iTunes 7.3 ushers in welcome UI changes
iTunes 7.3 has a number of subtle user interface enhancements that aid usability and in some cases improve the cosmetics. When iTunes 7 first shipped with its radically updated interface it sparked quite a bit of controversy. Indeed I wrote a piece titled Disecting 'Gloomy' Unified in iTunes 7.
iTunes 7 |
iTunes 7.3 |
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| The new look is much more consistent with the rest of the UI. It's a duller blue gradient than normal but at least it fits with the overall muted colour scheme of iTunes 7. The level of indentation seems to have increased too, not really sure what the reason was for that, but it doesn't seem to have noticeably impacted anything. | |
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| The improvement here is huge. The buttons are consistent with the unified gradient look and the contrast between them and their background makes them stand out much more. The blue highlights showing the active state of the shuffle and loop buttons are far clearer now. | |
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In iTunes 7 the source list could only be resized by grabbing the 1 pixel wide black line that divides it from the rest of the window. This was an awful style over usability decision. Things look the same in iTunes 7.3 but it turns out there is now a virtual 5 or 6 pixel wide bar you can grab to resize the source list, you no longer have to hit that one pixel line. This is a massive improvement in terms of usability. I'm not entirely sure dragable areas that are larger than the visual representation of the control like this are a great idea though. When they're used inconsistently throughout the OS it puts the onus on the user to have to remember which applications require them to grab the divider bar on the line and which ones they can just grab in the vicinity of. I think grab handles placed either at the top or bottom of the source list (like in Mail) are a better solution. Of course the problem in the first place is an entirely artificial one created for the sake of cosmetics. |
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I can't spot any other obvious changes in the interface, but its nice to see things are gradually being fixed that were botched in iTunes 7. It sure is taking a long time though when you consider these things should never have been broken in the first place.
posted by Rory Prior @ 2:20 PM
28 comments
28 Comments:
Not for cosmetics -- it allows the maximum number of pixels to be used for actual data, not for rarely used gadgets. (I always have to resize the iTunes columns to a compromise, they can never show all of the artist or album name, so giving me as many pixels as possible is a great design goal.)
Other welcome changes:
The bar that highlights the currently playing song in Party Shuffle has been changed from a high-contrast glossy look to a more tasteful plastic one.
7.2 - 7.3
The source list count bubbles have been lightened to match the new selection bar:
7.2 - 7.3
It's interesting to note that all of the visual changes present in iTunes 7.3 are partly for the sake of improving contrast. Either the contrast has been increased where it was previously far too low (such as the buttons in the bottom bar), or the contrast has been reduced where it used to be far too high (such as the source list selection bar).
David the amount of space we're talking about here, 5 or 6 pixels is about the equivalent of one character in Lucida Grande at 11pt (the systems standard 'small font'. Besides a resize grip can easily be accommodated within the width of the source list, it doesn't need to encroach on the space used in the main window.
I still don't like the glow in the search field, wich does not match the Graphite look i have set. Instead, it show blue. iTunes, although better with this new version, does not follow the Mac GUI...
I agree that it would be best for there to be a consistent amount of "slop space" for the invisible splitters. But I don't see any problem per se in having a hot spot that expands beyond the visible area. It's so much more important to do what the user wants than what they are literally requesting (clicking on the distant edge of some content view).
There are other areas where taking the user less literally causes an extreme improvement in usability. One that comes immediately to mind is the way that the menu manager forgives users' tendency to move the mouse diagonally towards an exposed submenu's contents, which should technically cause the selected menu item to change but which thankfully causes the selection to stay so you can reach the submenu without a problem.
More "magic" invisible behavior, but thankfully standardized across the system.
Another nice touch is that the Source list selection respects the users choice between aqua and graphite. I have to use UNO to get the -Finder- to respect that choice...
My favorite change is the new 'Sync' button at the bottom of the iPod preferences. Before, the only way to do it was either the 'File menu > Sync iPod', or option-clicking on the iPod itself and choosing 'Sync'.
I honestly can't imagine why it's taken them 6 years to add a button to sync an iPod. It was easier to 'Restore' than sync.
I don't know when it happened (maybe 7.3), but the Equalizer also got a plastic makeover.
You never mentioned about "Playlist" now have a collapse arrow. I use it.
There's a Hidden UI feature that I think cropped up with the new 7.3:
The "Album" column now has multiple states & functions when you click on it to list your albums:
- Album
- Album by Artist
- Album by Year
To change the sort order from ASC to DESC, you have to click on or very near to the arrow graphic, regardless of which sorting category you've chosen.
Anyone else notice that artists are sorted differently too? i.e. "13th Floor Elevators" now appears at the bottom of my library if I sort by artist alphabetically.
Blue gradients where before there were gray? Buttons that use a 75% gray instead of a 50% gray? This is a meaningful feature/change?
I guess I'm in the minority when I wonder what all the hullaballo is about.
These willy-nilly changes on Apple's part are one reason why UI design on the Mac has degenerated into anarchy. Apple's HIG is apparently in tatters, so every independent developer out there rolls their own implementation of the latest "look" that Apple is promoting--which, as surely as skirt lengths change from season to season, will be different in a future release.
The "latest and greatest" UI fashion on OS X are such a moving target it's ridiculous. Brushed metal, you're in! Now you're out! "Gradient metal/iLife," you're in! But no doubt you, too, will go by the wayside someday, when ProKit becomes the UI standard.
What's wrong with the basic Aqua specs provided by the HIG and by Interface Builder? Why does Apple, in this case, refuse to eat its own dog food? (Or at least, they are eating a very different brand of dog food than what they are selling to us.)
Now that they're actually correcting thier own mistakes with the iTunes UI, how long before they put the scrollbars back to normal?
The Source List indentation increased to accommodate two levels of collapsible arrows. For example: 7.3
Also, the "virtual size" of the divider line to resize the Source List is still only one pixel wide if there is a vertical scroll bar. For example: 7.3. I think this is a wise decision. Otherwise, the user could mistakenly resize the Source List while intending to scroll.
I don't believe the scroll bars ever will "go back to normal"; this is likely how they will look come Leopard.
They also finally fixed the blurriness of Cover Flow on Intel GMA based graphics.
Before, the scroll bar and arrows were very blurry - even though the covers themselves looked fine.
The sort order for all lists has now changed. If this was intentional it's an odd decision to make. Not sure why they would do this. I don't like it in particular.
One thing I've noticed (may have been in earlier versions but I only just noticed it) is if you option click a track and choose apply sort field you get a really really cryptic dialogue - now I'm pretty sure this is a harmless temporary act but despite my surety I don't want to see what this action does because the cryptic dialogue makes the action seem kinda scary.
The new GUI features I really liked concern the Podcast list of iTunes.
Now, if there are several new episodes in a podcast, you get a button to download all of them at once. Before you had to click each single episode's button, which sometimes meant more than 100 clicks!
Also, now iTunes ignores articles in the beginning of podcast titles when sorting. So if a podcast begins with "A" or "The" it is sorted according to the first letter of the second word — a very welcome feature I would say.
Amazing feature (which as most above, may not be new but I've never seen it before) in any playlist / library view, type in the first few letters of an artist and watch it jump to them. Doesn't matter if you haven't selected the search field. I found this out by doing it one day by accident and to my amazement it worked, which isn't surprising as it should work like that, but is surprising that someone has implemented it.
Also, I've no idea why numbers are now down the bottom, it's been pushed over to my iPod too, but ...and you will know us by the trail of dead are still at the top. Odd.
Another comment on the new sorting behavior in iTunes 7.3.
In my case, iTunes ignores any non-alphanumeric characters at the beginning of a title and sorts by the first alphanumeric character. It also universally ignores "A" and "The" at the beginning.
At least on my machine, first come the latin characters a-z. Then I have cyrillic in standard order, and then the numbers.
Oddly, -140 is sorted together with 140, which disturbs the nice number ordering.
I've no idea why are the number last, though.
And very last in my playlist — after all other numbers — comes a song whose title is the infinity character: ∞. What's your guess? Is this design, or coincidence?
I think we're going to continue to see more interface elements with bigger hotzones, mostly in unobtrusive ways where it is helpful to the user.
I think since around 1984 we've been able to select a submenu with a natural gesture instead of carefully threading the pointer through the triangle. OS X lost the ability to click the top-left corner of the screen to drop the apple menu, then regained it, and the spotlight menu works likewise. And now the apple phone enlarges the most likely keyboard keys when typing.
In Safari 3, you can also drop a URL at the right-hand end of the tab bar to open in a new tab, even when the tab bar appears full (a green (+) cursor provides feedback).
Regarding sorting, smart numeric sorting is a good additon, although as Венсислав pointed out, it ignores the additional characters in negative numbers, and also treats thousands separators as whitespace separors, as in R.E.M.'s 1,000,000. Numbers are naturally at the end, because an alphabetic list properly starts with A.
In addition to "A" and "The", mine ignores the French article in "Les Négresses Vertes" (I can sort by artist, and find it by typing "n-e-g"). Don't know if this works for everyone, or just because my system language is set to Canadian English (French is our other official language).
I miss the dark background.
I found it more sexy.
not that this matters much, but prior to 7.3 when i sorted by artist, all artists with numbers were at the top.....such as .38 special, 311 or 50 cent. Now with 7.3, these are at the bottom and my top listed items in my Library are A-Ha, ABBA, etc.
Looks better and works better. I like having artists beginning with A at the top, rather than the numbered entities. Not sure what 54-40 thinks of it though.
>>Anyone else notice that artists are sorted differently too? i.e. "13th Floor Elevators" now appears at the bottom of my library if I sort by artist alphabetically.
Yeah, that's one of the BAD change in my opinion. Now all my 2GB of 2Pac moved way down to the bottom of my library =(
>>Now that they're actually correcting thier own mistakes with the iTunes UI, how long before they put the scrollbars back to normal?
I like the scroll-bars, they match iTunes' UI theme
iTunes 7.3: Changes in music sort order
Starting with iTunes version 7.3, the following sort order is implemented:
General ordering
* Letters & Unicode characters (except for digits)
* Digits
* Other
Ignore leading definite and indefinite articles
* "The Beatles" sorts as "Beatles"
* "A Night in Tunisia" sorts as "Night in Tunisia"
Note: In English these are "A ", "An ", and "The " and includes the localized or international equivalents.
Ignore leading symbols and punctuation
* "#41"sorts as "41"
* " ' Til I Collapse " sorts as "Til I Collapse"
Sort digits numerically
The songs "1 foo", "2 foo", "10 foo" will sort as
"1 foo", "2 foo", "10 foo" and not as
"1 foo", "10 foo", "2 foo"
Ignore leading white space when sorting
Any spaces entered at the beginning of the title will be ignored when sorting.
Sort ignoring case
For example with iTunes 7.2 and older versions, the song playlist sorts in the following order:
* .38 Special
* 'Til Tuesday
* "Weird Al" Yankovic
* 4 Non Blondes
* The 5th Dimension
* 311
* Oingo Boingo
* ZZ Top
* つしまみれ
With iTunes 7.3 and newer versions, the song playlist sorts in the following order:
* Oingo Boingo
* 'Til Tuesday
* "Weird Al" Yankovic
* ZZ Top
* 4 Non Blondes
* The 5th Dimension
* .38 Special
* 311
* つしまみれ
Note: If you sort a playlist and sync it to an iPod, the sort order from iTunes will be retained.
If you want to override the default sort rules for a given artist or song, follow these steps:
1. Get Info on a song and click the Sorting tab.
2. Enter the text in the appropriate sorting field. If you want "The Beatles" to sort by "The Beatles" instead of "Beatles" you would enter "The Beatles" in the Sort Artist Field.
3. Click OK.
4. To apply that change to all of the songs by "The Beatles", right-click (or Control-click) the song that you just changed and choose Apply Sort Field > [relevant field] (using the example above, Same Artist).
If you want to override default sorting rules for artists that start with numbers, just put some a's in the Sort Artist field.
Example: 2 Live Crew, change to aaa2 Live Crew.
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