Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

iTunes will never work well

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 379 posts

Re: iTunes will never work well

#221

Post by mosselman »

niccaluim wrote: post #153
sirn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who got to use a PowerBook G4 (running 10.5.8) from time to time (in fact, I'm typing this very comment on it), I fail to see how their current UI is any more undiscoverable than the UI from 7 years ago. The trash icon was there in the Dock in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. The search function in help was there in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. To remove things from the Dock, right click the icon and the…

I'd go back even further to find decent Mac UI, to the pre-X OS. Yes, it was a reliability garbage fire, but the Apple of that time really invested in usability. They published a 400-page book[1] for developers that explained the principles behind usability, showed how interface design fits into the development process, and gave specific guidelines for each type of interface element. The guidelines they publish today…

[1] is a great resource and a lot of it is still relevant. Thank you for linking to it.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#222

Post by hawski »

majewsky wrote: post #198
icebraining wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with Google Maps? I've just been watching a non-technical friend use it and the only thing that wasn't intuitive was adding an extra stop to her trip (and even then, she discovered it without needing to search for help).

My two main gripes with Google Maps (on Android): 1. In the most recent version, there is some action (I don't know which at the moment) which makes all UI elements disappear, and I don't know how to bring them back except by restarting the app. 2. My most common use-case is to search for some amenity within a certain area. So I pan and zoom to the area that I want to search, type in my query... and it zooms out to t…

1. Single tap on the map (but not on Points Of Interest) toggles UI visibility.

2. That one is the most annoying thing for me. It usually happens if you search for something that it can't find in visible area, but it looks random. Google Search taught me that you can write a bit sloppy and it still is able to find it. Than in Google Maps it can lead to showing you some cryptic place in another country.

Another annoying thing for me is a language problem. I am living now in Germany, but I am from Poland. You can't do category search in Polish, because it will show you results in Poland. But at the same time if you look on details for the German place you will see category in Polish. So you may not know what Google expects.

Also when you click on category icon from search list (those red icons) it will search in language of the country you're in, but you have to click on a name in your language.

But multiple language support suck mostly everywhere... Chrome offers site translation (some of the time). I prefer translations to English, because they are better than translations to Polish. I also don't want to translate it always, because it is not always needed (and flicker is annoying) or not good enough.

To translate a site to English I have to do this every time (my UI is in Polish, but I will write all in English, but translation is mine):

1. Tap on underlined "Polish" in sentence "Translate to Polish"

2. Tap "Polish" in "Translation language" menu

3. Scroll to the top to find "English"

4. Tap "English"

5. Tap "Ready"

6. Tap "Translate"

7. Ignore annoying confirmation by scrolling or tapping "Ready"

At least translation from context menu is sensible now. You can select text by long tapping and tap translate and it remembers what language you selected earlier and has the most recent used languages at the top of the language list.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#223

Post by the_other »

majewsky wrote: post #194
fixmycode wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the trash can turns into the eject symbol if you start to drag an ejectable volume

1. Not very discoverable if your dock is set to auto-hide. 2. On a large screen, this action (the trash can transformation) can happen very far away from the place you're looking at, which means that you will miss it. This is a general gripe of mine with Mac OS: It will regularly place popup dialogs on seemingly random screens. I have three active screens, and when I'm looking at the left screen, the right screen is…

If you can set your dock to auto-hide, and run three parallel screens, you probably don't need any of the other assistance you're looking for.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#224

Post by kalleboo »

tomasandrle wrote: post #174

It must be really hard to maintain and add features to such a huge old application. Platforms have changed underneath it, the devices and services it connects to have come and gone, Objective C has changed a lot as well. And then there's the Windows version... Still, iTunes is crap. I hated it so much that I wrote my own music player for iOS, just to avoid using iTunes for putting music on my phone [1]. My guess is t…

> My guess is that sooner or later, iTunes will be dismantled and the features will be split into multiple smaller apps

I've been hoping for this for ages, but looking at the new Music app on iOS I guess I should be careful what I wish for. At least iTunes isn't that bad.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#225

Post by the_other »

twhb wrote: post #122
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…

Speaking of, Apple is to blame for the absolute worst case of discoverability I've ever encountered: getting the iOS App Store app to list all apps labeled "Essentials". Dug around, couldn't find it. Googled it, found a few forum threads where everybody concluded it couldn't be done. Went into an Apple store, gave an employee a few minutes to figure it out, and he gave up. And yet, it's possible. Rather than just tel…

Why on this blue-green earth would you want to ask a vendor for what they consider "essential". How is this useful to you? Why would you expect the vendor to provide this for you (except to further their own sales agenda)? This is a straw man that I implore you to burn.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#226

Post by SCdF »

OK, so I use OSX, and I want to play mp3s that I have locally, and see them in a library format that I can search. Even maybe have album art, though I'm not fussed.

Ignoring itunes, how do I do it? What is a good fast low memory music playing app with library management? If I was on Windows I'd be using Foobar2k. On OSX it seems to be either itunes, a command line app, or various bloated messes that aren't honestly better than itunes.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#227

Post by nicky0 »

majewsky wrote: post #205
flukus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Every company of non-trivial size operates like that.

A company is usually a tree-like structure, where the branches are connected by the root node. Too bad that this particular company's root node was garbage-collected in 2011 while there were still live references to it.

But iTunes was already shit when the root node node was still around.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#228

Post by giaosudau »

mrsteveman1 wrote: post #14

I'm still kinda curious why iTunes has blocked the UI thread so often for such a long time, perhaps a limitation of the overall architecture of the app combined with having webviews everywhere calling out to native code?

This is the most annoying in Itunes I tried Apple Music but couldn't stand to wait between each click to album artist and so on. That why I switched to Spotify which is much faster and easy to use.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#229

Post by nicky0 »

josteink wrote: post #152

> Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting iTunes, too. While a great quote, it's not entirely true. Some of us said enough is enough and ditched the iOS/Itunes ecosystem for something better. Why suffer needlessly?

And even better, with iOS 10 we can now delete the Music and iTunes apps from our phones.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#230

Post by ldjb »

SCdF wrote: post #226

OK, so I use OSX, and I want to play mp3s that I have locally, and see them in a library format that I can search. Even maybe have album art, though I'm not fussed. Ignoring itunes, how do I do it? What is a good fast low memory music playing app with library management? If I was on Windows I'd be using Foobar2k. On OSX it seems to be either itunes, a command line app, or various bloated messes that aren't honestly b…

Have you tried Clementine? https://www.clementine-player.org
Post reply on HN