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“Don’t get me wrong. I think Apple’s hardware is unbeatable, and my admiration for it has only grown since I got my first iPod back in 2003,” Roush writes. “My home/office is virtually an outpost of the Apple Store: with the exception of the TV, the videogame console, and the coffeemaker, almost every device in my house is an iGadget of some kind. The operating systems that power my Apple devices are pretty good, too. I love OS X and I’m very glad that Xconomy is a mostly Mac shop. On the mobile side… iOS is the slickest and most user-friendly mobile operating system out there.”
“But there’s one piece of the Appleverse that I’ve always detested, and that’s the desktop version of iTunes,” Roush writes. “The ugly duckling of the iFamily, this program is hard to understand, hard to use, inelegant, and ill-behaved—in short, the very opposite of most other Apple products. I dread booting it up every day, yet I can’t sidestep it.”
“I’ve been playing with Ping, and it seems to have most of the features you’d expect of a media-centric social network circa 2010—profiles, friending, news feeds, comments,” Roush writes. “Plus, of course, you can easily preview or buy the songs or albums mentioned in your friends’ news feeds. It’s easy to see how Apple might expand Ping beyond music to facilitate conversations around media of all sorts, including movies, books, and mobile apps.”
Roush writes, “That said, Ping has some serious limitations that, to me, are symptomatic of the larger problems with iTunes. For example, there’s no integration with Facebook or even with your contact lists, so it’s virtually impossible to find real-world friends to connect with. For a social networking tool, this is a bit of a problem… And there’s an even bigger issue: Adding a social networking interface, on top of all of iTunes’ other functions, is like grafting another limb to the forehead of an octopus. It’s just too much.”
There’s much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: While we agree that Apple has some improvements to make on the less-than-48-hours-old Ping, if you think “it’s just too much,” don’t click the Ping icon in iTunes. “Problem” solved. That goes for any other iTunes features as well. Turn them off or ignore them at will. iTunes can be as simple or as full-featured as you desire.
iTunes is hard to use? Seriously? He makes it sound as if they are making us use the command line to create playlists.
I do think it could use a little tweaking but to say it’s hard to use, well you must also have a hard time making toast.
Itunes sucks! Horrible UI. What happened to minimalism?
I love my iPhone, iPad, and MBP though!!!
I agree with MDN’s take. If there is a product or service you don’t want or can’t fathom – don’t buy it or use it. It’s simple.
I agree with MDN’s take. If there is a product or service you don’t want or can’t fathom – don’t buy it or use it. It’s simple.
I agree with MDN’s take. If there is a product or service you don’t want or can’t fathom – don’t buy it or use it. It’s simple.
I agree with MDN’s take. If there is a product or service you don’t want or can’t fathom – don’t buy it or use it. It’s simple.
I agree with MDN’s take. If there is a product or service you don’t want or can’t fathom – don’t buy it or use it. It’s simple.
I agree with MDN’s take. If there is a product or service you don’t want or can’t fathom – don’t buy it or use it. It’s simple.
I agree with MDN’s take. If there is a product or service you don’t want or can’t fathom – don’t buy it or use it. It’s simple.
Friending artists could be a gateway to using Ping. From there, with 200 million potential users, who knows?
Did this dufus even read Steve Jobs comments on why no Facebook?
I’ve turned off Ping. That piece of garbage is easy enough to ignore.
But what Apple has done to the UI of iTunes is a terrible. They have made an already weak product horrible, eschewing their own design standards.
I admit the general ease of iTunes and the media eco-system has helped to grow the iDevice market for Apple. But for very advanced users… problems still lurk under that now ugly skin. For instance, terribly fragile library databases, and a very difficult process to move files. Also, the difficulty of storing media on an external devices, the external drive it seems needs to be spinning when starting iTunes, or the media is not found. I could go on. I won’t.
Hey it’s easy to just tell pol don’t use so and so feature, but that is BS!
Idea is to raise our concern , give feedback , highlight the issue so Apple can improve and fix it… Not burry our hear in the ground and blindly ignore the issue or be a cult and say everything apple and steve jobs says / does is holy!
Itune is great, but it has it’s shortcomings, telling people to ignore it and not use xyz feature is simply stupid! Ping is new and sure improvements can be made,,, we accept it and we use it… Not bashing it, but giving feedback… Not trying to be an @$$ and ignoring the shortcomings!
Apple’s undoing?! Oh No!
I’ve been reading about Apple’s undoing for two decades. Every time it was overstated or just flat wrong.
Look if anything in iTunes doesn’t work right, they will fix it or ditch it. This is, after all, Apple.
It never ceases to amaze me that so-called industry watches always claim iTunes is bad or will kill Apple. When of course iTunes is the conduit to bringing Windows users to the Mac, especially using the iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. iTunes has helped propel Apple to the heights it is at now.
Sure it could use improvement, but there is STILL no real threat from anyone else!
When I was introduced to concept of addition in first grade arithmetic I remember how difficult it was to understand. Eventually I caught on…
iTunes is ungainly.
I too dread loading it up everyday.
When we mock Adobe or MS for being bloated, all they have to do now is point towards iTunes.
I have many of my music files on two different drives. iTunes allowed me to add the files. But once one of the drive was replaced due to disc errors. I had to move most of the files to a different drive. Renamed it accordingly, and hoped that iTunes would not reload the files as new. But it did, and now I have thousands of duplicates with no undo option. That’s just silly. All my painstakingly rated music and play counts and smart playlists are all useless.
I can go on, and there are volumes of tricks and tips online how to manage the iTunes beast. But seriously, is that the Apple way?
It’s a vast place, iTunes. And the turn-around software for Apple.
Yup makes some good points; beneath the skin, it’s begging for a ground-up re-write. In the dance of form and function, form is currently stepping on function’s toes.
iTunes does what I need–brings order to music and purchases as well as keeping a backup of my iPad and iPhone. Having lost an iPhone, I was happy to have had an up-to-date backup.
Don’t like vertical stoplight buttons? There is a simple hint over at the Mac OS X Hints site to change them back to horizontal.
What is so wrong with iTune’s interface? It’s basically a spreadsheet format. Tell me your solution for caragorizing over 10000+ songs?
MDN magic word: ri-tard
Either you are a Facebook junkie or you tweet (or roaming in MDN) all day long. I find people rarely blend or integrate their use. You don’t see a Twitter button in Facebook or a Facebook button in Twitter. All-encompassing sites are finding it harder and harder to attract people. Witness the failures of Orkut and Wave, and whatever MS, Yahoo, Or AOL had tried. Jobs is thinking about the problem, even if he does not have the answer yet. Focusing on a subject and doing it well has been a time tested technique as a start.
Look at all the big portals, and how even simple interfaces in the past like Facebook and Google News have changed and getting worse. KISS is a very difficult challenge as a site/software grows.
Apple has had years to study MySpace, Facebook, LastFM, and Twitter and this is the crap they came up with. God help us if this is enabled in iOS 4.1 and can’t be turned off.
I love Apple but just want to listen to my music from my library on the go and could care less what the neighbor is listening to make buying choices based on what is popular. I think Apple is going to feel the backlash from this poorly researched experiment in social media.
It seems the astroturfers are out in force today…
Who uses iTunes every day? I use it like once a month when I sync my iPhone. Otherwise, I share songs and movies from it to my Apple TV or listen to iPhone or iPod on speaker system. No interaction with iTunes required! I agree it’s not perfect software, but I have yet to see anything better and don’t see any need to use it all the time. (I’m sure Ping encourages that but I eschew all social networks so I don’t care about that.)
Apple needs to split some of the tasks assigned to iTunes to another app. iSync as a name would be great to manage the iPhone, iPad, iPod, Apple TV. Let iTunes simply be the media portal for the purchase and management of music.
Secondly, I would like to see a panel in Preferences that allows you to filter what you see when shopping the iTunes store. Bandwidth is precious on mobile and I really don’t need to see the latest country or hip-hop BS that I do not give a rip about- the same for rentals as I have no interest in them.