The user experience of watching WWDC session videos on the iPad has always been a thorn in my side.
Back when the 2011 videos were new, I downloaded them all to my computer (in Standard Definition) and synced them all to my iPad so that I would have immediate offline access to them all should I find myself with a free hour to spend.
Sadly, the Videos application has one horrible UX problem: the names of each session video was very long, but the label in Videos is too short, and so they all endup being truncated, like "Session 205 - Introducing Collection Vi...". Even in landscape, mind you! Half of the screen was wasted with a graphic that added no useful information.
Halfway through the year, things got a lot better when the "iTunes U" app was released, and browsing the 2011 videos immediately became much better. The Videos app still has the same usability issue (and I think they should still fix it), but the iTunes U app is better so at least I can avoid the bad app.
Well, last night I downloaded the 2012 session videos and synced them over to my iPad, and now iTunes U has a horrible UX, because the videos from 2011 and 2012 are all mixed in the same list, and there's no way to tell from the session title which year it came from.
It's as if no one at Apple dogfoods their own applications with their own content.
Edit: just to be clear, none of my complaint here is about iTunes or the iTunes store. Those applications (though I admit the former is a bloated dumping-ground of features) have always behaved perfectly for me. Rather, I'm specifically refering to the "iTunes U" mobile app (see link below) and the "Videos" app that is bundled on the iPad.
I've always found iTunes and iTunes Store UI's to be deficient in many ways. My theory is that the continuous overloading of iTunes with a wide range of functionalities is creating a mess. What makes sense for music files doesn't necessarily make sense for videos, books or apps.
Searching the iTunes store is horrible, particularly on an iPad or iPhone. More often than not it is easier to use Google on a browser to search the iTunes store.
Importing content into iTunes is equally fraught with issues. I had to import a library of hundreds of music CDs from Windows Media. Thousands of songs. iTunes refused to maintain the grouping of songs per album (as they show-up in Windows Media) and required manually editing and sorting of thousands of songs in order to clean-up the mess. I understand that it has to do with metadata issues, but if MS can do it iTunes ought to be far more intelligent and do it right and offer to auto-magically fix the issues during import.
This is very similar to what happened with XCode 4. Before XC4 browsing documentation was a good experience. Now they chose to overload the iTunes-ish Organizer with all manner of things, including documentation. Now browsing the docs is ugly and difficult. It sucks.
What I'd like to see is for iTunes to return to being the best app for managing your music while new specialized apps are introduced to manage your iPhone and other content.
Totally agree with all you say. The current philosophy of just adding more and more disjoint functionality to existing apps is simply creating one hell of a mess. A mess to use, and (I strongly suspect) a mess to maintain.
Remember the old UNIX philosophy: Write programs that do ONE thing and do it well. Whoever is in charge of overall software development at Apple (both apps and dev tools) needs to have this drummed into him. Preferably with a large hammer. ;-)
Back when the 2011 videos were new, I downloaded them all to my computer (in Standard Definition) and synced them all to my iPad so that I would have immediate offline access to them all should I find myself with a free hour to spend.
Sadly, the Videos application has one horrible UX problem: the names of each session video was very long, but the label in Videos is too short, and so they all endup being truncated, like "Session 205 - Introducing Collection Vi...". Even in landscape, mind you! Half of the screen was wasted with a graphic that added no useful information.
Halfway through the year, things got a lot better when the "iTunes U" app was released, and browsing the 2011 videos immediately became much better. The Videos app still has the same usability issue (and I think they should still fix it), but the iTunes U app is better so at least I can avoid the bad app.
Well, last night I downloaded the 2012 session videos and synced them over to my iPad, and now iTunes U has a horrible UX, because the videos from 2011 and 2012 are all mixed in the same list, and there's no way to tell from the session title which year it came from.
It's as if no one at Apple dogfoods their own applications with their own content.
Edit: just to be clear, none of my complaint here is about iTunes or the iTunes store. Those applications (though I admit the former is a bloated dumping-ground of features) have always behaved perfectly for me. Rather, I'm specifically refering to the "iTunes U" mobile app (see link below) and the "Videos" app that is bundled on the iPad.
http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/