Welcome to Idle Entity.net
This is the base of operations for Graham Lord.
From here I broadcast a mediocre blog of events that interest me, and the slow development of my on-going digital hub.
Latest Blog
2010-09-04 23:09:48 / iTunes 10 Sucks
I always love a new version of iTunes. It's Apple's most progressive application- it gets the newest GUI styling, and practical features for organising your music.
Sure, some new features I don't like... I'm not a fan of video playback and storage in iTunes; I think they should've made a separate application for that, so iTunes could remain light-weight and more suited to running in the background. But hey, I don't have to use the video features.
So iTunes 10 is announced, and there's the whole Ping hype, and I'm like; 'Hell yes I want in on this...'
But I've downloaded it, and fiddled for a few days, and I got to say, for the first time, I'm actually considering downgrading to iTunes 9.
We've got the new icon for a start. I can totally see why Apple changed it, iTunes started out as an app for ripping your music from CD and storing it on your mac. So they had a CD with a beamed musical note on it. But now iTunes is a complete media app, and ripping from CDs is immoral, so they've changed it.
The new icon though... I don't know, it's just not Apple. Apple's icons are all really practical... they're not fancy for the sake of it, but the the new iTunes icon has the horrible boringness of a circle with a musical note in it. It's lame. Apple can do so much better than this.
Then we've got the modified Album Art column... I loved this feature when they added it, it really help break up playlists into albums, so it was easier to see what songs were in them, and what CD those songs were from. But the new Album Art column doesn't even bother showing the album cover unless you've got at least five tracks from that album there, and with the album title on the right of the cover art, the column just looks unnaturally wide.
And then we've got the new icon set- why the hell is everything in black and white? The first time I opened iTunes 10, I kept clicking in the window thinking it didn't have focus, because it was all grey.
Coloured icons are far easier to read, and they look a lot more attractive. The whole source column looks like it's disabled.
I had high hopes for Ping, I thought this was going to be a great feature allowing me to better integrate Last.fm with iTunes, and share my music taste with my friends. But it's an entire network, which means I've now got ANOTHER social network profile to look after.
But that's not the worst of it... It's only interested in music I've bought from iTunes, and based on the fact that I prefer buying a CD when I can, and blagging music of my friends the rest of the time, there's not a lot on my iTMS purchase list. And the stuff that is on my list hardly represents my musical taste.
The iTunes Music Store is one of Apple's biggest cash cows- I can see the reasoning behind all of this, really I can, but I think iTunes 10 crosses the line where I really think Apple have forgotten the original purpose of iTunes. It's a program that runs in the background and plays music, first and foremost. And now it's 3rd on the Activity Monitor real memory list (behind MS Word and Safari), and it's using a constant 9% of my i7 2.66 CPU, just playing music on my laptop speakers.
I'm pretty tolerant about Apple's fascism, you know, the whole iPhone thing and media distribution monopoly in the making, but I'm tolerant because it's not shoved down my throat, and I don't have to buy into it. But now I feel like I have to use a black rapper's Hummer (complete with 22" rims) to drive down to the corner shop for milk. And my bicycle's illegal.
Apple are all about the perfect user experience, allow your Mac to control your stuff to a certain extent, and it'll take care of everything- but iTunes 10 does nothing to aid user experience over iTunes 9, and if anything, I think it inhibits it.