iTunes 10 chucks Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines out the window

“Yup. Apple’s decided it’s been at least a few months since it screwed with the iTunes UI, and so it’s made some changes. Some of them actually work. There’s a decent ‘hybrid’ list view, and the main interface pane offers more clarity,” Craig Grannell writes for Revert to Saved. “However, two changes are mind-boggling.”

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“iTunes previously coloured its sidebar items… [and] the close/minimise/zoom buttons are now aligned vertically in the full window mode. In the mini-player window, this was always the case, but in the full window mode, it’s a baffling decision,” Grannell writes. “Even though Mac OS X’s hardly a bastion of total consistency these days, these three important buttons usually stay put, and people’s muscle memory enables quick access to them. Now, iTunes 10 chucks Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (the ones Apple seemingly expects every developer but itself to follow) out the window, in order to save a little horizontal space.”

Grannell writes, “In the past, iTunes has foreshadowed subsequent updates to the look and feel of Mac OS X. I seriously hope that isn’t the case this time, because the iTunes 10 UI is a botch job.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Perhaps Apple’s reassigned the people responsible for the UI disaster that was Safari 4 Public Beta to iTunes? Thank Jobs for the Terminal.