“Apple, Thursday last week, surprised nearly everyone and unveiled Mountain Lion, the next major release of OS X due out at the end of this summer. Of Mountain Lion, Apple says, “’Inspired by iPad. Re-imagined for Mac.’ With this motto, Apple is taking a new approach to the entire definition of what an ‘app’ is on the desktop,” Matthew Janssen blogs for My Internet. “Gone are the days when one app serves many different functions; with Mountain Lion, Apple has re-evaluated many of the base OS X apps and stripped them down to their core functionality.”
Along with this new approach to apps you may have noticed a pattern with the names of them as well. Apple keeps names simple, descriptive, and overall effective: Mail, Messages, Calendar, Contacts (previously Address Book), Reminders, Notes, and so on,” Janssen writes. “These two ideas, Apple’s new approach to apps on the Mac and Apple’s naming convention along with the iCloud ecosystem give a great credence to the idea that Apple is finally going to tackle and get a handle on iTunes.”
Janssen writes, “With the single-function approach, Apple can create a much more enjoyable media experience on the Mac by splitting iTunes into 5 apps: Music, Videos, Books, iTunes U, and iTunes Store just like on iOS.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Just how much sense do the names “iTunes U” and “iTunes Store” make, either? Beyond the branding, not much. “Tunes” are a mere subset of what you can get at the iTunes Store and “tunes” have precious little if anything to do with the vast majority of the content found on iTunes U. Just as iTunes should have been renamed “iMedia” or something that effect years ago, so should the store and the educational content component get names the reflect what they really offer.
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Washington’s Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
I’m by no means a fan of Microsoft, but when it comes to my email client of choice, it’s MS Office Outlook. I hate the fact that Apple’s equivalent: Mail, Address Book and iCal are three separate apps. Microsoft’s equivalent Outllok has these functions all integrated into one nice program Outllok. Mail looks and is lame in comparison. I’d like to see Apple do what Microsoft has done. Fold Mail, Address Book, and iCal made into one integrated program. Bundle that with iWork, then market that as Apple Office Suite.
Something tells me when Apple went to Gates to bale them out, Jobs made him a promise he wouldn’t do that. Well, that was then, time to change the paradigm.
Opinions… Everybody has one. Mine is that I HATE Outlook.
Yeah, it’s all integrated in one “nice” program that’s so complicated I can’t find anything I’m looking for in it.
I’m not in love with Mail.app by any means, but I don’t see how having one giant app is any more powerful than three smaller apps tied together in the OS.
I agree with you!
I have been using Outlook for decade for work and since I switched and use Mail, Address Book and iCal, I’m more than happy and couldn’t switch back to Outlook.
I prefer to open a very dedicated apps for a very dedicated task, and make sure there’s a perfect integration between them with a common data base.
Regarding iTunes, even if I understand the choice for Windows world, it would make perfect sense to me to have separate Apps now (mainly since we can sync with iCloud now and don’t need everything in one app).
And the Store should be only one store with different tabs regarding if you want to buy music, video, books, apps, etc…
Buy in one place and consume in another? It’s not an issue. When I buy an App in the Mac App Store, it goes in Launchpad. So, it could be similar with music, video, books, etc…
You buy a song in the “Store”, it would go in your “Music Library & Music Player”.
Regarding the Video Player, there’s already QuickTime… So why should we have a Video Library & Player in another place?
Anyway, iTunes rewritten is over-due. Even if it works way better on Mac than Windows, it’s still kind of slow and laggy when you have very large library (50,000+ Music in my case, from iTunes, CDs, even vinyl for some :)).
But, if they can rewrite FCP from scratch (well, actually from iMovie), why couldn’t they rewrite iTuns from scracth or iOS?
You see the vote results to the left. That is going to be the same result against Maobama in November. You statists have no clue how small your numbers are.
Man… wrong thread I guess!
I don’t see what any poll has to do with the current thread discussion.
And personally, I don’t give a damn about any election in November and even more about statists…
iTunes must be broen up. It is a monster.
I have come to dread opening it just to play song. And the forced iphone sync is another nightmare. If I want to sync 5 new songs to my iPhone, why do I have to also sync my 500 apps? If I try to not sync my 500 apps, then iTunes tells me is gonna delete all my apps on my iPhone… WTF
You dread opening iTunes to play a song? Why? Type name in musicsearch and hit play. Second, iTunes only syncs new items to your iPhone based on what you tell it to. There is no resyncing of existing content.
Wrong!
If you choose to sync with iCloud, but you don’t have iTunes Match (because it only works on Lion and all your computer aren’t on Lion… because some of professional app are only working on Snow Leopard), and you add a new song in your Library and you want to sync it with your iPhone… when you will plug it to sync it, it will re-sync EVERYTHING, including your 450+ Apps.
Same thing happened to me the other day. I wanted just to add a song to listen it in the car, and it synced for decade…
iTunes has always worked well and been simple to use for me. I don’t understand why people get their panties in a bunch about it.
I’m sleepy because it’s late-ish and don’t feel like reading all the posts, but what about non-Mac users? I’m not one, but I sell iPhones, and it’s confusing enough for a LOT of people to even download iTunes on a PC. Or do you think there would still be iTunes for Windows users?
I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t see how that will happen since everything is built off of iTunes for IOS devices.
I don’t see any indication in Mountain Lion of iTunes going away. Without iTunes, you can’t down load from the store, without iTunes, you can’t sync your IOS devices, without iTunes you can’t rent movies, play them, play your music and so on.
So how is it suddenly going to disappear? It’s not.
Well, I hope the Moutain Lion Music app (or whatever they call it) won’t suck as hard as they made the most recent iPad version suck. What a lousy piece of garbage programming. The sort orders make no sense and it looks like the 1970s.
The confusion has already started. iOS 5 puts video podcasts and audio podcasts in different places. Very annoying as I like being able to go to Go to one place to see what I have available. Now I have to check two separate apps, which is less efficient. Multiple apps to do more specific things is not efficient in all cases. This matched with the model of keeping files matched with apps in ML will be hideous. All five of those apps would be able to view the same file type, so how does one decide which app to associate all of them with. In general, I am very unimpressed by what I see in Mountain Lion.
TO: All
RE: iTunes 11….
…is a POS!
Everything that worked so well through iTunes v10 now doesn’t work.
Regular complaints to Apple Tech Spt and via their on-line feedback have meet with no results.
I’m looking for a AppleEvent-aware replacement for iTunes.
Know of anything?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. Since Steve left us, Apple has been going steadily down into the black abyss of nothingness, i.e., like Microsoft….