Initial Reaction to iTunes 8

So, I just installed the new version of iTunes, and my first reaction is: Blech.

First off, Apple's created a new Grid view, which they've made the default. This view has visceral impact similar to the Cover Flow (which I'm on record as loving), but without any organizational aids. I mean, this is a computer program -- the idea is to use computer affordances to help me organize and scan a large music library, but this view is basically like laying all my CD cases in a big square face up on my floor. Not helpful at all.

Cover Flow allows the user to visually focus on a selected album while rapidly scrolling through the library; Grid is just like, boom, here's everything. Also, Cover Flow reserves screen real estate for a detailed view of the selected item, while Grid does not. Finally, the scroll in Grid view is annoying: it's a really big scroll with no animation, so it's easy to lose one's place in the giant matrix of album covers.

But wait! There are other sorts for the Grid view. Like the Artist sort, which uses album covers to represent the artists. Couldn't Apple facilitate some kind of link-up with the iTunes store to download artist images? It worked for last.fm, and they even went for user-uploaded content.

Next comes the Genre sort and wow. This is epic. Apparently there are some stock images to represent different genres so the ridiculous grid can strut its stuff. However, the stock images are... comical at best. Let me describe the five genres I have tags for (I tag genre very rigidly so that the tags match up with my main directory structure).

1. Electronic: blue and green text in a "clubby" looking font with what appears to be a Windows XP screen saver firing off behind it.
2. Hip-Hop: wow wow wow wow wow. This one features the word "Hip-Hop" in gold-plated, diamond-encrusted letters over a texture that could well be a truck grill. I won't even write a joke about it.
3. Jazz: Ok, this one actually looks decent, but only because they tried to rip off a Blue Note record cover.
4. Rock: Includes the word "Rock" in a diner font written on a guitar pick tucked into the strings of a guitar. This would probably be appropriate if I listened to more Chuck Berry and less Efterklang.
5. Funk: This, my fifth and final genre tag, apparently isn't impressive enough to have a default image. So iTunes fills in with a Bamboos record cover, presumably since that's the first funk record in my library alphabetically.
   

Then comes a Composers view, which would maybe be useful for pure classical libraries... but for me, I can confidently say I will never use it. For example, when would I want to sort Portishead's "Third" by which subset of the band wrote each song? It seems like a pretty esoteric view for most libraries.

There's other stuff to talk about, like the new "Genius" recommender system that tries to get you to buy more music from the iTunes store, but I'm running out of commentating energy by now. Maybe in a later post. But I will say, as much as the grid view sucks, that iTunes 8 does seem to address one of my pain points with the previous version, which is sluggish scrolling in the List view. Good job guys! Since I will totally ignore the new grid view, I guess this upgrade is a net benefit for me so far.

Short, Angsty Post About Fruit

Dole Cherry Mixed Fruit cups, to be specific. They taste great, but every time I try to open the little plastic container, the juice explodes out onto wherever I'm sitting. Yes, the problem is: too much fruit juice. Since my error rate is 100% (n=5), I'm guessing it would have been enough for one guy in the factory to try to open one, spill it, and be like "Oh, let's put slightly less juice in there so it doesn't explode."

But no one did.

Apartments

As a recent graduate of the apartment searching process, I had occasion to look at a lot of poorly-implemented real estate websites. And, after some contemplation, I'm going to pare it down to two main thoughts for this post.

First, I encountered one website that sorted its results by the apartment's zip code. Now, I didn't think this was particularly useful because there are something like forty zip codes in the greater Chicago area. So even if you know the one zip code you want, I think the arbitrariness of zip codes means you miss out on a lot of semantic information -- especially when considering a place that might be just over the border of a desirable code. Now, if a little map was shown inline with each listing, I'd be okay with this sorting method. But... it wasn't. :)

The second thing that really struck me was the way that realty places can omit important details, like the exact address or availability date, from their listings. I guess this is to make sure the customer goes through the company rather than going straight to the place themselves, which I can understand. From a design standpoint, though, those are two critical pieces of information to an apartment hunter. Leaving them out means that the company is consciously creating a less effective user experience in order to further their business goals, and the same could be said of inefficient sorts, poor filtering options, difficult visualizations or slow response times.

So, my question: Is this ethical? If you were a designer, and your client asked you to design a poor experience for their web app so that the user would be driven to their face-to-face agents, would you do it?