Slashdot Mirror
iTunes' Windows Problem
Hugh Pickens writes "Jean-Louis Gassée writes that iTunes is the best thing that has happened to Apple because without iTunes' innovative micropayment system and its new way of selling songs one at a time, the iPod would have been just another commodity MP3 player. The well-debugged iTunes infrastructure turned out to be a godsend for the emergence of the iPhone. But today, the toxic waste of success cripples iTunes: increasingly non-sensical complexity, inconsistencies, layers of patches over layers of patches ending up in a structure so labyrinthine no individual can internalize it any longer. 'It's a giant kitchen sink piled high with loosely related features, and it's highly un-Apple-like' says Allen Pike. 'Users know it, critics know it, and you can bet the iTunes team knows it. But for the love of god, why?' People naturally suggest splitting iTunes into multiple apps, but Apple can't, because many, if not most iOS users are on Windows. It's Apple's one and only foothold on Windows, so it needs to support everything an iOS device owner could need to do with their device. 'Can you imagine the support hurricane it would cause if Windows users suddenly needed to download, install, and use 3-4 different apps to sync and manage their media on their iPhone?' But help may be on the way with iOS 5. As iCloud duplicates more and more of iTunes' sync functionality, they can start removing it from iTunes. 'Apple is very explicit about it in their marketing materials: they call it "PC Free". They're not quite there yet, but they're driving towards a future where you don't need to manage your iOS device with a PC at all – Mac or Windows.'"
Download and install 3 or more apps? No! You can easily avoid this. It's very simple: split up the apps, call the whole thing "iTunes Suite" (or "iTunes Pack", or "iTunes $WHATEVER") and provide one MSI/installer that installs these new three or more applications. In the first iterations, do add an iTunes application that does nothing more than provide you with a choice of "what do you want to do", per application, one friendly big icon with explanatory text.... and you're done.
Of course, that's the user-facing parts. Splitting up these applications is most likely what holds this back. Not the fact that it would be "strange" for the end-user. Especially, Windows users, who are used to nasty, nasty and continual changes in their interfaces.
All in all: it's a non issue. It can be split, it's just a herculeanean task.
However, they're already very close to the PC Free situation. My wife never connects her iPhone to her machine. I do sometimes, but only to be sure there is a backup. I really should switch her backup to iCloud or something.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I would be interested in the statistics, because I definitely will never use this feature, and in fact prefer to sync with my computer.
I bypass itunes completely on my PC with Copytrans
You still have to have iTunes installed for the dll it uses to copy media to the device.
I have never experimented with just loading the dll by itself with regsvr32
More cloud dependency! What could possibly go wrong by putting someone else in charge of my data! I'm sure that my credit card being stolen from Sony was a fluke, and nothing like that will ever happen again in the history of the world! Yay for placing responsibility on the steadfast shoulders of large corporations! Yay for control systems! Yay for yay!
I couldn't possibly be happier that I moved away from iTunes. Now to convince the rest of my family to do so.
I'm always bemused why Apple doesn't bake closer iPhone/iPad integration into the Finder itself - the "root UI" of OS X, if you will. Shouldn't syncing between your Mac and your iPhone be a core service these days? And no, it doesn't solve the Windows problem - except if you're Apple. "See, if you have a PC you have to use this external app. But if you switch to a Mac, look how easy syncing is..." But then I'm an old grouch who thinks that Apple's once fabled UI consistency has been slowly getting messier from System 7.5 onwards.
Its not just Windows. Having multiple Mac OS X apps managing an iOS device would degrade the user experience. Having one app sync everything (musics, video, photos, apps, etc) makes sense. Having to use more than one app to do so would be annoying, even error prone. Hell, I'm mildly annoyed when I plug in an iPhone and both iTunes and iPhoto launch. I want to use iPhoto far less often than it auto-launches.
iTunes may need to be redesigned and rewritten, but probably not broken up.
I would be interested in the statistics, because I definitely will never use this feature, and in fact prefer to sync with my computer.
That is almost no-one.
iCloud isn't really the major thing here, it just helps with the true feature that allows users to break free of the PC which is on-device updates and purchases of all content.
Even if you don't explicitly use iCloud you can at least simply turn on an iPad and activate it without a computer, which many (perhaps most) people do.
iCloud is really a huge boon for most people though, because it means at last the devices are actually backed up. I know a number of people with iPhones and iPads that once activated, NEVER synchronized to a PC again. That's pretty dangerous, but iCloud makes sure those people are taken care of without them having to do much at all.
If you have an iOS device now the PC you use or the iTunes on it is already irrelevant, except as an alternative to browsing the store.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
increasingly non-sensical complexity, inconsistencies, layers of patches over layers of patches ending up in a structure so labyrinthine no individual can internalize it any longer. 'It's a giant kitchen sink piled high with loosely related features, "
They wanted to emulate Windows users' typical experience and maintain familiarity.
Have gnu, will travel.
Set-up a separate team of programmers. One working on the original iTunes for one final release (11), and a new one rewriting the whole thing to produce a better cleaner iTunes (12).
Apple's done it once before, when they developed the final version of the Classic OS (9) and the new OS X concurrently.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
If everything moves to the cloud, you become dependent on the cloud. How much is managing your iDevice worth? $0/yr? $10/yr? What if you could sync everything through that cloud - all your music, all your shows? Now how much would you pay? $10/month? $20/month? What about backing up all your photos and documents? $30/month? And offering some streaming content? $40/month? $50/month?
If the cloud option is popular enough, we'll see the PC version (and possibly even the Mac version) fall lower and lower on the priority list for bug fixes, upgrades, and UI unification. It may come that buying into an iDevice means a monthly fee to use effectively, just as if you buy a phone. Sure, you can try to cheat the system, but you're going to get a significantly inferior service, or you'll spend so much time just keeping things up to date that you'll find it's not worth it.
I see this as the next revenue stream for Apple.
Personally, I'm limited to a 4Mb DLS line as my fastest (reliable) internet option. Syncing 40-120GB of personal music on each device when it goes toes up (and most have done that at some point; my phone has twice) is going to be a real bear. Movies? TV? You can't store/swap them locally, and the network providers will be salivating over the b/w charges (or business-class fees for those that go over their caps).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm one of those weirdos who actually doesn't mind iTunes as is. I generally know where the things are that I need it to do and don't really demand a ton of it (organize my music, change ID3 tags, auto-download a bunch of podcasts for me, and when I plug in my phone, sync it all without me having to do anything).
I have ZERO interest in using iCloud. I want my data secured locally and backed up myself. I don't want the potential for lost/stolen data as my data is now in a giant honeypot with everyone else's data. I don't want the inevitable, "oh, yea, this isn't anonymous at all, and the gov't decided to go through iCloud and send you a $999999999 fine for having 1 song you may or may not have paid for."
So if Apple's answer is, "trust us with your data/music collection or you're not using iTunes anymore," then my answer is going to be to not use iTunes anymore.
And I've found that wifi sync mostly doesn't work well. It's locked up and bombed on my iPad 1 and iPhone 3GS. I just don't bother with my daily-use 4S as GoodReader/SugarSync/Dropbox handle my "right now" file needs and ActiveSync takes care of mail/calendar/contacts.
I'd actually prefer my backups to be local and encrypted.
One improvement I would like would be specifying my local backup directory on a per-device basis (instead of relying on the Windows user profile clusterfuck) and the ability to say how many backup revisions I want to keep. The current system is far to opaque and makes it difficult to backup backups.
One thing Apple could do would be to rip the store out of iTunes and make it "really" web based -- purchases could then just show up in iTunes; it's horrible to browse the store via iTunes; on an i5-2500 with 16 GB of RAM it feels like I'm browsing the web on a low-end P4 with 512 MB of RAM.
I don't know, but the whole program kind of feels like its running some kind of interpreted code -- written for MacOS and somehow been run through a translation layer that converts MacOS system calls to Windows system calls.
I don't want to install special applications for every device. Let me mount the device as a drive, and buy content through a (secure) web page. All other administration tasks can be done through that web page. I already have an mp3 player I like, so no loss there either. The advantage of generic technologies is that Apple doesn't need to support them. The individual consumer would be better off with fewer applications, so that they could learn those applications to a greater depth, and have more general skills to use for computing in general as a result.
Most people who want it split up only use one of apple's products or services. What about people like me who have an apple tv, use the itms all the time and have huge collections of video and music. I like having it in one application. In fact, I find it annoying that it has to launch iPhoto when I sync my phone everyday. Now you guys want it to start 4 applications that all hit the forground and vie for my attention. No, I don't want that.
1 bloated apple app is enough thanks. It's not like they'd get thin and light if they split them up. They'd all have to use the same shared libraries and load the same garbage into memory but then have extra overhead for the address space of 4 processes. I don't see how this helps the situation.
What apple needs to do is optimize iTunes. Get rid of dead code. Put it on a diet, but don't remove functionality. Can you imagine the code cruft for having it support two platforms and not being able to use some of the native Mac stuff?
It's not my fault that you guys only drank a little kool-aid and don't see the benefit of one app. I drank most of the kool-aid and it's painful for them to split it up.
Thank you for telling me that iTunes is bloated. Truly news for nerds and stuff that matters.
Gotta get those Apple ad impressions up huh?
Quick question: has iTunes for windows been rewritten yet? I know they rewrote it as a 64bit cocoa application for OS X (the Lion release, at least)...is it still a steaming pile on Windows?
The app is snappy
How did you manage that? I've installed it on multiple machines (all fairly decent ones) and it's never been 'snappy'. 'Dog slow' is how I'd describe it. Admittedly I have about 60G of music on there, but it normally takes about 15s to load up and frequently locks up when doing anything with an iphone for about 20s before the UI will become responsive again. It's as if Apple devs never heard of multithreading or windows message loops to allow UI interaction whilst doing background processing.
I don't have an iDevice and don't want one, but a couple days ago I had to load iTunes just to get a specific music release that wasn't available anywhere else. Sure I could have scoured TPB, but I wanted to make an effort to be a paying customer. Aside from the music company being dicks and only releasing to iTunes, how would a "PC Free" solution have helped me in any way?
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
It always seemed somewhat silly that Apple's products with cellular capability needed a connection to a desktop machine at all. Apple got into this because they started with the iPod, which was a slave to a PC. That it continued years into the cellular era was just annoying. It seemed mostly intended to get crapwere onto PCs.
many businesses rely on microsoft office, so yea, you have to invest in keeping it going.... but there are very few by comparison that absolutely *need* apple software on their windows systems, so it makes perfect sense for them to keep that crap off of them
same goes for anything else -- if it's not needed, get rid of it... applies to both business and home users (e.g. if you don't use java, pleeeeaaase uninstall it already)
We bought a seasons pass for a TV show on iTunes on the ATV. It took us a surprisingly long time to figure out how to watch this on the Mac laptop.
The purchase did not appear in the item called "purchases", nor "TV", which only showed the things we already downloaded. Going into the Store, we found the show, and double clicking on it cause a smaller all-black window to appear with an episode list. Clicking on these played the preview. Eventually we figured out that clicking the cloud icon would download the episode. We could then go to the Downloads screen, and double-click to watch it as it streamed.
So logical.
As if this were not enough, last night we could no longer make this work. The episode list that used to open when we double clicked... somewhere... no longer appears. We tried everything.
Its time for this to die.
Errr, didn't use it in the early days did you? iTunes has always been a godawful UI that violates all of Apple's own UI standards, then ported to Windows where it made no attempt to fit in. It's been terrible from day one, along with the QuickTime player.
One thing that iOS devices don't do is auto update your podcast subscriptions. iTunes is basically required for this unless you want to go to iTunes on the device itself and check for new podcasts one by one.
The only way they would allow downloads of their free podcasts was through iTunes. But I don't have any Apple products, and I didn't want to install iTunes.
1) download mp3 from
2) copy to USB mass storage
No extra software
No heavy handed overlord control
No platform or hardware specific requrements
Thanks iTunes, but no thanks.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Whatever you're doing that makes it seem bloated or doggy, it's you not the program.
Yeah, cob666. You're probably holding iTunes wrong.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
why split? just split the ui.
could easily do that.
here's why not: insane lobbying inside the company about who's product gets to be jammed down the throats of the consumers. everything must be visible right there right then.
why not integrate with the windows os like it's possible? well fuck, they don't want to do that kind of favor. you know whats _really_ insane? microsoft copying this usage design. windows phone doesn't integrate with _anything_ else on windows than the fucking zune app.
the windows aspect of the reasoning in the article is equally insane. itunes sucks on both pc and macs and it's too precious to touch with a big hand, it has nothing to do with there having to be a windows version. itunes has _always_ sucked monkeyballs, I hear that nowadays it doesn't freeze if you drag 20 episodes from your hd to your ipod though.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
With all due respect to you and your skills, most of the MBAs I have met are completely clueless and are a disaster (whether they follow what they "learned" in school or not).
I would never put one in charge of managing a software development team.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
"Intuitive" is not a synonym for "just like Microsoft Windows".
0 1 - just my two bits
Yes, the title is that way on purpose.
.. and not because it's not designed to, but because they specifically designed it NOT to. Their artificial limitations are too much for me - though again, I'm not the typical usage case.
Preface: I understand that as an advanced user I'm not a typical usage case. I understand that my usage case is based on old preferences like wanting to work with files and file systems directly.
I'm primarily a Windows user at home, mainly because I play games as well as doing other things that require either Windows or OS/X [like using Adobe applications that won't run in Wine]. I also use linux [mainly mint these days]. I don't own any iDevices and I don't use the iTunes store for anything - and I'll happily admit that that may change in the future. I'm not prejudiced against the devices, but I am prejudiced against their desktop apps.
My issues with iTunes and the other desktop iApplications from Apple revolve around their handling of data - usually by obscuring the actual location of things in illogical places that require digging to get to and once you done your digging you run the risk of damaging the files' interaction with the Apple applications [metadata in particular]. iPhoto in particular is egregious in this regard, and while on a Mac I won't use it unless absolutely forced to for the reason above.
On Windows I use foobar2000 as an audio player for multiple reasons, among them being broad format support [including SACD/DSD, HDCD, DTS, AC3, FLAC, etc.] excellent metadata editing, extremely versatile format conversion, support for direct to device playback bypassing all system signal processing, a customisable interface that I've actually customised [in several different versions suited to different tasks] to suit my needs, etc. iTunes can't even begin to compare to the capabilities of foobar2000.. or winamp, or songbird, or most of the linux-originating audio players, or for that matter even VLC. Format support in particular is important to me, and Apple's closed ecosystem makes that a near impossibility right from the start.
iTunes is also a cumbersome pig on Windows and generally unpleasant to use.
More than any of that, though, is that Apple's iTunes installer and updater likes to do things of its own that I don't want any application or installer or updater to do - like hijacking default player settings for various media formats and continuously suggesting that I install Safari [fuck off, installer!] if it doesn't just force-install it whether I wanted it to or not. Maybe their installer/updater has changed to be less fascist but the thing is - I gave up on them. iTunes isn't installed on any of my systems - I do use quicktime-alternative to maintain support for some formats that my editing software requires QuickTime for.
I see the problems they have here, and many of them may be fixable. The fundamental things I take issue with though [obscuring file locations and hit-miss use of metadata outside of their apps alone], won't be fixed without a change in philosophy on Apple's part that simply isn't going to happen, because their entire philosophy is based on wrestling control out of users' hands and keeping users' data inside the walled garden whether they want it there or not.
The truth is: my data is for my use. I use many different applications depending on what my particular needs of the moment are, because no one application handles every usage case. Because of that, I need easy, logical, user-controlled access to all of my data, and I need that data to work across all the applications without destroying usage on the others in the process. I don't want my data hidden from me. I want to be able to find things easily - preferably by looking in the places where *I put them*, not where some application thinks it should put them for me.
For my consulting clients running Windows? I don't install iTunes. I tell them they'll have to do it themselves, and if they want support to contact Apple. I don't support iTunes. I don't even like iTunes, beyond the simplest usage case of "load the program, find the track in the library, and hit play". There are so many usage cases under which it simply doesn't work