iTunes 7 - a quick GUI review

Sat, 23 September 2006

It seems that Apple has pushed the iTunes 7 release way before it was really ready. This shows not only in the audio problems reported by many users, but also in iTunes 7 interface. It is clearly unfinished and although it looks nice, it has some serious shortcomings.

I used iTunes 7 for a few days now and here are my impressions.

Positive

The buttons - very nicely designed, particularly the view selection and navigation in iTunes Store.

Menu icons on the left of the screen, great improvement

Scrollbar - although some people don’t like it, I am a big fan of the new design. I hope this will be standard in 10.5. There are some issues I will mention later, but I guess that’s an easy fix.

Album cover flow - simply fantastic. Maybe something Apple should consider including in iPhoto 07 when released.

Look and feel generally, a very nice application to work with, and if it wasn’t for a few things listed below it would possibly earn top spot for application interface on OS X.

Negative

The dock icon. The new blue one looks just cheap and ugly, the green one was way better. But this is I guess personal preference. The number of colours in the blue icon is somewhat reduced and the icon itself looks like it was made by someone just rushing to get it out of his hands.

Scroll bar. Either I am blind or someone at Apple is. Take a look at the scroll bar on this picture, the moving part is clearly aligned left, leaving a few pixels of empty space on the right. OK, it may be due to the shaddow on the left side of the scroll bar ‘canal’, but it looks very dodgy to me.

Here it is again, zoomed.

Menu selection - black. What is that all about? It’s only consistent with, well - nothing. Yes, the album cover flow has the black background so it may fit half-nicely, but with everything else it just looks ugly.

Advanced search. What happened with the search? In iTunes 6 we had the option to narrow down the search by selecting Song, Artist, Album and so on (see below), in version 7 it’s simply gone. Why, Apple?

Icons on the bottom of the screen, did someone forget to turn the colour on? Someone may like it but I think they look very clumsy. First, there is no rollover effect, which would make some sense. Secondly they’re inconsistent with the view selection icons on top, which look great. And thirdly, once the icon is active, it only gets slight blue glow to indicate this, an inset would do much better.

Equalizer - what on earth is happening here? Firstly, the icon has been removed from the bottom right corner of iTunes (was there in iT 6) and now the menu item has no keyboard shortcut at all. The only way to activate it is to click View | Show Equalizer. This is just silly, to say it nicely.

And while we’re at the equalizer, there are some traces of Aqua interface left there.

So clearly iTues 7 is an unfinished product and was pushed for the September “Showtime” event. I hope there is an update soon addressing number of those issues as well as the cracking sound some users are experiencing.

I also hope this is the kind of interface Apple may introduce in Leopard next year. One of the things I always hated with OS X is the GUI inconsistence. Can we allow ourselfs the luxury of believing Apple will address this in 10.5? From my previous experience, I wouldn’t put too many dollars on it.

Update 24/09/2006 - Thanks to JD McMillan - the search can be narrowed down via drop-down menu. A bit unusual change and to a degree confusing, but I don’t believe it takes long to get used to it.

Stumble it!

Related posts

• iTunes changes its mind on MiniStore
• Still no equalizer shortcut in iTunes
• Best Skin Ever for iPod touch available
• Griffin Radio Shark review
• Video playback in iTunes 7.4

Web hosting - UNLIMITED space and transfer - $ 6.95 per month

Posted in Reviews, Software