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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

iTunes 4 - the day after
Over the past 24 hours, I've used iTunes 4 extensively, purchased a bunch of music online at the iTunes Music Store, copied purchased music between my iMac and iBook, manually dragged over album art from Amazon.com with Safari, and am now burning data DVD backups of my entire music library, which could take a while. So I feel as reasonably sure as one can this close to the product's introduction that I have a handle on how well it works. The good news is that iTunes is 4 is indeed excellent, and it's still my favorite all-around media player. The bad news is that iTunes 4 is getting more complicated as Apple adds features, and there is still a bunch of missing functionality. By complicated I'm referring to the suddenly huge selection of nearly indiscernable buttons that grace iTune's UI (ala Windows Media Player 9 Series on XP), including "Add Playlist," "Shuffle," "Repeat," "Show Album Art," "Show Equalizer," "Show Visualizations," and "Eject," but also the many hidden features, like Show Browser (which opens a weird new column view), and the weird new browser-like UI that pops up inside of iTunes when you view the Music Store (again, ala WMP 9, though the iTunes version doesn't support Safari's keyboard navigation shortcuts, which stinks): This UI includes a weird beveled toolbar with Back, Forward, Home, and Logon buttons, as well as a bunch of other associated controls, such as Search and Browse. The point here is that as iTunes gets more powerful (and therefore answers many of my complaints), it's also becoming less elegant and more complex, which raises new complaints, naturally. Anyone who has been using iTunes all along should have no problem picking up the new features, but people who start using iTunes now will suddenly find themselves confronted with a very complex piece of software, and that's too bad. As with WMP 9, I feel that there should be some way to turn off the advanced features (and associated UI) or, even better, make those features invisible until a power user turns them on.

[ Posted at 7:07 PM | Permalink ]