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iTunes 12.4 Update to Feature Minor Redesign With New Sidebar, Improved Navigation

It's about time they brought the left sidebar back. I still can't figure out why they went away from it in the first place. The iTunes interface was better in the 3rd generation iPod days than it has been recently.
 
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mkldev said:
In short, the iTunes team needs to put together a complete list of features, and then they need to lock a dozen UI designers in a room with that list and let them brainstorm a UI from scratch that implements all of the features, with an absolute prohibition on letting them even look at the current UI while doing so. That's the only way they'll ever get past the natural tendency to make lots of little incremental changes that at best put lipstick on a pig and at worst put lipstick on bacon, and start making the radical design changes that will turn iTunes into the world-class app that it should be.
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What they NEED to do is go back to the old days where they focused on how many clicks it takes to perform a certain job. They need to go back to a consistent interface. I certainly agree about the incremental changes that put lipstick on a pig.
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AdonisSMU said:
This is so presumptuous. We don't know how much user testing was done or anything about what went on in the design process to start calling for people to be fired.
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While it's true we don't know how much testing was done we DO know what the result was and it's almost universally agreed upon that the result was bad. Very very bad.
 
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trifid said:
I'm not the only one saying this, look at reviews all around the world, everyone was very critical of the UI when Apple music came out. For a music app that should be straightforward and easy to use, coming from Apple, with more than 10 years of expertise in beautiful easy to use iPods, it's catastrophic to say the least, something went horribly wrong in management.

The Apple Music UI nightmare translated to iTunes, and made it surprisingly worse than it was. A hide-and-seek sidebar, one of the most laughable, ridiculous, horrible UI designs I've seen from Apple in many years. Whoever is managing this has no clue what they are doing.
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They put Ive in charge of software design, that's been the disaster. He changed iOS and a lot of people jumped ship, including me, because they hated it, although I've come back now. And they have ruined iTunes.
The smartest move they can do is remove ALL software interface design duties from Ive ASAP, IMO

All he has done is taken something that had all the side bars, buttons etc and was easy or straightforward to use, removed the LOT, and made it impossible to use without a scientific degree from MIT or something! But that's Apple, they make things thinner and thinner and thinner for no reason, they make things more and more and more plain reducing functionality for no reason, other then Ive think's it looks cool I suspect.

I've made two posts on this now, but it is my bugbear, I really miss the old iTunes with the grey bar at the top that looked like an LCD screen etc.
 
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davemchine said:
You are right on point with this. All of the apps Apple has rebuilt have LOST FEATURES. How can that be considered an upgrade? Yet there it is.
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Yeap, case in point is Airport for the Time Capsule, it used to be pretty functional with a lot of options including the abllity to turn off the Time Capsules light, they now give you an IMMENSLY stripped down basic thing where you can't do anything with the light so people like my Brother in law, who has his iMac connected wirelessly to his router, and an ethernet cable to his Time Capsule has a blinking ornage light now, unless he sticks some tape over it... Apple it just works.....
 
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There was a time when iTunes was easy to use and for some it was fun. Those days are long gone as Apple continues a path to a) making it screwy and pathetic and b) orienting it to be a feed for purchases and rentals.

ALL of my friends with Macs hate the last several incarnations of iTunes and wish they would go back to when it was far more intuitive and just insert in the appropriate places the added features. I agree with them fully. The charm of Apple has long gone as greed and power stepped up to the plate.
 
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mkldev said:
Just to clarify, I don't mean that they're identical. I mean that in both cases, you're going in with the intent to passively consume some piece of media, as opposed to (for example) buy something or copy music to your iPhone. There's a clear difference in how different certain actions are, e.g.
  • Consuming content (listening/watching) is very different from buying it or copying it to your iPhone for future listening.
  • Watching a movie is not very different from watching a TV show.
  • Buying a movie is somewhat different from watching a TV show — more so than watching one versus the other, but less so than the difference between buying and watching.
  • The difference between listening to an audio book (whether fiction or education-related) and listening to a song is less than the difference between listening to an audio book and watching a movie, which in turn is less than the difference between listening to an audio book and buying an audio book.
This isn't to say that things shouldn't be grouped together or otherwise identified by type (e.g. audio books versus songs), but rather that there's not a good case for having a full modal separation between the two most of the time. A filter is more lightweight, and thus makes more sense for something where the differences are not really much more significant than (for example) differences in genre.
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I suppose this highlights the difficulty that Apple have, how do you group your terms.
You think consumption is common so group it all together and have a separate place for purchase. I feel that media type is common. Have one app that deals with content created by musicians, I can go to that app for consumption, purchase and organisation. When I know I need to listen to my 1980s rock ballads I know which icon to click, it's called 'music'. When I need to watch back to the further again, my home movies or even some junk of a to programme, I click Films, if I need to rent and by one, I can do it right in that app. Simples.
 
SMIDG3T said:
It seems people are slagging Apple off left, right and centre at the minute. What's wrong with it?

If you could do a better job, by all means, go ahead and apply for a job. I expect to see your work next year.
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yes, the poster registered 12 (twelve) years ago just to bash Apple.
Congrats, you're one of the best in here, reliable as usual
 
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ButteryScrollin said:
whats this then?
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An image that doesn't appear in the screenshots on the post??

But thats quite handy - Apple Music ones are obviously the subscribed playlists others have curated whilst My Music will be your usual playlists containing whatever you drag into them from Apple Music, iTunes Match or your own library. Spotify should have a way of doing this instead of just sticking every playlist you follow into the side bar - I mean they have folders but its just a messy cluttered place.

But yeah, thanks for that but I can't see that in any of the 4 screenshots in the original post.
 
pedrom said:
Jesus christ. Some of you even make me a catholic. There are a lot of legit complains to be made, but it just sounds (at least for someone that is reading MR threads about how Apple is useless, full of stupid people and doomed since the colored iMac, how Snow Leopard was nothing more than a buggy ripoff, how the iPhone would quickly sink the company...) like the usual suspects only like to bitch and moan.

Nothing constructive. Nothing useful. Only bitching and moaning.

I have a 2011 MBAir that came with Lion. It has a SSD (sata 2), it's true (if your Mac was bought since 2011 and you don't have a SSD, I blame Apple (50%) for money grabbing and the user (50%) for being uninformed and ignorant about the matter)).

I had a library with 40 to 50 GB, but with Spotify I only save the music that I enjoy the most. Anyone, the speed has always been the same: One bounce and that's it. Itunes opens.

I disabled everything that I don't want in iTunes, leaving only music management (Informed people outside of the US should never, ever, buy Movies/TVShows from stores until someone realizes that all people around the world should have access to the same stuff, but that's another conversation) active. There isn't a single music app, on any platform, that is faster and cleaner than what the latest iTunes version can be.

No wonder that it is the most used piece of software in Windows and OS X. The people complaining about the UI are the same people complaining about all new UI, Chrome, Windows, iOS, etc. It's just bitching and moaning.

Yes, the app should be broken, but it has nothing to do with UI for music management or speed.

View attachment 630357
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Welcome to modern macRumors, the awesome place where people used to be able talk about Apple.
Now it's
- how is battery life
- Safari is snappier
- Apple is doomed

Its a wonderful place.
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ConnYoungy said:
NO!
I definitely do NOT want a persistent sidebar, i very much enjoy my albums taking up 98% of the screenspace.
Replacing the music/video/app icons with a dropdown feels totally like a "what else can we tinker with to make it different" king of decision

edit: I also don't see how any of these changes actually make it easier to use
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Neither do I.
The sidebar is the worst part about iTunes yet it's the feature most people want back.
They complain about bloat but want a side bar taken right out of software design books from the 90S.
 
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If the seperate iTunes from Apple Music , that would be a positive move also. Keep streaming as a seperate app.
 
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dannys1 said:
An image that doesn't appear in the screenshots on the post??

But thats quite handy - Apple Music ones are obviously the subscribed playlists others have curated whilst My Music will be your usual playlists containing whatever you drag into them from Apple Music, iTunes Match or your own library. Spotify should have a way of doing this instead of just sticking every playlist you follow into the side bar - I mean they have folders but its just a messy cluttered place.

But yeah, thanks for that but I can't see that in any of the 4 screenshots in the original post.
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It's here:

itunesnavigation-800x527.jpg


On the MacBook above the MacRumors logo.
 
How about Apple combine For You and New into one and call it Discover or something. That would be the place to discover new music and discover music you might like based on things in your library and things you've liked or your friends like. So three sections - My Music, Discover and Radio. And maybe a 4th for Playlists. For You and My Music never made sense to me anyway.

imageWIS said:
Same thing that happened to the Mac lineup: they have a designer who can't design or engineer anything innovative anymore (Ives) coupled with a CEO who has no vision and can't focus the team due to lack of aforementioned vision (Cook).
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You do know that iTunes is part of Eddy Cue's organization and has its own software and UI teams, right? We have no idea what involvement Alan Dye's team has with iTunes and Music (his bio on Apple's website mentions iOS, OS X and Apple Watch). All we know based on the Bloomberg story is his team supposedly assisted with the redesign. I'm sure Ive would be amused at the amount of things MR posters assume he's responsible for. :)

With iTunes the biggest problem is bloat. A decision to just bolt Music onto iTunes comes from the top, not from iTunes software engineers or UI designers. They just have the unenviable task of trying to make it work.
 
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tkermit said:
Hopefully this will make iTunes be able to maintain its scroll position once again. Currently it has the annoying habit of scrolling back to the top every damn time you edit metadata or modify a playlist in edit mode. Speaking of which – how about letting us open playlists in a separate window again? That was kind of useful. And already implemented.

I can't believe this works in iTunes 1 but not in iTunes 12:

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This x 1,000,000. I've been going through the process of re-ripping my 3,000+ CD collection losslessly and updating the existing track entries with these new copies so I can maintain 13 years of playlists and play counts. These behaviors have been driving me CRAZY!!! Even if you've column-browsed your way to a single album, your view in the main library is reset every time you leave it. Insert a CD, lose your place in the main library. Click on a playlist, lose your place in the main library. Look at iTunes askance, lose your place in the main library. It's excruciatingly obvious that not one of the people responsible for iTunes development actually use it to manage and maintain a music collection doesn't come from Apple Music or the iTunes Store in its entirety.
 
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I don't mind sans sidebar after I got used to it. The only thing that was unintuitive was adding songs to playlists
 
wlossw said:
Lipstick on a pig.
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They have already done that. This is becoming a pig dressed up as a drag queen.
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scoobydoo99 said:
"being added"???

um, you mean like the one that we had forever that Apple took away when they "cleaned up" the interface?

I'll be surprised if this happens, since Apple lately seems to take great pleasure in removing usability features in favor of creating sterile, unfriendly interfaces. But if it's true, great. Now if we could just get scroll bar arrows back in OS X, we'll be all up-to-date and ready for 2006!
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You do not know what direction up and down is? Well, up goes towards the isight camera.... down goes towards the power button on the macbook pro...
 
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