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.

Multitasking on the iPad

My friend Ben hit the nail on the head.

…the majority of iPhone/iPad/mobile users probably don’t even know what “multitasking” is. They can probably only think about the one application they’re running at that very moment. Multitasking to these people would mean running out of processor power and memory, not realising it’s because they have 3 apps churning away doing their thing and only noticing the impact to the experience of the one app they’re focussing on right then.

Multitasking would introduce so many levels of complexity they clearly designed it out of the iPhone/iPod/iPad experience.

iTunes UIWTF

With every release the iTunes UI seems to get worse. This morning I attempted the seemingly simple task of copying a video from my Mac to my iPhone. Firstly, I need to drag the video to iTunes which then creates a duplicate copy of the video on my hard drive for no apparent reason. The video then shows up in iTunes, so I attempt to click and drag it to my iPhone. But unfortunately Apple have decided to put a bloody great big play button on the icon for the video itself, so in attempting to drag it to my iPhone, I accidentally play the movie.

What’s the point of this play button? It wasn’t that hard in the old days to double click a video to play it, which of course would be what a user would expect to do. Reducing the number of clicks by one has made several other tasks much harder, clicking to select or to drag the video, you now have to be careful where on the icon you click.

Clicking anywhere in the green does what you’d want to it to do, select or begin a drag operation. Clicking in the red not only starts the movie playing but changes the state of the iTunes app, you are immediately taken from a position of organising your files to viewing one of them enlarged. Bonkers.

So once I manage to not click on the play movie button, I drag the movie file to my iPhone.

But this gives me a dialogue box telling me that the movie was not copied to the iPhone because the movie won’t play on the iPhone.

Hmmm. This is strange as i exported the movie from Final Cut as an H.264 encoded .mov file, I thought that’s what my iPhone required. There’s nothing here telling me why it won’t play on my iPhone or how I can make it play on the iPhone. Maybe I need to do some kind of conversion inside iTunes. The context menu here should be my friend, if iTunes can convert this movie to play on the iPhone, then surely it will be in the context menu.

Well, looking at this menu it would appear that iTunes can’t convert the movie so that it’ll play on my iPhone. It can however consolidate the movie’s tracks, whatever that means, “Get Album Artwork” (for a home movie? Why on earth is this in the context menu for a movie?) and “Apply Sort Field”, whatever that means. I’m pretty sure now that iTunes can’t convert my movie for the iPhone as it would definitely be in the context menu ahead of Get Album Artwork, but just for the hell of it, let’s have a look what’s inside that Apply Sort Field menu.

Oh right, so I can do something or other with songs from the same album as this movie is from? What the fuck?

Anyway, a little Googling revealed that actually yes, iTunes can convert for iPhone for me, it’s in the “Advanced” menu, obviously. So what’s an “Advanced” menu I hear you ask. Well I’m gad you asked me that question. Let’s take a look at the iTunes menu bar and that should tell us…

Right, so the File menu, that’s where we can find file related tasks and operations, good. The Edit menu, another nice easy one, that’s where we find editing related tasks and operations. View, again this is easy, this is where we can find tasks and operations related to the application view. These are all easy so far as they’re pretty much universal across all OS X applications. What’s next? Oooh, a Controls menu. Well, this is still pretty straightforward, everything in here is about controlling playback of iTunes media. Simple. Next up, Store. This is obviously tasks and operations concerned with the iTunes Store. Which then brings us to the Advanced menu, what could possibly be in there? If we guess based on the other menus, it should be a set of tasks and functions to do with the advanced. Hang on, that makes no sense whatsoever. We’re going to have to take a look inside.

Oh! I see! It’s a menu of things that should appear contextually but the designers couldn’t be fucking bothered. What an absolute abomination of information design the Advanced menu is. It’s even less contextual than the context menu we got when right clicking the movie file.

So…

a) Why wasn’t “Create iPod or iPhone Version” in my right click context menu?
b) Why didn’t the dialogue box that told me the movie hadn’t been copied over offer to convert it for me?
3) What the fucking hell is the Advanced menu?
iv) Why didn’t my original movie play on the iPhone?
f) Why when i eventually found the Create iPod or iPhone version, did it completely fuck up the simple task of converting it to play on the iPhone by screwing the aspect ratio of the original video?

I still don’t have the movie on my iPhone.

Firefox bad, Safari badder?

John Gruber accuses Firefox of being a “Bad Mac App”…

It looks like you can customize menu key shortcuts using the Keyboard Shortcuts panel in System Prefs, but the custom bindings don’t work, and the factory shortcuts continue to apply, even though they no longer appear in the menu bar.

He’s obviously never tried to do the same thing in Safari, where though the custom binding do work, the factory shortcuts also continue to apply, even though they no longer appear in the menu bar. So mostly the same as Firefox. Are we going to see some Safari bashing on Daring Fireball? Unlikely.

The reason I know this bug also exists in Safari is that I had to change the next and previous tab shortcuts to match those of Firefox, namely Cmd+Option+Right/Left and I wanted this to disable the utterly stupid shortcut of Cmd+Shift+Right/Left which everywhere else in the OS and in every other app selects text to either the beginning or the end of a line. For some unknown reason Apple decided to make this switch tabs in Safari, however if your caret is in a text entry field, the address bar, the search bar or you have anything on a page selected then this shortcut goes back to its normal, systemwide behaviour of selecting. The stupidity of this decision is easily demonstrated by hitting Cmd+T to open a new tab, and then trying to switch back to the one you were on using Cmd+Shift+Left. You can’t as the caret is in the address bar of your current window. You now have to reach for a mouse, click somewhere making sure to not accidentally select anything and then hit the shortcut.

Before the comments, I know that you can also use Ctrl+(Shift)+Tab but that combo is differently placed between my Macbook Pro keyboard and my Aluminium wired keyboard. And I know that I can use Cmd+Shift+SquareBrackets but the square brackets are easily missed. My arrow keys are Fitt’s Law compliant, I want to use them to change tabs, Firefox got this right, Safari got it wrong.

So is Apple’s own Safari a “Bad Mac App”™ for suffering the same bug as Firefox and ignoring systemwide shortcut conventions?