First Impressions of iTunes 5
September 11, 2005
Now that I finally got the silly thing installed, I’ve had a little time to play with it…
Some first impressions –
Damn this thing is ugly. Burnt Aqua Unified? Were these corners done with pinking shears? It just all looks… Ummm… Out of place. Oh well. Looks ain’t everything (if they were, I’d probably never have another date.)
Did it actually get slower? I haven’t tried to do any benchmarks yet, but just as a subjective impression, importing a few new tunes, listening and cleaning up ID3 tags, I saw more beachballs than in a trip to the sporting goods store; nothing else was running but a web browser and a mail client…
Dear Apple — if it’s going to be next summer or next fall before we get PowerBooks with more horsepower than a G4, you’ve got to promise not to make basic parts of the system (hey, listening to tunes while I work is basic to me) worse performance hogs than they already are in the meantime…
On the up-side…
Folders for playlists. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I’ve needed this for a looong time…
Make any audio file bookmarkable — excellent! I was getting tired of converting spoken word stuff to AAC and running an AppleScript just to be able to pick up where I left off.
Skip this file during shuffle — This will simplify my playlists a lot.
Smart Shuffle — I wonder how we’ll know if this thing actually does something? iTunes — and particularly the iPod — seem to get into very weird moods with shuffle sometimes, running through strings of back-to-back same artist play; other times you couldn’t make it happen on a bet… It’d almost be funny if this was just a slider that didn’t do anything other than launch more long debates about random play behavior…
I’ve got mixed emotions about the reorganization of Preferences — it probably makes more sense this way, but I know people who’ve been using the old layout for several years who just figured it out, and now they’re going to be completely lost again…
Comments
Got something to say? [privacy policy]