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Ex-Be dope Mike Popovic takes my critique of iTunes 7 to the next level:

Other reviews of the iTunes 7 user interface are starting to roll in. Andy Matuschak says, simply, “What.” Rory Prior: a “death knell for Aqua”. Michael Tsai: “internally inconsistent and ugly”.

The benefit of waiting a few hours to chime in, I guess, is that you have time to carefully weigh your criticism and make it constructive. You know, instead of being all cranky and grumpy, like I was.

Update: David Chartier at TUAW has a series of articles walking through the new stuff in iTunes 7: big features, small features. Also, Dan Lurie seems pretty pleased about the demise of Aqua.

Update 2: Josh Buhler pokes a little harder at the scrollbars; Bruce Elgort appreciates the streamlined UI, once you get past the little issue of not knowing where your buttons are.

Update 3 (9/17): Daniel Wilson digs deep into color choices, interaction quirks, and lousy dialog button labels.

You probably saw that iTunes 7 is out (now apparently dubbed the “iTunes Jukebox,” presumably to contrast it from the iTunes Music Store). If you’ve installed it, you know that the user interface has changed. Again. There are plenty of improvements (off the top of my head: inclusion of CoverFlow, gapless playback^*), and reverse sync), but slopped atop all the new features is a thick coat of downright amateurish cosmetic adjustments.

By and large, iTunes seems to have been beaten with the same ugly stick that did such a number on Mail.app. (Oh, wait, I cribbed that line last year.) What’s different this time is that the stick must have been dipped in some of the Pro apps, and maybe iWork, before swinging around to hit the iTunes piñata again.

Therefore, let me present iTunes 7, Dissected: a catalog of all the inconsistencies, gripes, and irritations I experienced in the first ten minutes after upgrading.

high-res: PDF (mirror); low-res: JPEG (mirror)

Make no mistake: I still love iTunes. I think that’s why these quirks grate on me so much—the rough edges on anything you really care about are particularly abrasive—and why I felt compelled to disgruntle myself.

Feel free to disgruntle yourself in the comments.

Update: Welcome, Linked List readers. (And, uh, yeah, I guess I am being a bit…er, vitriolic. I gripe because I care!)

Well, the website for Rice’s undergraduate orientation week has finally undergone a total redesign (probably a result of a new upper echelon at the university, including a new Dean of Undergraduates). Verdict: blah.

The front page is slick and impersonal, and the undergraduate information is buried under a haystack of JavaScript menus. Not particularly engaging. The copy is new, too:

The mission of O-Week is to assist new students in the transition to academic and social life at Rice University, with the two primary functions being: to provide academic advising and to introduce and incorporate new students into their residential colleges. Informative presentations, small-group discussions, academic advising, and class registration are designed to help you enter the university informed and confident about your upcoming years at Rice.

YAWN. Sorry for the snoozer, Class of 2010.

Of course, I’m partial to the version I designed for O*Week 1998, whose design (roughly) and text (exactly) survived two redesigns and seven years.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?

These people are all dressed the same, and they know who I am, and they’re telling me I’m going to be LIVING in their building!

These people are crazy! Get me out of here!

WHOA, THERE

Now calm down. These people have been planning for months, and they’ve been working without sleep for days, doing nothing but preparing for your arrival.

Okay, maybe that doesn’t really vouch for their sanity.

But these are your advisors — a team of several older Rice students who have sworn to spare you from the dull sort of orientation you would have been subjected to at another school. You simply can’t adjust to an intense new atmosphere by sitting in 2,000-seat lecture halls with people you may never see again, listening to boring lectures by faculty you’ll never meet.

To put it another way (taken from the Will Rice College 1998 O-Week book): “You may be nervous, sweaty, and even scared, but we guarantee that you will remember your O-Week.”

OK, are you with me now? Good.

Welcome to O-Week.

I was always pretty proud of that legacy, and it’s sad to see it go. Oh, well; times change, and websites move on.

[On the other hand, the photos that they’re using on the new O-Week website do appear to be from the late 90s…]

Update: What, no information for transfer students on the new site?

Update 2: Yeah, yeah, the new site has all kinds of handy information that the 1998 version lacked. (This is partially because in eight years a lot has been done to put handy university information online.) So I guess I give the new site points for being somewhat more useful than previous versions. But it’s definitely not as much fun.

So, the new Slashdot stylee (by Alex Bendiken, who won the contest for best design) took effect this weekend. Go check it out if you’ve been getting your ‘dot exclusively via RSS for a while; it’s surprisingly fresh, while retaining that soothing green glow.

OK, NYT, you have both Times and Georgia on your redesigned pages (not to mention some pre-rendered headlines set in Times). So you need to choose a serif typeface. One. Right now.

Lots to look at in these Leopard/Chardonnay (OS X 10.5) Finder patent snapshots. Looks like Spotlight is finally moving into the, uh, well, never mind. Detail pages: Spotlight, Smart Folders redux, and indexing of detected text in analog data (images, audio). Steals a page (my very favorite page) from MS OneNote.

A nit:

It’s odd they would use photoshop to design the interface- why not something like interface builder?

Well, if you’re trying to design interface that doesn’t yet exist in the OS, by definition Interface Builder wouldn’t know about it.

Take a look at the new python.org and see for yourself. The bizarre, quirky, pseudo-unnavigable, recognizable blue design has been replaced with…what, exactly? It’s not quite a facelift. More of a Botox treatment—seemingly smooth and youthful, but upon closer inspection weirdly plastic and static. And while I do like the new logo (at right), it seems a little feeble in execution—I feel it could be made stronger.