I find the interface terribly confusing. Nothing is obvious or intuitive at all.
I love Real these days, it’s a straightforward and obvious to use media player and burning platform. I still burn quite a few CD’s and it’s the nicest drag and drop program I have for that. I can put together a playlist and have a finished CD burned in maybe five minutes tops, and I’ve never had one go wonky where it won’t read in another player (I’m looking at you Windows Media Player).
It’s funny that Picasa came out for the Mac, and the big complaint was that it “doesn’t look like a Mac applicatoin”, and yet Apple puts out stuff on Windows that makes no attempt to blend in.
Quite honestly, it seems like it’s expected that things on Windows don’t blend in. Windows (as does the Mac OS) has a HIG – human interface guidelines – but developers almost never seem to follow it on Windows, while adhering to the HIG is a must-have on the Mac. Even Windows Media Player (as I pointed out above) is completely non-Windows-like.
It’s the bloat and clunkiness, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve used winamp for 11 years, and it’s just as snappy on an old pentium 2 as it is on a vista machine - click the song and it’s immediately playing. Itunes, even on a brand new computer, is CLUNKY - just a total resource hog. This gets worse when you add an actual Ipod to the equation, with no shortage of random hangs and stalls. It’s a jerk-off program.
Itunes also does a horrible job of importing music ripped via other means. It often gets confused by albums with songs from different artists. Winamp and windows media player never have this problem. Also as mentioned above it adds two or three services that start up automatically. These services don’t do anything useful when I remove them Itunes works the same as before.
My biggest complaint about itunes, other than the newest version bogging down my PC, is that you can’t really use the “automatic sync” feature without either having missing songs, missing albums, missing artwork, all Greatest Hits albums being combined, or songs with “guest artist” being put in a seperate album.
well it may have improved but the question remains, when my aunt and uncle start bitching because their pc is running slow am I going to find realplayer in the start up list?
I usually run combined community codec pack or k-lite codec pack both come with mpc (windows media player classic) which has been warped and twisted to play damn near anything. the one thing it doesnt do is let you Q up a stack of videos.
I might give real another shot, but after years of removing that crap I am still a bit annoyed with them.
You might find a vaguely-related AskTog column an interesting take on the current Apple design approach.
I’m a diehard PC user slash Apple hater (Macs are just gay!) so it would take a lot to get me to install iTunes. Unfortunately for me the ability to see Natalie Portman nekkid qualified as “a lot”!
She did a short film including a sex scene and the only way to see it was via iTunes. Now my attitude about iTunes was certainly not helped by the fact that her sex scene turned out to be the most un-erotic, unpleasant, pseudo-rape / angry sex scene ever, or that all you saw was a side shot of her butt, or that even though Ms. Portman’s naked behind would normally reduce any right-thinking heterosexual male to quivering Jell-O here it was deliberately made unattractive by bruises and bad lighting…
B U T . . .
as others have said the program took forever to install (I mean, a really really long time), it was sluggish to use, it bogged down my whole system, the interface was plastered with advertising and annoying streaming videos. Like Apple in general it was all flash and little substance. 