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. ;-)
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.