Thanks to Victor A.’s recommendation, I finally made my first iTunes music store purchase: a multi-pass ticket to The Daily Show (my favorite show — I manage to watch many of the episodes despite never being home and never having access to the Comedy Channel. I met one of the producers of the show while I was out in Cayman Brac last week, which was really exciting…).

I hate the idea of buying music from iTunes because it’s sort of like the first sip of Apple kool-aid (and, it only works with Apple playback applications), but buying episodal video is perfect: I get to download, watch and delete, and so I’ve paid simply to watch the show once. The price was only $10 for 16 episodes, and by connecting to an internet connection wherever I am in the world, I via the subscription, I can automatically grab what I’ve missed.

I know that the same show is available via BitTorrent, but I have no problem with paying for downloads as long as the quality is fair for the type of media. Plus, it’s legal. :) For the Daily Show, you don’t really need high resolution video. For other kinds of shows, I would never pay for something of such low quality.

But one problem I’ve discovered is that iTunes on Windows sucks ass:

1. You get this tiny “Now Playing” window that you can’t resize vertically (without resizing the entire iTunes window).
2. If you right-click on the video, it opens its own window. Fine. But if you then close that window, it keeps playing in the iTunes video area. That’s weird.
3. You can maximize the video, but it doesn’t use the Alt-Enter Max/Min convention that nearly all PC apps use. Where’s the keyboard shortcut? You have to hunt around for icons.
4. The “Mini Player” mode in iTunes doesn’t support video. Lame.
5. Audio sync is off on my machine after only a minute or so of playback. Stopping and restarting seems to fix the problem, but there is only so much of that one can handle.
6. If you suspend and the wake up the machine while iTunes is active, you can no longer play back smooth video without restarting iTunes.
7. Resizing a video window from the lower-left grows the window from the lower-right.

That’s a pretty bad, and it certainly isn’t everything I don’t like about it. Get your act together, Apple! There are 95% of computer users out there who would love a good product.