Notable iTunes 9 Additions

18 September 2009 // Filed under Applications + iTunes

With the release of iTunes 9, a few new features were unveiled, and a couple of them are great.  First and foremost is the new Home Sharing feature.  Long have I longed for a way to transport music to and from my home server with ease, and though I have developed a work flow consisting of Screen Sharing and and the venerable DropCopy which does admirably well, though is a bit clunky, Home Sharing makes it Drag-n-Drop easy.  Simply configure all of the computers on your home network through iTunes (Advanced > Turn On Home Sharing), fill in your iTunes account email and password, and start browsing other libraries on your network.  When you see any form of media on another computer that you want, drag-n-drop to your own library and voila, those items are copied across the network.  Brilliant.

For all of it’s functionality and overall handiness, however, it does have two noticeable drawbacks; one cannot move items from your library to another.  For instance, I often rip CDs on my laptop, then transfer them to my headless server; for that you will need to either sit at the other computer, or use some Applescript wizardry or screen sharing.  In short Home Sharing allows users to pull, but never push media.  Though I’m sure that it is a security precaution, and likely a very good one, I find myself lamenting that there is no option for pushing media via Home Sharing.  I would find that functionality immensely useful.

The other issue with Home Sharing is that the syncing feature only supports items purchased via iTunes.  Though any media file is drag-n-drop friendly from one library to another, only media which has been purchased via Apple’s store will automatically sync to other computers with Home Sharing enabled.  Were this feature enabled for any new media file added to iTunes, the feature would be killer.  Though I’m sure that the execution of automatic syncing is well thought and fairly seamless for users, it’s the thought process which lead the Apple engineers to implement automatic syncing as an iTunes Store-only feature that seems half-baked.  Not all of the over 200 million iTunes users worldwide can buy from the iTunes Store, and I’m sure that only a fraction of those who are able actually do which seems to limit a very cool idea to only a relative few without reason.  We’re not talking some fancy MobileMe functionality, but some pretty basic copying from one machine to another over a network. I know that Apple favors their content over my own, a fact which they have proven time and again, especially with prioritizing iTS content over the content I already own in the Apple TV menu hierarchy, but to completely disregard my already paid for content as something I might like to transfer without jumping through hoops seems more like a business decision than a design decision.

Another notable change in iTunes is the new left side browser.  The “old”, on top browser view which appears above the library content is still an option but the new default browser is on the left side of the library and spans the entire height of the library window.  While I found it a bit odd initially, I soon discovered that this left side view allowed for me to view more, more efficiently.

Though my library is not large in comparison to some, I have 183 artists and 474 albums (5329 songs), and having the left side browser allows me to view my content without the constant scrolling (which would be worse in mammoth libraries), while also not having to sacrifice the available viewing area of the content.  If I want to see more artists in the traditional on top browser, I encroach on the number of songs/videos I can view.  Because most of the content in iTunes consists of shorter names,¹ vertical viewing space is more efficient at displaying lots of content, so encroaching on the left margin a bit does not lessen the amount of content I can view. With the Album Artwork column closed, I can view 44 artists and 45 songs in the left-side view,² a drastic difference to the traditional browser where if I choose to view 45 artists, where I would see exactly zero songs.³

Where the left side browser encroaches on usability, however, is when users show lots of attributes for individual songs. In my library, I show the song name, time, artist (though it's redundant), and album which are not hindered at all by the new found horizontal space constraints because of their relatively short entries. That said, some users show all manner of file attributes including bit rate, rating, play count, release date or any of the 38 viewing options available to users. If one chooses to show a lot of the metadata, horizontal viewing space could become quickly used up, making the vertical browser less useful because of the need to scroll horizontally to see the information required.

A question:

Why make this fairly drastic UI change now, 9 versions after iTunes' release? Were the left side browser not the default view in iTunes 9, one might surmise that the Apple engineers who design the iTunes UI have just thought of it, which seems unlikely given the level of thought put in to UI design at Apple and the fact that iTunes is on version 9 (as opposed to version 2 or 3).  But the new left side browser is the default, and it seems so obviously superior to the on top browser that it makes me wonder why it took so long to implement.⁴ Given that Apple has not shipped a non-widescreen monitor for years, it seems hard to believe that the UI guys on the iTunes team hadn’t thought of a left side browser to take advantage of the ever shrinking vertical space on the screen by using as much horizontal space as possible in lieu of vertical.⁵ Afterall, iTunes has always had a version of a left side browser since its inception in the form of the library pane on the left side of the screen.  It has always been this way, yet only now have they seen it fit to finally match the UI of the browser to that of the rest of the program rather than being in stark contrast visually, and far less efficient in everyday use.

________________________________
1. While there are long album/song/artist names that may go out of view due to their length, most of this information is rarely more than a few words meaning that vertical space is far more valuable than horizontal space when perusing the content in an iTunes library.

2. The discrepancy is due to the “All (183 Artists)” taking up the very top slot in the Artist column of the vertical browser. This changes, however, as soon as I scroll down just 1 slot to once again show 45 Artists and 45 songs. This is all on a 15″ MacBook Pro. I’m sure that large cinema displays show even more, and that smaller MacBook screens show less.

3. This of course is not possible as iTunes will not allow a user to drag the horizontal browser to cover the entire available space; fully open, there are but 6 songs viewable, and 36 artists in the browser.

4. It would seem that the iTunes design team also views the vertical browser as superior, otherwise they would not have made it the default view in its premier.

5. According to MacTracker, the last non-widescreen display to be shipped by Apple, the 17″ Apple Studio Display, left the factory over 5 years ago in June 2004.

2009-09-18  ::  Christopher Williams