Q: What are your thoughts on the New iTunes 11?

Drew Reece (Re:co) wrote:

 

woodmeister50 wrote:

Needed to download a third party app to get meaningful and useful access to the App Store.

 

What's the app on iOS 6 that makes the store usable?

 

I looked at the iOS 6 version of the store & it seems painful (less info in lists, one big app per info screen - scroll, scroll, scroll…).

 

I'd like to get an alternative to Apple's messy appstore.app when Santa brings an iOS 6 device

The app that you want is AppShopper.  It has a very usable

and customizable list views for the different catagories.  I

personally got it for the "What's New" which was totally

obliterated in iOS6.

adn792 wrote:

 

The only logical response to this situation is leaving the sinking ship.

 

New Year's resolution 2013: From now on i will stop buying apple products and i will as much as possible stop using Mac OS or iOS.

Good points all and well said. I hated it when they dropped Rosetta. I really hate what some call the "iOSification" of the Mac OS. I hate iOS. I only accept it as it is the best compromise of an OS for a small portable device with limited capability. But it is a compromise. The problem is that there is no where else to go. I resolved a few days ago to just limit my use of my computer. I survived decades with no computer. I can do it again. I'm just going to drop my computer centered hobbies and activities and spend more time in the real world where the rules, the physics, make sense, aren't capricious, and don't keep changing. Computers should make life easier and when they stop doing that it's time to just throw them away. I'm really frustrated with Apple.

Amazingly, until a couple of weeks ago I was a pretty big Apple fan. Then came iTunes 11 and it totally changed how I view the company. If they are releasing such bad software at the heart of their ecosystem, then something is very wrong and the Apple is rotten to the core.

But other people also became worried. Steve Wozniak this week commented that the iPhone is falling behind competitors: http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobile-technology/woz-worries-about-iphone-rivals-209 193

And he recently remarked that Microsoft is now more innovative than Apple: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-wozniak-microsoft-apple-innovation-2012-11

Pretty sad...

The list has been growing in the back of my head, but iTunes 11 really brings things into focus...

- OS scrolling behavior reversal

- smaller UI scrollbars that make it harder to grab with a mouse

- Safari - moving the refresh button off to the right, with no option to move it back

- iTunes defaulting to full screen mode in playback

- Quicktime storing a list of previously played files that you can't clear, and that don't clear if the files are no longer present

- iMovie becoming a UI mess

- removal of DVD/Superdrives, in addition to no BluRay

- Launchpad, and specifically, Launchpad with no way to edit what shows up on it, to make it actually useful

- iPhoto limiting the drag and drop from the desktop into particular events

- iPhoto and the increased difficulty in making and pairing events

- MIssion Control vs Dashboard

- iWeb lacking updates so it still displays broken MobileMe content

- iTunes 11 and major feature removal

This is just off the top of my head, before coffee.  I know I can go on if I start thinking about this too.  Ten years ago when Apple was debuting much of this, there was nothing close to iLife, and the thought that went into the engineering was evident.  A decade later, the competition has entered the market and gotten very close, in some cases surpassing Apple, and Apple is getting worse.

It all sums to the reality that Apple is not as good as it once was, the competition is better, and you don't give up as much by changing the ecosystem as you once would have.

Regarding alternatives like Linux and Android... for me and my family, it's all about the ecosystem. As poor as Apple's is becoming, it's still much better than the alternatives. Once upon a time, computing was one of my hobbies. But in 2012, I have better things to do. I don't want my computers to become another obsessive hobby. I don't want to join a religion. I need s**t to work. Seriously.

Apple at both the OS and application levels is regressing, until ultimately all their s**t becomes "dancing bear-ware." The remarkable thing about dancing bears is not that they dance well, it's that they dance at all. iTunes 11 barely (no pun intended) works. It certainly does not work as well as the previous major revision.

Software developers should never be allowed to define the user experience. For them, it's all about cutesy throttle linkage and edge features they can endlessly customize (usually by manually hacking stuff). The rest of us just need s**t that works. Well, at least I do.

Right now, I am reloading 800 songs into my iPhone because a lot of them lost art work. The art work is present in iTunes but not on the phone. It ran all night and I still have a few hundred to go. It's a beach ball fest. I have 8 cores on my iMac. How the bloody h**l does someone not write iTunes to be multithreaded in 2012? This isn't 1991 @ssholes! Half my cores are sitting idle while I'm putting up with beach balls for 2-3 seconds at a time just because the iTunes is creating 256 AAC files from my ALAC files. Jeebus people! Pull your collective heads out of your freakin' keesters and wake the fark up! This is seriously p*****g me off.

Does anyone else find it completely obnoxious that we have to sign back into the forum EVERY time we want to post? I belong to several other forums and all of them use cookies so that I can get right back in without logging in? Is Apple incapable of being at least as good?

And don't get me started on a host of other things. Like how terrible mail is, or how dreadful the mouse driver is on OS X. Hint: if you offer large displays, you have to scale your mouse driver accordingly! I have to load TWO aftermarket utlities to get the mouse to behave decently well. That's unacceptable.

I hate EVERYTHING about iTunes 11. Did they fire all their programmers after Jobs died?

I agree with what you are saying.  I think the idea that all of apples products should be able to communicate with each other easily should be the goal.  I believe they have lost their way and forget that people do real work on their computer and need that power and openess.  For people that don't need that power they should look to the ipad or netbook type devices.

I am also really annoyed that Apple litterd the iTunes app with links to the app store while removing many features I found useful.  The concept of opening windows for everything is deeply flawed.  You should have the option to do it, but not be forced into it.

I would also like to bring up the fact that moving everything to the cloud at this point is not a good solution for a lot of people.  I myself have a bandwidth cap for the amount of data I can use in a month.  My connection, like a lot of people, is not realiably fast and it seems like Co**ast shapes the traffic to allow small size chucks to be moved quickly while larger chuncks of data is dramaticaly slowed down.  Thsi makes using cloud service for multimedia a horriable experience.  (Your Thoughts?)

People are already using the app store effectively and it was easy to use.  I don't see them hurting in the money department.  Paying premium prices for a clean, unadvertised esperience is what I thought we were paying for.  It seems that the Businessmen and Bean Counters are taking over Apple and trying to squeeze out all the money they can from their dedicated user base.  This is the exact way you take your company down.

If you want a decient Linux user experience I can suggest Mint Lunix.  They seem to make things easier and less conveluded.  MHO.

Cheers

I LOVE how this journalist concluded his article.

"Apple should be very scared"

"Google's Maps app is a big fat warning shot to Apple."

<Link Edited by Host>

This is vaguely related to what we've been more or less ranting about, but for the sake of widening our view on the extent of Apple's uncanny software AND hardware decisions:

http://www.businessinsider.com/apples-imac-is-too-thin--review-2012-12

Might as well add to this with the latest mini - larger footprint and no optical drive, for no good reasons.  It sits on a desk' is a .5" increase in height really a deal breaker?

required desired alias wrote:

I'm just going to drop my computer centered hobbies and activities and spend more time in the real world where the rules, the physics, make sense, aren't capricious, and don't keep changing. Computers should make life easier and when they stop doing that it's time to just throw them away. I'm really frustrated with Apple.

That is the problem with a lot of folks these days.  They no longer

realize that there is a world and a life beyond there computer and

smartphone screens.

Getting back to basics in the real world world is the only solution

as all tech manufacturers are putting out trash and expect consumers

to accept it.  Apple instead of being a better choice has simply become

the lesser of all evils.

Whilst Cover Flow is not back.  They have just released an update 11.0.1 which at least means you can change the Media Kind to Podcast and scroll on an iPod's TV Shows etc.  So they are beginning to listen.  Shame that they needed to release such a poorly programmed application in the first place!!  But hey when you are lost in the Australian outback following Apple Maps at least you can now listen to music.

So many changes. Change the miniplayer button, change the double click to minimize, to override the system default, change the cloud, dumping crap I deleted a long time ago into my list. I am a fan of change, I like change, I love change, I spend change, but this change is a mess. I would like a roll-back, or a skin to appear to be the same as 10.

Had a chance to play more with 11.

I still like it.  What can I say.

Yes it has more bugs than it should...  I'm of the camp who believes, it's done when its brown, not when the timer goes off. But you still have to ship... I can agree it should have stayed in the oven longer.

I was wrong about the setting to turn off the colors... It does also hide the album art, odd choice...

Audio book management is a big part of why I like this version over the last. It's much better so far!

For those who like the side bar, its still an option to turn back on. And turning it on, makes it feel much more like 10. But then yoU Don't get some of the new ways of doing things. And there are many. I'm willing to explore and see how it goes.

I have used iTunes since before it was iTunes (SoundJam). My music library may not be as huge as some, but its big enough. And I'm not lost in this version. 

People complain about new features being only for looking cool, bling, or what not, but for those who like clover flow, it could be called the same. Perhaps they should not have completely removed it, but again, if you just go turn on the old tools like side bar etc, you miss out on the new stuff. 

In my previous posts I didn't attack anyone specific when I said 'most people don't like change', unlike those who attacked me directly in return. I only posted my thoughts on iTunes 11, and in that statement my observations of people in general. I believe anyone honestly thinking about it, will agree with that statement. Look around. I for one personally love to see things change in regards to technology at least. I do not agree with all of the choices Apple has made over the years, but I have to admire them for being willing to make them. And they have proven that they are willing to listen when they get things wrong. 

Don't panic.

Wow. This doesn't even look like it's from Apple. When I first opened it, I honestly thought that I may have been fooled by a hacker into installing fake software. It's that bad.

Besides the well-documented (above) functionality flubs, it's simply ugly. The typefaces are amateurish and inelegant. This looks like a kid designed it in his/her basement. Sorry...I didn't mean to insult kids. With this release, Apple has gone from the gold standard of user interface design to something done by a bunch of engineer hacks with no design aesthetic. VERY disappointing.