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My vague understanding (just from reading blog articles) is that iTunes became an insane metamorphization of the Eye of Sauron, an infinite pit of quicksand (bl
by exikyut 5y ago
My vague understanding (just from reading blog articles) is that iTunes became an insane metamorphization of the Eye of Sauron, an infinite pit of quicksand (blub blub) and Yes™, Inc (all things to all people).
Y'know, iPod (and later iPhone) sync, music browsing and purchasing, (payment handling), intelligent media organization (or some approximation thereof), working with giant media libraries...
I get the idea that everyone just feature-piled on top of the SoundJam code without fully scaling the design to the point of being able to coherently load-bear the additional functionality. So basically failure to adequately PM where it counts. That requires PM that understands engineering, which is sadly a tall order out of the gate and generally the most crucial before projects get big and the need for support becomes obvious.
*IFF* that happened in this case (I have absolutely no concrete idea), my question would be a) where "Steve really wants this - put a good PM on it" and/or b) where "this code explosion is killing everyone, we need PM help", ended up.
iTunes history anybody? (Genuinely curious, wondered for a while)
- JKCalhoun 5y agoCurious as well. All I can add is that iTunes also needed to run on Windows (and I believe QuickTime had, in effect, the old MacToolbox running cross-platform). So add throw that on the pile. iTunes had to move fast. There was not time, from what I understand, to step back and refactor it in any meaningful way.
- at_a_remove 5y agoThere never is time to refactor.
- easton 5y agoAdding on to this, I heard a rumor (probably here) that iTunes for Windows was ported by Apple porting Objective-C and Cocoa to Windows, which is part of the reason it acted so funny. I have no idea if that's true though.
- kitsunesoba 5y agoObjective-C and Cocoa for Windows dates back to the NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody days, but yes it’s true. Safari for Windows also utilized this, perhaps to a greater extent, because its UI looked significantly more like its Mac counterpart than iTunes did, to the point that even the text rendering was the same between Windows and OS X.
- mattl 5y agoYeah OPENSTEP Enterprise (OSE) was a commercial product sold by NeXT and briefly by Apple. Also later versions of WebObjects that ran on Windows provided much of the same tools.
- jfb 5y agoSafari for Windows was a side effect of the porting work that was happening on the Store to move away from a custom renderer to just using WebKit. And the reason iTunes on Windows was the way it was, and indeed, why iTunes on Mac stayed in this hellacious status for so long, is that it was built on _QuickTime_, which brought most of the Mac Toolbox over to Windows, and then -- eventually -- Carbon.