Thread by @metaning

what’s wrong with #iTunes has nothing whatsoever to do with it’s “complexity”, and everything to do with incompetent #UI design at Apple.

iTunes doesn’t need features removed, it needs designers removed, and replaced with people who aren’t #Bozos

For example the breaking of the disclosure-triangle list on the left. Previously the conceptual heart of navigation, where everything could be found (even downloads), its mutated into this confusing combination where the first level of the app is modal to the media kind.

Another offender - the downloads / activity window is now a separate entity, that loses its download history on quit, and has no place in the structural order of the app, even though downloading media is one of the primary things #iTunes does.

Then there’s #Podcasts - I know the #CupertinoLizardPeople live in this fantasyland where bandwidth is free and unlimited, but for a lot of the world it isn’t. The idea of downloading a podcast onto multiple devices directly is obscenely wasteful.

#iTunes used to be a beautiful podcatcher, up until version 10, when a whole bunch of stupid changes came in.

Firstly, the notion of “saved episodes”, which was a counter feature to default auto-deleting.

Auto-delete meant that unless you told #iTunes to “keep” all episodes of a show, it would wipe them from disk once you’d listened to them. If you set it to keep “all” episodes, iTunes will download every episode in a feed, every time the feed changes.

So, podcast moves to a new host, and keep “All” is on, there’s the whole back catalogue downloaded again. Host changes the naming structure, all of them downloaded again etc.

So to get around this, you only “keep” the most recent couple, but now you have to manually save every freaking episode in #iTunes to protect against the auto-delete setting, which protects you from having your bandwidth chewed up on downloading multiple copies of the same show.

The #iOS inspired List view in #iTunes #Podcast display - displays a separate entry for a podcast each time its host changes, or something about the episode is different, you get double or triple entries (worse on iOS) that only show as a single in the old “classic list” view.

and yes, that was a super-nerd slice through my #iTunes subscriptions. Not all of them are active, because iTunes used to also be about #Archiving things - your collection, and I treat most #Podcasts like #Comics collections.

Spending a bit of time again in #iTunes, and really struck by the fact that what was wrong with it, had nothing to do with the number of tasks it was expected to fulfil. Nor did it have anything to do with an excess in the breadth or depth of its features.

#iTunes was never a large, or complex program by any reasonable metric.

What killed iTunes, was that it was Cronenberged by a bunch of incompetent UI & UX “designers”, who in Apple’s major trend, removed the connection between UI structure, and task structure.

The primary target of this #iTunes ruination of the UI, was a company-wide obsession with destroying the hierarchical relationships, indicated by the turndown disclosure triangle, so instead of a single sidebar, where each media kind was a turndown, revealing all the items with…

…we get #iTunes made modal for each media kind. We get the stupid button for a device when it’s plugged in, that switches the whole app another modal view, instead of just being another sidebar item, as in earlier, better versions.

…and we lose the sidebar item for downloads, replaced with a separate floating window, that takes up screen real estate *for no benefit*.

Apple has forgotten more good UI since 2007, than they invented since, as evidenced by the gesture-commandline clusterfuck iOS has become.