iTunes 5: The star of the show

get into winamp so much better than iTunes, if only there was winamp for mac i might switch to mac ha ha seriously great to see apple making great succeses; always been more stylish than the alternatives; (iTunes apes windows software, and intrusively assumes the user has no intelligence)

Just wanted to say that a theme to makeover all the brushed metal in Tiger has been done. You can now have the unified-metal style all over your finder and other apps. Just go here to check it out: http://icespectre.ambitiouslemon.com/2005/09/12/it5/ or http://www.macthemesforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=1653

I stand corrected re the phone; I gather there is indeed an artificial cap on top of the memory restrictions. Very odd. Re the iTunes 5 UI, I like it, and especially like the new search. However, I agree that Apple need to get their house in order re user interfaces: settle on the iTunes / Mail 2 interface and be done with it!

Once you pointed out the new look of iTunes 5 it dawned on me shortly after that iTunes 5 now looks more like the Mail 2 app. Yes?

argh... I LIKE borders... this new version's aesthetics do not cut it for me.

I like the new look. And I have a few thoughts on user interface. Apple does need to move it's interface towards a consistent model, but not as much as many people on the boards want. I feel the interface consistency was much more important in the early days of computing, when the idea of desktop computing was still very foreign to most people. In those days it was much more important to provide a consistent world to the user, with well defined (if mixed) metaphors. These days most people are familiar with the 'idea' of computing, and don't need their hand held as much. I mean look at dashboard, where the user interface guidelines are extremely loose. We can all agree that the GUI something of a clusterf*ck right now. I feel like Apple is still in a very experimental stage and is still responding to user feedback (but not initial kneejerk reactions). Has anyone else noticed the speeeed?! Good god, it finally scrolls smoothly through my nearly 9000 song library and resizing is as smooth as it should be on my G5. I'm guessing that at least some of this has to do with the decision to dropped brushed metal. If never had a problem with brushed metal, but if this is the case, I'm all for wiping it from the OS as soon as possible.

The only thing I don't like about the plastic"y" metal is the faux horizontal lighting/shadow; it just doesn't look natural to me. Maybe if they put the "light source" on an angle, it'd look better. And I absolutely HATE the fake lens in front of the LCD display. They should just trash the lens concept. In terms of functionality, iTunes 5 is worth the switch. Was it the best announcement yesterday? Maybe. But the Nano, as I contemplate it, is becoming more intriguing.

I really don't see what is so special about this release. Let's hope the milestone is greater simply a podcast search and hosting system. Martin Tibbitts

>11. Sigh... I can't even INSTALL iTunes 5 on my Mac. I get a "please quit iTunes before installing" dialog ad infinitum. I've killed processes, I've rebooted... no joy. Open activity monitor and see if you're running any background applications with "iTunes" in the name. I was getting the same message until I quit "SizzlingKeys" which, fortunately, is 100% compatible with iTunes 5.

This would have been a nice post if it was predicted before iTunes v5 came out. Predicting future software apps to have similar characteristics of this app isn't too prophetic. with love+