Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

Book Plugs:

Buy 'em and I get
money. I think.
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Saturday, September 23, 2006

20:11 - For God's sake, we've got to do something!

(top)

Something that circumstances kept me from commenting on in a timely manner was iTunes 7, otherwise known as "Let's Make a Major Version Jump Actually Mean Something This Time".

In short: I like it, but they best watch theyself now. They're starting to flail just a teeeensy bit. It seems to me that there's plenty to get excited about in iTunes now that it supports full-scale (640-pixel-wide) Hollywood movies and lets you play them back in a wholeheartedly polished manner, without having to monkey with the established parts of the interface to the extent that they've done here.

First, we've got yet another reskinning of the buttons, which long ago shed their "Classic Aqua" guise in favor of the new-fangled "flat shiny round controls" and "metal buttons that you know would make a satisfying tick sound if you pressed them in real life" metaphors. Now, the buttons have dispensed with any pretense of Looking Like Things�they don't emulate any real-life devices, which is probably a good thing, no matter how many new generations of UI designers have to rediscover the merits of such principles. But it also means iTunes now has scrollbars whose Aqua-ness has dried up, possibly the first Apple app to do so since the release of OS X in 2001. Now the scrollbars are a solid-ish blue-gray color, with a rounded-looking surface and round endpoints, but no more resembling the "flowing water" (or "slippery squeezy snake") motif of old. This would seem to be a nod to the cross-platform nature of iTunes in this day and age, belonging as much to the Windows world as to the Mac; but considering how many reports are apparently flying about the rumor mills of playback bugs in the Windows version, that impartiality might only be for show at this point.

There's also some question as to how well thought out the new color scheme and interface layout in iTunes 7 has been. John Gruber of Daring Fireball noticed that a Knowledge Base article at Apple had a screenshot of a pre-release version of iTunes with a much darker blue sidebar with white text, much like what you find on the new iPod interface demo page. Presumably it was yanked at the last minute; but you'll still find that color scheme all over the place in the new iTunes website and in the iTunes ~~Music~~ Store. Personally I think it looks very sharp in those applications (and the Store in particular is much spruced-up, especially in previously neglected pages like the "Just Added" section, which has fixed a long-present bug where it would lose keyboard focus at the drop of the hat, making it a pain to read through the entire list if you ever click on any links to see what the listed albums are).

But although the sidebar now has more or less the same color scheme as it used to, albeit with completely redesigned icons and that new subheading-based layout (which I can just see my mom squinting at and wondering why they can't just pick a layout and make up their mind), there are these two new view modes that pervade the entire system: the "Grouped with Artwork" view and the "Cover Flow" view. These, to me, represent where iTunes is having an identity crisis. The Cover Flow browser is reportedly an outright-purchased bit of functionality from a third-party plugin, and it's quite slick, albeit pretty useless in anything but a demo; but the "Grouped with Artwork" view, which gives regular music, podcasts, audiobooks, and other pure-audio media types a visual browser analogous to the "icon view on a reflective black floor" view that videos had in the previous version, looks like it came straight out of a competitive design review. See, I recall that early screenshots of Windows Media Player in Vista operated on precisely that basis, with cover art down the left acting as a grouping mechanism for the tracks listed down the right. Apple seems to have been spooked by this, and is trying to jimmy in the same functionality�because whether it helps in browsing or not, it's a highly visual navigation mode that looks great in screenshots. It might prove to be useless in practice, but without it, iTunes would look quaint and austere next to a media player with that browsing mode. You just know it.

But Apple couldn't make that big a change to the default text-list browsing metaphor upon which its vaunted ease of use and intuitiveness is built. So they had to break it out into a whole new view mode, something that they can point to if anyone challenges them with a competitor whose interface looks slicker, even if it's clumsier to get around in. And if that isn't enough, there's always the Cover Browser, which is even more useless, and even more effective in shutting up the competition in a visual demo.

But that's what irritates me. iTunes has never needed to stoop to these kinds of blatant eye-candy tactics before. Along with the all-pervasive "reflection" trick that shows up in everything from album covers to the new multicolored stacked progress bar showing your iPod's disk usage in the new (and highly demoable) connected-iPod screen, these kinds of visual flourishes represent a strategy that I like to call "trying too hard". Apple started from zero market penetration, with an application that undercut its established competition both in price and in number of features, and it took the world by storm through its purity and simplicity. It could have wowed the world from day one by going the "Look how many skins we support!" route that everyone else at the time was doing; but they didn't, preferring to stick with this clean, simple, primarily textual interface to your music. They didn't even add album art until version 4.0 or so, and even then it was in that halfhearted little sub-window tucked away in the bottom of your Source pane. Now, as though to correct that injustice, they've turned automatic album-art retrieval and visual browsing based on the album cover into a central design pillar. And though those navigation modes are secondary and tertiary to the original, they still have the distinct odor of something that we could have done without. Now we can't chuckle inwardly at the sight of some other media player that uses these techniques, sneering about how they "just don't get it"... because now, apparently, iTunes doesn't get it either. Or at least it implicitly concedes that its way isn't superior�just one of several.

Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it'll win over more users. But it just feels dirty to me. Like how filename extensions felt to me when OS X 10.1 foisted them upon us. But maybe, just as with that issue, I'll eventually soften and come to see these three navigation modes as every bit as mutually interdependent and variously useful in their own specific circumstances as Icon, List, and Column Views in the Finder.

But probably not.

At any rate, what really gets me about iTunes 7 is that it doesn't need these bells and whistles to justify its big version number jump. It's already got plenty. Full-length movies, for one, that play in a full-screen window with an excellent floating controller that works vastly better than the clunky and unresponsive display window in iTunes 6. And more than this: playback has been addressed with a complete rethinking of the track-to-track transition issue, with a new "gapless" playback behavior that will address many users' complaints stemming from live albums with choppy silence in the applause between tracks. I'm not sure how it works, but iTunes 7 has to process your entire library for gapless playback the first time you run it, so it's apparently something fairly technically intensive. Then again, the Help page for gapless playback says this:

What is Gapless Playback?

Gapless playback means that there is no pause in playback between the end of one audio file and the beginning of the next audio file. This allows for playback of content with no gaps the way it was meant to be heard. Some examples of gapless albums include:

� "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd
� "Abbey Road" by The Beatles
� Many live and classical albums

Gapless Playback in iTunes

Gapless playback is always on in iTunes 7 or later unless the Crossfade feature is turned on. If Crossfade is on, only audio files that have the "Part of a gapless album" option checked and are capable of being played gaplessly will play with no gaps:

Gapless Playback on iPod

iPod does not support crossfade playback and only some iPod models support gapless playback. For those models that do, all files that support gapless playback are played gaplessly whether or not the "Part of a gapless album" option is checked.

Supported iPod models (make sure you have the latest iPod Software)

� iPod nano (Second Generation)
� Fifth Generation iPod
� Fifth Generation iPod (Late 2006)

So maybe all it is is another attribute that has to be plugged into every file. No digital processing of the audio data has to be done at all; it's just a schema change. Whatever it is, though, I'm glad they considered it this important.

Another helpful thing in the new schema is tracking of "skipped" songs. Now, if you press Next while listening to a song, it updates both a "Skip Count" and a "Last Skipped" field. I can imagine all kinds of uses for these in Smart Playlists, can't you? "Favorite Music" + "Skip Count > 5" = "Music I Think I Like But Actually Don't Ever Want to Listen To, So Who Do I Think I'm Kidding". Awesome!

Barring the bugs that plague Windows users, iTunes 7 is objectively lots more useful in organizing one's digital media than it ever has been; Apple is having to contend with a very challenging branding issue as they shoehorn movies into the "iTunes" experience, and the balance they're striking (renaming the "iTunes Music Store" to the "iTunes Store", but keeping the "iTunes" name) is probably going to be pretty successful. (After all, Tower Records hasn't exactly suffered from brand dilution.) They've managed to enhance iTunes' functionality with regular music while simultaneously making it eminently functional with movies and TV shows. The trick is in figuring out whether the focus should remain on music, or if they should go to a yet more agnostic presentation, not presuming that you want to listen to music when you fire up iTunes�hey, maybe you bought your iPod specifically for movies and TV shows, not for music at all. What then? Does iTunes cater enough to those buyers without alienating the ones who just want music and don't care about movies? It's not an easy question. But Apple seems to have answered it with aplomb, and in general I think the designers of iTunes 7 have done about as well as anyone could have.

That doesn't mean I don't take exception to the blatant demo-pandering in the cover-browsing, reflective-tabley eye candy. But if it all helps to tie all the media that iTunes supports together in a common metaphor, with hardly any thought expended on how best to watch a movie versus how best to listen to a song, I guess it's fine if that thought instead has to be expended on a clumsy, strange visual browser interface mode that exists only to thumb its nose at Redmond. If that's the worst we have to contend with, I think iTunes' charmed life will probably continue into the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: CapLion (who played an indispensable role in the recovery) reminds me that the scrollbars and the dark-on-slightly-less-dark buttons are right out of Apple's "Pro" apps. Does this mean iTunes is about to become a $599 boxed app? Gee, imagine the bottom line!