Steve Jobs Defends New iTunes 10 Icon Against Criticism

[kalsta]

615 Comments about... the iTunes icon?! Seriously? Okay, its Labor Day weekend so turn off your "device of choice", go outside, and get some fresh air!!

616 after your comment. Oh the irony.

 

[Lennholm]

Seriously? Come on man. At least give props to folks who you edited from?

 

[MorphingDragon]

"sed" has a GUI on Apple OSX?

I have seen SED front-ends, pointless though because sed works with streams.

 

[dccorona]

If you look carefully with your special eyes
Since few people are recording to CD these days, the CD as part of the icon is outdated.

though the CD may be outdated

I can't seem to think of a major release by an artist that was only distributed digitally...everything still comes out on CD

as for recording to CD...no one ever did that. They used to record to tapes, they may still for all I know, but never directly to a CD (just covering my bases here, in case you ment it very literally)

 

[tkermit]

though the CD may be outdated

I can't seem to think of a major release by an artist that was only distributed digitally...everything still comes out on CD

That seems to be the case - for now. But, just as an example, Sufjan Steven's latest EP was released in digital form on the internet first, and will only be available on CD and vinyl (!) later this year.

 

[Rustythebasenji]

Looks like Windows

...looks like it was designed by a Windows' employee

 

[dimmer-fj]

Why...

The only thing it matches is the new quicktime icon...

Wow, yes, yes it does! And damn if we should have apps with a common theme (media players/viewers) share a common style! Didn't we learn anything from MicroSoft?

 

[3282868]

My sincerest apologies

Earlier today I posted an animated gif that I meant merely in jest. However, to my shock I was unaware that the gif had inappropriate language. It was brought to my attention and I wanted to personally apologize to any one I may have offended. Truthfully I merely meant it as a light hearted comment, however as may be the case online, those intentions can be severely misconstrued. I intended on apologizing to those individuals I offended however as the comments were removed I do not know who they are, so with much mud on my face I apologize to all. It truly was overlooked and not my intention.

 

[dimmer-fj]

...a speedometer for Dashboard...

You have to be kidding, right? Do I use Dashboard to check out how fast my Mac is running? Or how hot? Or anything else related to the conventional "Dashboard"? Nope. The "Dashboard" icon followed the marketing title, which was where the problem started. There is nothing that makes sense in the visual language for Dashboard / Speedometer, unless if you want to argue that pulling up Dashboard slows you down, and not looking at your Speedometer might cause you to be pulled over by the filth. No matter how you parse it, it's piss poor at a concept level, much less implementation.

 

[kalsta]

If you want Steve Jobs' comment on rainbows, watch this YouTube movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eayBvZczwWE

That was brilliant! Thanks for posting.

 

[dimmer-fj]

INot to mention the lack of a 64-bit Cocoa version. Pathetic.

Err, what exactly would iTunes need a 64-bit address space for? Have you munged all of your Sky/Blue Oyster Cult/Fran Zappa/****** Era Floyd/Dead albums into one MP3 file (even then, wouldn't help)? 32-bit iTunes runs fine on any supported Mac OS -- adding 64-bit buzzword compliance would have no meaningful effect, anywhere.

A version for the kludged Win-64 might be good for those silly enough to take that route, but hell, you have to leave some people running Windows Media Center...

 

[polaris20]

I find it positively astonishing that there's 33 pages of discussion about a friggin' logo. Don't we all have bigger things to worry about?

 

[Tec972]

I concur with the majority. That icon is piss poor! Not the usual slick and attractive stuff I'm used to seeing from apple. Alas this icon will most likely not grow on people either because there is no depth to it. It's flat out boring and ugly and doesn't go with the decor of everything else on the system.

Also don't even get me started of the blandness of the actual program. I have been wanting to see more pizazz in OS X anyway. This is certainly going in the wrong direction. I hope it doesn't escalate to their other products.

One of the reasons products have caught on is the aesthetic appeal and it's stuff is usually eye candy. This is terrible. A shame too as I just bought a mac. Next they will be shipping black and white monitors because Steve Jobs will declare color as uncool and everyone will think he is a genius, and follow along blindly anyway.

 

[dimmer-fj]

they should incorporate the Apple logo in the iTunes logo. What better way to get your brand literally in front of the eyes of a bajillion Windows users?

As SJ says: "We don't whore the brand." -- putting an Apple logo on anything Windows would give credence to the MS-abomination, even if we are all too "smart" to see it. Apple software running on Windows is not there to show how great both platforms are, or equal, or anything else.

 

[ipodtouch-user]

A change - not so good though

Well, although it's a change (which is a good thing), it's still a poor icon.

 

[gkarris]

Go, thread, go!

I was at Fry's today and CD/DVD media was relegated to the back corner of the store...

CD's are so late 20th Century, anyways...

I say, while Steve's at it, change the name to iMedia...

 

[tbrinkma]

There BOTH taken from my dock. One at "rest" state and one is from the "magnification effect" when the mouse rolls over it. I use a 30" Apple cinema display so the these are shown in the native high resolution of the display. As far as those "tiny bits." I don't know what you are talking about. If you are referring to the design in the background, then from that point I guess you don't see ANY background elements in the Safari icon, the Mail icon, the Preview icon, etc. I know you want to make some valid point and are trying real hard to back it up, but sorry, you fail.

No, sorry, he's right. Using the massive blow-up picture you posted originally, your icon has a 'busy' background that distracts from the main iconography. When shrunk to the size it will be in actual use, it just looks like a marbled-glass background, because the mini-icons around the perimeter of the purple area are too small to be seen for what they are. They are, from a graphical design perspective, nothing more than clutter. That's what he was saying.

The new design may not be perfect, but at least it conveys all the same information at any reasonable resolution.

 

[KnightWRX]

On Linux, I'd put

alias AppleFAIL='defaults write'​

Since I've been "Apple OS free" since 1995 I don't know if the alias syntax for terminal.app matches my default Linux shell.

OS X uses bash, a sh variant, so of course the alias built-in is included.

 

[tbrinkma]

It's not a question of spelling/grammar, but of meaning. "I could care less" means you care. If you can care less, than means your care meter is not at 0, so you indeed have some form of care about the issue.

"I couldn't care less" on the other hand indicates your total lack of care about the issue at hand.

They are not a simple typo and do a complete 180 on your meaning. Not to mention most people use "I could care less" when meaning the opposite, which leads to confusion for most normal English speaking folk.

Just get it right next time, it'll help drive your point home instead of doing quite the opposite.

And being senselessly pedantic about the 'proper meaning' of a sentence you know damned well means exactly what the original poster meant, is better?

As I've pointed out before, the two phrases you piss on about have the same freaking meaning. As in:
I could care less(, but I don't want to make the effort).
I couldn't care less(, even if I wanted to).

Get used to the fact that language constructs don't always carry the literal meaning of their constituent words. (Unless you plan to put his point in your car and drive it to his house.)

Get a life.

 

[tbrinkma]

a designer should understand that things can work on multiple levels. You can have the instant impression, which in this case is "music" (which isn't entirely appropriate for an application that is now being used primarily to sync phones and tablets with their video and applications, now is it?).

so after that initial impression, anything extra that you notice is just making it a nicer icon. You'll notice all sorts of nice things in apple's icons if you pay attention. This one is pretty derelict of anything beyond the surface.

For examples of good Apple icons (that you can't see every detail of in the dock *gasp*):

address book.app
automator.app
chess.app
dashboard.app
dictionary.app
front row.app
garageband.app
ical.app
image capture.app
photobooth.app
preview.app
safari.app
system preferences.app
text edit.app
time machine.app
even the generic folder icon in 10.5 and 10.6 has some great detail you can't see in a dock.


and some really great 3rd party ones:
VLC
Mariner Write
Transmit
Transmission
Chrome
Calibre
mail.app

If you go into your applications folder and go to full screen and cover flow view, you'll quickly see what I mean. Some of the icons are works of art. Most people never see them, but that doesn't really matter because some people DO, and that's the whole point. The new iTunes icon is like the iChat and Quicktime icons. you can't get anything extra from the icon by making it bigger. Even Sync.app has some nice texture that only comes out at high resolutions.

One day very soon we will be using computers with 300+ dpi screens, and huge resolutions, and a 1/2 inch icon in the dock will be as big as a 2 inch icon is now from an absolute resolution perspective. That means you'll start to see more and more detail in the icons that have it. iTunes will probably not get another icon refresh until it gets a name change in another several years. That means this opportunity was wasted. It's not the end of the world. It's not even important, but it IS something, and it's not good. It's just lame, and another indication that Apple is heading further into a direction I don't particularly like.

Perhaps some rephrasing is in order to better clarify what we're saying.

Secondary details which actually disappear at smaller sizes are fine. Secondary details which remain *visible*, but not distinguishable for what they are turn into clutter.

Some of your examples don't make any sense. The Chess.app icon is a knight on a four-square section of chess board. The only details the become more or less visible as you re-size the icon are on the knight itself, and when shrunk, become shading which has the same visual effect as the detail on the full-size icon in cover flow mode. The iCal.app icon is another example of that. Even at the maximum cover flow size, the little 'month at a glance' calendars are only useful from an iconographic stand point. Shrunk to minimum size they become virtually invisible, but when noticed can be recognized for exactly what they are. The same goes for the text in the Text Editor.app icon. I don't need to be able to read the text of the letter in order to recognize that it is a letter.

Unfortunately, the icon you're defending doesn't quite hit that mark. You've got a textured background with little fiddly-bit icons buried in it. At full size, they're visible and discernible. At normal size, they blend into the background texture simply turning into additional noise.

 

[dgmul]

You have to be kidding, right?

Nah, my point was that Apple's icons were cool because they looked like little objects of some sort. Not just abstract bubbles.

 

[KnightWRX]

As I've pointed out before, the two phrases you piss on about have the same freaking meaning.

I could care less and I couldn't care less don't mean the same thing. No matter how much you want them to, as even your examples were diametrically opposed.

You should read this article on the subject :

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm

 

[tbrinkma]

I don't consider the zoom buttons to be part of the UI, they are part of the chrome. Both close and minimise buttons are superfluous in single-window apps (as is the titlebar), quitting and hiding the app do exactly the same thing as closing or minimising.

Umm. No. Quitting, hiding, closing, and minimizing Hiding do *not* do the same thing as one another.
Quitting kills the app. It's not running any more.
Closing the window leaves the app running, and the icon in the dock.
Hiding minimizes the window and removes the icon from the dock (unless the icon lives on the dock).
Minimizing simply minimizes the window.

 

[tbrinkma]

I could care less and I couldn't care less don't mean the same thing. No matter how much you want them to, as even your examples were diametrically opposed.

You should read this article on the subject :

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm

Or you should simply accept the facts of the matter. The two phrases, as used in common parlance, carry the *exact* same meaning. Pissing about it over and over doesn't change that. It's just how language works in this case.

 

[KnightWRX]

Or you should simply accept the facts of the matter. The two phrases, as used in common parlance, carry the *exact* same meaning. Pissing about it over and over doesn't change that. It's just how language works in this case.

Read the article I posted. It'll give you some enlightenment. All will be revealed to you.