iTunes 9 Successes
iTunes 9 is a reasonable step forward for the incredibly popular software, but it’s not the step Apple needed to take. To be blunt – iTunes has become the kind of constantly-appended, bloated, inelegant software that Apple fans always accuse Microsoft of making.
First, the good stuff. The main store navigation is redesigned a bit, and is better than before. It’s a small step forward. More on that in a minute.
You can now manage and rearrange your iPhone and iPod touch apps within the desktop software, which is faster and easier than doing it on the device. It’s fantastic. It should have been this way from the start. Microsoft, as you build out a marketplace for Windows Mobile and hopefully Zune HD, pay attention to this. Don’t wait for it to get out of control before providing a solution.
Manage your iPhone Apps in iTunes
Home Sharing is another nice feature.You’ve been able to authorize up to 5 computers to play your iTunes music and video for some time. That hasn’t changed. The Home Sharing feature appears to be just an integrated way to literally move your music from one machine to another, picking which things you want to copy instead of just copying the whole damn iTunes music folder. Again, something Microsoft should make note of. You can authorize three computers to play your Zune stuff, and at some point they’re going to need to make it easier to manage your music between them. I bet Microsoft skips over copying and moves everything to the cloud, with the option to selectively download what you want.
Oh hey, look, Apple even added a touch of Windows 7 stuff! There’s kinda-sorta a jumplist (it only shows “Go to iTunes Store” and “Search iTunes Store”, which isn’t a terribly useful set of options). There’s a taskbar mini-player, like Windows Media Player has. Yay! This is bare minimum Win7 support, but it’s something. I’d like to see them do the “progress bar in icon” for syncing and downloading progress, and fill out that jumplist with some Genius stuff. But it’s a start. I’ve got a sneak peek at the Zune software coming with Zune HD on the 15th of this month, and it does a bit more with the Win7 taskbar (as you’d expect).
iTunes Taskbar Miniplayer in Windows 7
Despite some welcome improvements to iTunes 9, Apple is still far from delivering the kind of software they really should be. It’s full of nagging problems, large and small. iTunes 9 disappointments on the next page…
