

Brian here, from the iTunes Store. I understand that your recently purchased iBook does not function properly. I can definitely appreciate how eager you must be to get your money back and I apologize for any inconvenience. I would be more than happy to help you out.

I have reversed the charges to your credit card, Eliot. In three to five business days, a credit should be posted to the credit card that appears on the receipt for that purchase.

Please let me know if you have any other concerns of if you require any further assistance with this issue, Eliot. Thank you very much for being a member of the iTunes family and I hope you have a great day.

Aside from the surplus and unnecessary words – why use one word when five will do? – I’m surprised they so readily refunded it. Either way, I won’t be using iBooks again in a hurry, despite that the interface is generally a little better than Kindle.