“The list of [Apple] apps that need an overhaul continues to grow but right at the top of the list for many years is iTunes, a relic from the last century that might be the most complex app Apple publishes,” Kate MacKenzie writes for PixoBebo. “Why doesn’t Apple just fix iTunes instead of coating the pig’s lips with new lipstick every year?”
“It’s just not that easy to fix iTunes,” MacKenzie writes, “so I have some sympathy for Apple’s famed engineers as they wrestle with what might be the most complex re-engineering project in the company’s history.””
MacDailyNews Take: Not counting Pink/Taligent/Copland, the transition to OS X, or the move from PowerPC to Intel, of course.
“Today’s iTunes is a gargantuan, complex, unstable mess of code that Apple cannot tame into submission the way it did to Photos, or even Final Cut Pro X,” MacKenzie writes. “To see more clearly Apple’s major problem with iTunes, try to imagine completely remodeling and rebuilding an airliner carrying 400 people while it remains in the air.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re looking forward to the debut of Apple’s “Tunes” — err, “Media” app? — with bated breath!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tom R.” for the heads up.]
Trouble with the iTunes code base is that it was made cross platform by using QuickTime Media Layer as a porting framework. It was never intended to be that, except for porting QuickTime and QuickTime Player to Windows.
Consequently iTunes is all written in Carbon atop QTML.
The guy who headed QuickTime for Windows and owned that whole cross-platform code base was Tom Dowdy from the QuickTime team. Apple moved him over to the iTunes engineering team to port that to Windows. When Tom died 2008, the iTunes team was left without its central figure and visionary. It has floundered for the past eight years since then.
GTK, thanks…
5-years ago, before Jobs took his last breath, Apple was an iconic company. The products and software were stellar, and Apple’s reputation for build quality and software quality assurance was unparalleled.
Today, Apple is just another company. The new products being released are not groundbreaking. In fact many would argue the contrary, that they’e unnecessary and even silly. On top of that they are overpriced for what you’re getting, with margins on storage being maintained from 5-years ago; which actually seem ridiculous and greedy by today’s standards.
Nothing just works any longer. The Keynotes are worth missing. The company’s PR and famous advertisements are long gone. The political positioning of the company is now based around the CEO’s lifestyle, which has absolutely nothing to do with the day to day operation of Apple.
Morale is not only low amongst Apple employees, but once loyal Apple consumers and investors as well. This is heavily reflected in the significant loss of AAPL’s stock market value. The worst thing of all is the apathy. From the CEO down, no one cares about Apple. All they care about is the ever dwindling value of their options, refusing to admit that it’s a direct result of their own laziness and distractions.
This executive team is heavily reliant on the presumption that loyal Apple consumers will stay with Apple… well, because it’s “Apple”. Well guess what, that’s an erroneous assumption to make because this company is no longer Apple.
Cook and crew are in for a rude awakening if they think they can run this company into the ground and that it will still be business as usual and smooth sailing.
Your viewpoint is a bit too radically negative for me to accept. Apple has always had issues. As a much larger company, it has much larger issues with a much more complex ecosystem. No surprises there.
The difference is that you have already determined that the worst will happen while most of the rest of us believe that Apple will continue to strive for greatness and generally succeed. Time will tell.
When Tom died 2008, the iTunes team was left without its central figure and visionary. It has floundered for the past eight years since then.
Wow. That explains quite a lot! It’s the same time that QuickTime went to hell, aka QuickTime 10.
Theoretically, QuickTime and iTunes were well documented inside the code. But both situations indicate that it was NOT. Without the lead coder, those left behind to keep up the code base were faced with, ahem, difficulties.
Promoting content, wireless backups and syncing for every model of iPhone/iPad/etc., ripping, storarge, support of ePubs, videos, photos, etc.
Try do describe in one sentence what iTunes does… It’s practically an operating system. The spaghetti comes from its requirements – you can’t design software that is simpler than the problem it’s supposed to solve. Essential complexity is deadly to software projects.
Facebook split off Messenger because they claimed their single app was getting too complicated. A similar strategy might help with the iTunes conundrum.
I’m not so sure I buy that story… or maybe there are some pieces being left out.
If you had used that story to explain where we are today with QuickTime as a whole or the QuickTime Player, that would be one thing, but the overwhelmingly vast majority of the complaints about iTunes has nothing to do with QuickTime.
I’m generally pleased with iTunes to begin with and I think most criticism of iTunes comes from people who aren’t willing to learn it or want something that they don’t have to learn… but what all iTunes does is fairly complex, and Apple does a pretty good job of balancing features/power versus ease of use versus ease of learning. I’d much rather have something that was robust and easy to use than something that was easy to learn but wasn’t good for doing much with.
I don’t recall any complaints that had to do with QuickTime itself as being the problem with iTunes other than QuickTime lacking native codec compatibility, but that’s not really a problem with QuickTime as the architecture easily supports it.
There are some valid criticisms regarding how the library database is constructed as well as the XML for the media asset library, but again none of this has to do with QuickTime.
Likewise, there are valid complaints about what the default settings should be in iTunes and some basic UI tweaks that are needed, but it’s not like as if the QuickTime architecture is being pointed to in any way as being the problem.
It’s worth noting that the MP4 container is based on QuickTime and that’s carrying us over into H.265.
I’m not saying Tom Dowdy isn’t a God amongst Gods, as he certainly is, nor that his loss didn’t severely hurt iTunes or QuickTime development, but I don’t see how any issues with QTML are to blame for iTunes.
Apple seems unable to fix the disaster known as iTunes. What will it take to get this right?
I spent hours cleaning out iOS apps I no longer use. There needs to be a way to inventory of what is installed on my devices and. Indicate what is not, then delete the unused apps.
That’s just one item of a long list.
I agree a fresh wind needs to blow through older apps that have become more unmanageable over time. It’s in the nature of these things before a reset happens. (I actually prefer to search for stuff on Amazon’s site than any of Apple’s, including books, music, etc. first.)
I fully believe that Apple knows these things are an issue and expect they will address it more thoroughly shortly.
This new version is heading in the RIGHT direction. The sidebar is back as a mostly persistent interface element. Instead of putting tiny buttons and controls (with confusing symbology) all over the place on the application’s window, they are consolidated into the sidebar and other central elements, or (gasp) the MENU BAR. There are more useful keyboard shortcuts, such as for quickly switching media libraries.
Just look at the current iTunes window, when it’s showing the music library in “Songs” view. It hasn’t look this close to the early good ol’ iTunes (that people seem to remember so fondly) in a LONG time.
Also, there may be some bugs, but performance seems (as we say) more “snappy.”
What Apple is experiencing is much like what happens to many tech companies that become big. The innovations and adoption rates for their products/software flatten out. What was once easy to sell to the public as a disruption of the old, to the new, becomes much harder. Think of MS Windows. There’s so many Luddite users that don’t want to move along post adoption that Apple has an issue keeping the relevant and satisfied while trying to appeal and move toward newer innovations. iTunes falls into this conundrum. I would say that Apple as a whole company is falling into this conundrum. There stuff, which is wildly popular and useful, can’t move forward fast enough because of the disruption it would cause to its install base. Meanwhile, investors and advocates want Apple to keep moving faster and faster into these disruptive arena with their technology savvy (e.g. Apple automobiles).
It will be interesting to see how relevant Apple can be going forward. Google, Amazon, and Facebook have less to worry about since their really only software only companies. There problems are like MS’s though, how to make sure things work well on all platforms. So, far they’re doing well. Apple’s vertical integration however, is a big advantage because they can make the software perfect for the hardware out of the gate and fully tailored.
For me, Apple’s biggest lagging influence has been in their productivity tools and the cloud. iCloud hasn’t seen much development, nor has Pages, Keynote, Numbers, et. al. Compared this to Google’s productivity suite, which has a horrible interface in most apps, Their strength has been their vision to make their cloud stuff a “platform” to which developers can code and advance their tools.
Apple has seemed to be singularly focused now for some years on exclusively the iPhone. Well, it’s a winner. Put a team on it and update it a bit more frequently and get to work on the rest of the ecosystem that will tie the iPhone and mobile platforms more to the company and their tools. A company as big as Apple should be able to do retail, iPhones, and a multitude of software without much effort. I’m not getting that sense. Maybe the Apple “space ship” campus will help (in all seriousness).
Unstable? I have never had iTunes crash on me yet.
And the worst part is that iTunes was written in COBOL!
No. But as Sum Jung Gai indicates above, it is likely to still contain a lot of ye olde Carbon code, lawd help Apple.
@ MDN: “Not counting Pink/Taligent/Copland, the transition to OS X, or the move from PowerPC to Intel, of course.”
All but the last were spectacular fails for Apple. Let’s hope they can be more successful with an iTunes rework/replacement.
“All but the last?”
The transition to OS X most certainly was not a spectacular failure.
In fact, all but MDN’s first example (Pink/Taligent/Copland) were spectacular successes. and the first prompted the return of Steve Jobs, so, in effect, it was the most successful effort of all!
My typo bad. I meant to reference only the Pink/Taligent/Copeland group. Sure, their failures drove Apple to the brink of ruin and paved the way for Steve’s return. But they were failures none-the-less, and shouldn’t be invoked when talking about successfully transitioning an aging piece of software.
What iTunes needs is:
(A) A name that makes sense, seeing as most of what it does these days has nothing to do with tunes.
(B) A GUI overhaul to make it simply and seamlessly morph as required by the user.
(C) Conglomeration of the preferences into one single spot, rather than tossing them all over the interface with no coherence.
(D) Support of all the open source media formats, especially FLAC, dammit!
(E) A parallel overhaul of the awful, never-out-of-beta Mac App Store in order to make the two work exactly the same way and with equal, unequaled reliability.
(F) Kirk McElhearn as project consultant and Help system writer. (You’re welcome Kirk).
(G) The Title Bar put back again, as with every other Apple application, dammit!
I am sick to death of Apple breaking its own GUI guidelines for the sake of gawd-knows-what purpose from ill-informed GUI meddlers, hello Sir Jonathan Paul Ive.
IOW: This is mostly about GUI and coherence. The underlying code is mostly there and working. How to access it and use it is the chief problem. And yes, put FLAC support in there at long bloody last!
Memory Lane.
This is where iTunes came from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundJam_MP
IOW, iTunes sucks.
…Which fits beautifully with my comment above about spaghetti code. Get sucking on that pasta Apple and sort it all out! It will be worth the investment. Create a new, vital base for the future.
I would add to that:
1) Split the code into several applications. I am not a software engineer, so I can’t propose a way of doing it, but I am a software user, so I know it needs to be done. This makes it easier to maintain the code and add new features.
2) Apple has been dumbifying software lately. We are not in the fourth grade. KISS means “keep it simple, stupid,” not “keep it stupid, simple.” They need to improve iTunes by adding and consolidating features, not removing them.
3) Get His Royal Highness Jony Ive out of the UI business, for which he has demonstrated neither talent nor skill. They are just releasing whatever he dashes off. Remember how iOS 7 made people dizzy? That could only have happened if they didn’t test it before they released it. They need to do research and usability testing, like they used to, and they need a qualified UI designer to bring beauty back to Apple software. Meanwhile, Jony Ive can go back to designing hardware, where he truly is a genius.
If hardware design were physics, Jony Ive would be Einstein. If software design were opera, Jony Ive would be a lounge singer.
Get rid of side to side scrolling and ending content half on half off, on the screen (on side to side scrolling).
I submitted this idea recently in response to a similar discussion:
Implement the media database in FileMaker and them develop the user interfaces to link to it. FileMaker is solid, enterprise-level software. Use it.
Happiness for me is a tower to take all the crap off my desk: DVD reader/writer, camera card reader/writer, 4x6tb disk array, fibre channel/tb2 interface box, lto6 tape drive.
On the tower I want:
– music management with no shop
– mail that works
– ms office and OneDrive
– current graphics Technology
Apple doesn’t provide any of this!
Of course Apple doesn’t provide MS Office or OneDrive. Apple isn’t Microsoft. Duh.
iTunes is becoming better. I think Apple has heard us loud and clear. Now they’ve gone from scratching the surface to slicing it open and fixing major stuff within. It’s just a matter of time and updates now.
I’m thinking more that Apple needs to break out software and subscriptions to a different division. Photos, Keynote, etc., Music, and anything that involves payments or connecting to iCloud.
Call it Cueless, Cued Up. Cueball. or FuCue.