iTunes 7 was released a few days ago as I'm sure many if not most Mac users are aware of. It's a pretty nice upgrade in terms of features. Nothing all that exciting, but some nice new visual sorting/searching techniques. The flip through album covers feature is cool, and iTunes finally is able to look up album artwork which is nice. I'll no longer have to look add it myself.
Ok, so what's with the title? Well I've been a Mac user for a long time. I like the consistency of the OS. Having all of my applications look and feel the same is really nice. Apple's done a great job keeping their applications about the same over the releases. Aqua started it all and then there was metal that followed and contrasts the aqua feel nicely. iTunes 6 had this new "plastic" (as some have coined it) look. It took a while to get used to, but it still bothered me a little every time I looked at it. Don't get me wrong, it looks nice, but it looks different from all of the other brushed metal apps.
Read More...4 Comments Tags: Apple, Cocoa, iTunes, Microsoft
Many people are under the impression that iTunes is magical or something. iTunes contains their music and it only exists within iTunes. It's because if you obtain music legally, you never really see anything outside of iTunes. The music was on a CD, and then it's in iTunes, or the music was in the music store, and now it's in iTunes. It's a great design from a novice user's point of view, they have little to learn, but sometimes learning is good.
iTunes has a default preference for its music location, ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music. Why it's this folder, I'm really not sure. It seems like it would make a lot more sense for it to just be your ~/Music folder, but I don't work at Apple, and Apple provides no real reason why it is this folder (maybe it's to avoid clutter in your ~/Music folder, maybe not).
Why have an iTumes Music folder as it's called in Apple's preferences at all? Because music should be stored in one central location. Thus, there's a bunch more (advanced) preferences that actually come with the iTunes Music folder. You can keep your music folder organized, you can have all of your music copied to your iTunes Music folder when it's added to iTunes, and you can even have your iTunes Music folder located somewhere else.
Having that music folder is somewhat misleading. If I add music to the music folder on my own, shouldn't iTunes pick up on that? Answer: it doesn't. Why? Because it would slow iTunes down (Amarok for *nix can do it just fine, but that's besides the point). Other than that, the preferences aren't really misleading. Well, that is until you realize that by default iTunes copies music to your iTunes Music folder for you. Why anyone decided that it was a good idea to have this preference enabled by default is beyond me. It's not entirely beyond me, I do understand it on the level of "we assume someone using our application has no prior knowledge of how to use a computer," but for people who do know what they're doing, it just doesn't make any sense as a default. If you download a song from the internet and add it to iTunes, then decide you don't want it any more, you have to delete it in two places, off your desktop, and within the iTunes Music folder. Of course, you could just delete it from your iTunes music library which will conveniently ask you if you want to delete it from your computer, but wait, you just did delete it! What to do? (Correct answer: delete it again).
Ugh.
Read More...16 Comments Tags: iTunes, Senuti