Apple rocks with iTunes 9, iTunes Store improvements | Hacker News Reader

Apple rocks with iTunes 9, iTunes Store improvements

arstechnica.com

34 pointsprofquail39 comments

Anyone else feel their lineup is extremely.. non-Apple-y now?

It used to make a lot of sense - to me anyway - how they arranged their iPods from cheap(ish)/only basic features to the luxury-versions with more features.

I.e., shuffle -> play music; nano -> all of shuffle's features + view album covers, song texts, song titles to the music, calendar; iTouch -> all of nano's features + the whole smartphone without phone thing

But now, ever since the introduction of the iPhone 3G, this doesn't hold true any more. The iTouch is supposed to have all the features of the nano plus more - but now it doesn't have a camera?

The only reason to give the nano a camera and not the iTouch would be to distinguish it from the iPhone and market it as a gaming device. But then it doesn't make sense how the basic model of the iTouch has a slower processor and GPU than the iPhone.

I don't know, but from these oddities in the lineup I'd almost go as far and predict more changes to come very shortly. Either push the iTouch more in the gaming niche and make the nano the new multimedia device (as opposed to just audio in the first two generations of it), or push the iTouch more into the all-in-one direction - which would mean there ought to be a new iPhone as well in order to keep the two apart.

Not sure if I'm making sense here, but right now the nano, iTouch, iPhone lineup is quite counter-intuitive and almost non-transparent (yes, choice is not always a good thing).

I don't know whether I'd like to think this was done with Jobs' approval or not. Jobs' approval means that the guy made a major oopsie. Without Jobs' approval would imply that the guy really is the one holding Apple together.

You're right. The way to tell is how much difficulty you are having in explaining how the whole line-up/hierarchy works.

I think it goes against one of the Apple-y things that I quite like. Make something people like enough to pay for. Don't build a product based on cross subsidies, non-transparent pricing, customer lock-in (not sure about this one), etc. That concept (I think) keeps Apple grounded. If they can make something that users are willing to pay enough for to make Apple a profit, they make money. If they can't they don't.

I think you're overcomplicating things a bit. They all play music and that's still what most people buy iPods for. You still have basically three categories of device: small size, mid-sized, large. The amount of storage space included mostly matches the physical size of the device. The extra features on different models isn't really that important. Seems like they just need to give owners of older models some reason to upgrade and it doesn't really matter that much what those features are.

The iTouch is supposed to have all the features of the nano plus more

Says who?

says apple's usual product lineup aesthetic.

one of the problems apple had about the time jobs came back was a confusing product line. nobody had the discipline to say "no," so there were a bunch of nearly identical competing products. novices had trouble picking one.

this current situation isn't nearly as bad as that one was, but it's definitely headed in that direction.

Well, rocks. In a weird kind of way. The new things are all nice but iTunes has become this huge pile of features, thrown together with no sense of direction.

Case in point: Genius Mixes and iTunes DJ. They both do the same. DJ gives you more options (like a history of played songs, better display options, voting, etc.) while Mixes can pick out similar songs (which DJ doesn’t do). Both have the purpose to play a never ending stream of music. Why the heck do they keep them separate? That doesn’t make any sense at all. Combine the two.

Kick out the old and consolidate. That would be a bold goal for iTunes X.

For those who are wondering (it's the first thing I checked): It's still not 64 bits.

As someone mentioned elsewhere (Gruber I think), it uses the older Carbon API which is being left in the 32-bit world. They'll have to upgrade it to Cocoa to make it a 64-bit app, but Cocoa isn't ported to Windows... So they have limited options:

* Port Cocoa to Windows and port iTunes to Cococa

* (Gruber's prediction) Port iTunes to be entirely based on Webkit (though I don't know how well that would work as I've never looked into Webkit performance/issues on Windows)

* Port Mac iTunes to Cocoa maintain Windows iTunes in Carbon

* Drop Windows iTunes (not going to happen)

* Port iTunes to iPhone/iPod Touch and drop it on OS X (yea right)

* Port Carbon to 64-bit -- even though it has been stated that they won't in a push to force developers onto Cocoa.

None of those are particularly attractive decisions. Going back on their word and porting Carbon to 64-bit or porting iTunes to be entirely a Webkit view seem to be the only options with the least friction, IMO.

I think that porting Cocoa to Windows would probably be a larger undertaking than it would be worth it, though they may have some portions of Cocoa ported already (IIRC, Safari is Cocoa, but they maybe have only ported what they needed to make Safari work).

I think the third option (cocoa on OS X, carbon on Windows) is the most likely.

Would they really want to split development like that? Cocoa and Carbon are completely different (C vs ObjC) APIs to Aqua/Quartz/etc.

"Port Cocoa to Windows and port iTunes to Cococa"

OpenStep was already ported Windows NT at one time ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OPENSTEP_on_Windows_NT.jpg ). They already port other libraries to Windows to support iTunes and Safari. I think this option makes the most sense moving forward if they want to continue building cross-platform applications.

Arguably iTunes is on Windows to support Windows users of iPhones/iPods (to expand their 'device market' beyond just the Mac ecosystem). Safari.... not really sure why Safari is there other than to try and support Windows developers of iPhone-targeted web-apps (before there was an official iPhone API). But that conclusion is questionable seeing how there are no Windows development tools for iPhone apps now that there is an official API.

> They already port other libraries to Windows to support iTunes and Safari.

iTunes doesn't use Cocoa/ObjC. It uses the Carbon/C (C++ too?) that was a way to transition between OS/9 and OSX back in the day (You could download the Carbon libraries for OS/9 and a Carbon app would run in OS/9 with them). Safari is Cocoa/ObjC so far as I know, but it's just a wrapper around Webkit for the most part. They could have ported the Windows version of Safari to Carbon, or just ported the parts of the Cocoa libraries that Safari needs (rather than the whole thing).

So.... it looks something like this:

  Port X% of Cocoa to Win32 + Port iTunes to Cocoa

Depending on that percentage and the amount of time it would take to port iTunes itself to Cocoa would determine how costly it is (time & money). I realize that you're also saying that porting however much of Cocoa over to Win32(+ Win64?) would help them develop more cross-platform apps, but I don't see this being part of their strategy.

Unless you prescribe to the John C. Dvorák line of thinking that Apple is going to go cross-platform, make a way to seamlessly develope Windows/MacOS applications, and then eventually dump MacOS for Windows on Apple machines, I don't think that Apple will leave the galleon that they have for themselves (their product/developer ecosystem). They just use cross-platform apps as a means to an ends... extending gang planks to passing ships and beckoning their passengers to cross over to the Apple side (or at least buy their consumer-devices and get hooked onto those).

From what I've looked into, Safari on Windows isn't using Cocoa. The latest Safari even looks much more like a Windows application than previous versions. So maybe I'm wrong about this point. However, I still think they're going to have to port iTunes to Cocoa simply because they've essentially deprecated Carbon. For the Windows version of iTunes, maybe they'll just have an completely separate version that isn't a port.

I know that when Safari for Windows first came out people were looking into some of the DLLs that were installed along with it, which were ports of things -- IIRC CF libraries at the very least -- from OSX. They may have depreciated those in newer versions due to poor compatibility with Windows.

> Safari.... not really sure why Safari is there other than to try and support Windows developers of iPhone-targeted web-apps (before there was an official iPhone API).

My impression was that they ported Safari to window after they saw how much cash Mozilla was making from the embedded search fields.

Probably doesn't hurt to also have one more way for potential Mac customers to dip their toe in the pool...

Well that was another theory. When they first released it I saw these theories:

* It's there to help encourage developers from Windows to write iPhone web apps.

* It's there to help encourage web developers that use Windows to make their pages Safari/WebKit-compatible (because they don't have to own a Mac to test their pages against it).

* It's there to foster 'switchers' by showing people that there are viable applications on the Mac (and that it's not a 'broken' platform). (e.g. the guy that sat behind me when I went to see 'White Noise' that kept complaining to his girlfriend that Michael Keaton was using a Mac and how much faster the audio processing that he -- Michael Keaton's character -- was doing would be going if he was on a PC with Windows)

* It's the vanguard of Apple moving software to Windows to ditch OS X.

* It's the the vanguard of Apple porting their core libraries to Windows to make running Windows apps under OS X native and seamless. (i.e. Apple + WINE or something like that)

* It's their to drive up the number of Safari users to force better web standards.

* Apple has no clue what they are doing.

* Apple was using it as a way to make people excited and not bummed over the announcement that there would be no native API for developers on the iPhone. (Yes. It was released at that Keynote).

Obviously some of these have proven false. As for the rest, it's a toss-up.

But supporting 64-bit Carbon for their own use isn't the same as supporting it for everyone else.

For one thing, only a subset of the Carbon API is important to iTunes. And if it became necessary to fix things (or even break compatibility), they could, because the 64-bit frameworks would be private.

And it's certainly possible to port to Cocoa incrementally. It is also possible to isolate Objective-C implementations behind pure C APIs, so that an abstraction doesn't have to know it's using Cocoa on Mac and something else on Windows.

Many of the Cocoa APIs are abstractions of C libraries like libxml, etc. But you still need to port everything that supports the Cocoa API wrapper around that C library, even if you don't have to port the C library itself.

Does anyone know what they've done with Safari? Safari 4 on Snow Leopard is 64-bit. Are they supporting 32-bit Safari on Windows and 64-bit Safari on OS X?

This could give an indication of where they're likely to go with iTunes.

You left off an odd but plausible option:

* Port iTunes to Webkit

WebKit's native plugin system is fantastic for doing this kind of stuff -- it's expressly for embedding native code as elements that are fully interactive with the rest of the document (though it's awful for implementing the average FF extension). They could use WebKit as the majority of the GUI without having to ship very much inspectable JS.

> You left off an odd but plausible option:

You missed my second bullet.

> though it's awful for implementing the average FF extension

I find that most Firefox extensions are more about modifying the user interface, and less about modifying the content of the page. (i.e. Pearl Crescent Saver, Tab Mix Plus, Download Them All!, Tiny Menu, etc) The big names cover most things you could want to do to the page outside of a Greasemonkey script (Ad Block Plus, NoScript, etc)

Another option: Just leave things the way they are.

There's no huge need to make iTunes 64Bit or Cocoa. Most of the features Apple has added to iTunes in the last 3-4 years are just UI tweaks and some algorithms to make special types of playlists automatically. I don't think they're being constrained by Carbon or will be anytime soon. Being a native Cocoa app would probably improve some of iTunes performance issues but realistically those problems aren't that bad. I just don't see enough room for growth in iTunes to justify all the effort of porting Cocoa to Windows or iTunes to WebKit.

It's plausible that they have been maintaining the Windows port of the Cocoa libraries all along. This port existed at the time of the Apple/NeXT acquisition. It was called "OpenStep/Enterprise"...but it was, basically, a Windows port of the same APIs that became Cocoa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OPENSTEP_on_Windows_NT.jpg

Recall that when Apple still only sold PowerPC machines that MacOS X was "leading a secret double life" in the labs in the form of the same x86 port of NeXTstep that was brought forward in tandem with MacOS X as it progressed.

They could be doing the same thing with Cocoa/Win.

I don't like the new, white UI. It clashes horribly with the rest of the (dark, grey) UI feels rather tasteless. Screenshot: http://twitpic.com/h48v1

The old UI was far, far classier.

Isn't it a shame you can't theme it at all?

No. The only themes I ever install are the ones that make it look like a native app, as it should.

I installed iTunes 9.0 and it seems to have a very web2.0 interface. I kind of like it. They have also increased the top 100 to top 200 lists in the appstore, which is wonderful. Now, they need to improve the rating, review system and voila.

Yep, overall some nice improvements but I was hoping they would have carried the Top Earners across to categories too.

totally agree. And it should be relatively easy to add. I think they are going to have it with 9.1 or something within a month.

If by web2.0 you mean they saw it fit to harshen gradients and add a gradient to the search box, you're right. This is exactly why I disliked the web2.0 aesthetic.

I was not talking about the looks at all. I specifically mentioned web2.0 "interface".

The interface is almost exactly the same.

I was hoping to hear more about improvements in the technology that regularly offers to delete all the music on my iPhone or iPod. For instance, the Genius feature could save time by deleting only the tracks I am likely to enjoy. With pocket-sized tera- and petabyte storage on the horizon it's the sort of forward-thinking innovation that distinguishes Apple from the lesser players in the field.

They took away the category view in the iTunes Store for all older iTunes. A lot of app developers are going to be very upset about this.

They hid the categories beside the App Store disclosure triangle at the top of the screen.

Nano-phone?

It would be extremely unlikely for a new iPhone to be released at an Apple Music Event.

A Shuffle-phone would be interesting...

I could see a good accessory opportunity for a Nano-phone though... make a 'shoe dock' that's a dress shoe you can dock your Nano-phone into... turning it into a phone (007 or Get Smart style).

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