What are your thoughts on the New iTunes 11?

Vote on the new version of iTunes: http://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=50ba1fdbe4b0be35bc3c101d

"Unlike anyone in the industry, people want us to make products that they love. In fact, more than love. Our job is to make products that people **** for. That’s what Apple is meant to be."

Steve Jobs (http://blog.adamnash.com/2011/10/10/steve-jobs-bmw-ebay/)

Does anyone lu$t after iTunes, in particular after the last update?

Designing for passion seems to have gone out of the window at Apple: http://blog.adamnash.com/2012/06/26/the-game-has-changed-design-for-passion/

anyhow it is far from being an award winning user interface design. unfortunately.

- colour

the sophisticated layout is being destroy by adding "colourful" symbols (blue note (music), green note (purchased),...) and a dark unnecessary gradient in the status window.

- font

switching to retro helvetica is so not innovative. makes me wonder why the hardware always pushes new design limits but graphic design for user interfaces is not.why do they need a dropshadow in the status window?

– options
playlists are forced into an alphabetical order now. this option for unalphabetical sorting should ALWAYS be there. why must Z be last thus hidden and A first?

– forced album cover

the not-centered square album cover not vertically centered and the left margin is bigger) within the round corners ⚠ of the status window is a design faux-pas.

and certainly got no fengshui calmness about it. different angles of round and edgy corners provide no consistency. there should be an option to HIDE this (unwanted) feature as well. it is mostly a black disturbing spot without cover art.

Yeah, looks hideous, doesn't it? Windows-style...

At first I thought iTunes 11 was a reasonable evolutionary update, then I read the posts on here. Now I know Apple is Satan and they are making the first salvo in the apocalyptic end to this world on December 21st. Oh the humanity!

You can change that in Preferences to the default grey. You will only see track listings not album art but obviously the custom colour is generated from the artwork.

Good point, hadn't seen that one...

really? had an intelligent list with only unrated songs, and upon rating them they disappeared from the list and the next track started...

yesterday it still worked... today after update: nope

Yes - Apple threw out many features to replace them with one that some misguided exec thought was better. A better option would have been to offer more variety of viewing options to suit the myriad users, instead of alienating so many for the "next cool thing" everyone should start using, despite their preferences.

Apple doesn't use focus groups because it recognizes the dangers of them and feature creep, but just as dangerous is ignoring usability studies and understanding its user base, which it apparently has done with iTunes 11.

absolutely horrible !!!! please give us a way back !!!!

Give_me_a_break wrote:

Does anyone lu$t after iTunes, in particular after the last update?

What I lu$t after is the ability to easily downgrade to iTunes 10.7.

And what the heII is so ***ing obscene about the word lu$t, anyway? Or the word heII, for that matter. Jesus. Can I say "Jesus?"

Saki GT wrote:

Yes - Apple threw out many features to replace them with one that some misguided exec thought was better. A better option would have been to offer more variety of viewing options to suit the myriad users, instead of alienating so many for the "next cool thing" everyone should start using, despite their preferences.

Apple doesn't use focus groups because it recognizes the dangers of them and feature creep, but just as dangerous is ignoring usability studies and understanding its user base, which it apparently has done with iTunes 11.

Amen to that. I'm not that upset with the way they changed the layout/organization of library info but I am upset that they either broke things I use all the time (playcount updating for example) or they disabled them (display dupes, opening playlists in new windows, shuffle set by playlist not globally, etc...). I am far from "delighted" by iTunes 11 and am telling everyone to stay away from it as long as they can. Certainly it should have been better tested before releasing it (what's the rush, Apple?).

Beyond that what really irrirates me is that I would not have updated to iTunes 11 except recently I installed an SSD as my boot drive, reinstalled Lion and then migrated my settings and apps from my old harddrive. When this was done somehow iTunes 10.6 was on my SSD instead of 10.7 which was on my old harddrive. When I started iTunes it errored out saying my iTunes library was made with a newer version and I needed to update iTunes. Instead of finding the install image for iTunes 10.7 I just installed 11 and have regretted that ever since. Thanks Apple (not).

The new iTunes 11 will not work with speakers connected to my home network.

I have to agree. I really really really miss the grid view for artists! I don't get why we can only see grid view within the albums view. This dicision doesn't make any sense to me. Now if I have to sift through tons of albums from the same artist just to get to the one I want to listen to, or scroll endlessly on a list on the left side. This grid view for albums doesn't work well when artists have 15 or more albums.. I have many artists that have several albums; Tom waits, Kiss, gwar, dillon, etc.