The white is nasty.
They need to bring back the black backgrounds and fix the green button!!
Yep and also it's weird to have the volume slider light on the left and dark on the right, especially when the trackplay / progress indicator uses dark on left, light on right.
I sent them a feedback basically said hey u r frazzle my brain, which likes to drive entertainment on autopilot whenever possible. There is something startling and WRONG about the way those two sliders look now; they should flip the positive/negative on one of them.
On the plus side, I like being able to put the column view back the way it was (split the browser window horizontally) and appreciate the options to choose what categories show up in the browser.
The Store... I dunno... still finding my way around the changes. At first I could not find genres when I went to Music. By time I clicked into someplace that gave me that, I didn't know how I got there and it was that dull list view, the one that makes me think I've left the Store and landed in one of the big playlists I maintain to autofill shuffles.
It's true that even good change is unsettling at first, unless one regularly does different types of startle-exercises to get the brain to buy into changes. You know, like occasionally putting the other earring on first, or the other sock and shoe.
So I will discount various WTF reactions I've had so far, such as the disappearing cart. I dislike that now everything is one-click or else wish-list... I liked dumping all manner of stuff into cart, previewing some along the way. Later on I would sort it out, make discards, listen to what remained one more time, maybe drag a few items to a previews playlist for later, then BUY THE DAMN CART when I was sure. I could put tracks from several artists in there, say eleven tracks, play the previews three or four times, right after each other, or alternately, and finally pick out seven to buy. You can't do that so easily with the wishlist because it's artist-album oriented.
Oh well. I can still drag the tracks to a playlist and mess with the previews until I have what I want in that list and then buy my way down whatever's still in the list. Still, I have reset my warnings and left on the one for "are you sure you want to buy this??" to prevent inadvertent buys, but when I'm buying about half an album then it also ticks me off having to click once to buy and once to confirm.
{pouts.. wants her shopping cart....}
{shrugs... still managed to spend $29.05 in there yesterday, doing it their way. Well I had to make sure it worked, right? I got everything I wanted more than I want what's on my grocery list.}
Actually I do like the wishlist, it works a lot better than taking screen captures of stuff I would like to get later, or dragging previews into playlists I sometimes forget to rename so they sort high and I see them later.
The Help documentation says you can find My Wish List under quick links at the top right of the store homepage, but actually it's currently way at the bottom right, down by links to your account stuff. They NEED to put a Quick Link up top for the wishlist.
Aisde from UI and store issues: I finally tried Genius on a pretty big library on my blackjack, figuring it was a way to test the integrity of the iTunes 9 update of my stuff. I was pleasantly surprised by a few of the mix constructions, they must have been working on ways to improve Genius. It shows. I have a lot of alt rock and singer-songwriter stuff and they made some nice choices for three different playlists. But they threw in a couple of "huh?" picks into one of two latin mixes. Inexplicably they chose a Kings of Leon offering and a Strokes track, and not for any shortage of latin rock and pop in my library, that's for sure. Anyway, the Tennessee boys' track was called "King of the Rodeo" so maybe that one Spanish word tipped that one in, but the Strokes pick was bizarre, the track was "What Ever Happened?" One might well ask!
On to the next bar, connecting the toys to iTunes 9: I'm going to start with the ipod touch having the least amount of data I care about, in case the fun part of this update is officially over now.