The problem is though now you expand one project into now several with no guarantee that these projects are going to be optimized and now have to be managed on multiple platforms. There is no guarantee that anything is going to be optimized forever. At least right now there is one team working on two different versions (platform) instead of trying to prioritize between multiple ones - I guarantee that you can never treat each program equally.
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Apple Announces Major iTunes Update Coming Next Month [Update: Version 10.7 Released Today]
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With apps split up, there could be more people/teams working on the various apps.
Of course there's no "guarantee" that things will be optimized. But with the current system, the chance of customizing how the different kinds of files are handled is slim to none. At least with specific apps there would be a chance of that, they'd be able to work on improving handling one without having to worry about breaking the whole big bloated app.
Basically it would help with situations like "Hey, it would be great to make that improvement...but that would break Books..."
Of course there's no "guarantee" that things will be optimized. But with the current system, the chance of customizing how the different kinds of files are handled is slim to none. At least with specific apps there would be a chance of that, they'd be able to work on improving handling one without having to worry about breaking the whole big bloated app.
Basically it would help with situations like "Hey, it would be great to make that improvement...but that would break Books..."
More is not always better. This argument always neglects the fact that all engineering talent is not the same.
I'm not sure why they couldn't customize how the different files are handled in one app.
Such as... ?
No, this argument recognizes that separate apps can be worked on by separate teams.
They certainly could. But in general it's just easier to put different functionality in different apps instead of cramming it all in together.
I'm not sure what that has to do with what I said. If separate apps are worked on by separate teams, than the separate teams are going to each have less talent than if they worked together.
Why?
I think it all comes down to this: If the stores are integrated into the app and it's done well and it doesn't feel sluggish or cramped, then it's fine. Nobody is going to really care. But the current iTunes is based on the original app from 2001 (or earlier?) which was likely at some point written in Carbon and then ported to Cocoa, and it wasn't designed with all of the media stores in mind. I think a rewrite can fix the problems with iTunes, even if thestores are still integrated into the app.
it is if you're one person writing the code
but with multiple people, probably multiple teams in fact, each working on one file type that the app can process, then there's no need for confusion. teams just need to work in sync with each other to avoid redundant duplication of the same tasks
as soon as the file it read in, it's type will be determined and then it's allocated to an object type and from then on it's only accessible to methods that work on that type of object. correctly written, the app should make it impossible for you to try and apply a method that only works with music files to a book, while at the same time, allowing one piece of code to perform an action that would apply to both.
I agree with most of what you said, but it's more incremental than that, as well. 10.5.8 on my upgraded G4 is almost perfectly stable except for the fact that some games that worked under 10.4 don't work right and Classic is gone (huge loss for using classic software and unnecessary, IMO as seeing 10.5 was going to be the last PPC OSX version, they should have gone ahead and included it for those PPC machines so they'd have the best combination of features and software to finish out with.
I agree that 10.5 was unstable at first, but I LOVE the 'spacebar preview" feature it added, the 3D dock does look better (even though I now use the left side dock for space constraint reasons) and Spaces was a great feature addition and makes it much more usable, IMO. I don't use Time Machine so I couldn't care less there (I use CCC for perfect bootable backups which has saved me a massive headache on at least one occasion where my PowerMac got a corruption from a bad software update and it also made it simple to upgrade my internal hard drive on my MBP since I could boot from an external and then copy back to the new internal).
In fact, the ONLY thing that has made my PowerMac unstable with 10.5.8 is certain iTunes versions over the past couple of years. iTunes itself would be unstable on PPC and it would take down the entire machine with it with those versions, usually within 24 hours of starting it (I use it as a server for a whole house system so it's on 24/7). I had to revert to the previous stable version when this happened (10.6.3 is on there right now and it's rock solid; Apple usually fixed the problems in the next version when I reported it. Obviously, they didn't test PPC versions as well as Intel in recent years). Now THAT shouldn't happen, but it's not like I've never had 10.4 come up with a kernel panic either. In fact, I'd say other than those times, 10.5.8 is more stable than 10.4 (which itself went through a LOT of updates so I can't say it was stable in every single update either).
I don't think I've booted back into 10.4 more than 3-4 times in the past 3 years (to play an old game, really) and NONE in the past year. I can still boot OS9 on this machine (although sound usually doesn't work since I upgraded the CPU to 1.8GHz and I'm not sure what the issue is there and there's no accelerated driver for my ATI 9800 Pro anyway, so it's mostly useless for gaming regardless at this point and that's the only real reason to boot OS9 anyway since most other OS9 software works fine in Classic mode in 10.4). From that I learned it's best to buy Windows games as they work longer and are better supported and generally run faster anyway.
Other than the occasional glitched iTunes (which was glitched in Tiger too until they stopped supporting it some time ago), my PowerMac G4 running Leopard is STILL "bug free" (as in it's normally up for MONTHS at a time without a reboot). In fact, it's been up now for 41 days and counting and the only reason it was shut down at that time was because I was on a trip for 6 weeks and saw no reason to waste power during that time. In fact, the only impediment to continuing to use it as a server is that iTunes is no longer being updated for it as of the 10.7 release. As long as I don't buy any newer iOS hardware, I still have no reason to upgrade. But it's getting long in the tooth in terms of browsing web sites (even with TenFourFox to keep it running) since the Web is using more and more GARBAGE on their sites that need more CPU power (ridiculous in itself IMO since I don't feel the Web is one-bit better for having loads of Twitter and Facebook icons on all the web pages and hide-away data that doesn't need to be loaded until it's asked for, loads of garbage advertising tricks, etc. etc.)
I don't run my MBP 24/7, but I did use it to make an album with Logic Pro over 2.5 years and considering I normally put it to sleep in-between sessions and not shut it off or rebooted, I think it held up amazingly stable. The amount of memory thrashing used in that program is off the scale and while I did have to quit and restart logic once in awhile (never failed to save even when it crashed, though so I never lost recorded data, which itself is amazing and speaks volumes about how professional such a complex "all-in-one" recording studio/LAW Logic is, but other than a few times for the odd software update for 10.6, I never had to reboot. That sounds pretty freaking solid to me and that MBP came with 10.5 and Leopard was pretty solid it on it as well. Admittedly, 10.6 was not very stable until 10.6.3, but I didn't upgrade until then anyway (I wait until the reports back are solid before upgrading machines I actually use for utility).
I agree that the "faster faster" aspect of OSX stopped with Tiger. Leopard was definitely slower than Tiger on PPC and Snow Leopard was slightly slower here on my MBP according to tests than Leopard (something I always found odd for an "optimized" version of Leopard), but that doesn't mean it was unstable by its final version.
I never tried Lion (didn't want to lose Rosetta) and it got so many bad reviews, I didn't even want to try it. Mountain Lion sounds like something I would like to try, but unless I can virtualize 10.6 to get Rosetta for a few apps, I'm not gung-ho to lose software usage when I don't 'need' any of those "features" (frankly, Mission Control sounds like useless crap and Spaces was destroyed in its most useful form and I'm a mouse guy, not a trackpad one, so any changes there mean squat to me).
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Maybe it was not "originally intended", but obviously since AppleTV came out and to an even greater extent, the iPhone and all the new iOS devices, it's now indispensable and frankly, it would be a disaster to remove the "kitchen sink" functionality at this point. That is why I say if someone "just" wants a music player, look elsewhere. Better yet, write your own. iTunes NEEDS to be a full-fledged media handler at this stage or the entire iOS world just falls apart. Microsoft has their own "do-all" media handler as well (Media Player). The world has changed. Devices do more than just play MP3s today. They're a lot more powerful. Get used to it.
I've never had my iPod Touch crash (either one of them) so I don't see what the big deal is about having "music only" apps. ITunes runs here 24/7 on a PowerMac G4 and typically runs for MONTHS without issue and that machine only has 1.5GB of ram and still runs browsers, e-mail and other programs without any issue while iTunes continues to serve my entire house in the background. I've never had iTunes skip for sound when playing music either, not even when browsing and that's a single CPU G4.
Yes indeed. I got hold of an old tangerine G3 300MHz iBook a few years ago, and it is absolutely useless for browsing on the modern web. Maxing out at 10.3.9 and Safari 1 makes it even harder, but I agree it is most unnecessary for this to be the case. Have you tried dialup any time recently? My dad can only get such a connection where he lives, and boy is that an experience. We used to do fine on the Net with dialup connections in their day, it's all the web's fault! Or perhaps we're all just getting old (couldn't resist that reference to what brought on my previous post
).itunes 10.7 wont load....pleas help!
I have have installed and unistalled itunes 10.7 multiple times. When I click on the itunes shortcut it acts like its going to open then nothing. Plug in my iphone and it doesnt start. What do I do??? I need help PLEASE!!!
I have have installed and unistalled itunes 10.7 multiple times. When I click on the itunes shortcut it acts like its going to open then nothing. Plug in my iphone and it doesnt start. What do I do??? I need help PLEASE!!!
Yes indeed. I got hold of an old tangerine G3 300MHz iBook a few years ago, and it is absolutely useless for browsing on the modern web. Maxing out at 10.3.9 and Safari 1 makes it even harder, but I agree it is most unnecessary for this to be the case. Have you tried dialup any time recently? My dad can only get such a connection where he lives, and boy is that an experience. We used to do fine on the Net with dialup connections in their day, it's all the web's fault! Or perhaps we're all just getting old (couldn't resist that reference to what brought on my previous post
It IS possible to design web pages that are efficient and load content quickly. I had a web site running from 1996 to 2006 on CD music reviews that rated audio quality (although it had to also be music I liked). The site was friendly to text browsers (included all text tags and I verified it looked good with Lynx), checked for "frames" capability at the time (used to be huge back then and early Amiga browsers didn't support it so I made sure they would still display correctly without it and offered a link button to force non-frames if a user didn't like it). I used graphics where appropriate, but kept the file sizes reasonable and used HTML coding for things instead of graphic menu selections, etc. I regularly got e-mails from people thanking me for a web site that loaded like lightning, even with dial-up (I was stuck with dial-up myself for the first 2.5 years of the site so I felt their pain).
I also hand-coded the entire site (which consisted of over a dozen primary pages and a separate review page for each and every artists reviewed) and that was in part due to the fact the graphic web making apps of the day just plain SUCKED. If you wanted it to look a certain way, you had to do it yourself. And frankly, it wasn't difficult to make and there is simply no technical reason web pages couldn't be that efficient today. But like all other PC "bloat" over the years (I remember the utterly amazing games and programs that were accomplished with just 64k of ram and a 360k per side floppy disk drive on the C64 and my Amiga 3000 surfed the web it was never designed for right up until I bought my first PC in 1999 with only 18MB of Ram and a 25MHz Motorola 68030 processor! My brother spent $3000 on a state-of-the-art Pentium 90 when it first came out and it got retired before my Amiga 3000 due to be too slow.
The point is that programmers have become lazier and lazier over the years and the tools used to support them have become more and more bloated as well. The entire operating systems have become bloat added to bloat. I can honestly say that the average web page loaded faster in 1996 on my lowly 25Mhz 18MB ram Amiga 3000 with dial-up than many sites today do with a 1.8GHz G4 with 1.5GB ram and 10Mbit high-speed connection. In fact, I would say the same thing even with my 2008 MBP running the web browser and this is due to the content itself becoming more and more bloated.
The sad thing is that Bloat does not equal Better! 90% of the time surfing the Web, I'm just looking for INFORMATION, not glam. I keep an iPod Touch in my living room next to my easy chair that I use to control my AppleTV setup there and sometimes watching TV, I'll want to look something up mentioned on the show and so I use the iPod Touch. That can be maddening, though because web sites load SO FREAKING SLOW on it, it's ridiculous. And that iPod Touch is a 1st generation device, but that just shows you how much the average web page has slowed down in just the past few years as it was much more usable a few years ago when it first came out (not real fast, but not mind-numbingly slow either).
There is simply no reason/excuse for the Web to be so mind-numbingly bloated. A C64 could make a great paper with Font Master II that looks every bit as good as a typical report made in Word today. It simply wasn't WYSIWYG in the interface. So why does Word need what was a super computer back in the '80s just to make a simple report in 2012? Are the graphics that great in Word? Nope. So WTF is slowing that thing down so much?
I might understand if the Web now had some 3D brain interface or something, but web pages today look no better, IMO than web pages from 6 years ago yet they are monumentally slower to load now. Blog pages are UNFORGIVABLY SLOW. WTF makes people put ALL their content on ONE page? I'll never understand that. I've abandoned sites simply because I could not scroll through the part I was looking at because the browser was so busy trying to load and render the equivalent of 1000 pages of CRAP into one giant page.
Browsers wouldn't have to compete for the fastest rendering if web pages weren't designed to be utter CRAP in the first place.
I can understand the progress in gaming (at least you get clear visibly improved results, although that doesn't make gameplay itself better; I still find blocky old AD&D on Intellivision more fun than a few of the modern games I've played!), but ironically it is the GPU there that is most important. Modern CPUs are most needed to load bloated web pages faster, it seems and THAT is SAD.
Interesting read. And what with the number of different browsers being used these days, making things work for just a few is enough effort for a lot of developers. I remember a few years ago when my brother was always going to the trouble of making sure IE6 was supported on his sites, and most weren't bothering with that. Now even IE10 messes up various sites, when at one point IE was the one you could be sure of. We're coming around to some pretty objective measures of how things used to be better .
The Word/Office thing is a mystery but you're right, it never seems fast enough on documents that would have been fine on 80s word processors.
.The Word/Office thing is a mystery but you're right, it never seems fast enough on documents that would have been fine on 80s word processors.
Why on earth would they remove cover flow and lists, they were perfect.
You can still view Artist and song lists
I don't know whether it was changed with this version or has been this way some time, but I just saw that you can downsample songs when transferring to iPhone/iPod, etc. to something other than 128AAC, namely 256AAC. This was my only gripe that still existed.
Yay! Happy camper!
Yay! Happy camper!
I don't know whether it was changed with this version or has been this way some time, but I just saw that you can downsample songs when transferring to iPhone/iPod, etc. to something other than 128AAC, namely 256AAC. This was my only gripe that still existed.
Yay! Happy camper!
That's been there for a while. I've been using the functionality for months now, since my music is all in Apple Lossless.
My pet peeve with iTunes is lack of encoding support for HE-AAC v2. It can encode HE-AAC v1, and play back both v1 and v2. This is a shame, because HE-AAC v2 delivers roughly the same quality as HE-AAC v1 at half the bit rate.
That's been there for a while. I've been using the functionality for months now, since my music is all in Apple Lossless.
Really now? Wow, and to think that was one of my biggest pet peeves. Great that they have the 256AAC option now.
The new version of iTunes has a wider support compared to the previous versions. It looks much better than before.