iTunes 10 was announced and launched yesterday at the Apple music event and I’ve been playing around with it a little bit for today. The first thing I noticed was how the left navigation sidebar now looks gray and dull. The colored icons are gone and replaced with color-less gray icons.
Next after, I noticed something odd about the close / minimize / maximize buttons in the upper left corner (the small red/yellow/green buttons, you know). They’re no longer placed horizontal like in pretty much all other Mac application, but vertical !!
Luckily, if you’re annoyed about the new placement of the buttons, there’s a fix. Quit iTunes 10, launch Terminal and enter the following string:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1
Launch iTunes 10 again and hopefully the buttons are back in their usual place.
But what’s up with the lack of colors in the left navigation sidebar? Initially I didn’t really like it. It was just too damn boring. So I decided to think about why Apple did what they did, cause I’m pretty sure they didn’t just re-design the icons for the fun of it. I came to the conclusion that because the navigation sidebar is now so dull to look at it, it attracts less attention and thus you might pay more attention to what’s going on in the main part of iTunes – the content area. I don’t know if that’s the reason, what do you think?
Either way, I’m not that annoyed by the lack of colors any more. I must be an early adopter 🙂
Ping
iTunes 10 now also has a built-in social media network for music and it’s already open to all 160 million iTunes account holders in 23 countries. After playing around with it for a while, I find it somewhat boring. I like the idea and I see the potential, but right now it’s rather boring, especially if you look at the artists to follow. I tried to look up Bruce Springsteen and Green Day but they were nowhere to be found. Instead you can follow artists such as U2, Katy Perry, Linkin Park and a bunch of other artists – oh, and Ladgy Gaga too, if you’re into that.
When it comes to privacy settings in Ping, Apple has certainly learned from Facebook how not to do it. Take a look at the screenshot below, that’s how easy the privacy settings work – a bit too simple but at least simple enough for everybody to be able to set them, compared to Facebook:
I’ve also played around with the “Ping” network a bit, don’t think I’ll be using it that much though, can’t really see too much of a point to it, I personally think it’s Apples way of trying to make more sales by promoting music via the network, but I could be wrong 😉
Ping has already suffered from a tonne of spammage 🙁
To be expected really… it’s social media, it gets spammed.
ping is something new , it would be nice to see how it works out .
Thanks for the fix. It is rather annoying to have them in the wrong place. I wonder what drove them to do that?
I love Ping so much because I can find out my favorite music here