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Where is the UI heading?


Timan

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Ok, this is the point where all A-S threads became Dramas, come on guys this is just an app for your computer, dont take this thing personal ;)
Yeah! I mean come on! This is Aqua-Soft. You know, the place that focuses on emulating Aqua. The cornerstone of OS X. Made by Apple. The same company that does iTunes. There is no connection.

The point is that, above all, iTunes 7 is giving us a look at what is happening in Leopard. This is the direction Apple is taking in their design. And this community emulates that direction on our computers. This is very relevant in the community, thus, we are very vocal about it. Our first peek was Mail 2, and you know how beautiful that app is. Then it leaked into iTunes, then slowly in other programs, but still, none of the scrolling or table elements changed. Now something important happened, they actually did change the way the scroll bars and table headers look. It's big.

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The scrollbars are fugly, desaturated blue is not appreciated, the aqua pills were though.

The buttons are a metallic moronic experiment, while the old ones where incredible, course this can be changed by choosing a different theme.

And the icon is a freak of nature that needs to go back to the design team, and recreated.

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Since iTunes 6, Apple made the top row (title bar, menus & controls) much sorter, in order to save space for your music lists. The bottom row buttons are kept to a minimal size, for the same reason.

And now iTunes 7 adds titles and spaces in the left pane. When Now Playing artwork is on, a scrollbar is almost inevitable.

After connecting my iPod and going to iPod "Summary" section, I thought I had already installed Vista: a big picture of an iPod, and too much wasted space (I also tested it in 800x600, there is no way to access the "Update" and "Restore" buttons).

The buttons for Visualizer and MiniStore are gone. The button for Equalizer is gone, too. The "browse" button (which opens a drawer near the top) is at the bottom now and it feels a little wrong.

Edit: Is by any chance the Mac icon different than the Windows icon?

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With the customization community getting so big, mods of icons, creating new GUIs, and such, it's probably near impossible to come up with something new and unique. That's what Apple tried to do here. It may not look great now, but remember when iTunes 5 came out? Everyone hated the dark unified look, but now almost everyone loves it.

People need to get used to change.

(Although, when the Multi-Plungin comes out, I'll still request an Aqua skin. :P)

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I'm sorta on the fense with this one. The toned down colors and more subtle button effects match the black, glossy reflective look much better. I like the buttons near the top, especially the play/reverse/forward ones. I like the redesigned sidebar a lot too. I've always been a fan of flashy black reflections too.

What I don't like are the buttons on the bottom. They're boring. And they don't FEEL aqua. The color scheme definitely needs some work; right now its a thrown up mess of blues and grays. I don't mind the colorful set of icons in the sidebar, but they don't mesh with the rest of the toned down UI.

Overall, a B- for me.

Now get to work on that Multi-Plugin. Themes+coverflow=joygasm.:D

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it doesnt remind of vista, and i love the new interface simple because there is more blue, and i love the new bluey icons, since i couldnt stand the old ones.

however, i hate the new 3 play, forward and back buttons, i preferred them glassier.

what i hate is what updating the firmware has done to my ipod screen, it wasnt 60% brighter to begin with and now its dim :(

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Well i still use iTunes 4.9 on my PC!

I didn't like the look of the 5, 6 or now 7 interfaces and i can't see it growing on me any time soon. I don't really need any of the new features these version are touting. I also hope the "iTV" interface isn't final either, because it just doesn't look very professional at all. Also those buttons in the screenshot posted by Paralex do look worryingly Windows-esque.

EDIT: The pieces don't seem to fit well together either... these thick black lines... and all the shadows are way to thick. Looks cheap and unfinished.

P.S. You went to the trouble to blur out the word pussy!?! :P

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Posted this on another forum but i thought i should share my opinion here too now that i've found some times to put in "on paper"

I think the new UI is horrible and here's why:

- the new icon looks like something dugg up from Vista. Apple removed all glossy elements from iTunes yet they added that horrible, hey-look-at-me! gloss to the icon. Also the icon looks terrible at 16x16 and is a big let-down compared to the normally great Apple icons.

- prev/play/pause/next buttons are horrible in my opinion. I'm not a professional UI designer but looking from a layman's perspective, those buttons are the most important buttons on a music player/app and light gray on gray doesn't make good contrast. Old buttons were pretty good in my view and the reason for this change is beyond my grasp. Besides, i've seen way too many crappy windows skins that have half-assed metallic elements like these new buttons. They're ugly but i'll get over them.

- The NEW SOURCE PANE with its CAPS TEXT has allready been mentioned. While i like the separate libraries for music/videos/games it will take some time gettiing used to.

However when i first installed iTunes 7 and saw the dark blue/black highlight i thought it was a bug. That's how out of place it looks. Horrible looking and the purpose of it being almost black is a mistery to me. I'm not a big fan of the icons either but they do what they're supposed to.

- The repeat/shuffle/library buttons look horrible. Hard to distinguish (gray on gray) with way too much stroke and they just look like crap. The dark outlines are probably there to make them visible but it looks to me like somebody used way too much stroke when designing in photoshop.

- new views - while i like how they implemented Cover Flow in iTunes, the regular (list) and the new artwork views work very funny with browse button. When i'm using the "regular" iTunes list view i like the browse panel and list view + browse panel work and look great. However, when i switch to the album art (not cover flow) view, the browse panel is still there and not very usefull (since you navigate by looking at album artwork) In this view the browse panel doesn't make much sense to me and it would be great if it could be turned off without affecting the other, regular view).

Now each time i switch between artwork and regular (list) view i have to enable/disable the browse panel. One would think if this was a global setting, cover flow view would have it too but it doesn't (because it makes as much sense as it does in the artwork view). Also moving burn and browse buttons to a less exposed place in the app makes them a bit hard to find and not as intuitive as it was in previous versions.

- the crapload of new colours! Let's see... Light gray buttons for play/pause, dark gray buttons for shuffle/repeat, gray highlight for innactive items in browse panel, "strong" blue highlight for active highlights, the horrible black, glossy highlight in the source list, another shade of blue for the source list background, another crappy shade of blue for scrollbars, yet another shade of blue for colums highlights, yellow-ish LCD, dark gray highlight for view buttons...

Did i miss any? If Apple is after more professional and toned down look, i don't see it working out well.

- new scrollbars - fuzzy, crappy colour, weird lighting, not enough contrast make them horrible in my eyes. I don't want to spend a sec looking for scrollbars. They are important part of the UI and they should be visible and with good contrast.

- RAM usage - i don't know what's the situation like on OSX (i'm waiting for my iMac to arrive) but on windows it looks like a train wreck. With only 3 albums, in normal view and with no visualiser, iTunes is consuming 60 megs of RAM. I know you're gonna tell me RAM is cheap but there should not be a 20 meg of RAM jump from one version to another (40 megs in v6).

Maybe situation on OSX is different but people rightfully complain iTunes being a memory hog on windows. And since windows using people account for a fairly large ammount of Apple's iTunes users, i believe something should be done with it.

- the new iPod "page" is as someone have already said it, more of a webpage than anything else and it looks very tacky and a waste of space.

- Windows users like it - end of story! iTunes looks like a curved NextStep or Windows 95 UI and i pray to god Leopard won't look anything like it. I understand the need for "less distracting" colours and a more slick, pro interface but is the answer really to go back to porrige-like looking days of the old? I really like the new iLife apps look but iTunes is an abomination.

- Get album artwork only works if you have an iTunes account which would be fine if Apple let a door open for us not fortunate to live in a country blessed by Apple's presence. I have a lot albums i ripped and tagged properly and i used to get artwork from iTunes (unfortunally i found about it late and didn't get many covers) but now i'm left in the cold.

I allready tried to create an iTunes account but was rejected cause my billing address is not in the US (or a country where iTunes Store is present). I have a valid credit card i use to purchase stuff from amazon.com and i would gladly pay to be able to get those high quality covers but either cause of lack of foresight, arrogance or copyright lawas, some honest users cannot use something that others get for free.

Obviously there are some great new features in iTunes 7 that i love. Cover Flow is a nice eye candy, gapless playback is great and so are some new features but that's not what i'm trying to say now. I'm not saying everything in iTunes 7 sucks nor i'm saying i'm not impressed with the ammount of new features Apple released. But my gripe about the UI still stands.

Again, i'm not a UI designer but i've designed quite a few widgets and have been following Apple and its GUI design since OSX was announced. There were some ups and downs to it but in my opinion, iTunes is the worst UI Apple has released in a while.

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