iTunes 5 - Bringing Windows like preferences to the Macintosh
My first impressions of iTunes 5 was “bleh”. When I heard, via Macworld’s periodically updating page about the Apple music event, that they were releasing a new UI for iTunes I instantly said “Please do not ruin iTunes.”.
At first glance I thought they had, but after using iTunes 5 for 24 hours, I’m becoming less worked up about it. I think some of the changes that Apple made to iTunes 5 were much needed, and I love the new search bar and nested playlists.
There is one thing that I hate, and will not like, ever. The fact that the iTunes preferences now has an OK and CANCEL button. Macintosh users know, that many preferences within the Mac OS do not need to be “saved”, which is one of the things I love about Macintosh. The only explanation I can think of for this quirk is because they are compiling iTunes both for Mac OS and for Windows. But I could be wrong.
One might argue that they also compile Quicktime for Mac OS and Windows and yet Quicktime does not follow this new preference rule. Well, the Quicktime for Mac and Quicktime for Windows code base are not the same. I think we can see this from the fact that they’ve released 3 release candidates for Quicktime 7 on Windows, and yet the Mac OS version has been out and has proceeded to version 7.0.2 recently.
Along with the preference saving oddity, is the fact that Apple has decided to remove the “sharing” and “importing” panels - and add them as tabs within the advanced preference panel in iTunes 5 preferences. I think this is a horrible move, as now new users will consider importing and sharing their music as “advanced activities” and the simple fact is that these things could not be much easier with iTunes.
I know many novice computer users that would consider not changing their importing and sharing preferences now that they are snuggled into the Advanced tab simply because they “could mess something up”.
Overall iTunes 5 is a great upgrade that adds some great features.
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