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iTunes will never work well

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Re: iTunes will never work well

#21

Post by firasd »

Bud wrote: post #17

Interesting that every single UI example in this article is from an old version of Windows. Fuck Windows. You want iTunes to work well? You want to see Apple's real UI? Then use their real platform.

Are you saying on OS X I wouldn't have gotten the inscrutable dialog saying, "You are about to start playback. Do you want to clear the 2 songs previously added to Up Next?"

(I guess, all these years later, I kinda get it? But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue.)

Re: iTunes will never work well

#23

Post by striking »

jheriko wrote: post #11

i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui... all of their stuff is terrible. the main problem: zero discoverablity - i need to google how to do things, then get some snotty fanboy answer about how easy and obvious it is, but there is literally no way to infer the functionality from the design. they do love to steal context too... and interrupt your flow... ... i could go on and on, but having zero-di…

Their reputation stemmed from the days where everything was discoverable. Want to delete a file? There's a trash can glued to your dock. Need to perform a function but don't know the name? Look it up in the Help menu's search box.

Now, though, they've done the Windows 8 thing of overloading gestures and hiding behaviors. Want to see your notifications? Two-finger swipe to the left, starting from the edge of the touchpad. If the piece of text hasn't been there since OS X first came out, is it clickable or not? Because I damn well can't tell, nothing new looks like a button anymore.

I could also talk about how the gaussian blur effect is just about the most wasteful effect you can apply to anything, and is a far cry from pioneering the first fast rounded rectangle drawing algorithm, or anything in that vein, but I don't need to.

Because Apple's UI is just no longer good. I'd rather every button look like a shimmering stupid bubble than an unusable postmodern art piece.

Sent from my MacBook Pro

Re: iTunes will never work well

#24

Post by striking »

flukus wrote: post #20
askafriend wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, even Google has terrible UI/UX these days. Just look at Google Maps or Gmail. Material design isn't that great for discoverability either.

They took away the zoom in/out floating buttons on the android maps app, managing to destroy discoverability and single handed operation.

At least on my OnePlus phone, you can double-tap the screen and drag up or down to zoom in or out, like a scroll wheel. It's better than buttons, in my humble opinion.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#25

Post by mrsteveman1 »

neilellis wrote: post #10

I've switched to using Plex now, I find iTunes and the Music app way to complicated to use and constantly throwing up dialog boxes when all I want to do is listen to some music. I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.

> I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.

They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently.

But regardless of the details the end result is very often as you describe, and it's odd to see happen over and over. There are certainly managers and executives working over each of those groups that should be guiding them in the right direction so that things feel like a "part of the whole".

Re: iTunes will never work well

#26

Post by kovrik »

jheriko wrote: post #11

i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui... all of their stuff is terrible. the main problem: zero discoverablity - i need to google how to do things, then get some snotty fanboy answer about how easy and obvious it is, but there is literally no way to infer the functionality from the design. they do love to steal context too... and interrupt your flow... ... i could go on and on, but having zero-di…

Agree. I really love Apple, but I always find myself Googling for "Can I do that in iTunes?" (the answer is usually No) or "How to do this?". And I can't say that I want something weird. Some workflows look so simple and obvious to me (and I think most people have the same workflows), but they are literally impossible with iTunes and other Apple stuff.

For example, I have a 2TB AirPort Time Capsule, but it looks impossible to backup my iPod or MacBook directly to it (which is nonsense, why do I need 2TB then?). So I have to create backups with iTunes, then go to `~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/` and copy everything manually to the capsule.

Searching for a song in iTunes is always confusing. Why don't they have global search field that searches in both Library and connected device?

Photos app is another nightmare (and photos management overall)! Again, I just want to connect my iPhone or my camera and transfer photos to AirPort Time Capsule. Impossible.

Or in macOS, you can't just make some apps fullscreen: they always have that 5px gap between app window and dock bar (http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/141800/gap-at-the-b...).

Or the fact they don't have proper window management and themes. One have to use third-party apps full of hacks to have, say, dark window theme or some parody of tiling WM.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#27

Post by jfb »

Bud wrote: post #17

Interesting that every single UI example in this article is from an old version of Windows. Fuck Windows. You want iTunes to work well? You want to see Apple's real UI? Then use their real platform.

It's a catastrophe on Mac OS as well.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#28

Post by flukus »

Bud wrote: post #17

Interesting that every single UI example in this article is from an old version of Windows. Fuck Windows. You want iTunes to work well? You want to see Apple's real UI? Then use their real platform.

If iTunes is so awkward why would I want to switch to a whole OS + computer made by the same company?

Re: iTunes will never work well

#29

Post by Bud »

firasd wrote: post #21
Bud wrote: post #17

Interesting that every single UI example in this article is from an old version of Windows. Fuck Windows. You want iTunes to work well? You want to see Apple's real UI? Then use their real platform.

Are you saying on OS X I wouldn't have gotten the inscrutable dialog saying, "You are about to start playback. Do you want to clear the 2 songs previously added to Up Next?" (I guess, all these years later, I kinda get it? But they should just have moved the song you selected to the top of the Up Next queue.)

Honestly, I don't know, about that particular detail. I haven't seen that, though. Which version of iTunes was this?

Anyway, the question itself isn't that offensive, right? They want to know whether you intend to play your selected song and THEN the things in queue, or clear out the queue instead. I admit that a modal dialog is...sub-optimal here, but I'm not sure how else to do this.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#30

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

neilellis wrote: post #10

I've switched to using Plex now, I find iTunes and the Music app way to complicated to use and constantly throwing up dialog boxes when all I want to do is listen to some music. I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.

iTunes was an Apple acquisition. It has always been... different.

But bafflingly so. It would take less than year to write a better music player/app manager/etc from the ground up.

Given Apple's almost infinite resources, I don't understand why this hasn't happened.

I can only assume there are good commercial reasons for leaving iTunes the software equivalent of week-old underpants.

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