brian hefele's untidy spaceUpdate, iTunes 9.0.1 fixed everything except the ugly, which you stop noticing once you've lived with it for a while. Carry on!
I closely monitored a handful of liveblogs and livetweets about the Apple event today. I always get excited about new iPods even though I like to leave my music at home. Also, sometimes they announce a new iTunes, as was the case today.
This was exciting. None of the new features really interest me, but hey, it's still shiny new software! Maybe it was 64-bit/Cocoa and they just decided not to share that fact. Maybe there were new subtle UI gems that would make an already sparkling interface shine like a star (hint: browser in mini-mode). I hit refresh on the iTunes page repeatedly until the download was available.
Sadly, there were no UI gems, no mysterious new features… Just the most regrettable experience I've had all day, wrapped up in a glossy interface that further separates iTunes from the rest of Mac OS. This would be my first complaint - the UI, which has a strangely uncanny feeling to it.
It's like a poorly crafted simulacrum of iTunes, reminiscent of an iTunes skin for WinAmp. The added depth on the transport control buttons remind me of the OS X of yore, where everything was candy-colored blue, and popped far out of the screen to say "touch me, touch me!" These days have passed for the more subtle UI of today, yet Apple still seems to be clinging on with the glossy mess that is iTunes 9.
The default browse view in iTunes 9 is some kind of wild, single-column-on-the-left view. Fortunately, this is an easy fix, but I still can't seem to grasp why these things keep popping up under the guise of 'widescreen.' The advantage of widescreen is in its width - for things like a browse view, we can see multiple columns, and we can easily read the full text within. When we cram in too many vertical elements, they all start to turn to mush.
The zoom button no longer invokes the mini player. This is good and bad. It's good because (almost) nothing else behaves like iTunes used to behave. It's bad because having easily clickable access to the mini player was oh-so convenient, even if the behavior was non-standard. I'm a regular user of keyboard shortcuts, but I do tend to browse my iTunes library with the mouse. Fortunately, option-clicking the zoom button pushes one into the mini player, it's just going to take some time to commit that to muscle memory.
The worst part is this:
For some reason, when you're sorting by Album by Year (the One True Sort) or Album by Artist, this happens. Instead of grouping the discs together, it groups the corresponding track of each disc together. It's always important to keep in mind that things which worked as expected might break in a major version upgrade to any software. This seems to hold especially true for Apple, but often the problems are easy to ignore or simple to fix. This is neither fixable nor ignorable, and it's one of those things that I just can't imagine slipping through the cracks.
When iTunes 8 came out, the big complaint seemed to live somewhere between the blue icon and the weird, non-standard scrollbars. Valid points, but now iTunes 9 has come along and outdone itself with suck. The sorting error seems to be a bug, one that I expect Apple will either fix right away, or sit on until iTunes 10. The rest of my complaints just point toward a bleak future, in my mind. iTunes continues to detach itself from OS X, and act as the UI playground for Apple. At the end of the day, it's only rock 'n roll… But it is still a bit disheartening.