William Gallagher, AppleInsider:
The app that made it so easy to play music on your Mac that it transformed the entire music industry is going away, but the legacy lives on. As Apple scraps the omnibus iTunes app and breaks it up into multiple parts, AppleInsider looks at what went so right —and then so wrong.
Interesting look back. Success breeds expectations. The team behind a successful app inevitably feels pressure to add new features, to keep the app growing. What starts out simple, grows impossibly complex over time.
Microsoft Word, one of the most successful products of all time, started off as a simple, easy to use word processor. It evolved, over time, into an explosion of features, both incredibly powerful and as complex enough to require books and classes to truly master.
It was a natural path for iTunes to follow. I credit Apple with recognizing the need to go back to the drawing board, break the app into pieces. Could they have done it sooner? Sure. But that’s in the past. We’ll never know all the pressure points that made this move difficult. I’m glad we got here.
I used iTunes from the start, though it shared duty with SoundJam until iTunes added an equalizer in 2.0.
You know what? It was always a little confusing. Sure, it got worse, but right from the start it had fuzzy focus. I blame a lot of that on the inheritance of a lot of the SoundJam stuff, and skins in particular.
iTunes is not confusing. And it’s not bloated. It is a modular app. You interact with the section that’s relevant. It doesn’t consume excess memory.
It’s a tech journalism touchstone to say what a poor app it is. It has worked flawlessly for me on every machine since System 9 days.
It shocked me to be reminded that iTunes was introduced before my nephew was born. He starts college this fall.