“Apple’s brand new streaming music service is a lot like the first iPod,” Joanna Stern writes for The Wall Street Journal. “But it still stands to change how the world listens to music.”
“See, with a small software update, Apple is putting on-demand streaming of 30 million songs on most iPhones, iPads, Macs and iTunes-equipped Windows PCs—completely free for three months,” Stern writes. “Here’s how Apple Music isn’t at all like that first iPod: It is so jam packed with features, it lacks polish and simplicity. But its ability to know what I want to listen to next is so darn good, we may all be willing to live with the shortcomings.”
“Think of Apple Music’s interface as a game of Memory,” Stern writes. “The iPhone and iPad app, organized into five tabs, is so crammed with items, lists and menus that it’s hard to find things initially, harder still to remember where they are later. Seriously, it’s like Russian nesting dolls: menus within menus within menus!”
“The real decision doesn’t come now, but in three months,” Stern writes. “And that may be all the time Apple needs.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple Music is, right now, a hot mess. But, we’re already in love with it, warts and all.
Much UI work to be done – get crackin’, Apple!
We asked this in a previous post, in case you missed it, but have an answer:
You’d think it’d be apparent that if you choose to make a “New Station from Artist” (or from Song) that you’d be able to find the station or at least be pointed to it somehow. That’s the way iTunes Radio worked, but it’s not so with Apple Music Radio on the Mac, at least, that we can see.
Why is this so confusing! It seems like a really simple thing. So, where’s the station we just made?! We’d expect to be able find it somewhere (preferably prominently) under the “Radio” tab, plus synced and automatically available on all our Macs and iOS devices, of course. You know, for later use. But, no dice.
We’re off the RTFM, but we feel like we shouldn’t have to do that just to find a station we just made, if Apple had done their job properly.
UPDATE 9:51pm EDT: We still haven’t found an answer, but after poking around, it seems that if we make a new station in iTunes 12.2, the only way we’ve found to “Save” it for future use is to share it with ourselves via email, Messages, etc. That’s pretty suboptimal. If we’re wrong about this, please advise in comments below.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]