iTunes 10 - Direct Link

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).