waffle

• Slimmer.
• The column headers bear a startling resemblance to those really old bevel buttons from the early days of Mac OS X, or for current applications where the developer has something against push buttons.
• I’m not sure I like the “all greyscale, all the time” icons. Sure, the icons are simpler, but some of them are still small, and the color was a better cue.
• The Now Playing window does the QuickTime X thing. Borderless, floating controls.
• It looks like the balance of power continues tipping. Info.plist now enlists an NSPrincipalClass, ITNSApplication, meaning that it uses the Cocoa startup path. (Very curiously, I can’t find that class by dumping iTunes.) Still chock full of Carbon, but it seems they’re going to do this over several versions.
• Every time someone uses the phrase “Join the conversation” to coax someone else into joining a “social network”, a marketing executing gets a boner, poking out the eye of the nearest adorable animal. I suppose when they introduced Ping by showcasing Lady Gaga, I shouldn’t have kept thinking they could actually do it better or differently than everyone else.
• The buttons in the bottom bar should look a bit more like buttons. It’s okay for the ones that are binary indicators to look like that, and that makes one of them (shuffle has three states); three if you’d also so enhance the buttons to slide out the artwork square and the Genius sidebar.
• Flattening artwork view (show stuff as you have the space, not just “always”) is something they should have done from the beginning.
• I know what the handle on the volume slider is trying to pull off (a brushed metal button) but it uses just the wrong grey tones so it looks like some sort of dusty baseball instead.
• The source list feels choppier to scroll than the track table itself.
• The display up top now fits both the artist and album onto the second row if there’s room instead of having them alternate:

“This is a new song that we’re working on called Coldplay 2.6. This has a lot of features, it features seven different kinds of chord, including a new one that even our closest rivals have no idea about, which Jonathan Ive’s designed. It’s the chord of “i-minor”.” — Chris Martin

It’s better than the old QuickTime streaming. It cut out surprisingly few times. But those are the kindest things I can say about it.

• Sometimes, the previous segment would repeat.
• Sometimes, it would shift up or down in quality and also skip back or forward. (Skipping back was worse because it pretty much guaranteed that you’d skip forward sometime soon and miss about twenty seconds.)
• Sometimes, the whole image would flicker about 1Hz. A few times this would cut out on its own after a sufficiently long wait, but you had to reload the page, and the video would inevitably sync up with the freshest stream playlist, which means that if you were behind, you would without mercy skip the delta.
• If you had a sufficiently low quality stream, you couldn’t go into full screen. You could go into full screen on a good quality stream, drop to low quality, exit full screen to check on something and then be unable to go into full screen until you caught a good quality headwind again.

So it is better, and I hope they continue doing it, but it’s not good. The errors pretty much all seem endemic to the technology and could hardly be fixed as such by providing more, faster and better servers, but if they did that and it held up, most errors wouldn’t be triggered to begin with.

It’s possible that at Apple’s scale, nothing works acceptably. But they made a bet on using what they had including the server farm side of the equation, and they’re going to have to live with the consequences.

Paul’s angry:

If you’re among the majority of Apple’s customers–that is, you own a Windows-based PC and at least one of the company’s iOS-based devices or iPods–you’re out of luck if you want to see today’s Apple music event live. To do that from a PC-type desktop, you need to use a Mac. (Apple is also streaming its event to iOS-based devices if you don’t mind the small screen and performance issues.) Why shut out the PC? Because they’re Apple, that’s why.

I’m sure he was real angry with every single company that used their own video format or streaming for the past 15 years too.

I mean, it’s not like a third party or an individual developer could cobble together an implementation of HTTP streaming from a few pages of published specifications, or as if they used a video format that was already common and implemented (while not open and free in every sense of those words). And far be it from Apple to use an approach that so stands on the shoulders of existing standards that you could actually kinda sorta still see it.

We can only hope that they will aspire to the bettered heights of Microsoft, which has on its latest attempt on streaming video managed to get it down to the design and upkeep of a CLR several years prior and direct access to the developers of the original technology for a useful alternative implementation. Which, I must admit, is an improvement on “tough titty, we license this shit”.