Craig Grannell writes for TechRadar UK, “Below are the 11 things we’d like to see Apple change in iTunes 11.”
1. Embrace the cloud
2. Make podcast subscriptions stick
3. Improve app management
4. Enable global view options
5. Borrow from iOS
6. Get non-iTunes artwork
7. Expand Ping
8. Improve rather than regress usability
9. Improve the artwork window
10. Sort out the Windows version
11. Sort out the Mac version
Read more about all 11 points in the full article here.
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Remove Ping!
Just let me drag a song from <any> computer to <my> iDevice at any time without worrying about if the computer is the “master” computer. At the least I should be able to do that for any non-DRM’ed item.
Just let me drag a song from <any> computer to <my> iDevice at any time without worrying about if the computer is the “master” computer. At the least I should be able to do that for any non-DRM’ed item.
This review is stupid. Did the guy run out if things? Sort out the windows version – sort out the mac version! WTF?! Thats not helpful just stupid. The only thing on here that is right is that they need to sort out ping.
This review is stupid. Did the guy run out if things? Sort out the windows version – sort out the mac version! WTF?! Thats not helpful just stupid. The only thing on here that is right is that they need to sort out ping.
All I want is one giant global iTunes store whereby I am not restricted to what’s on offer here in the uk. So what if the price structure is different in different countries, we Brits have always accepted that we get screwed over pricing (but it doesn’t mean we like it) but I want to be able to buy US or Canadian music or tv shows that I cannot at present.
Can it really be that hard for Apple to do what I ask.
All I want is one giant global iTunes store whereby I am not restricted to what’s on offer here in the uk. So what if the price structure is different in different countries, we Brits have always accepted that we get screwed over pricing (but it doesn’t mean we like it) but I want to be able to buy US or Canadian music or tv shows that I cannot at present.
Can it really be that hard for Apple to do what I ask.
Better more advanced management period for everything.
Total rewrite
iTunes pro – a home server version, part of iLife
multiple libraries like aperture
Functional parental controls…Useless if only itunes content can be rated.
Split apps and iPhone syncing to separate application iTunes can sync pictures from other apps an iOS sync app should be able to access music the same way.
Better more advanced management period for everything.
Total rewrite
iTunes pro – a home server version, part of iLife
multiple libraries like aperture
Functional parental controls…Useless if only itunes content can be rated.
Split apps and iPhone syncing to separate application iTunes can sync pictures from other apps an iOS sync app should be able to access music the same way.
iTunes is becoming a big kludgy bucket with the eggs on top. iTunes 10 is faster and cleaner, which is welcome, but it added yet more features without addressing the fundamental problem: iTunes is just doing way too much. It’s time to share the load among the other members of the iLife family, turning the suite into a full media ecosystem. Once the burden of handling everything from movies to ebooks is off, iTunes could become a great, clean jukebox and store again, even adding functionality to that role.
My general proposition is to move all content acquisition and consumption from iTunes into the iLife app already provided for that type of content creation, so you buy music in iTunes, but TV shows and Movies in iMovie. Likewise, Garage Band folds into the newly stripped down iTunes by adding “Garage Band” or “My Music” to the left hand menu where “Music”, “TV Shows”, “Movies”, etc. live now. Those would have moved out to their own more full-featured and customized applications. Syncing between all these and your devices requires it’s own application so you can still have a single point of access that has room to expand.
In this scheme, there are 6 clear and distinct applications that fit naturally under the “iLife” heading or family:
iTunes
iMovie
iPhoto
iWeb
iBooks
iSync
Since this is modular, they could easily add iGame or any other form of media later.
Within each app, I’d like to see a standardized UI that flips from acquisition to playback to creation. I’d call them “Store”, “Player”, and “Studio.” Each Studio will have very different UI needs, but Stores should have the same UI across media types- maybe with slightly differentiating visual themes. Players should also work similarly to one another, at the very least in browsing and media management. One of the goals is transparency and unity across applications and devices. As much as possible, knowing how to use iTunes should let you use iPhoto and knowing iMovie on the Mac should let you handle iMovie on the iPad.
The Stores and Players should be transparent to an Apple TV, so when you turn them on there’s a unified Store and a unified Player, and each has largely the same UI as on the desktop.
The App Store moves out of iLife into its own space, like Mail or Safari, so it can naturally address the whole system, because it should distribute (and maybe become a central manager for) full fledged Mac applications as well. The App Store should provide for device-specific shopping and create a desktop windowed player for compatible apps to run in. Any item on the store may run on whichever hardware the developer specs. Maybe as apps continue to grow in importance, that’s the next addition to the suite- iAp, with Store, Player, and Studio.
As basic improvements, the App Store needs tabbed browsing and better text searching, including fuzzy logic and spelling correction/suggestion. The store would, to some degree, lose the ability to advertise you movies while you’re trying to find music, etc, but not entirely: for each search, there could still be a window to the side suggesting something similar from another store. Clicking on it would open its entry in the corresponding app, but when I search ‘Baseketball” I wouldn’t have to actually scroll past 2 movie review podcasts, the soundtrack, and the promotional app to get to what I’m looking for: the film.
iTunes is becoming a big kludgy bucket with the eggs on top. iTunes 10 is faster and cleaner, which is welcome, but it added yet more features without addressing the fundamental problem: iTunes is just doing way too much. It’s time to share the load among the other members of the iLife family, turning the suite into a full media ecosystem. Once the burden of handling everything from movies to ebooks is off, iTunes could become a great, clean jukebox and store again, even adding functionality to that role.
My general proposition is to move all content acquisition and consumption from iTunes into the iLife app already provided for that type of content creation, so you buy music in iTunes, but TV shows and Movies in iMovie. Likewise, Garage Band folds into the newly stripped down iTunes by adding “Garage Band” or “My Music” to the left hand menu where “Music”, “TV Shows”, “Movies”, etc. live now. Those would have moved out to their own more full-featured and customized applications. Syncing between all these and your devices requires it’s own application so you can still have a single point of access that has room to expand.
In this scheme, there are 6 clear and distinct applications that fit naturally under the “iLife” heading or family:
iTunes
iMovie
iPhoto
iWeb
iBooks
iSync
Since this is modular, they could easily add iGame or any other form of media later.
Within each app, I’d like to see a standardized UI that flips from acquisition to playback to creation. I’d call them “Store”, “Player”, and “Studio.” Each Studio will have very different UI needs, but Stores should have the same UI across media types- maybe with slightly differentiating visual themes. Players should also work similarly to one another, at the very least in browsing and media management. One of the goals is transparency and unity across applications and devices. As much as possible, knowing how to use iTunes should let you use iPhoto and knowing iMovie on the Mac should let you handle iMovie on the iPad.
The Stores and Players should be transparent to an Apple TV, so when you turn them on there’s a unified Store and a unified Player, and each has largely the same UI as on the desktop.
The App Store moves out of iLife into its own space, like Mail or Safari, so it can naturally address the whole system, because it should distribute (and maybe become a central manager for) full fledged Mac applications as well. The App Store should provide for device-specific shopping and create a desktop windowed player for compatible apps to run in. Any item on the store may run on whichever hardware the developer specs. Maybe as apps continue to grow in importance, that’s the next addition to the suite- iAp, with Store, Player, and Studio.
As basic improvements, the App Store needs tabbed browsing and better text searching, including fuzzy logic and spelling correction/suggestion. The store would, to some degree, lose the ability to advertise you movies while you’re trying to find music, etc, but not entirely: for each search, there could still be a window to the side suggesting something similar from another store. Clicking on it would open its entry in the corresponding app, but when I search ‘Baseketball” I wouldn’t have to actually scroll past 2 movie review podcasts, the soundtrack, and the promotional app to get to what I’m looking for: the film.
Here’s how I see each app breaking down:
iTunes
Audio purchase, consumption, and creation: podcasts, internet radio, and of course music. Audiobooks should probably go here, too, until the audio feature of iBooks/Kindle/Nook improves enough to obviate them. That seems like largely a copyright issue.
iMovie
Video purchase, consumption, and creation: movies, TV, webisodes like “The Guild,” maybe even embedded Youtube. It’d be nice to be able to save your fave Youtube items here along with your shows and movies.
iPhoto
Photo storage, organization, and light editing. Bump the editing features up a little and improve their UI, and increase linkage to Flickr, etc. I’ve never used Aperture, but would be happy if they’d just buy Pixelmator and make that the iPhoto Studio. It might also be interesting to see a store for this- a marketplace for images, available as art prints or as clipart for documents/web pages.
iBooks
Apple’s eBook reader, with the store built in. Consistent updated states and placeholding across all platforms and devices. Anybody who’s tried it knows that the iBooks shopping experience needs help, but it’s in it’s infancy. It just needs to steal the format of the other stores. This would also be a great place to add a layout program as the Studio portion to fill out desktop publishing.
iWeb
HTML5 authoring, editing, viewing. Safari stays separate, making this the only iLife app that doesn’t have a Player built into the creation tool. Maybe it would be a good idea to merge them, but I don’t see it. No Store here, either, unless I’m missing something.
iSync
Pulls all this content together with all your devices. iSync gains a real GUI, like the screens you get for each device you plug into iTunes, but it’s persistent so you can manage absent devices. If you remember that you needed to load Twittelator onto your wife’s iPad, but she has it at work, you could still do it now. Bringing syncing into it’s own app would make UI room for more the detailed and powerful options tha people are asking for, and the ideal spot for clean and clear file sharing across devices. Select location on device, select location on Mac, and set which direction files flow.
iPod, iPhone, etc. still show up in iTunes, iPhoto, etc, but only as a content source.
This also edges more people toward more content creation. I don’t think I’ve ever even opened iDVD or iMovie, but I bet I would have at least poked around with them if I was getting movies and TV there.
Aperture, Logic, and Final Cut remain distinct for pros, and as long as I’m in fantasy world, each of these has upload built in so that professional musicians, authors, and Auteurs can self-publish straight to the store within the relevant Application.
Of course, Apple should also take advantage of this massive re-organization to move everything to 64-bit and generally clean house on code, but most of it would have to be rewritten for this to happen anyway.
Here’s how I see each app breaking down:
iTunes
Audio purchase, consumption, and creation: podcasts, internet radio, and of course music. Audiobooks should probably go here, too, until the audio feature of iBooks/Kindle/Nook improves enough to obviate them. That seems like largely a copyright issue.
iMovie
Video purchase, consumption, and creation: movies, TV, webisodes like “The Guild,” maybe even embedded Youtube. It’d be nice to be able to save your fave Youtube items here along with your shows and movies.
iPhoto
Photo storage, organization, and light editing. Bump the editing features up a little and improve their UI, and increase linkage to Flickr, etc. I’ve never used Aperture, but would be happy if they’d just buy Pixelmator and make that the iPhoto Studio. It might also be interesting to see a store for this- a marketplace for images, available as art prints or as clipart for documents/web pages.
iBooks
Apple’s eBook reader, with the store built in. Consistent updated states and placeholding across all platforms and devices. Anybody who’s tried it knows that the iBooks shopping experience needs help, but it’s in it’s infancy. It just needs to steal the format of the other stores. This would also be a great place to add a layout program as the Studio portion to fill out desktop publishing.
iWeb
HTML5 authoring, editing, viewing. Safari stays separate, making this the only iLife app that doesn’t have a Player built into the creation tool. Maybe it would be a good idea to merge them, but I don’t see it. No Store here, either, unless I’m missing something.
iSync
Pulls all this content together with all your devices. iSync gains a real GUI, like the screens you get for each device you plug into iTunes, but it’s persistent so you can manage absent devices. If you remember that you needed to load Twittelator onto your wife’s iPad, but she has it at work, you could still do it now. Bringing syncing into it’s own app would make UI room for more the detailed and powerful options tha people are asking for, and the ideal spot for clean and clear file sharing across devices. Select location on device, select location on Mac, and set which direction files flow.
iPod, iPhone, etc. still show up in iTunes, iPhoto, etc, but only as a content source.
This also edges more people toward more content creation. I don’t think I’ve ever even opened iDVD or iMovie, but I bet I would have at least poked around with them if I was getting movies and TV there.
Aperture, Logic, and Final Cut remain distinct for pros, and as long as I’m in fantasy world, each of these has upload built in so that professional musicians, authors, and Auteurs can self-publish straight to the store within the relevant Application.
Of course, Apple should also take advantage of this massive re-organization to move everything to 64-bit and generally clean house on code, but most of it would have to be rewritten for this to happen anyway.
just want to drag and drop a downloaded music file from my desktop to my iPod.
Just like you would do it on a Mac.
oh wait, iTunes is for Mac. Thought it was Windows where everything takes 8 different steps.
Don’t want it to try to take over my life.
Never mind.
just want to drag and drop a downloaded music file from my desktop to my iPod.
Just like you would do it on a Mac.
oh wait, iTunes is for Mac. Thought it was Windows where everything takes 8 different steps.
Don’t want it to try to take over my life.
Never mind.
Buy gracenotes and find a way to make it recognize a live album with no gaps between the tracks. I am to lazy to type it in myself.
Buy gracenotes and find a way to make it recognize a live album with no gaps between the tracks. I am to lazy to type it in myself.
to hell with the “cloud”. clouds are slow, wet, and unstable. keep iTunes based in reality. Keep the Mac computer at the hub of the home, the master but make lightweight versions for those who don’t need/want all the features. add-in components a la Firefox (applescripting) already offers tremendous power for advanced users — it just needs to be less cluttered out of the box.
the rest of the list is pretty thin on reasoning. there are already excellent tools for getting non-iTunes art, for viewing multiple playlists, and so forth. Sounds to me like Craig Grannell needs to learn all the capabilities of the entire 3rd party iTunes universe before complaining about what already is the best, most useable media database. but then, any critic can always come up with something he wants to change, perhaps just for the sake of change.
to hell with the “cloud”. clouds are slow, wet, and unstable. keep iTunes based in reality. Keep the Mac computer at the hub of the home, the master but make lightweight versions for those who don’t need/want all the features. add-in components a la Firefox (applescripting) already offers tremendous power for advanced users — it just needs to be less cluttered out of the box.
the rest of the list is pretty thin on reasoning. there are already excellent tools for getting non-iTunes art, for viewing multiple playlists, and so forth. Sounds to me like Craig Grannell needs to learn all the capabilities of the entire 3rd party iTunes universe before complaining about what already is the best, most useable media database. but then, any critic can always come up with something he wants to change, perhaps just for the sake of change.
iTunes gets worse and worse with each iteration.Apple have made it do too much and clearly the UI designers have no clue.
Using devices over multiple computers is an issue – many people have laptops and desktops and an iOS device they want to use between both – why is it so damn difficult.
Why do I need to sync for the most basic of tasks?
Why can’t I easily use my iPod Touch or iPhone as a drive? (Yes third party solutions exist, but what’s with that?)
iTunes gets worse and worse with each iteration.Apple have made it do too much and clearly the UI designers have no clue.
Using devices over multiple computers is an issue – many people have laptops and desktops and an iOS device they want to use between both – why is it so damn difficult.
Why do I need to sync for the most basic of tasks?
Why can’t I easily use my iPod Touch or iPhone as a drive? (Yes third party solutions exist, but what’s with that?)
14, Allow the user to rate individual podcasts the way they rate individual songs.
14, Allow the user to rate individual podcasts the way they rate individual songs.
Might sound like a little thing but I always thought colour labeling the same way as with folders would be a nice touch, especially in list view.
Might sound like a little thing but I always thought colour labeling the same way as with folders would be a nice touch, especially in list view.