61–70 of 379 posts
"Spotify" just switch now and never look back
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…
E.g. with the podcasts sync feature, you can only decide how many episodes you want stored for every podcast at a global level, not per podcast. So e.g. you can either store the most recent ten episodes of each podcast, or every episode of each podcast. So even though for most podcasts ten is probably enough, you end up needing to store every episode of every podcast on your phone even if there is only one podcast where you want every episode.
Similarly, once you purchase an app the only option is to download all the new updates, even if you don't use the app anymore. There is no option to archive the app, so it's either let iTunes keep installing the updates each week or else delete it the app you paid for from your computer. Again, this just needlessly churns through backup disks so that Apple can sell people more external hard drives.
These are just a couple examples, but it seems like pretty much every features of iTunes is designed to force you to buy more stuff from Apple that you don't actually need.
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…
Even if you restrict yourself to one supplier, they have dozens of variants and arcane naming schemes that makes working out what's current something that takes hours of research. Compare this to apple which only has a couple of SKU's at a time in each category and it makes purchasing a lot simpler.
My thinking is that apple == easy is something that just sticks in your mind from the outset.
I'm having a hard time understanding these tweets. Playing a song and adding songs to 'up next' are two different things. That dialog box has saved me multiple times. What's wrong with it? It only occurs when you are telling iTunes to do conflicting things that it cannot resolve by itself. It's a better outcome than clearing a playlist someone may have spent a lot of time working on. Software update and login dialogs…
Okay. So I’m no UX expert, just a developer and I’ve also worked in product management. I think at some point, if you work in this field, you have to develop instincts around the design and experience of things. A modal (i.e. app-locking) dialog that says “contacting the iphone software update server”, which is current behavior and not changed as far as I can tell, is so far out of the realm of acceptable in my view…
Didn't realize it was in some sort of bad UI hall of fame :)
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…
I'm surprised they haven't been hit with a class action lawsuit for the iTunes UX yet, since it seems designed to needlessly fill up space on your computer / phone in order to get you to upgrade to larger models. E.g. with the podcasts sync feature, you can only decide how many episodes you want stored for every podcast at a global level, not per podcast. So e.g. you can either store the most recent ten episodes of e…
I actually highly doubt this. Apple has done a lot of work (starting in iOS 4 IIRC) to actually remove the need for iTunes.
From my personal experience, and that of working at the Genius Bar, most people don't use iTunes at all. With regular backups and sync happening over iCloud, with Apple Music/iTunes-over-the-cloud/Spotify, the use case for iTunes - ESPECIALLY for managing an iOS device - is incredibly small.
In fact, more and more iTunes features are added to lessen the space it takes up - the default behaviour of iTunes (as a music listening app) is for it to stream songs and download as much as possible on-demand. My 45GB iTunes library only takes up 15GB on my Mac.
I say this as someone who uses iTunes daily to listen to music, but never actually touches iOS devices through it.
People always bash iTunes, but I actually use it quite often and I like it. Maybe it's just me though? The only thing that bugs me, is on iOS, when I load the music app (that's basically iTunes for iOS, right?) it shows a blank page until it can connect to the their servers to grab some data. It doesn't have a problem if I'm on wifi or a fast connection, but I'm often in places where my service is shit, and I get a w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That must-connect-to-server-before-I-show-you-your-LOCAL!-files has really pushed me over the edge. Infuriating! I've been trying out some replacment music apps, but haven't really found any great alternatives at this point. I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months. Someone around here put it best a few wks ago in an iPhone7 discussion: Steve Jobs is dead.
> I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months. The stock android music app was, last time I punished myself by using it, terrible . This cloud integration stuff is so damn pushy. I wish there was something out there with only the features of winamp, but enough UI polish that it doesn't look like some college kid's hobby project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That must-connect-to-server-before-I-show-you-your-LOCAL!-files has really pushed me over the edge. Infuriating! I've been trying out some replacment music apps, but haven't really found any great alternatives at this point. I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months. Someone around here put it best a few wks ago in an iPhone7 discussion: Steve Jobs is dead.
> I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months. The stock android music app was, last time I punished myself by using it, terrible . This cloud integration stuff is so damn pushy. I wish there was something out there with only the features of winamp, but enough UI polish that it doesn't look like some college kid's hobby project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised they haven't been hit with a class action lawsuit for the iTunes UX yet, since it seems designed to needlessly fill up space on your computer / phone in order to get you to upgrade to larger models. E.g. with the podcasts sync feature, you can only decide how many episodes you want stored for every podcast at a global level, not per podcast. So e.g. you can either store the most recent ten episodes of e…
> it seems like pretty much every features of iTunes is designed to force you to buy more stuff from Apple that you don't actually need. I actually highly doubt this. Apple has done a lot of work (starting in iOS 4 IIRC) to actually remove the need for iTunes. From my personal experience, and that of working at the Genius Bar, most people don't use iTunes at all. With regular backups and sync happening over iCloud, w…
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.