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iTunes as an application is by far the worst UX present on a Mac or a PC, which is especially surprising considering how nice the vast majority of OS X apps are

iTunes as an application is by far the worst UX present on a Mac or a PC, which is especially surprising considering how nice the vast majority of OS X apps are to use. You can go down the list of the recommendations Apple gives out to developers on how make what they consider great apps for OS X and iTunes breaks every single one almost as if it were intended as a use case for terrible UX. The navigation and structure changes with every movement, there are occasionally two seperate back buttons present that can either do the same thing or completely different things, the "background activity" or as I like to call it, "What you need to know is happening to your iPhone" is constantly buried beneath the currently playing track, and is not readily accessible unless you click a 8pt square down arrow, on and on... Not to mention, as an owner of multiple machines I prefer to use ownCloud to sync my various libraries. Windows and Linux this is absolutely not an issue. Because iTunes insists on owning the directory and file structure though, I can't just point it at the folder or it will literally ruin it, I have to instead keep two copies of my library on my Macbook, and occasionally use an rsync alias to move over new stuff. Thankfully I usually do all my purchasing (on Amazon MP3) on the Macbook anyway so it's of little consequence, but it's just one more irritating thing to add to the list. I'm an Apple fan, I admit, but iTunes is a fucking train wreck.

hellofunk 11y ago
Totally agree. I love Apple's products but iTunes is an abomination. One anecdote notes that U2's Bono complained to Jobs that it was no different than a spreadsheet... well, I'd be happy if it were halfway as useful as a good spreadsheet. Instead it has zero flexibility. There seems to be a trend in some software to prefer search functionality over other basic UI techniques for presenting information. When I have a big music library, I don't always know what I'm looking for explicitly. I want to browse my music based on my own strategy, but doing this in iTunes has never really been possible. And it's not better on the iPhone's own music app. For a company that led the world in music-listening technology, their software for it sure has always been downright awful.
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  It's weird too, if you're looking at Playlists it looks like Excel, the only way out is to view your entire collection, but then you can't find sh!t because it gives you NO information as opposed to ALL information. Also, on the topic of playlists, removing a song from a playlist is labeled "Delete." Are you f!cking kidding Apple? This is UI Design 101!
  - hellofunk 11y ago
    It blows my mind how Apple has let this atrocious product represent such a core part of what the company has always stood for: music. How did they let this happen in the first place, and more importantly, why in tarnation has it never been improved?
    - FussyZeus 11y ago
      Honestly I think it's good old fashioned Developer laziness, and/or marketing. They've whittled down all their Windows offerings to just iTunes for Windows, which handles devices, music, streaming, movies, etc. etc. and they don't want to have to develop and maintain multiple applications. And why OS X is infected? They probably share a fair amount of code. It's just feature creep. On iOS you have a Music app, a Podcasts app (which is garbage), a Store app and I believe Movies and whatnot are under videos. It makes a certain degree of sense, yet in OS X universe, all of these are brought down into a single app with just a clusterfuck of a UI. I honestly feel a little bad for whoever has to design it, I can't imagine how difficult it would be to combine all that functionality and feature creep into a UI that felt even a LITTLE coherent, and honestly they do a pretty good job, it's the problem they're handed that should be addressed, i.e. break it up into a few apps.
    - parasubvert 11y ago
      Same reason Microsoft Outlook still is in heavy use; its a complicated set of festures that are hard to get right or to replicate.
    - smacktoward 11y ago

hellofunk 11y ago

Totally agree. I love Apple's products but iTunes is an abomination. One anecdote notes that U2's Bono complained to Jobs that it was no different than a spreadsheet... well, I'd be happy if it were halfway as useful as a good spreadsheet. Instead it has zero flexibility. There seems to be a trend in some software to prefer search functionality over other basic UI techniques for presenting information. When I have a big music library, I don't always know what I'm looking for explicitly. I want to browse my music based on my own strategy, but doing this in iTunes has never really been possible. And it's not better on the iPhone's own music app. For a company that led the world in music-listening technology, their software for it sure has always been downright awful.

FussyZeus 11y ago
It's weird too, if you're looking at Playlists it looks like Excel, the only way out is to view your entire collection, but then you can't find sh!t because it gives you NO information as opposed to ALL information. Also, on the topic of playlists, removing a song from a playlist is labeled "Delete." Are you f!cking kidding Apple? This is UI Design 101!
- hellofunk 11y ago
  It blows my mind how Apple has let this atrocious product represent such a core part of what the company has always stood for: music. How did they let this happen in the first place, and more importantly, why in tarnation has it never been improved?
  - FussyZeus 11y ago
    Honestly I think it's good old fashioned Developer laziness, and/or marketing. They've whittled down all their Windows offerings to just iTunes for Windows, which handles devices, music, streaming, movies, etc. etc. and they don't want to have to develop and maintain multiple applications. And why OS X is infected? They probably share a fair amount of code. It's just feature creep. On iOS you have a Music app, a Podcasts app (which is garbage), a Store app and I believe Movies and whatnot are under videos. It makes a certain degree of sense, yet in OS X universe, all of these are brought down into a single app with just a clusterfuck of a UI. I honestly feel a little bad for whoever has to design it, I can't imagine how difficult it would be to combine all that functionality and feature creep into a UI that felt even a LITTLE coherent, and honestly they do a pretty good job, it's the problem they're handed that should be addressed, i.e. break it up into a few apps.
  - parasubvert 11y ago
    Same reason Microsoft Outlook still is in heavy use; its a complicated set of festures that are hard to get right or to replicate.
  - smacktoward 11y ago