Hmm… I’m not spiteful, I just don’t have any hope for improvement. iTunes has been chronically bad, I could find thousands of other articles and testimonials about that. At this point the issue is clearly endemic to the product.
Constructively: everything else aside, one glaring and easily-fixed problem is the dialog boxes. No program released after 1997 should be so behind in the state of the art that it throws up modal dialogs that lock up the whole app to say pointless things like “We’re checking for updates”.
People always bash iTunes, but I actually use it quite often and I like it. Maybe it's just me though?
The only thing that bugs me, is on iOS, when I load the music app (that's basically iTunes for iOS, right?) it shows a blank page until it can connect to the their servers to grab some data. It doesn't have a problem if I'm on wifi or a fast connection, but I'm often in places where my service is shit, and I get a white screen and can't pick what music I want to listen to. My workaround is to pull the menu up from the bottom of the screen and just hit "play" and then it usually works.
That must-connect-to-server-before-I-show-you-your-LOCAL!-files has really pushed me over the edge. Infuriating! I've been trying out some replacment music apps, but haven't really found any great alternatives at this point. I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months.
Someone around here put it best a few wks ago in an iPhone7 discussion: Steve Jobs is dead.
> I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months.
The stock android music app was, last time I punished myself by using it, terrible. This cloud integration stuff is so damn pushy. I wish there was something out there with only the features of winamp, but enough UI polish that it doesn't look like some college kid's hobby project.
I don't use Android currently, but when I did, PowerAmp was a great music player. Simple interface. Would automatically find sound files wherever you put them. Played most formats including flac. Worked very well with my BT headphones. Never had a problem with it.
For a long time it was also the poster boy for how async programming is terrible. Press next twice in a row and the song that played was whichever song loaded last, sometimes after playing a bit of the one that loaded first. That's if it didn't crash of course.
Cesium is a really great iOS music player app. It's basically the iOS 6 UI with the bug fixes you always wanted, and none of the gunk from iOS 7 and above.
Heh. I have the same complaint about Spotify. I can't even play my own music on the device until it's finished failing to connect to Spotify's servers.
The lack of async and modal dialogs drive me nuts with iTunes. My main gripe is syncing my ipod or phone interrupts music playback--they should be completely separate things. Ideally separate applications.
> My main gripe is syncing my ipod or phone interrupts music playback
It doesn't though. I just tried. Start playback, plug phone (keeps playing), sync (itunes still playing), disconnect, itunes has never stopped playing.
I've honestly stopped using iTunes for the most part after 10+ years of problems like that. It's weird, but I'll listen to music on my phone while using my computer. I also sync phones/ipods a lot less often since so much has moved to the cloud. It may not interrupt playback, but I swear I still see modal dialogs when syncing.
I still think they should be completely separate applications.
Up to a few years ago, iTunes was full of these things. They've refined it over time, and most of those actions are now non-blocking from a UI perspective.
"People always bash iTunes, but I actually use it quite often and I like it. Maybe it's just me though?"
I'm really picky about OSX annoyances and confusing fake-ease-of-use from Apple, but I do use iTunes fairly regularly just to listen to music and podcasts and I have never had any issues.
Here's why:
I only use iTunes to just play tracks. I don't use it for anything else.
All of my file org and maintenance and backups and transfer - all of that is done from the command line with cp/mv/rsync/etc.
For me, iTunes is just a play button and nothing else. I use command-o to open files and then click play and that's it.
That's why I still use OSX even though I hate it. No matter what the OS refuses to let me do (or figure out to do) I can always just force the issue with the command line - and that wasn't an option always in Windows ...
That is also why this weird "you're root but not actually root" in the newest versions of OSX has me worried.
Yeah, I've had a similar experience: i only ever use iTunes for one thing, and that's as an Apple Music client. If you limit yourself to that, it's actually quite nice, much better than Spotify.
However, if I were trying to organize my mp3 library in it, I would lose my mind, I think .
I, too, kind of like it. Conceptually to me, it's a media player and store and that doesn't seem like it's doing "too much." Splitting out iBooks made sense. Splitting out device sync makes a ton of sense and I think you could have a headless homesharing system as well. But as a media player, it's not bad, I don't need skins and visualizations and such.
Where I think it is weak though is it's meta data format, it's some structured unified file that is opaque. As your media library grows things slow down. I'm somewhat confident that it can be corrupted but I have limited visibility in to how it's corrupted and less in to how to fix it. Thing is, people have gigantic media collections, I'd think something like sqlite could fix it. Along with that, as it has morphed over the years, there is this divide as to where the data lives. Like your podcast subscriptions can be duplicated in the cloud (makes sense so you can pull them on your phone) It's not super clear where the data really lives or where the canonical source of truth should be for it.
IIRC the location / icon for the song/album repeat toggle hasn't changed in iTunes since 11.0 in 2012 though. The menu entry for it hasn't changed in more than a decade. Music on iOS 10 was a big revamp so that's understandable but iTunes? It simply hasn't changed much or at all in 4 years. No clue how anyone could be confused about it.
Sure. There are a lot of streams available on shoutcast.com, just click the download icon and copy the URL, some stations list their stream URL on the site, just google the call letters + "m3u" or "pls" etc, then there is this site which is the best directory I've found so far radioroku.com. If you use iOS there's also a great app for playing these streams called fstream.
Here is my list:
alias wor='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wor-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/495/179680/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wor-am 2> /dev/null'
alias wgy='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wgy-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/697/21577/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wgy-am 2> /dev/null'
alias npr='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.npr.org/streams/mp3/nprlive24.pls 2> /dev/null'
alias rain='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=2340 2> /dev/null'
alias rain2='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=368490 2> /dev/null'
alias rain3='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ9OWMsJBTk 2> /dev/null'
alias art='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=366888 2> /dev/null'
alias chopin='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=590375 2> /dev/null'
alias phil='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=248466 2> /dev/null'
alias french='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/franceinfo.m3u 2> /dev/null'
alias fip='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/fip128.m3u 2> /dev/null'
alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null'
alias 1010='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8733.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WINSAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null'
alias ewtn='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://http.yourmuze.com/ewtn-2/mp3-128-s.mp3 2> /dev/null'
alias wabc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8723.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WABCAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null'
alias wktu='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wktu-fm.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/110/19973/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wktu-fm 2> /dev/null'
alias chant='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://calmradio.com/playlists-free/gregorian.pls 2> /dev/null'
alias chanteurs='/...
I've switched to using Plex now, I find iTunes and the Music app way to complicated to use and constantly throwing up dialog boxes when all I want to do is listen to some music.
I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.
> I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.
They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently.
But regardless of the details the end result is very often as you describe, and it's odd to see happen over and over. There are certainly managers and executives working over each of those groups that should be guiding them in the right direction so that things feel like a "part of the whole".
> They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently.
Every company of non-trivial size operates like that.
A company is usually a tree-like structure, where the branches are connected by the root node. Too bad that this particular company's root node was garbage-collected in 2011 while there were still live references to it.
i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui... all of their stuff is terrible.
the main problem: zero discoverablity - i need to google how to do things, then get some snotty fanboy answer about how easy and obvious it is, but there is literally no way to infer the functionality from the design.
they do love to steal context too... and interrupt your flow...
... i could go on and on, but having zero-discoverability is highly unforgivable, its an entire, rock-solid argument on its own.
At least on my OnePlus phone, you can double-tap the screen and drag up or down to zoom in or out, like a scroll wheel. It's better than buttons, in my humble opinion.
Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V works in Android too, among many other classical shortcuts. Try it with a Bluetooth keyboard or over USB-OTG. How about that for undiscoverable in a mobile OS? :)
> Not every feature needs to be immediately discoverable.
Not every feature does. But every function does. If there is no visual indication of how to zoom at all, there are users who will never even discover that they can zoom.
I have the OnePlus One still, actually. It's been in water and dropped on the ground, and somehow is still going strong. For $300, this is the best phone I have ever had, even ignoring the 64GB storage and out of the box rootability.
I've looked at the OnePlus 3, and it seems like a worthy successor. LinusTechTips on YouTube did a review on it. I'd recommend checking it out.
You're probably outside the 95th percentile on that one, though, and good design targets the rest of the user base. I think most people probably just got annoyed by accidentally hitting those, or by them taking up real-estate or cluttering the view.
> You're probably outside the 95th percentile on that one
In what way? If you mean one handed usage, it's pretty common here when people are standing on public transport, you need to hold on with one hand. If you mean the infrequency I need it, take a look through you're list of installed apps and tell me how many require zooming? Almost all are designed specifically to avoid it.
I agree with all you have written, but there is a way to zoom in or out without using your other hand: use your lips. "Muaa" zooms out, and "auum" zooms in. This will make public transport journeys more interesting (for the others).
I probably am. I spent some time in northern Europe, where the temperature would go as low as -25°C, around the time I stayed. I was loath to deglove my barely warm hands, and used my nose instead, for some basic operations.
What's wrong with Google Maps? I've just been watching a non-technical friend use it and the only thing that wasn't intuitive was adding an extra stop to her trip (and even then, she discovered it without needing to search for help).
Lack of quality control - the last two-ish months, the search feature on maps has been completely broken for me.
They rolled out a feature to limit search results to locations within your current zoom. Great! Problem is, they reloaded the entire page (not just the results partial) on every change.
The constant flickering made it very difficult to orient yourself around the map. Was infuriating to use and I'm very glad that they've now fixed it.
So tell me how am I supposed to find a route between x and y from my phone without being on x or y first?
It is doable, but how is it supposed to be done?
(For context: IIRC there used to be a shortcut to navigation for that feature. And yes I think ux designers mindlessly copying each others or Apple are at least partially to blame.(
Personally I think is flow is better than directly entering start and end for two reasons:
- The common case (go from where I am to somewhere else) is faster.
- I don't have to think about how to enter "my location", which isn't obvious (over the years I've seen - typing "my location", searching with the start box empty, pressing a special button for the purpose, and others).
Update: As lake99 and hawski pointed out it still is there. Just use the blue-sign-with-white-arrow-up-and-to-the-right (directions) and there the nice one is.
Bottom right blue circle with icon of a road sign - right turn <↱>. It is quite useful button, it can show you also time tables for public transport near you. But I discovered it by accident so it is not that evident as most icons.
But usually if I want to search for directions not to or from current location I just search for destination and later just change current location to different thing.
What is missing for me is the ability to select time of arrival/departure for car navigation. It is useful to see how traffic is predicted to look like in advance. But you can get something a bit like this (with just enough advance) by creating event in calendar and using Google Now. It will notify you when you must go with taking traffic in consideration.
They added the feature that used to bug me the most: when I search, my saved locations now get preferential treatment.
And, yet, the maps themselves are worse: they changed the algorithm for which labels are displayed, making it impossible to cause some street names to appear.
That's by far my biggest complaint. Driving in a dense and disorganized city, street names are sometimes the only way to sort out which of several connected (or vertically-overlapping) streets Maps actually wants me to take.
But with the labelling change, it's impossible to coax out the needed information. Combine that with Google's exotic definitions of "sharp" and "small" turns and it's surprisingly inconvenient.
On mobile, I would honestly say that Google Maps is the single most difficult app to navigate.
Add a route between A and B, then slightly scroll on the map. The context information disappears and once you get the bloody thing up again, how do you go back to results? It is infuriating.
My personal pet peeve is getting back to the map after clicking "explore food and drinks near you". There's an arrow at the top left, but it disappears once you scroll, and you might be on a different screen.
That UI is weird. The usual iOS swipe from left to go back gesture doesn't work, which I thought was because of the tabs.. but you also can't swipe between them. Seems silly.
1. In the most recent version, there is some action (I don't know which at the moment) which makes all UI elements disappear, and I don't know how to bring them back except by restarting the app.
2. My most common use-case is to search for some amenity within a certain area. So I pan and zoom to the area that I want to search, type in my query... and it zooms out to the city level to show me absurdly distant results. I can zoom back in afterwards and do "Search in this area", but it's still annoying every time.
1. Single tap on the map (but not on Points Of Interest) toggles UI visibility.
2. That one is the most annoying thing for me. It usually happens if you search for something that it can't find in visible area, but it looks random. Google Search taught me that you can write a bit sloppy and it still is able to find it. Than in Google Maps it can lead to showing you some cryptic place in another country.
Another annoying thing for me is a language problem. I am living now in Germany, but I am from Poland. You can't do category search in Polish, because it will show you results in Poland. But at the same time if you look on details for the German place you will see category in Polish. So you may not know what Google expects.
Also when you click on category icon from search list (those red icons) it will search in language of the country you're in, but you have to click on a name in your language.
But multiple language support suck mostly everywhere... Chrome offers site translation (some of the time). I prefer translations to English, because they are better than translations to Polish. I also don't want to translate it always, because it is not always needed (and flicker is annoying) or not good enough.
To translate a site to English I have to do this every time (my UI is in Polish, but I will write all in English, but translation is mine):
1. Tap on underlined "Polish" in sentence "Translate to Polish"
2. Tap "Polish" in "Translation language" menu
3. Scroll to the top to find "English"
4. Tap "English"
5. Tap "Ready"
6. Tap "Translate"
7. Ignore annoying confirmation by scrolling or tapping "Ready"
At least translation from context menu is sensible now. You can select text by long tapping and tap translate and it remembers what language you selected earlier and has the most recent used languages at the top of the language list.
Their reputation stemmed from the days where everything was discoverable. Want to delete a file? There's a trash can glued to your dock. Need to perform a function but don't know the name? Look it up in the Help menu's search box.
Now, though, they've done the Windows 8 thing of overloading gestures and hiding behaviors. Want to see your notifications? Two-finger swipe to the left, starting from the edge of the touchpad. If the piece of text hasn't been there since OS X first came out, is it clickable or not? Because I damn well can't tell, nothing new looks like a button anymore.
I could also talk about how the gaussian blur effect is just about the most wasteful effect you can apply to anything, and is a far cry from pioneering the first fast rounded rectangle drawing algorithm, or anything in that vein, but I don't need to.
Because Apple's UI is just no longer good. I'd rather every button look like a shimmering stupid bubble than an unusable postmodern art piece.
> Their reputation stemmed from the days where everything was discoverable. Want to delete a file? There's a trash can glued to your dock. Need to perform a function but don't know the name? Look it up in the Help menu's search box.
The trash is still glued to the dock. The Help menu still has a search box.
> Now, not everything is discoverable. Only some things.
Both of Striking's examples are wrong though. The notification menu has an icon in the top-right corner of the screen (next to the spotlight one), click it to get the widgets/notifications; and OSX buttons still looks like buttons, they have changed look slightly (from aqua) and that's about it. Links have always been in OSX, usually for contextual linking.
They seem to know some iOS and assume OSX is the exact same, which it isn't.
On c): recharge cycles are limited, as are Amper-hours. Idk though how much it takes, I just don't like blurs, it is like you're semi-blind or your screen is damaged, sort of. But flat interface would be too ugly without all that color blots. It is like a makeup to actually bad ui. Shame on Apple they lost it at iOS 7.
I'm not sure I accept D) as a full defense of a confusing system.
I get that some things can't be made intuitive, and have to be learned. But "there's a video somewhere if you know to look" is a crappy justification for the current setup. As is, non-regional gestures compete with regional versions of the same motion and the enabled-by-default gestures aren't terribly well chosen.
I've watched a lot of non-power-users work their touchpad, accidentally fire off either the wrong gesture or an unintended gesture, and then sort of click aimlessly until they get back to something recognizable. That's a sign that OS X is failing users, no matter how elegant things look to Apple.
want to eject a disk? drag it to the trash can...?
I think Apple was good at keeping things consistent across apps, but the chosen metaphors were sometimes just as confusing (if worse) than the blessed windows one.
Not that it matters, everything is learned behaviour anyways. Consistency is already a great achievement.
IIRC for trackpads at least it's been enabled by default for some time (though I believe the default gesture is a double-tap rather than a tap in the bottom-right corner).
But it's been considered a terrible design choice since 1984. It's not one of those things that we decided against long after it was put in place, Unix philosophy types were complaining about the inconsistency of that choice the day it came out.
1. Not very discoverable if your dock is set to auto-hide.
2. On a large screen, this action (the trash can transformation) can happen very far away from the place you're looking at, which means that you will miss it. This is a general gripe of mine with Mac OS: It will regularly place popup dialogs on seemingly random screens. I have three active screens, and when I'm looking at the left screen, the right screen is so far outside my FOV that I will literally not notice dialogs popping up there.
Sure, people can have as many screens as they can manage. I still think it's reasonable to assume that if you know how to configure a system to spread your desktop over three screens and to hide the widget that gives you the feedback/discoverability then you can use the skills that got you there to get you out of your predicament.
If your argument is that the dock is the wrong place for that feedback because it can be hidden, or that the disc/drive icons should always be closer to the dock, then we have a table laid for a good discussion.
I would argue that OS X still has bad multi-screen support because I shouldn't have to hunt for where dialog boxes and status updates have been placed. Yes, I'm capable of doing so, but that doesn't mean I want to.
Broadly, I object to the inconsistency and high astonishment factor more than any specific choice. For example:
- If a program has dialog boxes open (e.g. a 'find' box), they maintain relative position as you drag the main window across screens. Which, if you move to a smaller screen, puts them in offscreen no-man's-land where they can't actually be used or closed.
- Popups should consistently happen on either the active screen, or the active/furthest-forward window of the spawning program. As is, they unpredictably follow either rule, or borrow from the next bullet:
- Spotlight should appear somewhere sane and predictable. Either the same every time, or over my active window, or over my mouse cursor. Instead, it appears on the window which my Dock has most recently minimized to. My hidden Dock, which I have to use the mouse to locate/move. And then let re-minimize, because OS X doesn't update Spotlight's target when it appears but when it goes away. And which can automatically move itself to different screens without my help, based on where I open programs. Again, invisibly because it's hidden.
- And Spotlight's screen is also the screen where it will open new programs (a good decision). So I can't just look for it, I have to revert to the mouse to move either Dock or program to the screen I've been attempting to use this entire time.
So rambling aside, I think OS X actively causes time-consuming problems for multi-monitor users. I resent that because it's a pain even if I memorize the rules and how to solve the problems.
In particular, I object to tying large swathes of behavior to the Dock, since it's location/contents are both invisible and unpredictable for many users.
> want to eject a disk? drag it to the trash can...?
This is the appendix of the Mac UI.
Gather round, kids, and listen to Grandpa tell you a story of the days when Macs had only one floppy disk drive. When you wanted to copy a file from one disk to another, you had to (physically) eject the first disk to insert the second one, but the first disk volume was still logically mounted so you could use it as a source or destination. So the volume's icon remained on the desktop, only dimmed so you knew the disk wasn't physically present.
So you physically eject a disk by selecting it and pressing Command-E (remember, only one mouse button), but how do you get rid of the ghost icon afterwards? Same way you get rid of anything -- you drag it to the trash.
From there it's an obvious shortcut to combining the two operations by dragging a "live" icon to the trash to both eject it and remove its icon in one step. (Well, obvious in 1985, anyway.)
Now that we can right-click the icon to eject the volume and have forgotten the origins of the drag-to-trash gesture, it may seem nonsensical, but those of us who were there at the beginning were grateful for the shortcut. (Also, get off my lawn.)
As someone who got to use a PowerBook G4 (running 10.5.8) from time to time (in fact, I'm typing this very comment on it), I fail to see how their current UI is any more undiscoverable than the UI from 7 years ago.
The trash icon was there in the Dock in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. The search function in help was there in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. To remove things from the Dock, right click the icon and the "Remove from dock" is still there in both versions. Any menu items that will open a dialog still indicates with three dots ("...") in both versions. Shortcut for opening dictionary is still not very discoverable in both versions (Cmd-Ctrl-D). I still don't know how to trigger Space/Expose without either using gesture (in 10.11) or look up the shortcut key (in 10.5).
I always see people saying Apple UI got worse in discoverability for the past few years and make it sounds like earlier releases were perfect, but I don't believe that is true. The bad part of the UI interaction was always there (e.g. drag icon from the dock to somewhere to remove it). The main difference I see is that 10.11 has a LOT more features than the 10.5, but the core interaction remain the same in regard to discoverability. In 10.11, we're exposed more to gestures, because it's quick, but there is always alternative way to trigger something without gesture.
I'd go back even further to find decent Mac UI, to the pre-X OS. Yes, it was a reliability garbage fire, but the Apple of that time really invested in usability. They published a 400-page book[1] for developers that explained the principles behind usability, showed how interface design fits into the development process, and gave specific guidelines for each type of interface element. The guidelines they publish today[2] are a lifeless husk by comparison.
> As someone who got to use a PowerBook G4 (running 10.5.8) from time to time (in fact, I'm typing this very comment on it), I fail to see how their current UI is any more undiscoverable than the UI from 7 years ago.
Problem: You plug in an external monitor and for some reason it doesn't immediately display an images. What do you do?
In pre-el-Capitan, you open up the display settings pane and press the button marked "Detect Displays".
In El Capitan, you open up the display settings pane and note that the button is not there. Are you screwed? It appears so. So you run a google search and discover that if you hold down the option key, the button that had been there for maybe 16 years magically appears in an area of what previously appeared to be blank in the dialog.
I believe that's called the Indiana Jones UI pattern.[0]
So yes, the discoverability has gotten worse over the years. This is something that was visible and made invisible.
The old way doesn't seem discoverable to me either. The only thing that I would find discoverable is typing "display" "monitor" "screen" into spotlight.
Maybe this is just a personal quirk, but it makes me hate how spotlight will frequently show web or file text results instead of whatever it is I'm looking for.
The best thing Apple could do for my user experience is have all of their employees spend a day tagging UI elements with every relevant search string they can think of.
Notifications have a dedicated button at the far right of the menu bar, a prime Fitt's Law location. The help and the trash are still where they've been for years.
I take some issue with this because you're describing one method to resolve a task when there are many.
You can also see notifications by just clicking on the omnipresent icon in the Finder Bar, or act on the notifications themselves by clicking them as they appear.
Like, I agree that the versatility of the trackpads is a blessing and a curse - beyond a few common ones, most gestures are unintuitive and it's probably why not too many applications take use of them on non-mobile devices. But the issue isn't with Apple having hidden behaviors here, it's that one method is less visible than others which are very accessible. The issue with the Windows 8 charms was that all means of accessing them were obfuscated. You had to move to a certain corner or swipe from a certain way on trackpads that often had poor sensitivity (or conversely, were overly sensitive) and the behavior was erratic and unpredictable.
It's fine to dislike aesthetics, but that doesn't make it unusable. In the case of the text buttons, I can't think of an instance off the top of my head where the text wasn't clearly marked as button with either a drop down arrow or ... or some other item.
some of these are not obvious, the little arrows pointing right are a bit confusing for instance - i only discovered they did anything when i clicked one in error.
Wanted to eject a disk back then? Drag it onto the trash can. Not the most clever ui decision in the days when formatting floppy disks was a common task.
Yes, but there was still good reason to hate it - what about users who learned the pattern the other way?
It sounds silly, but ejecting disks was about as common as deleting local content. Overlapping "delete" functionality with anything else still threatens to cause unintended deletes, even if this was better than the reverse.
(It's still fuzzy with Volumes in OS X, where you can click an 'eject' button that effectively deletes downloaded content if you haven't copied it out. Check out how many Volumes low-confidence users have running some time.)
I don't know, iOS was doing a lot of these things before Windows 8 was even in the earliest of pre-release states.
Sure the flat UI thing could be argued to have inspired some of Apple's later work... but I think the lack of discoverability started at Apple and was inherited by Microsoft, not the other way around.
You are definitely right that it has gotten worse in OS X overtime though...
Agree.
I really love Apple, but I always find myself Googling for "Can I do that in iTunes?" (the answer is usually No) or "How to do this?".
And I can't say that I want something weird.
Some workflows look so simple and obvious to me (and I think most people have the same workflows), but they are literally impossible with iTunes and other Apple stuff.
For example, I have a 2TB AirPort Time Capsule, but it looks impossible to backup my iPod or MacBook directly to it (which is nonsense, why do I need 2TB then?).
So I have to create backups with iTunes, then go to `~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/` and copy everything manually to the capsule.
Searching for a song in iTunes is always confusing. Why don't they have global search field that searches in both Library and connected device?
Photos app is another nightmare (and photos management overall)! Again, I just want to connect my iPhone or my camera and transfer photos to AirPort Time Capsule. Impossible.
Or the fact they don't have proper window management and themes. One have to use third-party apps full of hacks to have, say, dark window theme or some parody of tiling WM.
You can use Time Machine to automatically back up your MacBook to the Time Capsule, and as .../MobileSync/Backup/ will obviously be a part of that backup, your iPod backups will come along for the ride as well.
I could be wrong, but my impression is kovrik wants to back up the iPod to the Time Capsule directly. In other words, the backup shouldn't go through the MacBook at all (or, speculating based on my experience, kovrik wants to avoid storing the entire iPod backup on the MacBook as a step in the process).
Yes. That is what I mean.
My wife and I both have 6 Apple devices, 624GB in total (well, yes, they are not full yet, but still) + 1 2TB AirPort Time Capsule, which could store all these GBs easily.
All devices (except for old iPod) have WiFi and can connect to the capsule.
Do you know how I transferred my photos to the capsule last time?
I had to:
1) Connect iPhone to Macbook (via USB cable, not wifi)
2) Run shitty Photos app
3) Copy all pictures to the capsule...well, NO! Select 50% of pictures (because I don't have enough space on Macbook), press Import all selected pictures (don't forget to check Delete after import!)
4) Wait, wait, wait
5) Then drag all imported pictures to the capsule
6) Wait, wait, wait
7) Then Google where Photos stores all photos
8) Delete them
9) Repeat for the rest pictures
It is even more difficult if you want to transfer YOUR music from iPod to the capsule. I had to make a backup, then google backup location, then copy everything manually (bad thing is that all files have cryptic names).
Apple loves to say that all their devices are integrated with each other.
What I want is, for example, to press 'Transfer all pictures/music/whatever to Time Capsule' and just wait until it is done (via WiFi).
> What I want is, for example, to press 'Transfer all pictures/music/whatever to Time Capsule' and just wait until it is done (via WiFi).
It's not an Apple product, but "Plex" can transfer your photos to your own harddrive/library if you buy the pro version. You can for example run the Plex server on your Mac or on a Raspberry Pie, and then let Plex synchronize your photos to your Capsule over wifi or 3G.
Another solution (I'm using it with Apple devices but it might work with other type of hw) could be to use Image Capture app included in macOS/OS X which lets you access the photos directly and exporta them to a folder of your choice.
Edit: it also allows to delete them directly after import
a) Photos stores its library in your Pictures directory. You can back it up entirely to any drive. Or if you want individual photos just use the Export/Save menu option.
b) Almost every app bar a few older ones can be made full screen. Unless I am confused there will be no black bar at the bottom. I definitely can't see it.
c) You can do basic side/side tiling if your apps are full screen. Most people aren't clamoring for advanced window management and there are dozens of tools available that aren't hacks by any measure.
Please. Don't try to defend Photos.app, it's an abysmal piece of junk. It breaks UI metaphors. Saving its library to your pictures directory? Sure. But it's a royal pain if I don't want to store those pictures on a Mac. Which wouldn't be such an issue if Apple let you upgrade the storage. But no, you can't do that. So buy iCloud and shut the hell up, right?
I find myself wondering daily, how the hell have Apple dropped the ball so badly, and how on earth have they not been steamrolled by Microsoft.
>Which wouldn't be such an issue if Apple let you upgrade the storage. But no, you can't do that. So buy iCloud and shut the hell up, right?
>I find myself wondering daily, how the hell have Apple dropped the ball so badly, and how on earth have they not been steamrolled by Microsoft.
Because there's legions of gullible suckers who'll line up to buy the latest iDevice and then believe everything Apple tells them, whether it's "you're holding it wrong" or "you don't need to copy music files to your phone, just buy them again on iTunes" or "you don't need a headphone jack, just buy a new pair of Bluetooth headphones from Beats for $$$".
I always hear this, but then I look at all the people I know who are less technically able, who struggle daily with Apple's stupid ecosystem. Oh, I filled up the 16GB iPad with Photos, how do I make more space?
It's getting harder and harder to answer the questions they ask.
Are you saying they come to you with these questions? What do you tell them?
I know what I'd tell them: "Easy, transfer your old photos onto your computer to free up some space." Now if they ask how to do that, I'll tell them "I don't know, I don't use Apple devices. Try asking Siri." Unless maybe it's some hot girl I'm trying to bed, then I'll work a little harder, but I'll still try to convince her to dump Apple and switch to Android so I don't have to deal with this stuff in the future.
As a PC-only user since the days of DOS up till Windows 8, and having used Windows 10 after jumping ship to Macs a few hours ago, macOS has demonstrably more discoverability than Windows.
One example: Just click on the Help menu, in any app, and type something like "show" or "find" or any other operation, and it will show you all the menu items which have that word in their name.
That feature is a part of the Cocoa subsystem and comes for free with every app, and very handy when you know an app has a certain feature but you're not sure which menu it's buried in (like standard operations and filters in different image editing apps.)
Also, all the shortcuts and standard menus are the same in every macOS app, and can be discovered/modified from System Preferences -> Keyboard, again for any app.
Take "Preferences", which in Windows is sometimes under Edit, Tools, or the app name menu (which imitates macOS.)
I could go on and on, but "zero discoverability" is an undeserved hyperbole.
> "zero discoverability" is an undeserved hyperbole.
Actually, it's a deserved hyperbole.
It's not like Apple haven't realized their mistakes... They wrote a book in the late 80s about UI and it's still one of the best works. But they've abandoned many of their most-important guidelines, and almost always for the worse.
They threw out the discoverability baby with the skeuomorphic bathwater.
i would say that i think recent windows 8/10 are considerably worse than OS X - they approach iOS levels of undiscoverability.
maybe i am overstating it a bit - maybe unforgivable sounds really bad, but what i find it hard to believe that most people couldn't trivially improve on the more confusing or poorly implemented UI elements.
I'm surprised they haven't been hit with a class action lawsuit for the iTunes UX yet, since it seems designed to needlessly fill up space on your computer / phone in order to get you to upgrade to larger models.
E.g. with the podcasts sync feature, you can only decide how many episodes you want stored for every podcast at a global level, not per podcast. So e.g. you can either store the most recent ten episodes of each podcast, or every episode of each podcast. So even though for most podcasts ten is probably enough, you end up needing to store every episode of every podcast on your phone even if there is only one podcast where you want every episode.
Similarly, once you purchase an app the only option is to download all the new updates, even if you don't use the app anymore. There is no option to archive the app, so it's either let iTunes keep installing the updates each week or else delete it the app you paid for from your computer. Again, this just needlessly churns through backup disks so that Apple can sell people more external hard drives.
These are just a couple examples, but it seems like pretty much every features of iTunes is designed to force you to buy more stuff from Apple that you don't actually need.
> it seems like pretty much every features of iTunes is designed to force you to buy more stuff from Apple that you don't actually need.
I actually highly doubt this. Apple has done a lot of work (starting in iOS 4 IIRC) to actually remove the need for iTunes.
From my personal experience, and that of working at the Genius Bar, most people don't use iTunes at all. With regular backups and sync happening over iCloud, with Apple Music/iTunes-over-the-cloud/Spotify, the use case for iTunes - ESPECIALLY for managing an iOS device - is incredibly small.
In fact, more and more iTunes features are added to lessen the space it takes up - the default behaviour of iTunes (as a music listening app) is for it to stream songs and download as much as possible on-demand. My 45GB iTunes library only takes up 15GB on my Mac.
I say this as someone who uses iTunes daily to listen to music, but never actually touches iOS devices through it.
I still think there should be some kind of iOS device management on Mac (for backups and old-fashion-sync), but I'm not the first person to call for it to be overhauled and split out into a seperate app (iSync anyone?)
iTunes is not necessary at this point. I have never agreed to the terms of service in iTunes desktop and thus have never used it. I don't know if there are any terms to agree to on the phone because it also never gets used there. iTunes for me lives in a folder called "other" that I never open. (Spotify is my music player)
The podcast thing is not true. You can create "stations" with different retention settings, and put the podcasts inside.
Archiving is redundant. You can have manual update and update the app as needed, you can have auto update and update all installed apps, or you can just remove the app from your device and install it again later when you need it. If you don't use an app, just remove it. You can redownload it later. Why keep things you admit you don't use?
I've been wondering lately if it stems from the purchasing experience. I'm looking at getting a new PC lately and there are just so many options from supplier to hardware details. How many cores do I want? Which processor architecture? What nanometer size? How much RAM? How big a hard disk? What graphics card (a dozen questions on it's own)?
Even if you restrict yourself to one supplier, they have dozens of variants and arcane naming schemes that makes working out what's current something that takes hours of research. Compare this to apple which only has a couple of SKU's at a time in each category and it makes purchasing a lot simpler.
My thinking is that apple == easy is something that just sticks in your mind from the outset.
Heh, Apple don't really make it easy anymore either. You have to choose upfront how much RAM and HDD you need, because unlike on almost every other decent manufacturer's higher end machines, you can't change them later.
But I agree. It's even worse with phones - have you seen the number of phones Samsung have? I have a nack for remembering model numbers and specs and even I find it absurdly difficult.
Speaking of, Apple is to blame for the absolute worst case of discoverability I've ever encountered: getting the iOS App Store app to list all apps labeled "Essentials".
Dug around, couldn't find it. Googled it, found a few forum threads where everybody concluded it couldn't be done. Went into an Apple store, gave an employee a few minutes to figure it out, and he gave up.
And yet, it's possible.
Rather than just tell you, I'm going to leave this as a challenge. See how long it takes you to figure this out.
Wow. That was about five minutes of hunting, and I actually seriously considered the possibility that your comment was a troll. That was impressively unexpected.
Took me no more than 10 seconds. After noticing that the essential terms is translated into a query for apps TAGGED as essentials by Apple (Facebook, Google Mail etc), I just put the term in quotes("essentials" vs essentials in the search bar).
It's a convention followed for literal matches in tons of environments (including Google Search IIRC).
Why on this blue-green earth would you want to ask a vendor for what they consider "essential". How is this useful to you? Why would you expect the vendor to provide this for you (except to further their own sales agenda)? This is a straw man that I implore you to burn.
Perhaps the App Store has been upgraded in the last 10 hours, but I too simply typed "essentials" into the search bar and it worked fine (on both iOS and Mac, as well as iTunes). Didn't even need to put it in quotes.
Perhaps actually doing the text search is the barrier you mean? Were you looking for an item labeled "Essentials" in the Quick Links section? I agree that would be preferable, but it's not like doing a search is the Riddle of the Sphinx.
For my part, my surprise comes from the fact that I have to use the free-text search UI to list matches for a tag, and whether it matches free text or a tag is completely opaque. It is hostile UI when I can filter on "Games" in the category list, and search for "Angry Birds" by free text, and yet tags live in a nebulous nowhere-space. If I wanted to find apps titled "<Language> Essentials", I'd be pretty annoyed to find them disappear behind an unexpected magic keyword-to-tag search.
In this case, there is no good place to put tag search because tags aren't first-class citizens.
Good to know I'm not the only one who can't figure out UIs these days. Mobile apps have all these icons that give me absolutely no idea what action will be performed. I miss the days of being able to hover and get an English description. (I guess this is where I say "get offa my lawn!")
apples UI reputation is from the mac days when it's major selling point over windows boxes was that the UI was nicer, shinier and easier. the ipods looked nice, and the iphones looked nice.
but the UX for some apple things is trash.
I've had years of IT working with crap interfaces and itunes is still one of the most confusing and willfully annoying programs i've used.
Yeah, that's because it's not a maximise button. It's the button that adjusts the window size to the content size.
At least, that's what it used to be. They changed the default behavior to 'fullscreen' because all the people coming from Windows thought that's what the button should do...
Does OSX even have keyboard controls for window management, like win+arrows? I think I have a 3rd party thing doing that, which seems like it shouldn't be necessary.
Yes, it does. Pretty much the entire OS can be controlled by keyboard. You may have to turn on Assistive Services to make it work in all contexts, but it's definitely there.
Until a few years ago, the difference to windows was like night & day.
Whenever I had to use a Windows PC during the Windows XP - Windows 7 days, I'd wonder how Windows users ever got anything done.
Windows would almost constantly interrupt any sort of flow with notifications about updated virus definitions, really really urgent updates that need a reboot right now, the highly relevant information that I got a new DHCP IP etc. etc.
It's gotten better now I believe, and OS X usability has indeed suffered a bit while expanding in features.
No, it's gotten much worse with Windows 10: now it'll force you to spend 45 minutes downloading and installing updates (while you can't do anything else) and then rebooting, at whatever time it feels like it, even if you're right in the middle of a critically important meeting. I don't remember XP-7 doing stuff like that.
I had an SSH password once with a # character in it. I tried to log in from a friend's Macbook and was forced to ask him how to type this. Apparently it was Option-3. Completely unmarked. Astonishing. But hey, at least you can type §.
Huh? I have a Macbook Pro and a Microsoft keyboard on an old Win XP box right next to each other right now and they both, clearly labeled, have # above the "3" for shift-3
I believe this is because I live in the UK. Apple seems to have invented some kind of bizarre hybrid layout between the UK and US ones. Shift-3 is the £ symbol here.
"The # symbol is replaced by the £ symbol (as on PC keyboards); the # is available by pressing ⌥ Option+3
More recent Apple British keyboards move the backquote/~ key to the left of the Z key and replace it with a section sign (§) and a plus-minus sign (±) respectively.
The Enter key spans two rows and is shaped similarly to the Enter key of many ISO PC keyboards."
I'm still kinda curious why iTunes has blocked the UI thread so often for such a long time, perhaps a limitation of the overall architecture of the app combined with having webviews everywhere calling out to native code?
This is the most annoying in Itunes I tried Apple Music but couldn't stand to wait between each click to album artist and so on.
That why I switched to Spotify which is much faster and easy to use.
The hearts affect Apple Music algorithms. The stars are legacy (I don't even think the new iOS Music app has a way to see/change them, or I just can't find it in that tire-fire of a UI)
There's no reason to convert backwards if they want to phase out stars. Also, I'm guessing they hope to make the act of pressing heart an "experience" for the listener. Give everyone the joy of professing your love of a song to their algorithms. I know I got a dialog playing it up the first time I pressed the heart.
Although I'm a proud owner of a Winamp license, I've been using AIMP over the past year or so. It's blatantly, if not purposefully, a Winamp clone but has a few excellent innovations of its own and is frequently updated. I strongly recommend it for any Winamp fans.
Are you saying on OS X I wouldn't have gotten the inscrutable dialog saying, "You are about to start playback. Do you want to clear the 2 songs previously added to Up Next?"
(I guess, all these years later, I kinda get it? But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue.)
Honestly, I don't know, about that particular detail. I haven't seen that, though. Which version of iTunes was this?
Anyway, the question itself isn't that offensive, right? They want to know whether you intend to play your selected song and THEN the things in queue, or clear out the queue instead. I admit that a modal dialog is...sub-optimal here, but I'm not sure how else to do this.
That dialog happens when you've added some songs to Up Next, then double-click on a new playlist/album. Double clicking on a playlist/album means play this song and all the ones that come after it in the album. So you've given itunes conflicting instructions. Without that dialog, there's no way of resolving the conflict without pissing someone off.
> But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue.
You can do this by right clicking a song, and clicking Play Next. There is no dialog for that. But imagine how frustrating it would be if they adopt your proposed behavior for someone double clicking on an album. What if I just want to clear everything and just play this album? I want to hear it now, not wait until this song ends.
Because a reputation is the result of the experience of many different people who communicate with each other. Your experience with Apple software is a very small sample.
Your position is a bit like saying: "Although everyone else thinks the earth is round, it looks flat to me!". Of course, you're free to disagree with the consensus opinion, but you'd probably need a better argument than personal experience.
If the consensus differs from your personal experience, it's worth taking a second look.
It is a fair question. However, iTunes is arguably Apple's worst product. So it's not really a representative sample for judging their entire output on.
Oh Well, if Apple cannot do a half-decent App on windows maybe they shouldn't develop software targeting windows users until they can?
Microsoft, for example, are developing their Office suite of applications for OSX and they are not off the hook for any UI/UX issues for Mac Users. They must make the Apps work for that platform's users as they expect.
If they are marketing their platform and its services & Apps for other platforms, then at least they should give respect to those customer's choices.
After I subscribed to iTunes Match, it "helpfully" reworked all of my ~4300 song iTunes library so that most of the songs where I ripped a whole CD into iTunes were now spread across various "Greatest Hits" albums from the same (or sometimes different) artist, with random cover art. And after reading Jim Dalrymple's horror stories of upgrading to Apple Music, I am fearful both of ever discontinuing my iTunes Match subscription or upgrading to Apple Music.
My solution thus far has been to stop even trying to listen to music on iTunes and switch to podcasts instead (on Overcast, not Apple's horrible Podcasts app). #ThanksiTunes
This is the one complaint I agree with. Honestly, all the so called UX problems in those tweets are eye-rollingly contrived, but there's no excuse for messing with the actual music that I own.
I feel your pain. Same thing happened to me twice(!) and then it tried to delete all my Google contacts.
iTunes is now second from the top on my list of software-I-will-never-use-again[0], so that means no shiny Apple devices for me. Which is a shame, because otherwise I quite like Apple stuff.
I'm having a hard time understanding these tweets.
Playing a song and adding songs to 'up next' are two different things. That dialog box has saved me multiple times. What's wrong with it? It only occurs when you are telling iTunes to do conflicting things that it cannot resolve by itself. It's a better outcome than clearing a playlist someone may have spent a lot of time working on.
Software update and login dialogs? Yes those are a thing many apps include. What makes these unique or interesting?
The podcasts menu seems super straight forward to me. Am I missing something here? It says exactly what it does.
Contacting the iPhone update server dialog? Once upon a time Apple's servers would go down under a heavy load of people activating new iOS devices. Presumably the dialog is there to inform you there is a problem contacting the iPhone update servers. Either way I think it's long since been changed.
Okay. So I’m no UX expert, just a developer and I’ve also worked in product management. I think at some point, if you work in this field, you have to develop instincts around the design and experience of things. A modal (i.e. app-locking) dialog that says “contacting the iphone software update server”, which is current behavior and not changed as far as I can tell, is so far out of the realm of acceptable in my view, that if we differ on that point, we can’t even begin a discussion about the more subtle issues… (Consider that Chrome updates itself all the time; now imagine if you launched Chrome, typed in gmail.com, and it suddenly locked up all your tabs because it was ‘contacting the Chrome software update server’.)
After all, design trades in subtleties, otherwise if the discussion is just about explaining the purpose for a widget, everything in an interface can be explained, even this well-known ‘bad UI’ example: http://i.imgur.com/UJXoqwR.png
Would you mind developing a QuickLook plugin for the latest OS X/macOS releases that could play FLAC? :) I've been breaking my head over it and don't seem to have any solutions.
Spotify has just as bad if not worse UX as iTunes/Apple Music. Spotify kept taking away useful features from their desktop app and promised to return them, but never did, even years later. Plus, I don't need to run another instance of Chrome and Adobe Flash which constantly consumes 5% of my CPU and a few hundred MB of RAM just to listen to some music. While still not perfect, I'm pretty happy with the newest release of iTunes and the iOS music app.
Completely disagree. Spotify has nailed the desktop/mobile music app UX like nobody ever has, and it is an absolute joy to use. Yes it's missing a few features, but nothing that's actually truly essential to just listening to music.
The single worst thing about itunes, in my opinion, is the way it handles duplicate songs. It has a "detect duplicates" feature, but all that does is show a list of groups of songs that it thinks are duplicates, and it has false positives! But the one thing it can't do, is detect when you've added multiple copies of the exact same file in the same directory.
My music collection needs to by synced across computers, and if it refused to add the exact same file twice, then the operation would be trivial. Add mp3s to your music directory, drag and drop all files to itunes, and let it detect new songs. Since it's not, I have to do a long series of "okay, the timestamp on this file is newer than the newest added-on date in itunes.... I think.... except this directory was untarred, so it retains old timestamps, and blah blah blah..."
fdupes is your friend in cases like these — it finds duplicate files fast. As usual, the CLI tools are much better at solving problems than a terrible GUI like iTunes.
The problem isn't duplicate files, it's that iTunes has an internal list of songs, and it allows the same file to appear in the list twice. I can manage a directory of files, I just can't manage iTunes' indexing of them.
I understand why you would have assumed this was a file issue, though, because the real problem is the most idiotically stupid thing ever.
You missed the point. iTunes is a old product holding together well.
* No doubt if iTunes was designed today it would be completely different. But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!)
* Say iTunes failed today. No doubt the writer would say it deserved it, and the product was a failure from the beginning. But I want to emphasise that iTunes has existed for several years now and has given many hours of pleasure for many millions of users. it works well and is a success.
You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well. It won't get better. What is going to happen with it? It is obvious. You don't have to go past Microsoft with Internet Explorer. They kept that product going for years and it was a great success. However eventually the tech aged and they replaced it with a new product, Microsoft Edge. The same will happen with iTunes.
>But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!)
The UI changes so much with each release that I have no clue how to navigate any more, and don't care to learn because I'll have to relearn it all again in 12-24 months. There is no consistency, and legacy to uphold, except perhaps a legacy codebase.
> as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI
I cannot think of an application with a less consistent UI than iTunes. Every major version seems to present a total rethink and re-engineering of the entire UI layer.
If consistency is a goal for iTunes then it has failed dramatically.
Well to be fair the title might be: iTunes will never work well ON WINDOWS.
I was always wondering why I can read so much rants about a good product I've been using on a daily basis for years... Well it seams that the Windows version sucks, and what is described is really a world away from the native cocoa version on macOS.
There is no user experience difference. There hasn't been for at least 10 years. You can't put together a post that says "this is how it works on OS X" versus "how it works on Windows". Because it's the same.
iTunes was beautiful up to 10.7. Then they removed the column browser, disabled the Library view, and broke USB sync. I still haven't upgraded, and I'm desperate for another company to step in.
Do you still have to use iTunes to transfer music to iPhones? Can't you just copy files over and use some other playback app on the iPhone? The author sounds makes it sound like they are "forced" to use iTunes.
(disclaimer: the newest Apple product I own was manufactured in 1983)
There is no "copying files over" with iDevices. For a long time there was "gtkpod" / "libgpod" which reverse-engineered iPod protocol and database format to load songs on an iPod. But on later iPods it involved an extracted Apple signing key, and Apple issued (successful) DMCA takedowns on websites which provided these keys.
Most pages on the gtkpod website currently appear to be defunct, probably because it's been impractical to make it work with iPhones.
Playlist sync is the #1 thing why I use iTunes on Windows for years now with Android phone. It's easy, seamless and works. Manually copying multiple GBs and keeping playlists on both devices seems asinine.
Sadly I haven't found a Linux replacement which syncs music like this, probably no one is interested in making that works since everything is cloud nowadays.
KDE Connect is Android-only, and even if there is an iOS version sometime I don't think it would ever be able to support file syncing like on Android due to Apple restrictions on filesystem access.
This is one of those simple things I was happiest about when I finally moved from iOS to Android. Look, it's an operating system which actually allows you to move any files you want back and forth like with any other external storage! What an amazing innovation! How did they do it?! It was like having handcuffs removed.
There are many other reasons, but this is probably my biggest issue with iOS (well, this and all the hours of my life iTunes wasted while I wrestled with it to attempt something simple, such as its constant, needlessly slow & complex updates). It's intentionally broken to inconvenience us in the hopes of making more money unethically. I shudder in revulsion.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadConstructively: everything else aside, one glaring and easily-fixed problem is the dialog boxes. No program released after 1997 should be so behind in the state of the art that it throws up modal dialogs that lock up the whole app to say pointless things like “We’re checking for updates”.
The only thing that bugs me, is on iOS, when I load the music app (that's basically iTunes for iOS, right?) it shows a blank page until it can connect to the their servers to grab some data. It doesn't have a problem if I'm on wifi or a fast connection, but I'm often in places where my service is shit, and I get a white screen and can't pick what music I want to listen to. My workaround is to pull the menu up from the bottom of the screen and just hit "play" and then it usually works.
But iTunes itself, I do like.
Someone around here put it best a few wks ago in an iPhone7 discussion: Steve Jobs is dead.
The stock android music app was, last time I punished myself by using it, terrible. This cloud integration stuff is so damn pushy. I wish there was something out there with only the features of winamp, but enough UI polish that it doesn't look like some college kid's hobby project.
It doesn't though. I just tried. Start playback, plug phone (keeps playing), sync (itunes still playing), disconnect, itunes has never stopped playing.
I've honestly stopped using iTunes for the most part after 10+ years of problems like that. It's weird, but I'll listen to music on my phone while using my computer. I also sync phones/ipods a lot less often since so much has moved to the cloud. It may not interrupt playback, but I swear I still see modal dialogs when syncing.
I still think they should be completely separate applications.
I don't seem to have the same issue with playback and syncing.
I'm really picky about OSX annoyances and confusing fake-ease-of-use from Apple, but I do use iTunes fairly regularly just to listen to music and podcasts and I have never had any issues.
Here's why:
I only use iTunes to just play tracks. I don't use it for anything else.
All of my file org and maintenance and backups and transfer - all of that is done from the command line with cp/mv/rsync/etc.
For me, iTunes is just a play button and nothing else. I use command-o to open files and then click play and that's it.
That's why I still use OSX even though I hate it. No matter what the OS refuses to let me do (or figure out to do) I can always just force the issue with the command line - and that wasn't an option always in Windows ...
That is also why this weird "you're root but not actually root" in the newest versions of OSX has me worried.
However, if I were trying to organize my mp3 library in it, I would lose my mind, I think .
Where I think it is weak though is it's meta data format, it's some structured unified file that is opaque. As your media library grows things slow down. I'm somewhat confident that it can be corrupted but I have limited visibility in to how it's corrupted and less in to how to fix it. Thing is, people have gigantic media collections, I'd think something like sqlite could fix it. Along with that, as it has morphed over the years, there is this divide as to where the data lives. Like your podcast subscriptions can be duplicated in the cloud (makes sense so you can pull them on your phone) It's not super clear where the data really lives or where the canonical source of truth should be for it.
I also keep aliases in my .bash_profile for streams like this:
Here is my list:
I did a similar thing (using `mplayer` though) for me, wrapping it in a script that takes shortcuts for stream names:
https://gist.github.com/EarlGray/d64514459892650881353a465c4...
I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.
They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently.
But regardless of the details the end result is very often as you describe, and it's odd to see happen over and over. There are certainly managers and executives working over each of those groups that should be guiding them in the right direction so that things feel like a "part of the whole".
Every company of non-trivial size operates like that.
But bafflingly so. It would take less than year to write a better music player/app manager/etc from the ground up.
Given Apple's almost infinite resources, I don't understand why this hasn't happened.
I can only assume there are good commercial reasons for leaving iTunes the software equivalent of week-old underpants.
the main problem: zero discoverablity - i need to google how to do things, then get some snotty fanboy answer about how easy and obvious it is, but there is literally no way to infer the functionality from the design.
they do love to steal context too... and interrupt your flow...
... i could go on and on, but having zero-discoverability is highly unforgivable, its an entire, rock-solid argument on its own.
Take keyboard shortcuts - they're EXTREMELY undiscoverable, but they're not required for most operations, it's more of a power-user feature.
Not every feature does. But every function does. If there is no visual indication of how to zoom at all, there are users who will never even discover that they can zoom.
I've looked at the OnePlus 3, and it seems like a worthy successor. LinusTechTips on YouTube did a review on it. I'd recommend checking it out.
It's annoying as hell when you're holding a coffee and want to zoom.
In what way? If you mean one handed usage, it's pretty common here when people are standing on public transport, you need to hold on with one hand. If you mean the infrequency I need it, take a look through you're list of installed apps and tell me how many require zooming? Almost all are designed specifically to avoid it.
http://www.carlsednaoui.com/post/46803524724/google-maps-one...
They rolled out a feature to limit search results to locations within your current zoom. Great! Problem is, they reloaded the entire page (not just the results partial) on every change.
The constant flickering made it very difficult to orient yourself around the map. Was infuriating to use and I'm very glad that they've now fixed it.
It is doable, but how is it supposed to be done?
(For context: IIRC there used to be a shortcut to navigation for that feature. And yes I think ux designers mindlessly copying each others or Apple are at least partially to blame.(
2. Ask for directions
3. Replace your location with y (or x).
4. Reverse start and end if necessary.
Personally I think is flow is better than directly entering start and end for two reasons:
- The common case (go from where I am to somewhere else) is faster.
- I don't have to think about how to enter "my location", which isn't obvious (over the years I've seen - typing "my location", searching with the start box empty, pressing a special button for the purpose, and others).
> - I don't have to think about how to enter "my location"
IIRC at some point this where solved rather nicely by offering you start location pre-filled with your current address.
This was on Android. Is your UX any different?
But usually if I want to search for directions not to or from current location I just search for destination and later just change current location to different thing.
What is missing for me is the ability to select time of arrival/departure for car navigation. It is useful to see how traffic is predicted to look like in advance. But you can get something a bit like this (with just enough advance) by creating event in calendar and using Google Now. It will notify you when you must go with taking traffic in consideration.
(For some reason it seems I only tried the search field and looked in the menu.)
And, yet, the maps themselves are worse: they changed the algorithm for which labels are displayed, making it impossible to cause some street names to appear.
But with the labelling change, it's impossible to coax out the needed information. Combine that with Google's exotic definitions of "sharp" and "small" turns and it's surprisingly inconvenient.
Add a route between A and B, then slightly scroll on the map. The context information disappears and once you get the bloody thing up again, how do you go back to results? It is infuriating.
1. In the most recent version, there is some action (I don't know which at the moment) which makes all UI elements disappear, and I don't know how to bring them back except by restarting the app.
2. My most common use-case is to search for some amenity within a certain area. So I pan and zoom to the area that I want to search, type in my query... and it zooms out to the city level to show me absurdly distant results. I can zoom back in afterwards and do "Search in this area", but it's still annoying every time.
2. That one is the most annoying thing for me. It usually happens if you search for something that it can't find in visible area, but it looks random. Google Search taught me that you can write a bit sloppy and it still is able to find it. Than in Google Maps it can lead to showing you some cryptic place in another country.
Another annoying thing for me is a language problem. I am living now in Germany, but I am from Poland. You can't do category search in Polish, because it will show you results in Poland. But at the same time if you look on details for the German place you will see category in Polish. So you may not know what Google expects.
Also when you click on category icon from search list (those red icons) it will search in language of the country you're in, but you have to click on a name in your language.
But multiple language support suck mostly everywhere... Chrome offers site translation (some of the time). I prefer translations to English, because they are better than translations to Polish. I also don't want to translate it always, because it is not always needed (and flicker is annoying) or not good enough.
To translate a site to English I have to do this every time (my UI is in Polish, but I will write all in English, but translation is mine):
1. Tap on underlined "Polish" in sentence "Translate to Polish"
2. Tap "Polish" in "Translation language" menu
3. Scroll to the top to find "English"
4. Tap "English"
5. Tap "Ready"
6. Tap "Translate"
7. Ignore annoying confirmation by scrolling or tapping "Ready"
At least translation from context menu is sensible now. You can select text by long tapping and tap translate and it remembers what language you selected earlier and has the most recent used languages at the top of the language list.
Now, though, they've done the Windows 8 thing of overloading gestures and hiding behaviors. Want to see your notifications? Two-finger swipe to the left, starting from the edge of the touchpad. If the piece of text hasn't been there since OS X first came out, is it clickable or not? Because I damn well can't tell, nothing new looks like a button anymore.
I could also talk about how the gaussian blur effect is just about the most wasteful effect you can apply to anything, and is a far cry from pioneering the first fast rounded rectangle drawing algorithm, or anything in that vein, but I don't need to.
Because Apple's UI is just no longer good. I'd rather every button look like a shimmering stupid bubble than an unusable postmodern art piece.
Sent from my MacBook Pro
The trash is still glued to the dock. The Help menu still has a search box.
I don't think anyone who uses osx would be unaware that the trash can is in the dock.
Both of Striking's examples are wrong though. The notification menu has an icon in the top-right corner of the screen (next to the spotlight one), click it to get the widgets/notifications; and OSX buttons still looks like buttons, they have changed look slightly (from aqua) and that's about it. Links have always been in OSX, usually for contextual linking.
They seem to know some iOS and assume OSX is the exact same, which it isn't.
b) Apple has not changed the behaviour of buttons on OSX. They still look like they always have.
c) Computing resources are not finite like oil. It's there to be used.
d) Which gestures are available has always been in the Trackpad system preference which has videos to show you how to use them.
I get that some things can't be made intuitive, and have to be learned. But "there's a video somewhere if you know to look" is a crappy justification for the current setup. As is, non-regional gestures compete with regional versions of the same motion and the enabled-by-default gestures aren't terribly well chosen.
I've watched a lot of non-power-users work their touchpad, accidentally fire off either the wrong gesture or an unintended gesture, and then sort of click aimlessly until they get back to something recognizable. That's a sign that OS X is failing users, no matter how elegant things look to Apple.
I think Apple was good at keeping things consistent across apps, but the chosen metaphors were sometimes just as confusing (if worse) than the blessed windows one.
Not that it matters, everything is learned behaviour anyways. Consistency is already a great achievement.
That was just something that was there forever, basically since 1984. It was part of the Macintosh vernacular. You could also right-click to eject.
Control, which still works incidentally.
Though someone's saying that dragging the ion turns it into the eject symbol, which I hadn't noticed until now but is more reasonable.
2. On a large screen, this action (the trash can transformation) can happen very far away from the place you're looking at, which means that you will miss it. This is a general gripe of mine with Mac OS: It will regularly place popup dialogs on seemingly random screens. I have three active screens, and when I'm looking at the left screen, the right screen is so far outside my FOV that I will literally not notice dialogs popping up there.
If your argument is that the dock is the wrong place for that feedback because it can be hidden, or that the disc/drive icons should always be closer to the dock, then we have a table laid for a good discussion.
Broadly, I object to the inconsistency and high astonishment factor more than any specific choice. For example:
- If a program has dialog boxes open (e.g. a 'find' box), they maintain relative position as you drag the main window across screens. Which, if you move to a smaller screen, puts them in offscreen no-man's-land where they can't actually be used or closed.
- Popups should consistently happen on either the active screen, or the active/furthest-forward window of the spawning program. As is, they unpredictably follow either rule, or borrow from the next bullet:
- Spotlight should appear somewhere sane and predictable. Either the same every time, or over my active window, or over my mouse cursor. Instead, it appears on the window which my Dock has most recently minimized to. My hidden Dock, which I have to use the mouse to locate/move. And then let re-minimize, because OS X doesn't update Spotlight's target when it appears but when it goes away. And which can automatically move itself to different screens without my help, based on where I open programs. Again, invisibly because it's hidden.
- And Spotlight's screen is also the screen where it will open new programs (a good decision). So I can't just look for it, I have to revert to the mouse to move either Dock or program to the screen I've been attempting to use this entire time.
So rambling aside, I think OS X actively causes time-consuming problems for multi-monitor users. I resent that because it's a pain even if I memorize the rules and how to solve the problems.
In particular, I object to tying large swathes of behavior to the Dock, since it's location/contents are both invisible and unpredictable for many users.
This is the appendix of the Mac UI.
Gather round, kids, and listen to Grandpa tell you a story of the days when Macs had only one floppy disk drive. When you wanted to copy a file from one disk to another, you had to (physically) eject the first disk to insert the second one, but the first disk volume was still logically mounted so you could use it as a source or destination. So the volume's icon remained on the desktop, only dimmed so you knew the disk wasn't physically present.
So you physically eject a disk by selecting it and pressing Command-E (remember, only one mouse button), but how do you get rid of the ghost icon afterwards? Same way you get rid of anything -- you drag it to the trash.
From there it's an obvious shortcut to combining the two operations by dragging a "live" icon to the trash to both eject it and remove its icon in one step. (Well, obvious in 1985, anyway.)
Now that we can right-click the icon to eject the volume and have forgotten the origins of the drag-to-trash gesture, it may seem nonsensical, but those of us who were there at the beginning were grateful for the shortcut. (Also, get off my lawn.)
The trash icon was there in the Dock in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. The search function in help was there in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. To remove things from the Dock, right click the icon and the "Remove from dock" is still there in both versions. Any menu items that will open a dialog still indicates with three dots ("...") in both versions. Shortcut for opening dictionary is still not very discoverable in both versions (Cmd-Ctrl-D). I still don't know how to trigger Space/Expose without either using gesture (in 10.11) or look up the shortcut key (in 10.5).
I always see people saying Apple UI got worse in discoverability for the past few years and make it sounds like earlier releases were perfect, but I don't believe that is true. The bad part of the UI interaction was always there (e.g. drag icon from the dock to somewhere to remove it). The main difference I see is that 10.11 has a LOT more features than the 10.5, but the core interaction remain the same in regard to discoverability. In 10.11, we're exposed more to gestures, because it's quick, but there is always alternative way to trigger something without gesture.
[1] http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf [2] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...
Problem: You plug in an external monitor and for some reason it doesn't immediately display an images. What do you do?
In pre-el-Capitan, you open up the display settings pane and press the button marked "Detect Displays".
In El Capitan, you open up the display settings pane and note that the button is not there. Are you screwed? It appears so. So you run a google search and discover that if you hold down the option key, the button that had been there for maybe 16 years magically appears in an area of what previously appeared to be blank in the dialog.
I believe that's called the Indiana Jones UI pattern.[0]
So yes, the discoverability has gotten worse over the years. This is something that was visible and made invisible.
[0] http://youtu.be/xFntFdEGgws
Maybe this is just a personal quirk, but it makes me hate how spotlight will frequently show web or file text results instead of whatever it is I'm looking for.
The best thing Apple could do for my user experience is have all of their employees spend a day tagging UI elements with every relevant search string they can think of.
[1] https://atap.google.com/soli/
You can also see notifications by just clicking on the omnipresent icon in the Finder Bar, or act on the notifications themselves by clicking them as they appear.
Like, I agree that the versatility of the trackpads is a blessing and a curse - beyond a few common ones, most gestures are unintuitive and it's probably why not too many applications take use of them on non-mobile devices. But the issue isn't with Apple having hidden behaviors here, it's that one method is less visible than others which are very accessible. The issue with the Windows 8 charms was that all means of accessing them were obfuscated. You had to move to a certain corner or swipe from a certain way on trackpads that often had poor sensitivity (or conversely, were overly sensitive) and the behavior was erratic and unpredictable.
It's fine to dislike aesthetics, but that doesn't make it unusable. In the case of the text buttons, I can't think of an instance off the top of my head where the text wasn't clearly marked as button with either a drop down arrow or ... or some other item.
some of these are not obvious, the little arrows pointing right are a bit confusing for instance - i only discovered they did anything when i clicked one in error.
Eject is a lot safer than format.
It sounds silly, but ejecting disks was about as common as deleting local content. Overlapping "delete" functionality with anything else still threatens to cause unintended deletes, even if this was better than the reverse.
(It's still fuzzy with Volumes in OS X, where you can click an 'eject' button that effectively deletes downloaded content if you haven't copied it out. Check out how many Volumes low-confidence users have running some time.)
Sure the flat UI thing could be argued to have inspired some of Apple's later work... but I think the lack of discoverability started at Apple and was inherited by Microsoft, not the other way around.
You are definitely right that it has gotten worse in OS X overtime though...
Or, y'know, you could just click the notifications icon in the menubar (the one that looks like a list of notifications)?
For example, I have a 2TB AirPort Time Capsule, but it looks impossible to backup my iPod or MacBook directly to it (which is nonsense, why do I need 2TB then?). So I have to create backups with iTunes, then go to `~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/` and copy everything manually to the capsule.
Searching for a song in iTunes is always confusing. Why don't they have global search field that searches in both Library and connected device?
Photos app is another nightmare (and photos management overall)! Again, I just want to connect my iPhone or my camera and transfer photos to AirPort Time Capsule. Impossible.
Or in macOS, you can't just make some apps fullscreen: they always have that 5px gap between app window and dock bar (http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/141800/gap-at-the-b...).
Or the fact they don't have proper window management and themes. One have to use third-party apps full of hacks to have, say, dark window theme or some parody of tiling WM.
Do you know how I transferred my photos to the capsule last time?
I had to:
1) Connect iPhone to Macbook (via USB cable, not wifi)
2) Run shitty Photos app
3) Copy all pictures to the capsule...well, NO! Select 50% of pictures (because I don't have enough space on Macbook), press Import all selected pictures (don't forget to check Delete after import!)
4) Wait, wait, wait
5) Then drag all imported pictures to the capsule
6) Wait, wait, wait
7) Then Google where Photos stores all photos
8) Delete them
9) Repeat for the rest pictures
It is even more difficult if you want to transfer YOUR music from iPod to the capsule. I had to make a backup, then google backup location, then copy everything manually (bad thing is that all files have cryptic names).
Apple loves to say that all their devices are integrated with each other. What I want is, for example, to press 'Transfer all pictures/music/whatever to Time Capsule' and just wait until it is done (via WiFi).
It's not an Apple product, but "Plex" can transfer your photos to your own harddrive/library if you buy the pro version. You can for example run the Plex server on your Mac or on a Raspberry Pie, and then let Plex synchronize your photos to your Capsule over wifi or 3G.
Edit: it also allows to delete them directly after import
b) Almost every app bar a few older ones can be made full screen. Unless I am confused there will be no black bar at the bottom. I definitely can't see it.
c) You can do basic side/side tiling if your apps are full screen. Most people aren't clamoring for advanced window management and there are dozens of tools available that aren't hacks by any measure.
I find myself wondering daily, how the hell have Apple dropped the ball so badly, and how on earth have they not been steamrolled by Microsoft.
>I find myself wondering daily, how the hell have Apple dropped the ball so badly, and how on earth have they not been steamrolled by Microsoft.
Because there's legions of gullible suckers who'll line up to buy the latest iDevice and then believe everything Apple tells them, whether it's "you're holding it wrong" or "you don't need to copy music files to your phone, just buy them again on iTunes" or "you don't need a headphone jack, just buy a new pair of Bluetooth headphones from Beats for $$$".
It's getting harder and harder to answer the questions they ask.
I know what I'd tell them: "Easy, transfer your old photos onto your computer to free up some space." Now if they ask how to do that, I'll tell them "I don't know, I don't use Apple devices. Try asking Siri." Unless maybe it's some hot girl I'm trying to bed, then I'll work a little harder, but I'll still try to convince her to dump Apple and switch to Android so I don't have to deal with this stuff in the future.
Betteridge's Law of iTunes Features
As a PC-only user since the days of DOS up till Windows 8, and having used Windows 10 after jumping ship to Macs a few hours ago, macOS has demonstrably more discoverability than Windows.
One example: Just click on the Help menu, in any app, and type something like "show" or "find" or any other operation, and it will show you all the menu items which have that word in their name.
That feature is a part of the Cocoa subsystem and comes for free with every app, and very handy when you know an app has a certain feature but you're not sure which menu it's buried in (like standard operations and filters in different image editing apps.)
Also, all the shortcuts and standard menus are the same in every macOS app, and can be discovered/modified from System Preferences -> Keyboard, again for any app.
Take "Preferences", which in Windows is sometimes under Edit, Tools, or the app name menu (which imitates macOS.)
I could go on and on, but "zero discoverability" is an undeserved hyperbole.
Actually, it's a deserved hyperbole.
It's not like Apple haven't realized their mistakes... They wrote a book in the late 80s about UI and it's still one of the best works. But they've abandoned many of their most-important guidelines, and almost always for the worse.
They threw out the discoverability baby with the skeuomorphic bathwater.
maybe i am overstating it a bit - maybe unforgivable sounds really bad, but what i find it hard to believe that most people couldn't trivially improve on the more confusing or poorly implemented UI elements.
Discoverability is when you can see what/how to do something by just looking or clicking around a bit.
E.g. with the podcasts sync feature, you can only decide how many episodes you want stored for every podcast at a global level, not per podcast. So e.g. you can either store the most recent ten episodes of each podcast, or every episode of each podcast. So even though for most podcasts ten is probably enough, you end up needing to store every episode of every podcast on your phone even if there is only one podcast where you want every episode.
Similarly, once you purchase an app the only option is to download all the new updates, even if you don't use the app anymore. There is no option to archive the app, so it's either let iTunes keep installing the updates each week or else delete it the app you paid for from your computer. Again, this just needlessly churns through backup disks so that Apple can sell people more external hard drives.
These are just a couple examples, but it seems like pretty much every features of iTunes is designed to force you to buy more stuff from Apple that you don't actually need.
I actually highly doubt this. Apple has done a lot of work (starting in iOS 4 IIRC) to actually remove the need for iTunes.
From my personal experience, and that of working at the Genius Bar, most people don't use iTunes at all. With regular backups and sync happening over iCloud, with Apple Music/iTunes-over-the-cloud/Spotify, the use case for iTunes - ESPECIALLY for managing an iOS device - is incredibly small.
In fact, more and more iTunes features are added to lessen the space it takes up - the default behaviour of iTunes (as a music listening app) is for it to stream songs and download as much as possible on-demand. My 45GB iTunes library only takes up 15GB on my Mac.
I say this as someone who uses iTunes daily to listen to music, but never actually touches iOS devices through it.
I still think there should be some kind of iOS device management on Mac (for backups and old-fashion-sync), but I'm not the first person to call for it to be overhauled and split out into a seperate app (iSync anyone?)
Archiving is redundant. You can have manual update and update the app as needed, you can have auto update and update all installed apps, or you can just remove the app from your device and install it again later when you need it. If you don't use an app, just remove it. You can redownload it later. Why keep things you admit you don't use?
Even if you restrict yourself to one supplier, they have dozens of variants and arcane naming schemes that makes working out what's current something that takes hours of research. Compare this to apple which only has a couple of SKU's at a time in each category and it makes purchasing a lot simpler.
My thinking is that apple == easy is something that just sticks in your mind from the outset.
But I agree. It's even worse with phones - have you seen the number of phones Samsung have? I have a nack for remembering model numbers and specs and even I find it absurdly difficult.
Dug around, couldn't find it. Googled it, found a few forum threads where everybody concluded it couldn't be done. Went into an Apple store, gave an employee a few minutes to figure it out, and he gave up.
And yet, it's possible.
Rather than just tell you, I'm going to leave this as a challenge. See how long it takes you to figure this out.
Those devs are master-level trolls.
It's a convention followed for literal matches in tons of environments (including Google Search IIRC).
Perhaps actually doing the text search is the barrier you mean? Were you looking for an item labeled "Essentials" in the Quick Links section? I agree that would be preferable, but it's not like doing a search is the Riddle of the Sphinx.
In this case, there is no good place to put tag search because tags aren't first-class citizens.
but the UX for some apple things is trash. I've had years of IT working with crap interfaces and itunes is still one of the most confusing and willfully annoying programs i've used.
All you need to know about Apple UI is this:
Sometimes you click the green (maximize) button and the window gets smaller.
At least, that's what it used to be. They changed the default behavior to 'fullscreen' because all the people coming from Windows thought that's what the button should do...
Which is just so, so wrong. Imagine how much mouse-mouse-mousing around (and time wasted) that kind of organization produces.
Things I wish Steve Jobs had said:
"If you're using the mouse, you're doing it wrong"
(I have to use a Mac for work. I'd kill for a touch pad with physical buttons, or even better, the Lenovo clitmouse.)
They don't. Apple is the only tech company that markets their products like fashion accessories.
That's not a bad thing: in 2016 we're living squarely in the age of 'wearable computers'.
The "good UI" stuff is just rationalization, however.
Whenever I had to use a Windows PC during the Windows XP - Windows 7 days, I'd wonder how Windows users ever got anything done.
Windows would almost constantly interrupt any sort of flow with notifications about updated virus definitions, really really urgent updates that need a reboot right now, the highly relevant information that I got a new DHCP IP etc. etc.
It's gotten better now I believe, and OS X usability has indeed suffered a bit while expanding in features.
"The # symbol is replaced by the £ symbol (as on PC keyboards); the # is available by pressing ⌥ Option+3
More recent Apple British keyboards move the backquote/~ key to the left of the Z key and replace it with a section sign (§) and a plus-minus sign (±) respectively.
The Enter key spans two rows and is shaped similarly to the Enter key of many ISO PC keyboards."
Why there's no conversion factor [EG: heart = 5 stars], i don't know
Fuck Windows. You want iTunes to work well? You want to see Apple's real UI? Then use their real platform.
(I guess, all these years later, I kinda get it? But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue.)
Anyway, the question itself isn't that offensive, right? They want to know whether you intend to play your selected song and THEN the things in queue, or clear out the queue instead. I admit that a modal dialog is...sub-optimal here, but I'm not sure how else to do this.
> But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue.
You can do this by right clicking a song, and clicking Play Next. There is no dialog for that. But imagine how frustrating it would be if they adopt your proposed behavior for someone double clicking on an album. What if I just want to clear everything and just play this album? I want to hear it now, not wait until this song ends.
Everyone admits iTunes is not the greatest thing ever to spring from the mind of Steve. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Why would I go off reputation and not my own experience with apple software?
Your position is a bit like saying: "Although everyone else thinks the earth is round, it looks flat to me!". Of course, you're free to disagree with the consensus opinion, but you'd probably need a better argument than personal experience.
If the consensus differs from your personal experience, it's worth taking a second look.
Microsoft, for example, are developing their Office suite of applications for OSX and they are not off the hook for any UI/UX issues for Mac Users. They must make the Apps work for that platform's users as they expect.
If they are marketing their platform and its services & Apps for other platforms, then at least they should give respect to those customer's choices.
My solution thus far has been to stop even trying to listen to music on iTunes and switch to podcasts instead (on Overcast, not Apple's horrible Podcasts app). #ThanksiTunes
iTunes is now second from the top on my list of software-I-will-never-use-again[0], so that means no shiny Apple devices for me. Which is a shame, because otherwise I quite like Apple stuff.
[0] Of course, Lotus Notes is top of the list
Playing a song and adding songs to 'up next' are two different things. That dialog box has saved me multiple times. What's wrong with it? It only occurs when you are telling iTunes to do conflicting things that it cannot resolve by itself. It's a better outcome than clearing a playlist someone may have spent a lot of time working on.
Software update and login dialogs? Yes those are a thing many apps include. What makes these unique or interesting?
The podcasts menu seems super straight forward to me. Am I missing something here? It says exactly what it does.
Contacting the iPhone update server dialog? Once upon a time Apple's servers would go down under a heavy load of people activating new iOS devices. Presumably the dialog is there to inform you there is a problem contacting the iPhone update servers. Either way I think it's long since been changed.
After all, design trades in subtleties, otherwise if the discussion is just about explaining the purpose for a widget, everything in an interface can be explained, even this well-known ‘bad UI’ example: http://i.imgur.com/UJXoqwR.png
Didn't realize it was in some sort of bad UI hall of fame :)
doing anything else
> Microsoft AutoUpdate starts bouncing in the dock
> Modal "There are no updates for your Microsoft software at this time." dialog appears.
Seeing as half of the updates it receives are FOR THE UPDATE CLIENT, it's incredible this behaviour hasn't been fixed in the last eight years.
This is a modal dialog which prevents you from changing the song or pausing it. That is bad.
However I'm quite interested in building a dedicated OSS music player node/electron for OSX (and windows eventually).
RIP Rdio, Lala, and countless others. Hell even Beats was better!
My music collection needs to by synced across computers, and if it refused to add the exact same file twice, then the operation would be trivial. Add mp3s to your music directory, drag and drop all files to itunes, and let it detect new songs. Since it's not, I have to do a long series of "okay, the timestamp on this file is newer than the newest added-on date in itunes.... I think.... except this directory was untarred, so it retains old timestamps, and blah blah blah..."
When people mean duplicates, they normally mean duplicate songs, not duplicate files (audio + metadata + headers).
I understand why you would have assumed this was a file issue, though, because the real problem is the most idiotically stupid thing ever.
I would try but I have a 20k+ songs itunes library and it takes hours to reindex whenever I move anything...
* No doubt if iTunes was designed today it would be completely different. But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!)
* Say iTunes failed today. No doubt the writer would say it deserved it, and the product was a failure from the beginning. But I want to emphasise that iTunes has existed for several years now and has given many hours of pleasure for many millions of users. it works well and is a success.
You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well. It won't get better. What is going to happen with it? It is obvious. You don't have to go past Microsoft with Internet Explorer. They kept that product going for years and it was a great success. However eventually the tech aged and they replaced it with a new product, Microsoft Edge. The same will happen with iTunes.
The UI changes so much with each release that I have no clue how to navigate any more, and don't care to learn because I'll have to relearn it all again in 12-24 months. There is no consistency, and legacy to uphold, except perhaps a legacy codebase.
No he didn't.
> iTunes is a old product holding together well.
No it's not, it's a terrible product and always has been.
> You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well.
He doesn't think that. In fact, the title of the article states the exact opposite.
> What is going to happen with it? It is obvious.
Yes, which is the whole point of the article.
I cannot think of an application with a less consistent UI than iTunes. Every major version seems to present a total rethink and re-engineering of the entire UI layer.
If consistency is a goal for iTunes then it has failed dramatically.
http://swinsian.com/
It's a lean, fast native player that supports tons of formats, has great library management features, and omits all the bloat and confusion of iTunes.
That's the biggest thing I miss in most music players, including my current one, Google Play Music (with my all-access).
https://github.com/simon-weber/Autoplaylists-for-Google-Musi...
I was always wondering why I can read so much rants about a good product I've been using on a daily basis for years... Well it seams that the Windows version sucks, and what is described is really a world away from the native cocoa version on macOS.
(disclaimer: the newest Apple product I own was manufactured in 1983)
Most pages on the gtkpod website currently appear to be defunct, probably because it's been impractical to make it work with iPhones.
Sadly I haven't found a Linux replacement which syncs music like this, probably no one is interested in making that works since everything is cloud nowadays.
Don't use an iPhone myself, but if I did, I would try if KDE Connect on iOS supports file syncing over Wifi like it does on Android.
There are many other reasons, but this is probably my biggest issue with iOS (well, this and all the hours of my life iTunes wasted while I wrestled with it to attempt something simple, such as its constant, needlessly slow & complex updates). It's intentionally broken to inconvenience us in the hopes of making more money unethically. I shudder in revulsion.