I pulled up the iLife photos in Finder and compared them at 512x512px with the new iTunes logo and... there is no comparison. The amazing detail we find in the former is strangely lacking in the latter and the result is shoddy craftsmanship.
Personally, I'm going to avoid iTunes 10 for as long as possible. I don't need Ping much, not planning on getting a new tv and I can do without a horrendous UI.
Plus iTunes 9.2.whatever is still working fine with my iPhone (which is running iOS 4.1 GM).
It really is odd. Also gone are the colored icons, replaced by grey/slate with blue highlights. It's not the blue that's currently used as the default OSX highlighted row color, either. Makes me think that the Aqua theme will seem some changes rather soon.
iTunes has always been doing (for lack of better words) weird shit. That was sometimes a sign of things to come (the beginning of the end of brushed metal), sometimes not. I wouldn’t read much into it.
iTunes is not really the jewel of all of Apple’s applications. At least not anymore. Other applications always seem to have much more polished UIs. Safari is an obvious candidate, all their iWork applications also have pretty nice UIs, as has the iLife suite. Those always seem to be the better OS X citizens.
Combine that with the frequent UI blunders in iTunes (usually at least partially straightened out in subsequent updates) and I’m beginning to suspect that their top UI people are not really working on iTunes all that much.
I’m not even sure whether Apple likes iTunes. For all we know they think of it as this huge, overly complex burden, a trap in which they themselves ran. iOS doesn’t have one monolithic iTunes app that does everything and that clearly seems to be what Apple should have done on OS X. If they could have a fresh start they might. It’s just that they probably don’t want to make that kind of investment. (Consider also that Apple probably doesn’t want to install half a dozen different applications on some poor, unsuspecting Windows user’s PC just so that it can sync to the newly bought iPod shuffle. One application is quite enough and that already makes a lot of people angry.)
Take note: Scrollbars have been matte in iTunes for a few versions now, from before Snow Leopard came out, and we haven't seen wide adoption of those in the rest of the OS.
Reminds me of Tiger, when things were horribly disjointed. Then in Leopard, Apple made a point of unifying the user experience (universal button styles, no brush strokes) to combat tweaks we used to use for that purpose (Uno, etc.). Now, things are starting to re-fragment, along with their mobile OS.
I'm not an OS X programmer. Anyone know how loosely couple Aqua is from the rest of the OS? A tightly coupled system could be the reason Apple's been so slow to change...
Library access seems a good bit faster on OSX but that could just be the benefits of a cold start. We'll see how it goes in a few weeks without an iTunes restart.
That seems a bit high. Looking at my site's analytics, when we got 50% of our traffic from HN, we had about 45% mac usage, compared to 28% normally. Obviously, there are a lot of conflating factors but that suggests that 60% of HN click-throughs are mac.
What is also interesting is how Linux usage is quite low on HN compared to our regular base; HN appears to be only about 7% Linux. (The people who can't use iTunes at all).
(Again, this is a very rough conclusion; the percentages can easily be way off).
First impression: it's fast, unlike many people here I actually like this GUI, it's more sober, the old one was like a bunch of kids (icons) screaming for attention. Other than that it's the same ol' itunes. I don't care much about the Ping, but it also doesn't bother me having it.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 71.8 ms ] threadhttp://twitter.com/MuscleNerd/status/22762830722
I'm surprised this made it past Jobs...
Plus iTunes 9.2.whatever is still working fine with my iPhone (which is running iOS 4.1 GM).
iTunes is not really the jewel of all of Apple’s applications. At least not anymore. Other applications always seem to have much more polished UIs. Safari is an obvious candidate, all their iWork applications also have pretty nice UIs, as has the iLife suite. Those always seem to be the better OS X citizens.
Combine that with the frequent UI blunders in iTunes (usually at least partially straightened out in subsequent updates) and I’m beginning to suspect that their top UI people are not really working on iTunes all that much.
I’m not even sure whether Apple likes iTunes. For all we know they think of it as this huge, overly complex burden, a trap in which they themselves ran. iOS doesn’t have one monolithic iTunes app that does everything and that clearly seems to be what Apple should have done on OS X. If they could have a fresh start they might. It’s just that they probably don’t want to make that kind of investment. (Consider also that Apple probably doesn’t want to install half a dozen different applications on some poor, unsuspecting Windows user’s PC just so that it can sync to the newly bought iPod shuffle. One application is quite enough and that already makes a lot of people angry.)
Reminds me of Tiger, when things were horribly disjointed. Then in Leopard, Apple made a point of unifying the user experience (universal button styles, no brush strokes) to combat tweaks we used to use for that purpose (Uno, etc.). Now, things are starting to re-fragment, along with their mobile OS.
I'm not an OS X programmer. Anyone know how loosely couple Aqua is from the rest of the OS? A tightly coupled system could be the reason Apple's been so slow to change...
What is also interesting is how Linux usage is quite low on HN compared to our regular base; HN appears to be only about 7% Linux. (The people who can't use iTunes at all).
(Again, this is a very rough conclusion; the percentages can easily be way off).