Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi Discuss Bloated Software Accusations, Upcoming iTunes Plans

[kagharaht]

Well Apple TV 4 is absolutely atrocious. Frequent hangs and losing home sharing connection. Crashes back to Ariel screen saver ever other day. DD sound is horrible. Worse product release from Apple. How about concentrating on quality software and hardware release instead of a DR Dre porn film.

 

[bob24]

The problem is the insane amount of irritating bugs and glitches. Was that addressed?

Exactly - and Craig Federighi is dodging the bullet by answering as if the question was around users being allergic to UI changes. But what I rember for the Walt Mossberg piece is that he was - like us - mostly talking about the quality of the software in terms of reliability rather than UI and functionality.

 

[Bubba Satori]

128 comments and 7 people like iTunes.

 

[TheTissot11]

"I would say first there's nothing we care about more," said Federighi, speaking on Apple's software and services. He believes Apple's core software quality has improved significantly over the course of the last five years, but pointed towards an ever-raising bar that pushes Apple to keep evolving and implementing new features. "Every year we realize the things we were good at last year and the techniques we were using to build the best software we can are not adequate for the next year because the bar keeps going up," he said.

This is the joke of the day!! This Craig guy is nothing more than a joker. He is only busy thinking about some funny videos for his keynote at WWDC but has no time for overseeing that OS X is full of bugs and bugs haven't been patched up for more than a year. And he thinks Apple software quality has improved. Shut the **** up!

 

[MrAverigeUser]

They are talking a lot while saying NOTHING in the interview.
Like little boys pretending that the windows they crashed with the ball would not be broken, it is just invisible...
It´s now "Götterdämmerung" in Cupertino…

Let´s face it: It began already when Godfather himself explained to his customers, that the iPhone 4 was perfectly working, but some 100 Million custoómers were too dump to use it:
"You´re holding it wrong!"

Jony Ive with his ridiculous pseudo-copies of Bauhaus has never ever understood what the basic idea of BAuhaus and Dieter Rams at BRAUN was.

Jony Ive has always been vastly overestimated.

Now it is not only the "hardware-design" getting more and more ridiculous - Jony Ive has been very effective in destroying software quality - but he is TOP in hiding his crappy Software-Dpt with its infamous "Products" under a glittery and childish Cover of useless Toy-GUI.

Ive should be the first to be fired.
Phil Schiller should be the second.

Customers are getting upset worldwide and apple will pay for that.
The times of record sales are history.

We saw that already several times: Xerox, HP, GM, …..

 

[ClaytonK]

My impression is that being a software developer at Apple lately only requires the ability to remove features and introduce bugs.

 

[iThingsGurl]

"We decided in the short term that what we wanted to do is really make it when you're in music and iTunes, all you see is music," said Cue.

I think he means, "all you see is Apple Music clickbait"

 

[kevinkyoo]

Separate apps. Please, for the love of God.

One for the streaming services, one for the library and storage of your music/videos, and one to purchase. Less bloatware, less bugs since you're separating the one app into three, and less complaints from everyone. "Win-win-win" (Michael Scott).

 

[B4U]

I don't know. The newest versions of the iTunes have been horrible. Personally, I miss the older older UI

The worst part is, this new UI is more user-unfriendly than before...
Can't find anything in the current iTunes and online help is useless...

He's barely competent as software VP. Scott Forstall needs to return and set things straight!

Hallelujah!
Thank you!

 

[tkermit]

If there is one simple thing I wish they could fix about iTunes it would be to get it to keep its scrolling position when you're editing metadata or adding items to a playlist. It jumps around on you like a hyperactive child, making the whole experience as frustrating as using Windows ME:

http://f.cl.ly/items/3i1p0Q0b0r1j3R3c041G/scrolling.m4v

 

[MrAverigeUser]

I propose a new product
name:

iCrap….

 

[dyn]

They really should separate it into 2-3 apps:

1. Music Storage
2. Music Streaming
3. Music Store

Interacting with music now requires 1 app, you are suggesting to do this in 3 separate apps which throws out all the user-friendliness you have when being able to do all music stuff in 1 place. It would be a better idea to divide it by topics: music, movies and software. eBooks and photos are already in separate apps (iBooks and Photos), they could create 1 app store app where you can buy and manage all iOS and OS X software, the movies part of iTunes can be merged with something like DVD Player and maybe even QuickTime Player. iOS already has such a separation so why not do this on OS X as well? I like the way iBooks works because it makes a good distinction between your library and the store, the animation when switching between the two greatly helps with that. They could do that with movies, music and software apps as well.

Sync could be done via those apps or it could be done from within 1 central app (think iSync). The latter would also set them up for non-iOS devices but I'm very sceptical they'll do this.

Dividing things by topic (tasks would be a better word) matches the way most people work. It is also more OS X and iOS like (take a good look at the apps, not many apps do a plethora of different kind of tasks).

There are bigger issues though: services. They have become more and more important but they are still more unreliable than say Microsofts Office 365. A more reliable app store would be nice as well as a more reliable sync with iTunes (or whatever apps they'll break it into).

 

[bmac89]

It would be pretty bold and much welcomed if they gave us a new Itunes 10!
I really dislike the new cluttered look!

 

[adamhenry]

IMO, Apple music made iTunes irrelevant. The music app was so bad after AM was added that in frustration I switched to Spotify and don't see myself buying another thing from iTunes.

 

[visualride]

Eddie Cue is a big problem at Apple. The music player gets worse with each release. I can cite easy to understand, concrete examples:

1. The red dot that used to be on the time line of the music player is gone now, making it harder to change the position of the player position in the song. The current thin line is harder to see.

2. As others stated, the intrusive and hard to avoid Apple Music part of the player is annoying. This should be a separate app. The blatant force to entice us into the music subscription is loosing us.

3. Single songs take an extra tap to play. Now the album or artist is brought up with the single song listed underneath.

4. Song controls default to being hidden, and the full controls are not as easy to access as they should be. Really, most of us would rather be able to control our music instead of stare at the large album art of the song.

5. If you do tap on the large, easy to tap album art of the single song, nothing happens, you have to tap on the song name to play.

Make it easy for us Eddie. That's why we bought into iPhone in the first place! If you are so itching to add features, why not give us controls for playback speed or an option for gesture swipe controls (not the default, but as an option in the settings)?

 

[duervo]

Only thing that drives me nuts with iTunes is that every once in a blue moon, I will got to play a file, like a TV episode, and a song will play instead. Upon closer examination, I discover that somehow a music file has had its info changed so that iTunes thinks it's a tv show. Actual tv episode is still in its original location, but is nowhere to be found in iTunes library. This started happening when they revamped the UI. Until then I was ok with iTunes.

Crap like that gets on me last nerve.

It's only lack of available free time that has kept me from researching to find a viable alternative solution for at least the majority of my iTunes library. The DRM'd movies and TV shows I'm most likely screwed, and stuck with iTunes for now.

 

[MrAverigeUser]

IMO, Apple music made iTunes irrelevant. The music app was so bad after AM was added that in frustration I switched to Spotify and don't see myself buying another thing from iTunes.

I use DEEZER since 9 Months and I am very, very pleased!
NEVER will get deeper in the walled apple garden than now, just the opposite.

At the moment I am getting challenged by a sport:
And I am beginning to lose: iTunes eradicates my locally stored mp3-ripped Cds faster than I can re-rip them again…

"it just works"? Good joke...

 

[npmacuser5]

I am scaling back my one stop shopping, Apple only. Moving to others for music, movies, and other content, purchases. Additionally looking at other forms of cloud storage including photos. I am still positive on the Apple hardware and supporting software at this point. Important for me to be flexible as I can but still maintain an integrated familiar system.

 

[DoctorKrabs]

The bugs are not so much a "gut feeling" that people "can't put their fingers on" in my eyes. I have a handful that can be reproduced with 100% success, even on the latest 9.3.

If Craig and Eddy take any bug they see and try to get the team to fix them right away, imagine what could be done if they knew the bugs.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVQFi5tAhOgeBCheLWnovZExMXFRhQnu-

 

[Yojimbo007]

Eddy, Craig (da man)
There is a huge differance in eveloving things towards a better user experiance and devolving things to a convoluted mess.

There is no tricky balancing act there...its pure negligence and/or bad decision making.
And iTunes or Applemusic are not the only areas of problem.


RAZOR SHARP FOCUS IS GETTING BLURRY ...
OUT OF BOX thinking ? Seems we are ever more confined to a box , the Apple Box, still a box ... a stubborn set of idiosyncratic philosophies that are becoming very limiting to progress... Exactly what Steve was trying to avoid!!

 

[shiseiryu1]

They need to fix the Music App for the iPhone; it makes my phone run like crap.

 

[tubular]

"I would say first there's nothing we care about more," said Federighi, speaking on Apple's software and services.

I would say first there's nothing they care about anymore.

 

[sinsin07]

Over 500 movies, over 50 TV shows (7 TB).
But I consider anything over 200 GB a large library for iTunes. The reason is that noob iTunes users will typically store their iTunes library on their Mac by default. Most Macs today have SSD drives and they tend to be small capacity. iTunes music libraries are fine for local storage. Video is just too much for SSDs.

Thanks for the reply.
I was trying to gauge at what point people consider iTunes to be an issue in regard to large libraries.
So far I have not run into issues yet but I am getting concerned about how much I rely on iTunes to manage my media.
I currently have 1422 movies and 456 TV shows on 5 externals so I'm wondering at what point iTunes will cause me issue.

 

[manu chao]

iTunes - All Apple's music-related functionality, with a store, streaming etc.
Video - As above, but for video like movies, TV Show's etc.
iOS Manager - Sync & Update iOS devices. Plugs into the above apps to fetch playlists & content.

I know this appears to be the most sensible solution but under the hood the 'application/process' that runs the database managing music (or video) needs to be running as part of the OS for the "iOS Manager" to hook into it. There are 'pref' files that can be used to rebuild a library but playlists per se exit as tags in the database managing all music. And if the database is run as a faceless background process, we suddenly have lost the ability to shut it down or restart it without using Activity Monitor or Terminal.

What I am trying to say is that splitting up things, taken on its own, might not change much. It can be used to overhaul the underpinnings and adapt the UI (eg, to better manage large video collections) but I think those advocating a split up should present specific improvements that separate apps would make possible that could not be implemented in a combined app.

There are synergies in a combined app: for example a lot of preference settings (including but not limited to the store, parental controls, library sharing).

 

[lysingur]

I think that would be too extreme, that's all music functionality and should be in one App in my opinion. I would split like so:

iTunes - All Apple's music-related functionality, with a store, streaming etc.
Video - As above, but for video like movies, TV Show's etc.
iOS Manager - Sync & Update iOS devices. Plugs into the above apps to fetch playlists & content.

If syncing and the content to be synced are in separate applications, manual management of music files (drag & drop) would become a hassle.

I'm a little dismayed they continue to relegate iTunes remarks to music. It is the Media Hub for the entire Apple eco-system! Movies, Books, AudioBooks, TV shows, video... It is the gateway for the Apple TV to get to all of my stuff.

The most horrific thing to me about iTunes is it can't be trusted 100% to keep the library straight. Things can simply disappear and you have to show iTunes what happened to it. How the hell can something just disappear? It should rigorously protect the location of files and their integration into the database.

Another thing is the Dan Brown-esque intrigue to get the library transferred to another computer. It should be as easy as putting the whole folder on the new computer (PC or Mac - shouldn't give a ****) and saying to iTunes - here it is. Right now there are many files and even after following directions, everything - all my careful organization and meta data for my videos is gone. WTF.

It's not about making changes to interface or features that will make it better. Get the stuff under the hood rock solid and RELIABLE and that'll win the war. The dressing can come later. There has been WAY too much focus on the dressing.

It's very likely that there are a lot of legacy codes buried within iTunes that Apple doesn't want to update, either out of laziness or for the sake of backward compatibility with older devices and older OSes. DRM and Apple Music complicate the problem even more. Now some of your multimedia content are tied to your Apple ID, which requires authorisation and makes moving your content around difficult. iTunes is a victim of Apple's own success, specifically its rapid expansion in the content distribution business. Different types of media other than music were made available in the iTunes Store faster than iTunes could adapt.

The crux is that Apple tries to provide a uniform experience with iTunes while having to deal with incremental complexity arisen naturally from the myriad of iDevices and iOSes it makes. This is also the reason why many think Apple did a better job on the iOS with multimedia content management, e.g. Music app is separate from iTunes Store and Video. There simply is less complexity on the iOS because the operating system itself doesn't have to deal with other iOSes and outdated iDevices (while iTunes on the Mac OS X has to deal with them all).