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Comment by fjh | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that your perception of iTunes being more intuitive comes simply from being more used to it. I used to use Amarok a lot and when I had to use iTunes it didn't really make any sense to me. For example, I once ended up deleting some songs from a friend's collection when I tried to remove them from the current playlist. Now, maybe I'm just not smart enough to use a computer correctly, but may friends definitely had less trouble using amarok on my computer than I had with itunes on theirs.

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No, no, you're right. iTunes does have some usability issues still. The "removing a song from playlist" is actually the first one I'd think of also; the fact that you hit the same button to delete a song and to remove it is problematic. By default iTunes pops up a warning either way asking you if you're sure you want to delete/remove, so that that way you know what you're doing, but if you tell it to stop popping up warnings there's a risk of messing things up.

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.

> The thing is that anything can become intuitive. Use Amarok long enough and I'm sure it becomes effortless.

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?)

I disagree with your disagreement, but I figure at this point it's nitpicking on both our sides. We both stated our cases pretty thoroughly, I think.

> (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.)

It is impossible to move songs in a playlist to the trash. That can’t be what happened. (“Deleting” songs in a playlist always merely removes them from the playlist.)

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.

Holding down option while pressing delete in a playlist prompts you with the "Move to Trash" / "Keep in Library" deletion dialog.

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