Let's Talk About That Icon

It's pretty fucking terrible. It's so bad that I don't even care that the software runs faster than before (and it does). The improved responsiveness? 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…

I had been working on something similar, though admittedly much, much less details when this dropped. My interest in this was strictly personal, as I've been bitten by Austin Motherfucking Sarner twice now: I am a recovering license holder for Catalog and Disco.

Oh sure, when these apps were launching there was fanfare and banners and near-daily blog updates about the status of them… and the promises! Oh, the promises that were made to get my small amount of hard earned money. But where are the updates, bug fixes, or new versions of these simple apps? If they're abandoned, is there any notice that they're now orphans?

What really kills me about all of this is that there is a bounty of Mac developers who are producing amazingly well designed applications (that don't shit all over the human interface guidelines) at an astounding pace. Everything Panic puts out is quality, TextMate rocks my face off, and CSSEdit is still the best style-sheet tool in OS X for the billionth year in a row.

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Venting aside, I know that this generation specifically can produce talented, focused, creative software developers who are interested in writing good software, not in offering engineering services without actually being a trained engineer*.

SKEdit is a wonderfully usable product, with regular updates, and a caring developer, and Sean Kelly is in the same age bracket as Austin and Phil Ryu; but no one ever lumps him in with them. Is it his lack of shameless self promotion (MacHeist, Disco, AppZapper, etc)?

Is it his ability to stick to a single project, and see it through to completion, or his talent for actually listening to what his customers want in the next version of SKEdit? Is he excluded for not spending his time on a flashy seizure inducing website or complicated marketing campaign? Maybe it's just because he's not a complete bag of douche like Phil Ryu is proving himself to be?

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Oh, how I long to hear the rebuttals that the Douchebag Generation developers are going to wallpaper their blog-o-trons with. I suspect that when they are finally written, they too will have fancy shmancy custom designs, highlighting the subtle contrast between the babyshit green and pock-marked "too much Indian food" black in their endlessly spewing rivers of bullshit.

*As of this evening, Austin Sarner's self-named site offers "human interface design and engineering". As the friend of a number of real engineers (mechanical, electrical, computer, etc), I take umbrage on their behalf as "engineer" is a term that denotes serious andstrenuous training, study, and at least a modicum of testing before one earns the right to slap it willy-nilly on their resume.

Engineers build things that people depend on, not fluff people discard 4 months later.