DesignDesignDesign

I'm starting up this blog to polish my writing and essay skills to better prepare me for future gigs doing analysis, critique and article writing about design process & theory. Don't know if anyone will ever read this, but ah well.

Today I upgraded this:



It's the new iTunes, at least it's new to me. I just upgraded to Os X Tiger yesterday, and today upgraded to iTunes 5!

• Not really sold on the interface upgrade -- the design styling should emulate the style of the iPod in my opinion -- why not push that similarity and use the clean white lines and the power of simplicity to distinguish their music products from computers? I don't understand. It's a very pedestrian design, and doesn't excite me. It looks way too much like a bank account register or something a mechanical engineer would use for diagnostics. Not visually pleasing or sexy. Remember that whole MTV generation thing? I think we're on about the third generation of kids who grew up with that particular cable channel now!

• Basic layout is dangerously close to looking like college-ruled notebook paper -- hopefully this isn't enough to scare away any of those graphically-motivated MTV kids as potential first-time users.

Which brings us to:
• Are there 'skins' for iTunes? I've never seen any, and it isn't readily available. Why not under 'visualizer' have a few preloaded skins to choose from? Seems easy enough to me ...

• Speaking of visualizer, does anyone use this? It hasn't been upgraded or improved. Why does it exsist? It reminds me of bad 1990s house or rave music. Rock is back, man! Maybe just ditch the idea and make a more interesting and accessable music video player? A program that deciphers the guitar parts and generates tableture of a particular song? A way to add your own photos of the artist to play a little slide show of the images you have collected while the songs play?

• Maybe add a menu item that directs you directly to preformatted templates to create CD cases and labels? I know you can do it, though iTunes, but it could be a much more simplified process.

• An annoying thing is the placement of the buttons that take you to the Music Store. I accidently click on those arrows all the time! Then again, maybe they've done this one purpose ... Tricky! If not, it should have been fixed for 5.0.
*Just figured out you can turn those buggers off in the 'Preferences' panel!

That's all I have for now, I'm not a program designer or an advanced user -- keep that in mind. Just spent five minutes toying around with the program!

posted by Aaron @ 10:45 PM