Seriously, it's such a ridiculous step backwards that I can't figure out what the iOS team was thinking.
1) It looks ridiculous. Going away from the design aesthetic of iTunes or other native applications for a kind of faux old-time radio look? Really?
2) If you have a lot of playlists, look out. The huge images for each playlist aren't a problem per se, but they shouldn't be the default. I've got dozens of playlists on my iPad, and under OS4, it was easy to surf through them to decide what I wanted. There was a side column with the playlists, and the contents of whichever one you had selected showed up in the main pane. Now, when you select a playlist, it zooms into that list's contents... which makes it much harder to compare playlists quickly.
3) If you like to create new playlists, that just got more difficult, as well. On the iPhone and under iOS4, when adding songs to a playlist, you could use existing playlists to make it easier to find stuff. The iOS5 iPad Music app does not let you do so (although the iPhone one does).
4) There is no visual difference between playlists and playlist folders.
5) Seriously, isn't it about time we get some sort options and the like when viewing playlists or songs? Or how about having a list mode when viewing by artist or album? It's like whoever used this app only tested it with a hundred songs at a time. Those of us who keep thousands of songs on our iPad and like to use them for on the fly playlists are better off using iPhones. That's sad.
1) It looks ridiculous. Going away from the design aesthetic of iTunes or other native applications for a kind of faux old-time radio look? Really?
2) If you have a lot of playlists, look out. The huge images for each playlist aren't a problem per se, but they shouldn't be the default. I've got dozens of playlists on my iPad, and under OS4, it was easy to surf through them to decide what I wanted. There was a side column with the playlists, and the contents of whichever one you had selected showed up in the main pane. Now, when you select a playlist, it zooms into that list's contents... which makes it much harder to compare playlists quickly.
3) If you like to create new playlists, that just got more difficult, as well. On the iPhone and under iOS4, when adding songs to a playlist, you could use existing playlists to make it easier to find stuff. The iOS5 iPad Music app does not let you do so (although the iPhone one does).
4) There is no visual difference between playlists and playlist folders.
5) Seriously, isn't it about time we get some sort options and the like when viewing playlists or songs? Or how about having a list mode when viewing by artist or album? It's like whoever used this app only tested it with a hundred songs at a time. Those of us who keep thousands of songs on our iPad and like to use them for on the fly playlists are better off using iPhones. That's sad.
