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You might recall that, several months ago, I went a little nuts about the iTunes 7 UI. To this day, I stand by my complaints, though I freely admit that my tone could have benefited from some moderation.

The ThinkMac blog (which, by the way, posted their own gripe about many of the same things I objected to) observed over the weekend that several of the most glaring inconsistencies were tidied up in iTunes 7.3. (For those keeping score, these are gripes #2 and #4c in the original dissection, plus the subsequent discovery of the impossible-to-hit pane resizer.)

Thanks, iTunes UI team!

I just updated my copy of Adobe Reader so I’d be able to add fancy annotations to PDFs (one of the side-effects of your advisor being halfway across the country is that it’s harder to pass marked-up drafts back and forth).

I officially hate it in all ways. RAM eater? Check. (The reader takes up gobs of memory as you’d expect, and even the Safari plugin chews up an additional 40MB when it first loads.) Interface? Uglier than the dog poop left in my parking spot by the neighbors in the next building.

But what’s really driving me nuts is the text rendering. This is Adobe, for pete’s sake—you’d think they’d have gotten it down! But, no, the anti-aliased type display is a disaster. The ClearType (or CoolType, or MyType, or ZOMGtyp3!, or whatever Adobe calls it) is worse—a plague visited upon the Earth. There’s also some kind of horrible spasm going on inside the hinting engine, visible especially at small point sizes:

So I’m thinking I’ll shelve Reader until I absolutely positively need to do some annotation that can’t be handled by Preview. But does anyone know of an easy, reversible way to switch on and off Reader’s control of PDF viewing in Safari? (Online documentation seems to indicate that Reader will “heal” Safari if it notices that the PDF viewer plugin has been deleted.)

Update 2/1: Well, at least Adobe lets you turn off the Web plugin (in the Reader app’s preferences):

OK, I’ve finally given up on the Dock. It’s always irritated me for a number of little brain-nibbling reasons:

1. Muscle memory or real estate: Pick one. I really, really like things to stay in one spot over a long period of time; it’s not even muscle memory so much as spatial memory. (I use Virtue to keep major concurrent tasks on separate workspaces; in my head I have a 4096×768 monitor, workspaces side-by-side, and the GL effects I use to switch workspaces reinforce that topology.) So it bugs me that if I want apps to show up in a recognizable place, I need to pin them to the Dock, taking up valuable real estate when they’re not running.
2. No real estate? No feedback. How many emails do I have? No idea; the icon’s too small for me to read the little red badge on the Mail.app icon. Why are the icons so small? Because I have too many of them pinned in there; see #1.
3. No muscle memory for you, anyway. The Dock is centered, so it’s not like pinned applications stay in one place anyway; as soon as you open an app not on the Dock, everything shifts to accommodate. (This is “easily” addressed by magnetizing the Dock to one side of your screen, using some defaults write command I’ve used and long since forgotten.)

So, yeah, the Dock and I never really got on well. You may recall that Dave tamed the Dock; that solution never really worked for me (real estate; $ for DragThing), and I don’t know if he still uses it like that, anyway.

I finally gave up on the Dock entirely. Here’s what it looks like now:

That’s right, everything’s unpinned, and the icons (snapped to 32×32) are large enough that I can read the feedback badges.

So what about all that spatial memory crap? I gave up on that, too, at least as far as the Dock is concerned; it’s purely a status/feedback region for me now—I don’t click on it anymore. All my app-launching and open-file-with-app needs are now satisfied by Quicksilver, which is usually faster than (spatial-memory-accelerated) mousing anyway.

Now if only QS were faster on my poor little PowerBook. I know, I know, I’m never satisfied.

Thanks a lot, Allan, that actually scared the crap out of me.

Update: Oh wow, there’s more.

Update 2: Wow, the app’s actual icon (TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/TextMate.icns) changed itself:

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!)

Whoa!

Pressing the space bar in a read-only rich-text or HTML view (e.g. Mail.app, Safari) advances the scroll position by a page (satisfying habits of Eudora or more users). This is old news. But I just now discovered that holding down Shift will reverse the scroll direction.

Brilliant.

[Yes, yes, I’ll write a little about Vancouver and USENIX Security in the next day or two. I’m still recovering; it was a long week.]