What's Wrong With iTunes
Recently I’ve tweeted a couple of times about wanting to see iTunes killed off, and both times I’ve received replies asking why. It’s not possible to explain what’s wrong with iTunes in 140 characters so I’ve moved it here.
Apple mostly follow the Unix philosophy – write programs that do one thing and do it well. If you look at Mail, Address Book and iCal they all have one primary use case, and they interoperate perfectly. Each is far better than its Outlook counterpart and as a whole they produce an experience that is infinitely preferable to Outlook’s combined approach. In iTunes we have an application that was originally written to do one thing and do it well – manage and play music. Over the years so much has been bolted on to iTunes that has little or nothing to do with playing or managing music that even the name iTunes now seems completely irrelevant to what the application is actually used for. iTunes is now so bloated with unwanted features that it’s not even a good music player any more, it’s a mish-mash of functionality and disparate content types. It makes Microsoft Word look clean and considered.
iTunes now manages and/or plays your TV shows, movies, audiobooks, podcasts, iOS apps and course material. It even has a shop to let you buy all this content. But most baffling of all of iTunes’ functionality is the iOS device syncing.
To manage the content on an iOS device such as an iPhone or iPad, you need to connect it to your computer and open iTunes. To copy music, photos, movies, apps and even documents on to your iPad, you have to use iTunes, even though all but one of these things have nothing to do with “tunes”. Managing any of these things through iTunes is a painful experience, made even worse by the fact that you need to have the device connected before you can access any of the settings.
To return to the ‘one thing well’ philosophy iTunes should be broken down and split into its component parts. Let iSync handle my phone syncing, surely that’s what it’s for? Let the iTunes store run in a browser instead of my music player; it is after all a website built out of normal HTML, CSS and Javascript. Let the Finder be used to manually manage content on my iOS devices, that’s how I manage content on every other device I ever need to connect to. But most of all, let iTunes be just a music player.
01:26 PM | 2 Comments | Tags: itunes, faulty, apple, fail, kill
Predictions
#1 Within a year Adobe will have released some software geared towards authoring HTML5 / Canvas animation.
#2 It will have a terrible, buggy interface that makes you want to kill.
05:58 PM | 0 Comments | Tags: adobe, html, html5, canvas, prediction
Deleting Unwanted Calendars from the iPhone
For future reference, this is a royal pain in the arse.
12:12 PM | 0 CommentsScotch Egg Navigation
While working on a project with Richard Amos about a year ago we were pondering the static linear nature of breadcrumbs and wondering why they should always be so. The breadcrumb serves two purposes; firstly it gives users a sense of where they are in a site’s structure, helping them to never feel lost or disoriented. Which leads to the second purpose, to always provide them with a path home. The first of these is done entirely visually, you don’t need to click on the breadcrumb or interact with it in any way in order to help orient yourself. Its second function though, is all about the interaction, and this is where I feel it falls somewhat short. A typical scenario for using the breadcrumb might go something along these lines: Bernard is shopping on Amazon for some bits for a computer he’s just bought. He’s googled for Apple monitors and been brought straight into Amazon on their page of Apple monitors. After choosing one and adding it to his cart, he decides he needs some extra RAM. Bernard looks to the Amazon breadcrumb and sees something along the lines of:
It would seem like a fair assumption that he should step back up to Computer Accessories and check in there for the RAM, but unfortunately this isn’t the case. RAM is actually under Computer Components which resides at the same level as Computer Accessories, but there’s no way for Bernard to know that this section even exists. In reality, the Amazon breadcrumb is even less useful than the one I have presented here as it hides the first level of the hierarchy for some reason.
With Scotch Egg Navigation, we allow the user to see all the options available at each level of the hierarchy. So Bernard can have a quick check to see if RAM is listed in the Computer Accessories section of the site…
And when he finds that it isn’t, he can check for other suitable categories at the next level up, where he would find Computer Components, the correct category for RAM.
One click and he’s in the right place.
The two separate purposes of the breadcrumb have both been improved:
Firstly, our visual representation of current position is still immediately viewable helping the user understand their current position in the structure of the site, but we’ve also given them the ability to view much more of the site’s hierarchy. And secondly, we’ve given them the ability to traverse that hierarchy without backing out and in again.
It’s the difference between giving someone directions to the postoffice and giving them a map with the postoffice and all other points of interest marked on it.
Scotch Egg Navigation, it’s breadcrumbs with hidden meat.
06:07 PM | 6 Comments | Tags: scotch, egg, navigation, ux, hidden meat, user experience