Apple Delays Simpler and Cleaner iTunes 'to Get It Right' 252
Hugh Pickens writes "iTunes has been criticized in the past for being slow and growing increasingly unwieldy as more and more media types have been added to what used to be simply a music player. Apple announced iTunes 11, the latest version of the program, at its iPhone 5 event in September and said the update would be released by the end of October, but Apple's deadline for the upgrade has slipped. 'The new iTunes is taking longer than expected and we wanted to take a little extra time to get it right,' Apple told technology site AllThingsD. 'We look forward to releasing this new version of iTunes with its dramatically simpler and cleaner interface and seamless integration with iCloud before the end of November.' The update is said to be the most significant upgrade to iTunes in the 11-year life of the program, which has grown from a simple music player to the most powerful retailer in the music business — and a force in the movie, television and e-books businesses — and, on Apple's PCs, the portal to its app store."
Re:Better upgrade (Score:4, Interesting)
Reminds me of one major update where a new feature they were touting was a new and improved visualizer.
Really? Who sits at their computer just watches 3D rendered shapes change form? This is a selling point for the general audience? Why did you spend Dev time working on this instead of making the program more stable or streamlines; or even a USEFUL feature?
Re:Sign of the times (Score:3, Interesting)
It neither works as a music player, or device management...it never did.
Strange, I work with dozens of people that use it for those purposes every day. Melodramatic much?
iTunes does just fine, sorry your hardware and OS are old and outdated and things lag but on my Macbook Air iTunes runs just as fast as any other app on my machine. Granted, Ping was stupid but its gone now. As to the rest of your rant, whatever. Millions of people use it successfully every single day, purchasing billions of songs and movies every year. The evidence is very much against you.
Better late than crap. (Score:3, Interesting)
I still use iTunes. It's my favorite way to buy music. If i can't find an album there, it's probably not available for digital distribution at all. (Once or twice amazon has had an album that iTunes has not)
I don't even like to download torrents/rapidshares/whatever of albums unless they're lossless. I've downloaded too many albums with bad encodes that sound like garbage. I'll go to ebay/amazon and get a physical CD before I download some random mp3s
It's not perfect, but I still like it. iTunes is one of the few programs Ive used that actually shave bloat with later iterations. Recently they shed the quicktime requirement (Even apple admits that quicktime is a niche product now) And now they're chucking ping and other unnecessary things.
Since iOS5, apple has moved to make the iOS devices independent of PCs. You don't need a computer to use and iOS device now, and they're changing itunes to reflect that.
Re:Good for them (Score:3, Interesting)
"As much as I dislike Apple, kudos to them for admitting the new iTunes isn't ready and postponing the release rather than pushing out potentially buggy and incomplete software. Too many software companies will just shove whatever they have finished out the door, whether it works or not."
Like that company that pushed out iOS 6 with the Maps application that everyone was so impressed by? What were they called again?
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
Like that company that pushed out iOS 6 with the Maps application that everyone was so impressed by?
Like that company that recently shoved the VP's in charge of those bungled releases out the door.
Re:Sign of the times (Score:1, Interesting)
The masses don't know any better. I regularly find these "average people" with literally half their browser (IE, of course) real estate taken up by toolbars. They don't really know how the toolbars got there or what they're for, and aren't really aware that they can get rid of them, much less how to do it. If they can put up with that, they can put up with iTunes, it doesn't mean it's not a steaming turdball.
Re:Better upgrade (Score:4, Interesting)
I wouldnt worry about that, Im sure theyre trying to make sure it runs as well as possible on OSX while remaining as buggy as possible on Windows.
That makes little sense from a business strategy perspective. They make most of their profits from portable devices; desktop and laptop hardware, despite its visibility, is secondary in financial terms. When they had the only decent smartphones and tablets, they could get away with having iTunes work crappy on Windows and hope to maybe guide a few users onto OSX with promises of better support. But now that Apple faces serious competition from the new generation of Android devices, this roadblock risks losing market share in portables for no good reason. I think they're serious about fixing iTunes on Windows this time.
long time (Score:4, Interesting)
They've been delaying it for a decade now.
I don't need iTunes as any sort of player (Score:4, Interesting)
I just need to manage my iPhones. I need separate profiles (since I have multiple devices) so they don't try and sync up apps with whatever the last person did. I don't need music playing when all I wanted to do was drag some tunes into my phone.
Maybe I'm using it wrong? I'm not an apple fanatic. I just needed to get into the iOS development game, and it was a good deal on a decent phone (now that the iPhone 5 is out, iPhone 4/4s is a heck of a deal if you are in a contract anyway)
Apple should have an iOS Device Manager that does all the syncing and such, and keep iTunes separate.
Re:Sign of the times (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll try not to sound like a fanboi here...
I was reviewing products for CNET back when MP3 players and software was starting to take off...before Apple had anything and SoundJam was its own thing.
I remember back then it seemed like everyone had a player before the iPod. Every consumer electronic company had one, as did Intel, Virgin, Coke, Nike, etc...
The one thing most of these had in common, along with many digital cameras, was that they didn't desktop mount, but required platform specific software. In fairness, this was in part an issue with how USB was implemented on PCs prior to Windows XP, but many vendors even after XP were thinking they were doing the consumer a favor by requiring the use of software that "facilitated the use" of their products.
I was dual Mac/PC platform at the time (now I use mostly Macs except to develop/test for PC). It was very frustrating that devices couldn't just mount on the Mac, although some devices that required software on the PC did just mount on the Mac.
So when Apple came out with iTunes and the iPod, at first, it seemed pretty screwed that they themselves went with a software required syncing system.
However, things have changed radically since then.
My *main* iTunes library is almost 1TB. I have other iTunes libraries on several volumes that I use for work, production, a media server and other uses. On my main library, I have, I don't know, a bazillion playlists? I have multiple iPads, iPods, and iPhones. I also sync iTunes with a media server, Sonos system, as well as flash cards in my car and other devices. It's not uncommon for me to sync multiple devices at the same time, some wirelessly and some plugged in via USB.
For the life of me, I have no idea how I could even begin to manage all of this on a system level without software. Likewise, without playlists, the idea of duplicating folders would be a nightmare, since many of the playlists have the same songs in them.
For a casual user, I can understand the "why can't I just drag and drop from the system", but for me, the filesystem is actually a generic purpose filesystem app, be it The Finder on the Mac, or Explorer on Windows that absolutely sucks for specific file purposes such as music or photos. And iTunes/iPhoto/Aperture are file management apps only much better suited for these file types.
I'll admit that iTunes is far better on the Mac than Windows, and of course there is no iPhoto/Aperture on Windows, but still it's far better than trying to manage everything yourself from the generic file system management app be it Finder or Explorer.