Sometimes I long back to the time when music players had a simple streamlined minimal interface like xmms, and the old winamp...
Look at the screenshot included in this post:
http://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok2.4.0.png
It uses a three-panel layout, for information that is not essentially equal. The left panel determines source, the right panel browses through music, and the center panel shows related artists. There's a lot of unused space in the title (now playing) bar and in the lower left corner.
So if I'm picking music to play, I have to first choose an option on the left. Then I skip OVER the center panel and look at the newly-updated right panel, which doesn't seem to be showing me very much music at once. The middle panel only matters if I'm actively looking at similar artists.
iTunes, on the other hand, has a clearly delineated (smaller, different-looking) left panel that lets you decide what sources you're using to play your music (playlists, the online store, podcasts, etc). The bulk of its interface is dedicated to letting you browse as much music as possible. It has an artist recommendation that shows up as a similarly delineated bar on the right, and which is disabled by default.
Also, look at how many untitled icons there are on the Amarok interface. And how many repetitive images there are. That one band's album image repeats five times — is it adding extra relevant information? And in the center pane there seem to be two separate Settings icons. Do they do the same thing, or do they serve different purposes?
iTunes has bloat, but on a WAY different magnitude. Here's a screenshot of what mine looks like right now:
http://cl.ly/191a0U1o411X0O433Q0g
There are only three groupings of unnamed icons. The one at the top right pretty clearly depicts the viewing style; the one at bottom left is all the playing controls (though the Add Playlist and Hide Artwork buttons are a bit ambiguous); the ones on the bottom right (AirPlay, Genius, and Show Sidebar) are the only ones that I think are a little confusing to new users. Everything else is very clearly labeled and pretty much explains itself.
I'm not a big fan of iTunes but it's operating on a different level of UI design than Amarok, currently. That's not to say it's prettier (although I think Amarok is a little clunky), but it's a program that a team of expert interface designers have thoroughly tweaked. I wish KDE had more interface designers working for them; it's one of those fields that sounds like a lot of unnecessary bullshit but goes a long way towards making experiences more enjoyable.
The thing is that anything can become intuitive. Use Amarok long enough and I'm sure it becomes effortless. The term interface design uses to describe this is "mental model"; good designs let users form a model of how something works before they even touch it. (So on iTunes, the metaphor of seeing album covers immediately makes me think that to play an album I click on its cover, which is exactly right.) It's very difficult to create a program that forms a good mental model of every single function at once, especially if you're making a complex program like iTunes. But I'd argue that it's still vastly easier to intuit from the interface than it would be for Amarok, where, looking at that screenshot, I can't tell how I would look at other artists' music or how to form a playlist or a number of other relatively trivial tasks.
Agreed, but the same applies to itunes. Which is why I think that it is quite hard to accurately judge whether or not one's own music player is intuitive or not.
> But I'd argue that it's still vastly easier to intuit from the interface than it would be for Amarok
And that's where I disagree and why I mentioned that my friends seemed to have less trouble with amarok than I had with itunes. (btw. why are people downvoting my opinion? ok, anecdotal evidence and all that, but really?)
> (btw. why are people downvoting my opinion? ok, anecdotal evidence and all that, but really?)
It's because we all like kneejerk downvoting opinions that disagree with ours! Kneejerk is fun! Sometimes we also curse each other out too. It's an awful joy.
(I wish Hacker News would stop with the downvotes. We derive enough data, I think, from masses of upvotes to sort threads by popularity. The only people who deserve downvotes are spammers, and we have the "flag" option for that.)
The only place where you can directly move songs to the trash is the music library. You must have been browsing the music library and confused it with a playlist.
It’s trivial to let iTunes display all albums I bought in 2010. I know of no easy way to do that with a file manager.
I have no problems with advanced features, but I simply don't like the big clunky windows that pop up by default.
When I want a small player window I have that too. To each his own, but your arguments against music libraries are pretty bizarre and make no sense to me.