Users expect that menu items in a navigation bar won’t change their location after they click on them. So if you’re in your own iTunes Library, then click on “For You,” you’ll find the entire navigation bar has shifted under your mouse: Your mouse is now hovering over “Playlists,” as the software has inserted forward and back buttons on the far left.įrom a user-interface perspective, this doesn’t make any sense. When navigating a user’s music library, as below, it doesn’t-which moves all the menu options around. When navigating Apple Music, above, iTunes inserts a forward and back button.

Its “design is horrible not because it has bad designers, but because they’ve been given an impossible task: cramming way too much functionality into a single app while also making it look ‘clean,’” writes Arment.ĭoes this kind of failure-call it institutional cruft-appear in iTunes? I think absolutely. ITunes’s user interface follows from this poor strategy, too. (Arment doesn’t say whether this new app would also play MP3s.) He believes the company should have discontinued iTunes, its media management service, and rolled out a new Apple Music app. Why does iTunes fail at what it sets out to do?Īrment blames its failures on Apple’s decision to cram too many different features into one piece of software. Apple is the most valuable company in the world and an organization hailed for its good design. Toxic hellstew it may be, a new version of iTunes points at what kinds of technology are allowed to come out of Apple. I agree: It’s why I wrote about how poorly iTunes performs for classical music listeners and, really, for anyone with a large music library.īut it’s worth spending time on iTunes’s specific design problems, which surpass those raised by managing a music library or listening to a specific genre.

It is also, in the inimitable judgement of the indie iOS developer Marco Arment, “a toxic hellstew.” ITunes is the glue of Apple’s software universe: It connects the company’s phones and tablets, desktops and laptops, and online media store and streaming service.

New itunes update problems 2015