FTFiT
iTunes is the new QuickTime. It’s well beyond the point of redemption. Needs a full rewrite.
Couldn’t agree more with this.
In the olden days, devices synchronised via iSync. You downloaded stuff with a web browser. iTunes was just about… tunes. Things worked better then.
Apple is rapidly heading towards the point where it needs to throw out iTunes and start again—and preferably, take it back to its roots.
I’m happy enough, conceptually, with iTunes dealing with more than just music: TV shows, movies, podcasts. No problem there. I’m unconvinced that the store should be part of iTunes, though. Branding is tricky—the store has already gone from being “the iTunes Music Store” to the “iTunes Store” (with the AppStore as a division of this). I’d quite like a Webkit(+magic)-driven Storefront.app that does all of this stuff separately from my media library, though.
Similarly, I want device syncing to be entirely independent of iTunes. In the days of Panther, I used to sync phones and Palm devices along with iPods using iSync. It worked well. My “mobile devices” were all synchronised and managed from a single place. Later, when iTunes for Windows went mainstream, all of the functionality relating to iPods was moved there permanently. iSync needs to be brought back into sharp focus and refreshed.
All of this would allow the various parts of the Apple media ecosystem to operate sanely as counterparts, rather than the behemoth it currently is. The Windows XP VM that powers my media library is crippled when iTunes attempts to download a large podcast video and sync to the Apple TV simultaneously. Not for any good reason, either—it’s purely a matter of iTunes being poorly-written.
Please, Apple, let iTunes 9 be a ground-up rewrite.
