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iTunes will never work well

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Re: iTunes will never work well

#331

Post by rsfinn »

striking wrote: post #23
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 touch…

> Want to see your notifications? Two-finger swipe to the left, starting from the edge of the touchpad.

Or, y'know, you could just click the notifications icon in the menubar (the one that looks like a list of notifications)?

Re: iTunes will never work well

#332

Post by rsfinn »

rtpg wrote: post #104
striking wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 touch…

want to eject a disk? drag it to the trash can...? I think Apple was good at keeping things consistent across apps, but the chosen metaphors were sometimes just as confusing (if worse) than the blessed windows one. Not that it matters, everything is learned behaviour anyways. Consistency is already a great achievement.

> want to eject a disk? drag it to the trash can...?

This is the appendix of the Mac UI.

Gather round, kids, and listen to Grandpa tell you a story of the days when Macs had only one floppy disk drive. When you wanted to copy a file from one disk to another, you had to (physically) eject the first disk to insert the second one, but the first disk volume was still logically mounted so you could use it as a source or destination. So the volume's icon remained on the desktop, only dimmed so you knew the disk wasn't physically present.

So you physically eject a disk by selecting it and pressing Command-E (remember, only one mouse button), but how do you get rid of the ghost icon afterwards? Same way you get rid of anything -- you drag it to the trash.

From there it's an obvious shortcut to combining the two operations by dragging a "live" icon to the trash to both eject it and remove its icon in one step. (Well, obvious in 1985, anyway.)

Now that we can right-click the icon to eject the volume and have forgotten the origins of the drag-to-trash gesture, it may seem nonsensical, but those of us who were there at the beginning were grateful for the shortcut. (Also, get off my lawn.)

Re: iTunes will never work well

#333

Post by jonathankoren »

sirn wrote: post #119
striking wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 touch…

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…

> 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.

Problem: You plug in an external monitor and for some reason it doesn't immediately display an images. What do you do?

In pre-el-Capitan, you open up the display settings pane and press the button marked "Detect Displays".

In El Capitan, you open up the display settings pane and note that the button is not there. Are you screwed? It appears so. So you run a google search and discover that if you hold down the option key, the button that had been there for maybe 16 years magically appears in an area of what previously appeared to be blank in the dialog.

I believe that's called the Indiana Jones UI pattern.[0]

So yes, the discoverability has gotten worse over the years. This is something that was visible and made invisible.

[0] http://youtu.be/xFntFdEGgws

Re: iTunes will never work well

#334

Post by [deleted] »

sirn wrote: post #119
striking wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 touch…

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…

[deleted]

Re: iTunes will never work well

#336

Post by rsfinn »

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…

Perhaps the App Store has been upgraded in the last 10 hours, but I too simply typed "essentials" into the search bar and it worked fine (on both iOS and Mac, as well as iTunes). Didn't even need to put it in quotes.

Perhaps actually doing the text search is the barrier you mean? Were you looking for an item labeled "Essentials" in the Quick Links section? I agree that would be preferable, but it's not like doing a search is the Riddle of the Sphinx.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#337

Post by gregn »

Saying "iTunes will never work well" is like saying the sky is blue. Why would anyone need a kitchen sink to copy an audio file to their device? Oh, wait, unless there is manufacturer locks, and controls put in place to steer consumers' capital flow. Oh yeah, that's why. From that perspective I would say iTunes is a smashing success. And this negative social virus has spread like gang-busters spawning countless imitators.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#338

Post by moogly »

Razengan wrote: post #46
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…

> all of their stuff is terrible. As a PC-only user since the days of DOS up till Windows 8, and having used Windows 10 after jumping ship to Macs a few hours ago, macOS has demonstrably more discoverability than Windows. One example: Just click on the Help menu, in any app, and type something like "show" or "find" or any other operation, and it will show you all the menu items which have that word in their name. Tha…

It could be argued that is not "discoverability". IMO, that's a feature to handle bad discoverability and unintuitive UI.

Discoverability is when you can see what/how to do something by just looking or clicking around a bit.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#339

Post by dave5104 »

izacus wrote: post #329
newscracker wrote: post #310

Apple needs to allow importing songs into the Music app on iOS from any source, not just iTunes and its own store. This has been a long standing pain point. Not everybody wants Apple Music and not everybody wants to buy music from Apple. But there are people with existing music collections who want to add them to iOS devices easily without having to use iTunes. This procedure works for iBooks, where you can add books…

Isn't that what iTunes Match did (does?) for a fee?

No, iTunes Match simply allows you to sync your music via iCloud. If you have a song on your computer in iTunes, Match will find the song in their catalogue and let you download that to your iPhone, or it will upload the music file from your computer and let you download that to your iPhone. It was basically a way to cut the cord, so to speak, and not have to actually sync your phone to your computer.

You still need iTunes for it all to work in the end.

Re: iTunes will never work well

#340

Post by CapitalistCartr »

I strongly prefer a Unix approach to tools: each tool does one thing, Vasili. One thing only, please. That eases understanding of what is going on. Users are better educated and troubleshooting bugs/flaws is vastly easier. I consider a corporate decision as to what my computer will do irrespective of my wishes to be a flaw.
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