So you know that article only a few days ago about the design rift at Apple… here's the folks to blame for it and back with more custom widgets that look nothing like the rest of Mac OS!
Seriously, are they now just doing it because it's traditional or something? Where's an iTunes version that looks like a Mac app? Pretty please?
There's also no mention of performance, which iTunes has been steadily getting worse and worse at with every version; when literally everything interferes with music playback on an 8-core machine (including, crucially, iPod syncing) then there's something really wrong as there's these little things called "threads" that have been around for a while now…
Handling of multi-media has been awful for a long time now too; ever since the old option for double-click to open a video disappeared (many, many versions ago) it was a huge loss for such a tiny, no-brainer of a feature. And anyone that's tried importing TV shows or movies into iTunes will know from hard experience that it's a non-starter; even if you import files in exactly the same format iTunes uses, and tag them correctly, they still won't always show up in the right place. Last I checked setting a movie file to type "TV Show" is supposed to make it show up in TV shows, but hey, what do I know, right? Importing any media needs to be just as easy as importing music, and even that's not that great as there's no option to automatically convert file formats if you want to, nor support for half of the most common music formats such as FLAC and OGG.
Also, iTunes is not a browser; using the iTunes store is possibly the last thing I want to do in iTunes, as it's just god-awful as a browser, and almost unreservedly so! All the shortcuts I use in Safari do something different when browsing in iTunes; it's a really huge step back when I actually have to use all the interface widgets to actually get anywhere while browsing the web in an application that simply isn't a web-browser.
While it's sort of an OS issue, ditching Front Row, which was basically an alternate remote-friendly interface for iTunes so technically an iTunes feature anyway, still irks me. All my content is in iTunes, I want a simple media view suitable for a Mac Mini hooked up to a TV. I mean, why even have an HDMI port on the Mac Mini if not to be able to hook it up to a TV and use it like a beefed up Apple TV if you want to? It's not like it should take all that much to maintain Front Row; just use the same codebase as the Apple TV or something, or shove a suitable interface directly into iTunes, either way just give me some way of using iTunes on a TV that doesn't suck balls. It's really stupid when the best experience of a Mac Mini with TV connected is to boot into a Windows or Linux media centre OS!
I dunno; I have to remain pessimistic about the whole thing as there hasn't been a single good update to iTunes since version 3 or 4, and that's a lot of historical evidence that this one will be just as bad. I'd love to be pleasantly surprised, but the iTunes team has proven itself adept at talking a bunch of hot-air while pushing increasingly bad versions of an already bloated and sub-par music player; I remember when iTunes was actually a music player, that was pretty sweet wasn't it? I wouldn't use it at all if not for my iDevices, and even then it's easily the worst part of the user-experience when it comes to iOS device use.