Now I've downloaded it an played with it a while, I'm spotting more and more UI inconsistencies. What's going on with the Apple UI team? Do they have one at all anymore?
First Mail, Dashboard, now this. It's better than metal but not quite right. Why the almost square corners, yet another plastic colour and different colours to Mail for things like the search bar and selection line. The font size in the search bar is smaller than in the Finder. The graduated pane titles that stand out a mile instead of the aqua/plastic look used almost everywhere now including widgets.
Whilst on the subject of the search bar, it would have been useful if they'd included a 'save' button to save your search as a smart playlist.
The lines between the panes are too dark IMHO. In Mail and other apps it's a lighter grey and they don't clash as much with white. And it could do with a thumb tab divider between the left pane and main area for resizing instead of the single pixel line. ie. like they have in the Finder or iTunes 4. They've also put a thumb tab for sizing in the top of the Source pane. In Mail, it's at the bottom of the pane.
Bizarre.
I can only hope someone writes yet another tool to tame down the rampant UI re-designers at Apple so we can get back some consistency. If only they'd attach as much effort to the Finder as they do to iTunes!
The podcasts in the library thing was easily fixed by the way.
First Empty your trash in Finder.
In the Library there is an artist named 'Podcasts'. Delete that and tell iTunes to store the deleted tracks in Trash when asked.
Go to Finder. create a temporary folder on your desktop and move the trashed podcasts into that.
Now select the Podcasts icon in iTunes. drop the trashed podcasts on top of that icon and you'll see them rippling back in to iTunes where they belong. It appears to then work just as before.
Smart Playlists where you set the rule 'Podcast / is true' doesn't work for me. I presume because they are now no longer in the Library. That's a bonus IMHO.