Membranophonist’s Ramblings

Comments on iTunes 7.

Visual

• The second the main window came to view, I noticed that iTunes 7 does not use the system theme alternate row color, neither Aqua (#edf3fe) or Graphite (#f0f0f0). The color itself (#f1f5fa) is more subtle than either one, so I’m okay with the change.
• Not a fan of the bottom button design.
• Not a fan of the scroll thumb look. The arrows are nice.
• I would much prefer a drop shadow to the reflection effect in the middle view. In addition to being more visually subtle, shadow depth could be used to indicate selected albums.

Interaction

• A Shift+Scroll wheel behavior in the Cover Flow view would be nice, perhaps jump 10 albums.
• I like the three-mode Album column and hope that such functionality becomes a part of the development frameworks for use in other software.
• Album covers are not pervasively treated as proxies for the album itself:
  • Covers do not have contextual menus for revealing the album folder in the Finder or opening the Info window for the entire album.
  • It is not possible to select multiple albums by Control-clicking on their covers in the middle view, which instead selects just the first track of each album.
  • The cover drag proxy icon is a generic iTunes document with the number of tracks badged rather than the album cover:
    
• The software still lacks the smarts to automatically relocate all the tracks of an album when iTunes loses track of them. If every track from an album is “missing” and I manually locate and fix the association for one, iTunes should automatically compare the track list to the file list in that folder and fix them!
• The Command-1 and Command-2 shortcuts were unbound from the main iTunes window and the Equalizer respectively, but not bound to anything in their place. The Keyboard Shortcuts list (accessible through the Help menu) still lists them as bound to the windows. Rather than rebinding them as they were pre-7.0, two alternatives make sense: the View switcher (consistent with the Finder) or to star ratings (consistent with iPhoto).
• The addition of Album Artist is great for jazz nerds; I can keep my Art Blakey and Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers albums straight without having different artists displayed and creating multiple folders.
• Unless you have selected the “Don’t show this again” checkbox, the “Get Album Artwork” command should have ellipses at the end as it requires further user input to execute.
• The plain Album column is not good at handling identically named albums. The tracks from McCoy Tyner’s Illuminations are interleaved with those from the Santana & Alice Coltrane album of the same name.
  
  You get jazz nerd points if you know how McCoy Tyner and Alice Coltrane are connected without consulting a resource other than your brain.
• When in the middle view with the browser open, if you select a single track and then hide the browser, the track you selected is deselected and the view scrolls to the top. Annoying.
• “No/Yes” dialogs must die. If Microsoft’s use of them was the reason for their prevalence in iTunes, they should disappear soon seeing how the Windows 6.0 guidelines now recommend using verbs as labels (just like the Apple HIG).
  
  

Miscellaneous

• Still a crappy video manager.
• The Gapless Detect-O-Matic didn’t get Santana’s Caravanserai or Borboletta.
• As I might have said before, the reason I’m so critical of iTunes is because I use it a lot.