The iTunes 10 UI is an abomination

So, iTunes 10 looks like Apple's col­lege intern office bitch slapped the design together over the week­end while on a ben­der. What hap­pened to those LEGIONS of UI design­ers they employ?

Let's Talk About That Icon

It's pretty damned ter­ri­ble. It's so bad that I don't even care that the soft­ware runs faster than before (and it does). The improved respon­sive­ness has taken a back­seat to shame. Ping? HOST UNREACHABLE. It's an embar­rass­ment to use or to be seen using. Here are two pieces of shitty MS cli­part that my wife found in Office 2007 in less than 45 seconds:

If these two crazy kids tried to get shitty on cheap wood­work­ing glue and Mad Dog 20/20 one week­end and "made an oop­sie", you'd get some­thing that looks a lot like that icon.

Oh, and here's a seri­ous ques­tion: why are the win­dow con­trols ver­ti­cal? Chew­bacca lives on Endor! It does not make sense! Styl­is­ti­cally and con­cep­tu­ally the whole thing feels clumsy and a bit like an attempt to get "in your face."

Almost every damned wid­get is A) yet again cus­tom to iTunes, not the OS; B) dif­fer­ent than it was before. They're almost all uni­ver­sally ugly. Things that should be but­tons are just sort of decal look­ing sec­tions of the screen and a lot of stuff has tremen­dously crappy bezels for no real reason.

Is There Any­thing They Did Right?

The speaker man­age­ment win­dow is a tremen­dous improvement?

I think I like this hybrid cover art view they're push­ing for col­umn based browsing.

You Like Third Party Library Servers?

Too bad. iTunes 10 has munged with the DAAP pro­to­col (which, admit­tedly, is Apple's pro­to­col, so it's their right) and bro­ken 3rd party DAAP servers. So, your Drobo, your Syn­ol­ogy DiskSta­tion, your Net­gear Rea­dy­NAS, and those West­ern Dig­i­tal disks that sup­port stream­ing music? They're all basi­cally going to need firmware updates when the some­one fig­ures out what to patch or change in MT-DAAP (or Fire­fly, if you pre­fer) to make it work again; you can make a pretty safe bet that Apple won't rev the pro­to­col back to help fix this problem.

Final Thoughts

I have to believe that some­one, some­where is labor­ing away on music library man­age­ment soft­ware that isn't encum­bered by goofy wid­gets and ridicu­lous busi­ness deci­sions. It's prob­a­bly not com­ing from the Linux camp (see: Rhythm­box, Ban­shee, Amarok, Clemen­tine, & Guayad­eque for an idea of where they're rein­vent­ing the wheel). Song­bird is wrapped in XUL inter­face hell (never mind tech­ni­cal back­end "iffi­ness"). I think iTunes has been the dom­i­nant player in this space (at least in OS X) for so long that no one even both­ers try­ing anymore.

Sigh…