I got this message when I recently ran the software update (while iTunes was running) to go from iTunes version 8.1 to 8.1.1.
Unfortunately, the developers weren’t smart enough* to figure out how to do an update gracefully (in the background, without quitting iTunes, and more importantly without forcing me to do the work). I know this is possible, because anything is possible with software (that, and the Firefox developers have figured it out). I’m sure it’s hard, and it would be boring work for the team, but is that really my problem? If there’s a choice to make between developers doing more work or users doing more work, I think the developers should have to do the work. A handful of developers would only have to do the work once, but instead they have passed the buck to tens (hundreds?) of millions of unsuspecting iTunes users.
The really galling thing about this dialog box is that the text clearly shows that they know exactly what needs to happen but they are unwilling to assist me. For some reason I have to read some annoying message, go quit iTunes on my own (and wait for it to close “completely” – how am I supposed to know what that means?), return to this dialog box to click Continue, wait for the update to finish, then relaunch iTunes. Just throwing the word “please” in there at the beginning doesn’t make it polite to order me around like this. Even if Apple can’t do a graceful update, couldn’t they at least do all that stuff when I click Continue?
* I don’t really think that their developers aren’t smart enough to figure this out, but someone at Apple is to blame. I imagine “graceful updating” is on a long backlog of features to implement, but it never bubbles up as a high priority because there’s a workaround.