One of the most-used programs, regardless of platforms, is iTunes. Given that the iPod is far and away the dominant media player, and that Apple has sold hundreds of millions of iOS devices, the application used to buy and manage audio, video, apps and books is ubiquitous.
It’s also, frankly, pretty bad. iTunes’ design hasn’t been updated since its initial 2001 release. It’s bloated and notoriously slow. It’s incredibly non-intuitive. On Windows, iTunes is prone to lockups and crashing. On the Mac, it’s more stable but still balky.
Jason Snell, the editor of Macworld, on Tuesday published a rant calling on Apple to give iTunes a badly needed overhaul. Snell is particularly unhappy with the state of iTunes’ core feature: How it syncs files to iOS devices. His ire was inspired by a bad experience syncing his wife’s iPad to the family Mac:
Recently I connected my wife’s iPad to our Mac at home to add some videos for my kids to watch. The iPad had never been synced with the Mac before, because it was using iCloud and the App Store. The moment I plugged it in, iTunes attempted to sync its own parallel collection of apps to this iPad, which I didn’t want. When I tried to turn off this feature, it offered me a decision I’d never seen before: To delete all the apps on the iPad, or keep them and stop syncing. The second option was exactly what I wanted to do. So I chose it, and watched as iTunes proceded to delete all the apps on the iPad anyway.
Given that all apps are available in the cloud these days, I’m not sure why iTunes is aggressively trying to sync apps with devices. In fact, given Apple’s aggressive moves withiTunes Match and iTunes in the Cloud, even Apple seems to realize that syncing media with a Mac or PC running iTunes is kind of a mess.
Rather than continue to patch a sync system that was wonky to begin with and has only gotten worse, it’s time for Apple to take a step back and re-think device syncing entirely. Right now it seems like the company’s planning on solving this issue by having every device a person owns automatically download everything, a feature introduced in iOS 5. That’s not a bad start, but users shouldn’t have to pick between the cloud and their local computers—they should be able to move back and forth effortlessly. Adding a single movie to an iPad shouldn’t take 25 minutes and the risk that you’ll lose all your apps along the way.
Snell has particularly harsh words for iTunes’ management of apps.
And let’s be honest: iTunes is at its worst when it comes to app management. The app-management interface in iTunes is ridiculously slow. iTunes can fill up your hard drive with tens of gigabytes of iOS apps that can easily be downloaded from Apple. Syncing apps frequently destroys folders and makes app disappear. The interface that shows where the app icons will appear on your iOS device is unstable, unreliable, and inefficient.
And he rightly points out that, if iTunes was being designed from scratch in 2012, it would look nothing like what it does now, nor would it behave the same way. iTunes harkens back to the early 2000s, and even then its interface echoes design standards from the late 1990s. I’ll state the obvious: In some of its views, it looks like it was built using Microsoft Visual Basic, circa 1997.
And it’s clearly possible to build a better-looking media manager that has a modern, intuitive interface. For example, here’s the basic iTunes view, with music shown as a list:
And here’s Microsoft’s Zune software, the media manager used for its often-mocked (and now-discontinued) Zune MP3 player. This app is also used to manage media on Windows Phone devices.
Now tell me: Which one looks more appealing, inviting and easier to navigate? (Yes, I could have shown one of iTunes’ other, more graphical views, but list is the default. And the other views really aren’t that much friendlier.)
If Microsoft wanted to really embarrass its Cupertino rival, it would make the Zune software work with iOS devices, with bonus points for building a Mac version. If I could use Microsoft’s program to manage my media on my iPhone and iPad, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
So I was initially intrigued this morning to read a 9to5Mac entry indicating that Apple’s working on iTunes 11. However, it appears that an imminent interface overhaul is not in the cards:
According to sources, Apple has recently begun internally seeding the next major release of the iTunes application for computers, iTunes 11. Work on iTunes 11 began prior to the release of iTunes 10.6, and the development of the new software product – that we are familiar with – is currently focused on under-the-hood changes, rather than cosmetic changes. However, Apple develops different portions of products in separate groups or at separate times, so the final product will likely include some new user-interface elements and more visible features.
Apple is working on iTunes 11 as a version of iTunes that supports their upcoming iOS 6 release and future devices. Apple typically releases new versions of iTunes alongside major new OS’s and mobile devices. While iTunes 11 is built as an iOS 6 compatible-release, according to sources, iTunes 11 could very well be a release coming farther down the road, and Apple could very well release another iTunes 10.x point update as a simple iOS-6-compatiblity release. One source calls that the more likely situation.
This holds out hope that iTunes 11 eventually will give the software a badly needed streamlining and modernization, but it’s hard to be optimistic. Apple kicks hardware designs to the curb every few years, but it doesn’t seem inclined to redo software. Still, iTunes is long overdue for a do-over.
Please fix it, Apple.