(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Bruce Tognazzini, former Apple employee and founder of Apple's Human Interface Group, clearly explains what bothers me so much about the modern Mac aesthetic and interfaces.

Oh, and here's part 2.

But yes. He's got a clear, noninflammatory (where's the fun in THAT?), detailed description of the kind of interface hell and lack of useful tools, difficulty in customising, and general crippling of powerusers that Apple hardware and software aims for. Why, dear fucking Jobs why, can I not *filter* my iTunes library on fields other than Artist, Genre, and Album? Why can I not sort by multiple fields? Grr.

Comments

[hollowpoint.livejournal.com]

In the current version of Windows iTunes I can sort by multiple fields to an extent, although it's not clear. If you click on the 'Album' column header multiple times you can set it to sort 'Album by Artist', which is good for me. I also recall managing to get iTunes to sort by multiple columns by setting them in turn - I think it prioritises some over others. I'm at work so can't try it out, but I think you could, e.g., set to 'Album by Artist' and then click on 'Year' to sub-sort by that. But that last bit is obviously guestwork.

All things considered, though, I just wish Songbird were feature-complete.

[hollowpoint.livejournal.com]

I've now read those articles and, based on my admittedly limited Apple / Mac experience, I agree. There's a lot to love about their approach to design but for power users the options available are usually lacking.

I also agree with the commenter below about the bloated nature of iTunes. Personally it's everything I want and need in a media player / library, but the resource drain is just unreal.

(Tried Media Monkey 3 times, really don't like it... used to use Winamp but don't like its library at all.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It depends on the field you search by - for example, if you sort by star rating, then artist, you do NOT get artists with each artist sorted by star rating.

No matter what you sort by before, sorting by star rating puts each rating's worth in alphabetical order.

Which fields retain previous settings when sorting and which ignore and sort again from scratch? Inconsistent and undocumented, because a know-nothing user with 50 entries in his library will never care, and Apple *deliberately* programs things in such a way as to block customisation.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

In otherwords it works beautifully on the demo machine that has 15 sample songs preloaded, and is absolutely useless in the real world.

I wonder how much apple really "eats their own dogfood" and really uses their applications in house. I know microsoft does a lot of this but isn't absolutely wedded to the idea. they will sometimes use other hardware or software when a competitors offering is clearly better. From the little bit I've used apple products I agree with both articles on the flatness of the interface. If something isn't available from the beginning, it isn't available at all.

[hollowpoint.livejournal.com]

I can't and won't argue with any of that!

[argonel.livejournal.com]

I tried iTunes a couple times and never again will I allow it to infect one of my computers. I cannot concieve a single reason for a media player to consume 60% of of the CPU time while playing MP3s. The MP3 player on my PDA occaisonally spikes into the single digit percentage for CPU load on a 400MHz ARM chip.

I'm using winamp to manage the music stored on my laptop and media monkey to manage the library on my external drive. Anyone have good sugesstions to replace these? I'm am particularly interested in a program that will identify duplicates stored in different folders so I can trim the library down to 4-5000 files.

[elffin.livejournal.com]

It eats so much CPU to drive the interface the user sees - which is XML driven.

Millions of computers around the world are executing, repeatedly, run-time interpretation and rendering of something that ought to have been optimised for locale and such once per computer/user account, and rendered into static resources.

There's also the overhead of securing memory space for a protected iTunes-purchased file, which is a ridiculous arms race.

If you're sharing music on the network, well ... byebye CPU and bandwidth.

I have no suggestions for deduplication; I always end up dedicating manual labour to the task - dedupe tools invariably think that a remix or cover or mashup needs to go.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

If so much of the CPU consumption is driven by driving the interface, shouldn't the resource consumption drop off when iTunes is minimized?

At this point removing the duplicates isn't a big deal I have plenty of space on my external drive. However stuff it is offending my sense of order. Stuff has been copied back and forth between different computers afew times, and I know that for some songs I have at least 3 copies of the exact same file. Not just different covers of the same song or the same version with different encoding settings, but the exact same file.

[elffin.livejournal.com]

"If so much of the CPU consumption is driven by driving the interface, shouldn't the resource consumption drop off when iTunes is minimized?"

The SDK Apple uses to develop the iTunes interface makes it portable to Windows and (presumably) other platforms as well; It abstracts beyond the ability to determine whether the interface is visible or not for the purposes of the XML rendering for the interface. It abstracts beyond the ability to turn what ought to be a powerful and customisable interface to one that is easily maintainable for multiple platforms. It's not a paid-for application: It is a loss-leader, and provides Apple a foothold into people's computers.

In short, where it ought to be a native application, it is instead a series of Excel macros under the reasoning that Excel is available for both Mac and PC and is therefore easily ported. All their native-platform wizardry is distilled into the encryption modules, and is why they won't port iTunes for a *nix OS - they consider those systems to be insufficiently trustable or too easily circumvented on an opensource or easily virtualisable OS.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

iTunes isn't so bad if:
A) you crush, kill, and destroy all the malware it installs silently alongside - four different Services, three autostarting applications, two completely unnecessary desktop applications (more than one of which has had serious security flaws just for having it installed, before) and one network spyware application.

B) you have a machine that is really truly terribly overpowerful.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

Seems awefully wastful to dedicate an entire gaming computer to playing music and still need another computer to play the game on. Not to mention their are dozens of other programs that do the exact same thing except for linking to the iTunes music store and wasting CPU cycles.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The overpowerful computer isn't actually troubled by, say, iTunes, and DVD authoring, and Skype, and Call Of Duty 5 on maximum settings.

I know, because I do that kind of thing regularly.

But I do see your point.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

It uses a lot of cycles to process audio normalization and (lately) downloading album art. Once your ENTIRE library is done processing, or you turn them off, it sits on your processor like nobody's business. And there's no option to make it throttle down when the user is active, or do its thing after midnight, which is a big part of the problem.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

And of course, now that I've pried all that crap out, every time iTunes checks for updates it helpfully asks if I want to install X or Y or Z. Of course I don't! I ripped it out for a reason! Fuck off!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You let it update?

Ewwww. That's... unclean.

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

I like MusikCube (http://www.musikcube.com/) for playing and managing music on Windows.

It uses SQLite for storing song metadata. To find duplicates, you can create a dynamic playlist using this SQL fragment:

lower(title)||lower(artist) IN (
SELECT lower(title)||lower(artist)
FROM songs
GROUP BY lower(artist),lower(title)
HAVING count(*) > 1
) ORDER BY artist,title

Unlike Winamp, MusikCube has a "Delete from hard drive" thing right in its context menu.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

PS: Running "properly neutered" iTunes right now. It's using 80MB of RAM (Skype is using 50, Thunderbird 100, Firefox 105) and consistently isn't getting into the top 10 CPU users - one of which is "System Idle" at 99%, none of the others going above zero.

It isn't *music playing* that makes iTunes hog resources. It's all the other crap that it does.

[ben-raccoon.livejournal.com]

How do you properly neuter iTunes, anyways? I personally have never had trouble with it, and in fact switched to it after getting tired of Winamp's memory leaks and random crashes. Still wouldn't hurt to make it behave better, though.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You get rid of the other stuff it installs with it. (http://theweaselking.livejournal.com/3269797.html?thread=16923813#t16923813)

First, uninstall Apple Update, Bonjour, Safari, and any other malware it "bundles" that I've forgotten about.

Second, unless you have an iPod, you disable and remove the Apple Mobile Device Support, iPod Helper, and whatever the third annoying "iPod" Service is.

Third, you kill the "iTunes Helper" and "Quicktime Quickstarter" boot-time applications.

Finally, you tell Quicktime to never, ever, ever, ever be the default player for anything ever again, never update again, and tell iTunes to notify you of updates rather than installing them.

Then, you repeat this ENTIRE PROCESS after each time you update iTunes.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Now that Apple's got into the Movie distro business, iTunes sucks even more as a catalog app. I have 383 movies in iTunes and trying to sort/catalog them is even worse than songs. The first thing that springs to mind is the single genre thing. A lot of movies can fall into several genres. Would love to file Cleopatra under Historical, Shakespeare, and Drama.

Sigh.

Was really expecting an iFlicks app about 4 years ago.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

The first thing that springs to mind is the single genre thing.

Jesus. Even library catalogs do better than that, and the ONLY reason things have a single class number is because the record is tied to a physical object. What's iTunes's excuse? (I don't use it for movies.)

[opaqueplanet.livejournal.com]

If anyone has an iPod and HAAAATES that they need iTunes to use the damn thing, there's Anapod Explorer. It's not a free download, but there are *ahem* places where it IS a free download...

I use winamp to listen to music, my own damn folders to catalogue it thank you very much, and I just drag music files onto the iPod with Anapod. Playlists can be made in Anapod as well, of course.

I hate me some iTunes pretty hard. Stupid Quicktime updates always trying to install it...

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

The only reason I can think of to use Quicktime would be that some digital cameras that only do video in Quicktime.

Am I right, or is there some other reason you keep it on your system?

[opaqueplanet.livejournal.com]

I thought it was like a codec, in that it was required to run certain video files, and some sites needed you to have quicktime like you need flash or java for other sites. I'm pretty sure that's how I GOT quicktime, because god knows I didn't put it on here unless I thought I needed it for something. I may be totally wrong though. If I am, I'd love to get rid of this piece of assware.

So is it true? Is it absolutely unnecessary? /hopefull

[wherever.livejournal.com]

There's also EphPod, and it's free. :)

[opaqueplanet.livejournal.com]

:O Woah! I'll have to check it out! thanks!

Novice-friendly experience

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

At some point Apple realized/decided that if you nail the "out of the box" experience, that sells computers, and to heck with people who use the machines for longer than a few months. This is upsetting to me, but not upsetting enough to switch to one of the alternatives...