{"id":1020,"date":"2012-12-06T15:13:49","date_gmt":"2012-12-06T23:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/?p=1020"},"modified":"2012-12-06T15:13:49","modified_gmt":"2012-12-06T23:13:49","slug":"ten-reasons-why-i-hate-itunes-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/06\/ten-reasons-why-i-hate-itunes-11\/","title":{"rendered":"ten reasons why I hate iTunes 11"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hate the new iTunes. \u00a0Hatehatehatehatehate it.
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  1. My favorite view is gone. \u00a0I loved the old music view, which I had set up to show me both the album cover as well as the songs. \u00a0Now, I have to choose between views, each of which have their own issues:\n
      \n
    1. Songs – Impossible to scan, because there’s no differentiation between albums. \u00a0It’s just a laundry list of my music, which on my small iTunes library at work is 23,212 items as of this writing.<\/li>\n
    2. Albums – This clearly wasn’t designed for someone who has a large library. \u00a0It’s also difficult to scan for something. \u00a0And yes, I do like scanning my library. \u00a0Searching is fine, but sometimes i just want to scan.<\/li>\n
    3. Artists and Genres – These are the closest to the old view that I loved, but there’s so much wasted space here that it drives me mad. \u00a0I like whitespace, but they’ve crossed over from whitespace into wasted space. \u00a0Also, of course, this is per-artist (or per-genre), which isn’t a complete view of my music collection.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
    4. I clicked on “auto-size all columns” in the main songs view, which gave me columns that are all massive, and there’s no undo. \u00a0Now I have to manually resize them. \u00a0This is okay since I’ve got my laptop connected to a 24″ external monitor, and I put iTunes into fullscreen mode on it so that I could see more than one column (because apparently I’ve got some songs and albums with long titles), but is nearly impossible otherwise.<\/li>\n
    5. The fonts are all wrong. \u00a0I don’t know how the fonts got to be all wrong, but they are. \u00a0The kerning is wrong, the weighting is wrong. \u00a0I have no idea how you can make Helvetica look so horrible, and I assume that you have to work hard on doing so. \u00a0This contributes to being difficult to read and difficult to scan. \u00a0It’s especially noticeable when bold is used, which is in a surprisingly high number of places. \u00a0I don’t hate Helvetica as much as some folks do<\/a>, but something’s wrong with its use in iTunes.<\/li>\n
    6. Tooltips are gone. \u00a0Apparently they’ve forgotten one of Neilsen’s heuristics, recognition over recall. I have to recall what these buttons mean. \u00a0I used to be able to recognize them and have the tooltip there at the ready to help me when I couldn’t recognize them. \u00a0Looking at podcasts, for example, there’s four buttons immediately after the name of the podcast, and I had to click on two of them to see what they were. \u00a0Or, let’s consider the gear icon, which is mostly used for settings, except in the sidebar, where it’s “export”. \u00a0How can I recall what an icon means when it has multiple meanings?<\/li>\n
    7. Buttons have lost their button-y look. \u00a0In most places, this isn’t an issue. \u00a0I don’t mind that the previous\/play\/next buttons in the main toolbar of the app are just icons and don’t have any kind of visual indication that they’re buttons. \u00a0Those three buttons together have a lot of meaning on their own, I recognize them immediately, and I’m okay. \u00a0However, in other places, it’s often difficult to tell what’s a button and what’s not. \u00a0For example, those four buttons after the name of the podcast have insufficient whitespace to immediately identify that they’re buttons. \u00a0Also, the play button out of context from its previous\/next siblings just looks like an arrow (and that’s a glyph that I’ve seen in the names of songs and podcasts).<\/li>\n
    8. … Except when they haven’t. \u00a0There’s still a few buttons hanging around. \u00a0There’s a nice bug “unsubscribe” button for podcasts, except it’s all in caps, just in case you weren’t aware that This Is A Button.<\/li>\n
    9. The removal of the sidebar makes creating playlists a lot more difficult. \u00a0If you don’t re-enable the sidebar, the only way to add a song to a playlist is via command-click. \u00a0With the sidebar, you can just drag a song (or a group of songs) to the playlist on the left.<\/li>\n
    10. In books, I’m now forced to care about the difference between “books” and “PDFs”. \u00a0They’re both stuff that I want to read, and a lot of those PDFs are books. \u00a0They might not be in a book-related file format like epub, but they’re still books in any way that I care about.<\/li>\n
    11. Movies, TV shows, and podcasts have all added an “unwatched” (or “unplayed”, for podcasts) type. \u00a0This is inconsistent with all other views, because it’s the only view where I’m now viewing a subset of the available content. \u00a0Unwatched is now the default view, which makes this doubly annoying.<\/li>\n
    12. Search is \u00a0s l o w<\/em>. \u00a0I know I’ve got a big library and that I type fast, but I can click to the search box and type a whole song or artist name before a single character appears there. \u00a0Since I can’t scan my library anymore, search is important, and it’s all but unresponsive.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      UGH.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      I hate the new iTunes. \u00a0Hatehatehatehatehate it. My favorite view is gone. \u00a0I loved the old music view, which I had set up to show me both the album cover as well as the songs. \u00a0Now, I have to choose between views, each of which have their own issues: Songs – Impossible to scan, because … Continue reading ten reasons why I hate iTunes 11<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1020"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1021,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020\/revisions\/1021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}