Hm, I wonder if I'll still be able to sync music and podcasts to my iPod.
My 10-plus-year-old iPod is rock solid technology, hardware and software, just keeps on working. At this point it feels like some retro SF alternate vision of the future we could have had, with simple easy to use things that never broke.
It depends on the version, but you can really trick out iPods. I've got an iPod Video (5.5) with an iFlash Quad [1] (up to 4x micro SD cards) with a 2000mAh battery, running Rockbox [2]
I also replaced the rear panel since I didn't need the beefy 80gb version, and also the lock / headphone jack so they were both solid black.
Rockbox is excellent because it runs off of a basic folder structure, but also has a library option.
You can do the iFlash mod and still use iTunes / the original OS if you like, but Rockbox has proven to be superior in all ways.
If you're on a Mac, be sure to format the main card with a Windows box so its Fat32.
Seems interesting, especially since I used to use Rockbox. But my iPod Classic/6G is in the Rockbox unstable category and has apparently been that way for 2 years. Bummer, I still use mine all the time. :(
I've been using Foobar2000 with some iPod plugin to sync my iPod classic for as long as I can remember. It's never failed me yet. That could be another option.
I've been trying to break free from iTunes with a modded 5.5 gen, but Rockbox caused endless errors where non-corrupted songs would skip constantly(1). Wiped back to the default Apple firmware, and voila, no skipping. I tried an iPod plugin for Musicbee, and it appeared to work (files were syncing in Musicbee) but the songs and playlists didn't appear on the iPod. So back to iTunes sadly. I'd love to kick it to the curb.
When you add songs, do it from the original firmware. With the iFlash and all that, transferring files while loaded into Rockbox will cause the issue you mentioned... a lesson I learned after transferring about 80gb of FLACs.
When you boot the iPod, lock it right away and it'll boot to the normal firmware. The transfer speeds are better than using disk mode.
Thanks for the tip! I did some foobar2000 research yesterday and came across that component. It appears to work, next step is to convert remaining songs to mp3 so everything works as expected. I like foobar2000 lightweight 'feel', Musicbee feels like an explosion of panels everywhere by comparison.
I'm using the original firmware with a while now, it's less error prone and the UI on rockbox isn't exatly polished.
fb2k is the best. By fluke I stumbled upon it when it first launched, and I've never looked back.
Rockbox is one of those things that is perfect once you live with it for a while. I've been using it since the iPod Video came out (and on a few devices.) The main thing with Rockbox and the modded iPods (iFlash etc) is limiting the EQ bands and other DSP settings. The Sandisk Clip+ is an unexpectedly killer device for Rockbox -- but like anything, the UI takes some getting used to.
Considering they're working around clickwheels with a center button, d-pads with menu button, some with power buttons, others without... its a bit of a marvel that everything is accessible on the devices that are able to be used -- but like I said, I've been using it for ages and can get around some of the odd navigational quirks.
One of the biggest benefits of Rockbox over the iPod firmware is 'timestretch' / playback speeds for files (podcasts, audiobooks.) Its still my favorite audiobook player.
Thanks for the suggestion. Other friends of mine swear by Foobar2K, but I can't stand the interface (a combination of hard for me to use/configure and bad aesthetics), so much so that I still prefer to use Winamp.
I still have my first-gen iPod and it works great. Battery life isn't too terrible all things considered, I get about 2-3 hours from a charge which I've been told is great compared to others. The looks I get from people are priceless. Teens stop me on the train to ask what it is and their jaws hit the floor. It feels like it's made of solid uranium it weighs so much. I can't even add new music anymore, luckily I have a lot of good stuff loaded.
It's a shame what's become of iTunes though...just an awful app.
The reason I am asking is because I am surprised yours has lasted so long. I had two and they broke within two years due to the mechanical hdd inside. (the headphones also broke, within a month each time; really put me off buying Apple products again)
Yeah, I've got a nano 4th generation, no moving parts in there, it should last forever, or until the battery goes, but battery still going just fine for me, can play more music than I've needed without a recharge.
If this does turn out to be a rewrite, I assume they’ll handle it like the iPhoto -> Photos transition, where if you already had iPhoto you could keep using it (supposedly iPhoto still works on Mojave), it just won’t get updated.
Yes, that’s why the new Mac music app is supposedly built from iTunes code (probably the device support components) rather than the iOS Music app code.
I remember when iTunes came out for Windows ca. 2003. I had friends with Macs so I leapt at the chance to try it for myself---it just seemed lightyears ahead of whatever I was using to interface with my music library at the time (Winamp, probably).
And what a long, slow, weird, decline it's been since then.
Minority here, I never understood why music players shifted towards iTune-ish style of owning and re-categorizing everything in their own way... I mean, OS has a file system, why not just rely on it? Throw some searchable tags in, and you get the same abilities but without obscurity.
I think you may be envisioning two extremes when the parent comment wants a happy medium. I.e. files on disk in any way the customer wants, but add a db on the side to do things like play counts and tags. With reasonable defaults for most people who don't care about filesystem layout.
When you open a file, it copies it, renaming it in the process.
You can manage the files yourself and point it at that, but the default, eg. if you choose to open a file from any old place, is to copy into its own naming and organization scheme.
That is not the default when you install iTunes it asks you whether you want it to “manage your music”. This is not a new behavior - note the date on the above post.
That is how I always use iTunes, since the music was stored on my NAS. There is/was no requirement for iTunes to manage the storage and filesystem organization of your music - that was just the default.
The problem wasn't really at the iTunes end, that's just a symptom. It was at the iPod end. You'd go to a friends house and want to copy a few songs over from a Windows box and couldn't do it without installing a hundred gig monstrosity.
The filesystem is strictly hierarchal. How do you have one song in multiple playlists without duplicating the songs? How do you propose to make that usable for the average person. History kind of proves that Apple took the right approach in the iPod era. The simple drag files to an attached device MP3 players failed to become successful.
You miss the point with this question. A media player managing playlists certainly can. Or it can manage m3u files. Or it can put them in an sqlite db. Or ...
You posed as an intractable problem unless we adopt iTunes thinking.
> Do I really need to bring up the “No Wireless. Less Space than a Nomad. Lame.” Meme and how geeks didn’t get the iPod?
People love to bring this up... but that product (pretty much) did fail, in no small part because it had less space than a Nomad. The iPod wasn't successful until a couple revisions later and after the introduction of iTunes (which led to an end-to-end rethink of how you loaded music on these devices). No matter how hard Apple-acolytes want it to be true, if I come out with a bad product, and then later come out with a good product, it doesn't make the bad product retroactively awesome.
Yes... a _company_ (Apple) won under a cohesive brand (iPod), but _that product which was being reviewed at the time_ did not. Nothing about what happened with later products retroactively changes whether the physical product that people had in their hands was good or not, or whether their review _of that specific product_ was fair.
The major things that changed after the iPod was released: adding online music sales, switching from FireWire to USB for all the people stuck with the slower Windows hardware interface, and iTunes for Windows.
None of those changed the core iPod design; I don’t think the first one failed in any meaningful way.
Sorry: I specifically meant "the iTunes Music Store", which was where I was going with "end-to-end rethink". iTunes existed as a music player, but it wasn't until they provided a way to buy songs using it as part of a cohesive service that it was game changing for the industry, and that wasn't until the third-generation iPod came out.
According to Steve Jobs “Thoughts on Music” essay posted in 2007, only 3% of music on the typical iPod was bought on iTunes. This was original posted on Apple’s home page. So it wasn’t the music store that made that much difference.
Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.
Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM.
Sorry: I specifically meant "the iTunes Music Store", which was where I was going with "end-to-end rethink". iTunes existed as a music player, but it wasn't until they provided a way to buy songs using it as part of a cohesive service that it was game changing for the industry, and that wasn't until the third-generation iPod came out.
And still only 3% of Music on the iPod was bought from the music store according to Steve Jobs himself - 4 years after the store came online. That didn’t make much of a difference.
“create a list of all of the songs I haven’t played in X days” - this can easily be done in winamp. they got full query language that can be saved as a playlist. i even think they got this as one of pre-sets.
Well, I only measure the things how they work for me. And these smart playlist were the default - you can press "edit" and see how they did it to learn and customize.
Since 10.4, the Finder has had Smart Folders for this. (I believe Windows got a similar feature in Vista.) Apple even bragged that it worked "Just like iTunes" when they introduced it.
This geek doesn't understand why we need two nearly-identical systems. Once you make the more-general form, refactor the prototype to use it!
Normal people wouldn't need to "use the filesystem" any more than they do with iTunes now. Just make iTunes use these features internally so we don't have two incompatible sets of tools, and two separate sets of bugs.
Windows 10 calls them Libraries. Open your explorer and it's in the left sidebar. You can create new ones to group files and folders together regardless of where they physically reside.
They are already used by Windows to provide the major Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, etc. locations.
Since HN likes technical analogies: why do you use a RDBMS instead of flat files?
People don't care about how the files are stored, and they shouldn't need to. We've seen this in everything from music catalogs to file sharing to productivity software. We want content organized logically with metadata, tags, folders, lists and search that's completely removed from the physical location. Let the computers do what they're good at while the software lets you consume it the way you want.
> People don't care about how the files are stored, and they shouldn't need to.
The second clause of this sentence is a pretty good software design value. The first part is overgeneralizing at best.
Some people care very much about where in a folder/directory system their files are stores. I'm not just talking about HN audiences, I'm talking about actual people I've observed from personal acquaintances to real live user testing. Files are not some weird obscure technical point they're a dominant metaphor that's been used in computing workflows longer than more than half of HN has likely been adults. Lots of people know and care how they work.
This is especially true for music files, where people have been ripping, transcoding, slicing/processing into derivative works, backing up, and yes sometimes sharing files for longer than iTunes has existed.
They're not perfect for every application and user. An application-specific database with a different use profile might be good to have between the filesystem and a user. Users shouldn't have to care.
But if we really mean "the software lets you consume it the way you want" then you don't really want it completely removed from filesystem location. You want to keep facilities that allow users to find underlying files and keep them easy enough to find. You want to accommodate use profiles where users may bring in files from outside your curated market, or even choose to intentionally organize files in a way that your application doesn't by default.
The separation between logical and physical data is a very old concept used to enhance UX everywhere and has been the general trend for decades.
Most people are not concerned about files, they want music. Tracks, playlists, artists, albums, etc. That's how they think and interact, and this abstraction provides that rich interface. That's why it's so seamless to switch from iTunes to Spotify where everything is streaming, because the basic primitives are not files.
If you do want to handle the raw files then there's nothing stopping you, but it's definitely a tiny minority.
> The separation between logical and physical data is a very old concept used to enhance UX everywhere and has been the general trend for decades.
I mean, yes. Files as we're speaking of them are in fact this very thing themselves. But:
> Most people are not concerned about files
Do you know how you know that? Is it based off of observation, or is it a story you like to tell yourself?
Like I said, I'm not pulling this out of my nose, I'm basing this off of real life observations including non-technical users. It isn't everyone who wants files in every case, but it is waaay more than a tiny minority. It's a little complicated given that you've got at least two curves you're dealing with (user experience and very roughly speaking intelligence), but if you imagine a bell curve and draw a line about a half standard deviation down from the median, roughly everyone north of that will likely care about files or file-related behavior at some point.
> they want music.
Ask yourself this: do you see "Copy Song Link" with Spotify tracks? What exactly do you think Activities are doing all over iOS?
These are ways of directing/handling files.
> If you do want to handle the raw files then there's nothing stopping you
Except sometimes in applications written/designed by people who think "they want music" means "Most people are not concerned about files."
> We want content organized in a logical manner with tags, folders, lists and search that's completely removed from the physical location.
The problem is that there's a lot of room for interpretation as to what is the best way to actually translate media metadata into an organizational scheme. Furthermore, the most appropriate interpretation is DIFFERENT depending on the type and/or genre of the music.
Most metadata-oriented media players tend to pick one scheme, apply it across the board, and completely screw up somewhere along the way. For whatever kind of music the developers had in mind, it'll work okay. For anything else, it's borderline unusable as you constantly struggle to find/browse what you're looking for.
The whole point is you can structure it however you want because of the separation between logical and physical representation. Some players are better and more flexible than others but that separation is still a requirement to offer any kind of rich interface beyond just files on a disk.
Because despite what everyone thinks again and again, music is not hierarchical, as a file system is. Does my album go under the composer, the conductor, the orchestra or the soloist?
Does my album go under the composer, the conductor, the orchestra or the soloist?
This is one of my peeves with the 40's channel on Sirius. There could be the wonderful voice of a woman singing a song, but the display will only read "Benny Goodman Orchestra."
Seriously, I had my MP3s organized this way pre-iTunes. I get why that can’t scale to the general public, but I still think a tool could approximate it.
For one thing, even if this was a good idea, you would still need a tool to covert the meta information from the ID3 tags that come with your music from amazon, iTunes Store, or wherever into a myriad of hard links.
Further, it's hard to imagine how the hard link system could ever be as flexible as even an average music library program, where you can trivially find songs released between 1990 and 1995, with at least one play count, and then have them sorted by beats per minute.
Music libraries act as relational databases, which are a far more powerful data modeling tool than the file system.
Same as any other document on my disk: it doesn't matter. Just dump everything in there and let Spotlight index it.
(That's basically what iTunes does now, except the exact behavior is hidden behind a mysterious "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" checkbox, and the index is stored in big opaque XML files rather than Spotlight.)
My email has hierarchical folders, too, but I don't know anyone who worries about the folder structure of their email. All messages are indexed, and search is quick, so there's not much point.
The question is how you organize the albums, hierarchically. The easy case is when you have artist/album/track, like:
Music > Buckethead > Enter The Chicken > Funbus
But how do you file, say, classical music? Do I file this album under Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor? Do I file this under Bach and Beethoven, the conductors of various tracks? Do I file this under Wiener Philharmoniker?
In iTunes it’s irrelevant, because I can find the album by looking for Composer=Bach, Composer=Beethoven, artist=Wilhelm Furtwaengler, or artist=Wiener Philharmoniker. With a filesystem I would… use symlinks or something?
Beethoven goes under Beethoven. No one groups stuff by orchestra.
And just because a media player respects your filesystem doesn't mean you can't search by the metadata in the Mp3s. This is extra-helpful when you realize not all Mp3s have metadata. In that case, such search routines will just pass it by.
That was my point... you're not really using the filesystem. It's just a big pile of files if you stick it all in Albums. iTunes organises that because the filesystem can't.
I have a lot of friends who do literally all of their work out of their "Downloads" folder - I don't know how they survive that way, but they love music players which they can just point at a directory and say "index this and make a neat library" and know that everything lives in one place.
Personally, I'm in the camp who kept a manually-organized directory tree for music for years, and would still prefer that mode of working, but even among my technical friends I think I'm in the minority there. Presumably Apple was right that this is what most people prefer.
That was what bothered me about iTunes...I was never sure WHERE things lived. Even if I pointed it at a folder, was that my music, or just an input source for where my music actually ended up living?
was that my music, or just an input source for where my music actually ended up living?
If you have "Organize my music" checked then iTunes copies the files to its library. If you have it unchecked, then the files stay where you left them.
What are you asking for, specifically? iTunes lets you organize music how you want on the filesystem, or you can let it organize the music for you. The only thing it doesn't do is present a view of the filesystem, but the Finder already has that.
But there is a standard for tagging audio data and iTunes uses it, just like any other half decent audio player / music management software. As long as your meta data is clean your library should present in a very consistent way between different players.
I consider myself a huge music collector/enthusiast that maintains a carefully organized collection and the file system is way too limited to handle anything but the most simple music organization and browsing tasks. I’d go as far as far as suggesting that relying on the file system is a rather casual way of handling a music collection.
iTunes brought library management and meta data editing to the masses, which is a good thing. While Roon is my main player/management software I still use iTunes to sync to iOS devices. Of course I won’t let iTunes move any files - there’s an option that tells iTunes not to move anything. So you could actually have it both ways: Use your preferred file structure and benefit from proper library management software.
OS level doesn't have enough metadata. I remember tirelessly starring and categorizing my music to make smart playlists -- AFAIK you can't do that in the OS without some weird file naming schemes and a lot of extra work.
I get better reliability (say, restoring after power shutdown), portability (can copy files via external drives and/or network), discoverability (songs show up in regular search), interoperability (hypothetically, I'd be able to drag a song file into my browser to share it, accompanies by full metadata), and finally simplicity of the software (no need to reinvent the filesystem).
iTunesFS sort of gives you this. You get a read-only disk that maps to the iTunes database. Playlists are their own directories, along with artists, albums, etc.
I was a long-time winamp user and I've still never found that sweet spot in any new player, of being able to easily queue up albums and always be listening to exactly what I want, in the order I want.
Several custom modular interfaces are a tab-switch away.
Takes a while to get everything the way you like it but you've got modules for autotagging, working integration with Winamp's Milkdrop2 (and any other Winamp plugins one might have), youtube search & playback, lyric fetching, advanced playlist organization, direct playback from VGM music files, pop-up search, artist bio fetching, etc.
It's very easy to get exactly where you want to be with a custom queue within seconds.
I would also recommend Amarok, not sure how it performs on Windows, but there's a KDE build[0]. It comes a lot more configured out of the box, plus it's still fairly customizable and its playlist creation features surpass even fb2k's.
I still use Winamp 2.x on my Win 10 PC. I have had my MP3s sorted as /mp3/genre/artist/album since mp3s first started and it suits me just fine. I’ll right-click either a genre, artist, or album folder and Play In Winamp.
I use Spotify on my phone but I’m someone who listens to pretty much all the same music that I always have, so Spotify is more replicating my mp3 collection due to a lack of being able to have Winamp on iOS. I’d love to have Winamp on mobile though, it’s still the easiest fastest and cleanest music player I’ve ever used.
Foobar 2000 is probably the closest to an honest successor of WinAMP's queue support. It's visually boring, but gets the job done well and is configurable and extendable to other needs. Has all sorts of power user options for shuffle modes, play queue management, and play list management.
(For instance, the ability in a shuffle to right click a song for it to play next in the queue, and then have it return to the shuffle. Or to shuffle entire albums, playing the albums in track order but shuffling which album is next.)
that s not my memory at all. there were tons of all kinds of fancy player players in linux or windows (winamp? i dont think it was relevant then). Itunes was nothing special, in fact it was so odd that it had to scan every file, and have its own library, ending up with a stale library if you deleted a few songs. I doubt people who did not purchase songs used it
I was an iTunes obsessive from 2003-2012. Then uploaded all my music to the cloud and moved on. Still miss the functionality though.
Two days ago I wanted to rent a movie for an airplane, so I opened up iTunes on my Mac. I'm not kidding, in order to rent this movie I had to type in my password 8 times and confirm so many dialogs I almost gave up. If your purchase flow is that bad, you just don't care anymore. So not surprised they're gonna end it.
As someone who prefers to own music and organize it how I want, this is incredibly disappointing. I have no doubt that Apple Music will include only a fraction of the features I've come to depend on.
If you want to organise your music how you want, why were you using iTunes in the first place - an app which organises your music for you? Surely it was already not suitable for your particular workflow and never aimed or claimed to be?
Ahh I see what you’re saying and I don’t particularly care where the audio is sourced from, so long as I can’t accidentally delete it. The file system is not designed for many dimensional indexing, it just indexes by path. You need software that query to make sense of thousands of files.
1000% agree with you. As a DJ and a connoisseur of 24bit music iTunes is incredibly good at organization not to mention the third party support in dj software and applications. I cannot believe a better windows alternative will ever exist and honestly unless a team is backed with money probably won’t be.
Good riddance. iTunes went from one of my favorite music players, to an app I loathe to use every day at work just to listen to my Apple Music subscription.
Admittedly I don't find iOS' Music app that much better, so I'm pretty wary of iTunes' upcoming replacement.
- I'm all-in the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Watch, ATV4K, Airport Express). So are my family members.
- I'm on a family plan so $15/4 is a price that can't be beat. I do not live with the family members I share the plan with. This is relevant because:
- I actually had a friend share their Spotify Family plan with me and Spotify insisted I prove I lived in the same address! Apple doesn't ask for anything beyond linking Apple IDs to a family.
- The actual service/catalog provided by AM is fantastic, but overall I'm very unsatisfied with the UX of Apple's music apps.
Apple is very open about their long term plan to convert to a media and services company. Their business plan is to 1) get you to change over to these 3 new apps now when they are free, 2) convert each to a paid monthly subscription plan once enough people use them.
so soon you'll be paying for 3 things instead of being able to use iTunes like it is now.
Apple is not splitting up the apps on macOS as part of a nefarious plan to make you pay more money. They're doing it because the apps have been split on iOS for years already:
- The new Music app will have the ability to play local music, so it won't need a subscription. (Conversely, you can get an Apple Music subscription with iTunes right now.)
- The TV app will likely function just like the iOS one: if you have videos in your library that are playable by it, it'll play them, no subscription. If you subscribe to a TV "channel," it'll show up there. (This presumably includes the forthcoming Apple TV+ service, but there are no details about its pricing model yet.)
- Again, the Podcasts app will likely function just like the iOS one, which means it's not something that Apple is making money from. You subscribe to podcast feeds in it the same way you do in any other podcast player.
To be clear, I'm not saying Apple doesn't actively have nefarious plans to make you pay more money -- I'm just saying this isn't one of them.
This confuses me. Isn't this essentially how it already works? Like QuickTime is how you play video files and you can organize videos in QT just like you can do so with music in iTunes. I know both apps are kind of tied together, but it seems like outside of Podcasts they already have two apps doing two different things.
If this is true, and it follows Apple normal software re-write playbook, then the new replacement will have hardly any functionality compared the current iTunes version.
The only feature I want back is full app sync with a computer, like it used to be some years ago (both transferring from the iOS device to the computer and back from the computer to the iOS device). This was removed when app thinning was introduced, and partially retained in the iTunes version for enterprise.
This saves bandwidth when managing multiple devices, makes setting up a new device a whole lot faster (than waiting for apps to download), offers control on the app versions and also helps in cases when some developer removes an app from the store because they want customers to buy another app or a differently named one.
Now, iTunes backups (which historically took up gobs of space on the tiny MacBook drives of years past,) only save app data, and restoring will take up the aforementioned bandwidth.
That’s why I use an iOS 6 iPhone 5 with iTunes 11 on OS X Mavericks.
This section was super disappointing. It sounds more like iTunes is being rebranded to Music since it’s still going to be the hub for managing iOS devices. What exactly is changing here other than the name?
Some of the ancillary features are getting refactored out, it seems. Plus the app might be getting a rewrite so it's not some awful C++ cross-platform hybrid?
The arguments here between "file hierarchy" versus the "library/drawer/shoebox" styles of organization highlight a fundamental failing of traditional filesystems:
The need to store certain content under multiple horizontal categories (or folders.)
For example I will add the same song to multiple playlists, for different moods and activities, or a photo may have multiple elements that I might search for (e.g. "nature", "warm", "urban" etc.)
Symlinks/Aliases are too cumbersome. Tags help alleviate this a little, but they're still a tacked-on layer instead of a core FS feature in modern OSes (even macOS has inconsistent UI support for tags and becomes unwieldy if you have hundreds of tags.)
Of course. "Playlists" are a layer over the filesystem to make up for deficiencies of a traditional filesystem.
Playlist-like organization is useful for a lot of other types of content besides music, so why not bring those features back into the filesystem layer?
What does this men for getting data onto and off iDevices from non-Apple equipment like Windows PCs? Apple has always stubbornly refused to support standardised formats and transfer protocols for a lot of widely useful data types, and if you didn't want to trust your data to iCloud then the PC iTunes application was one of the few other officially supported ways to move things onto or off your mobile devices. It would be great if their push to make their devices stronger candidates to replace general purpose PCs included improvements here, because iTunes on Windows is pretty bad, but it would be a concern if this actually heralds a move further in the other direction.
The main factor keeping me on Deezer instead of switching to Apple Music since getting an iPhone has been "Oh god, I'd have to use iTunes on desktop". So this is a positive development.
This article falls loosely into the "announcement of an announcement" category, which is off topic for HN. There's no harm in waiting for the announcement itself.
I'm torn on this one. Part of me loves iTunes and it does so much more than the typical user will ever realise, but the other part of me sees that iTunes is come to the end of the road and an entire rebuild of the Apple Music app needs to happen. I still miss features like iTunes DJ. It was the best way to just click play and enjoy your library, and hasn't been replaced by any player that I know of including Spotify.
Wow, glad to hear it, but what a cool piece of software. I was so excited when it came to Windows and it helped me slowly move over to Mac which I am super happy with.
Good move as the thing went from doing x to doing a-z and being so bloated. I am happy to see it streamlined into a few apps again :)
I work on cross platform design for a fortune 500. We keep our eye on this kind of thing.
In conversation, the consensus among my peers was that the separation between iOS and OSX is destined to be impermanent. Phones are becoming more complex, and more integral to our every routine. But more significantly, they're raising a new generation of digital natives that have different expectations about UI and its scale, density, information architecture, onboarding, collaboration, and storage, to name a few.
These mobile-first expectations are flavoring desktop software, and smoothing over the once rough edges of highly-compact power user software. Gmail's redesign, and most redesigns really, demonstrate this. Less information, displayed in a more opinionated way, with whitespace and garnish and a focus on golden-path big-brother-knows-best presentation over configuration and optimization for power users.
Desktop and mobile trends are slowly converging, and I think that when it comes, that convergence from apple risks being abrupt and unapologetic. They're like that – with flash, the headphone jack, and the touch bar. They wait a long time, but when they make a move, they really rip the bandaid.
I find this future to be sad and scary, for the most part. But I agree that the icon grid home screen abstraction feels more like a "because it's always been that way" thing than anything else. It's a holdover from the blackberry days. Given how far mobile apps have come in the mean time, the mobile phone's desktop/start menu is ready for some new abstractions.
I see a conversational, transactional OS leading the way to the next generation of UIs. No more cockpits. Not sure Apple has laid any groundwork for that. Amazon is positioned.
Can you talk more about this? Conversational as in "voice/nonphysical primary input"? or "user offers abstract intent and computer sorts it out" instead of "user negotiates with computer via GUI", both, more?
For iPad, it's primarily clunky and a huge waste of space.
For iPhone, I'm certain there is a better way to discover and open apps than what was devised a decade ago. The current pull-down search is useful, but as a naive idea: some sort of search & auto-complete on the home screen would be great.
EDIT: Bonus - Trying to organize your apps is a nightmare. How do you organize a bunch of icons split across multiple screens?
On Android I have a 7 icon dock (3 are folders of each <=4 apps) and swipe up for an alphabetical list.
The alphabetical list is my main criterion, I don't think anything beats it. The dock is just a handy shortcut to a few common things, but even the coach tracking app I use every working morning and most of those afternoons isn't in there (that's much more frequently than I use some that are) and it's fine.
Grid of all app icons was designed at a time when 'apps' were newNd nobody had many.
I don't have many, I only recently got 'smartphone' again, but still more than I care to spread over a grid.
(The only annoyance is some daftly named apps, like 'Credit Card' instead of '<Provider> Credit' or something.)
iTunes is the single worst piece of software I have ever used. It’s the only software I’ve seen bring someone to literal tears. And it’s done that to more than a couple of family members.
> iTunes is the single worst piece of software I have ever used
I mean sure it's bad, but I find it hard to take this statement literally for any HN reader.
*Note that is not a comment about HN UX, just that anyone who uses software and technology extensively has to have used some pretty terrible software products in their lifetime.
I thought about it, but no I think iTunes is actually the worst.
Some software is broken. It doesn’t work. But iTunes is so bloated and janky I don’t think I could design something that bad if I tried. The concept of “syncing” is completely wrong in a multi-device context Venn diagram.
Plus iTunes has literally brought friends and family to tears. Actual tears. No other software has done that.
As a PC user with an iphone, I loathe the fact that I have to open itunes just to transfer some music to my iphone. Let me just drag and drop instead of forcing me to into some prolonged, annoying machination.
> Apple has pushed the iPad as a laptop replacement for years. But many pro users have noted that while the hardware is capable enough, the software is still behind.
As other HN users have noted in the past, until Apple gives me access to a terminal where I can run the command line tools required for my work, I have absolutely zero interest in replacing my laptop with an iPad.
On the one hand: if Apple really wants the iPad to be a laptop replacement, there needs to be a way to do everything that a laptop can do. It doesn't have to be the same way; it might be a new way that requires a learning curve. (A lot of the "iPads suck because I can't do my work" articles I've seen really mean "iPads suck because I can't do my work the way I expect to be able to do it.") But if I literally can't do my work on an iPad, it's not a laptop replacement.
On the other hand: while I can't open a terminal on the iPad, I can open Blink and open an effectively persistent mosh terminal on my Linode. I have a Git client that can make a repository a document provider, letting text editors work with it directly. It's possible that there may be some things that the iPad can never do locally that I can still technically do "on the iPad," and that this may be enough.
Are you willing to pay $8 or so for wifi access on the plane? Boom, you have mosh access.
I mean, yes, I get what you're saying, but I think it's at least plausible that the long-term solution for "doing developer things on the iPad" is going to involve network access and The Cloud™ for heavy lifting. (Granted, I think long-term, the distinction between local and remote everything is going to progressively blur over the coming years.)
[Edited to note: I think "Xcode for iOS" or an equivalent is almost certainly on the road map. I'm not sure whether full-blown web development of the "I am running a local web server on my iPad to test things" variety" is, although thinking about it, I can imagine ways a "LAMP App for iOS" might be implementable even today.]
Apple’s usage of the word “user” (as in “pro user”) doesn’t usually mean to include developers. “Pro users” refers to the category of people who use computers as a black box to do professional things.
So what do you call all the people who develop for apples platforms because they make an extremely high portion of the value for an OS. Without Mac/iOS developers, apple would have gone bankrupt long ago as no OS can compete withouts external developers?
You seemed to be arguing that Apple was at risk of losing its developers for iPad if it didn't make it suitable as a development platform. That's not plausible.
You seem to be responding to a higher-level comment saying "developers are not the target audience" with "but it's not suitable for developers", which... yeah?
Long-term, there are likely to be iOS development tools that allow this. They may not be this year, or the next, but given that iOS already has Git clients, code editors, and even sandboxed programming environments like Pythonista and Scriptable, it's hardly ridiculous to think that an iOS equivalent to XCode is already under development.
You are in a tiny minority. I say this as a fellow member of that minority. But our complaints have (and should have) very little to do with what Apple does or doesn't do with iPads.
Except that you need developers to build an ecosystem and Apple is currently alienating them in droves. developers developera developers as a wise man once said
People will build tools fine on Xcode for Ios or whatever, and you will have a unix app or something that gives you access to tools. Not want you want? I doubt apple gives a shit.
I'm going to disagree about the hardware being capable enough, the memory and compute resources are too weak for professional uses where MacOS is the standard.
If the rumors are true and Apple is planning to abandon x86_64 for their machines to switch to the ARM cores for everything, I'm going to have to pry the mac pros running 10.6.8 from the cold dead hands of our users to get them over to Windows with modern hardware.
Take Geekbench for what it's worth, but the absolute fastest of the old cheesegrater Mac Pro's (dual 6core X5675) are just 56% the speed of a A12X single-core, and only about 40% faster multi-core. The next iPad Pro's A13X will probably get close to evening the playing field on multi-core.
It's really only the memory capacity that the Mac Pro's have an undisputed advantage on (4-6GB vs up to 128GB). Memory bandwidth is way faster (33GB/s vs 19GB/s) on A12X owing to LPDDR4 vs DDR3.
The latest iPad Pros are beneficiaries of a decade of intense R&D from the most profitable product in the world (iPhone). Form-factor aside, the chips themselves are stupid fast.
I have tried every variation of new laptops/phones/etc I have come to the conclusion that anything which doesn't have a full physical keyboard is a consumption device. That is not necessarily a bad thing (you can consume excellent learning material, for example) but it will preclude it from ever being useful for work.
You can certainly attach a bluetooth keyboard to an iPad (I did so yesterday) and then they are pretty good for writting emails, but they are annoying to carry and a thin laptop is much better.
The article also mentions new tools for building cross-device apps. I hope that induces a non-superficial commitment to PWAs but sadly I wouldn’t bet on it.
iTunes was so finicky to get music onto iPods with. I prefer mounting the drive as a folder and copying manually. Android easily does this but it feels like a struggle with iTunes.
...anyone want to explain why they have a problem with this? Personally I find it really interesting that a web framework that dates back to NeXT is still in production behind widely used software.
"At this point, whatever the causes of the product problems with iTunes and related iOS apps — feature scope, management, team structure, etc. —we can be pretty sure that the only ‘solution’ will appear when this software achieves end-of-life, the same way that the mystery of how to set recording time on VCRs was finally solved by their obsolescence."
Fair enough. My claim was from September 2016, predicting that it will never work well in the future (and the UX problems I highlighted were from 2010 onwards.) I think it was pretty obvious that the app will need to be unbundled (about an year after my post, Apple started removing some features from iTunes like the iOS App store).
I'm sure people liked it in 2004 (although I never was blown away by it.) Also the fact that it was the #1 store can reflect music distribution agreements (and the success of iPod/iPhone) more than its prowess as a product.
My 10-plus-year-old iPod is rock solid technology, hardware and software, just keeps on working. At this point it feels like some retro SF alternate vision of the future we could have had, with simple easy to use things that never broke.