This is a rant. As much as apple has had its focus mainly on the user they are now heading in a new direction. The new iTunes addiction is sales, the new incarnation of iTunes is only about how to get the next fix, closing the next deal.

The sad thing is that as with many other companies that has reach world domination - it cripples innovation. There hasn’t been much innovation in the user interface since it was introduced years ago. The few is focused on one thing, selling stuff.

To start with, what is iTunes?

Well this is one problem, it has become a beast, to the user it is foremost a media player, or at least tries to be. It’s not among the better media players but it gets the job done. As a media player there has been added a few extra features like burning CDs, music sync to iPod and oh, it let’s you buy new music.

But later on they have added more and more bloat; iPhone calendar and contact sync, application sales, pushing media and stuff you already own, podcast, video downloads. Oh, and the updater doubles as a portal for pushing safari as well.

The iTunes beast of today

iPhone sync - Why on earth do I want my iPhone to start up a (now) bloated media player just to sync contacts, calendar details and some music? Why not a blazing fast slimmed down sync application that use the database from iTunes to get the playlists, media track and application that are stored there?

The pusher – For a long time now iTunes ha added a little arrow to each and every track in the library, clicking it took me to iTunes music store, so that I could easily - buy the track I already own. Not a big problem as you could just remove it with a little setting. But not anymore, you can solve it with a hack but how many user are able to do that? We are going to sell more whether you like it or not! And it gets worse.

The genius - Masquerading as smart playlist manager genius gives Apple a way to display even more buttons with the word BUY in them. Now they have taken up 10% more of my screen real-estate with lists of music to buy. The playlists are not that bad, but I guess using genres, artists and some randomness would create about the same result. 

Grid view – The latest “innovation” is the ability to show albums in a grid…wow. And the cover flow before that, that turns out to be, not that useful. I love Eye candy and think it can serves a purpose but adding a black blob with a reflection in the middle of the database grid that represent all your tracks doesn’t help much.

What they could have added

Folder watching – I tend to move my music around, as there are not enough space on my laptop to have all my music and there are no easy way to have a central place for all tracks I have a subset on my machine, about 10GiB of music. So why not just add some smart folder watching? Thankfully there are people out there that get it.

Re-sync of statistics – If I play my music on my iPhone it would be so easy to count and then sync that back, as well as what tunes I skip etc. that would be excellent statistics for that genius playlists…

Native OS support – I’m a windows vista user, I actually like vista, and applications should behave. This is not a new problem with iTunes. But when are you going to address it? Not in one single place have they added right click support. You know, we use it a lot in windows. Or even looked at the Visa UX guidelines. But then again, why would they add functionality to us windows user that would be missing for the Mac OS crowd?

There; now I can get back to syncing photos, buying ringtones clips of music I already own and let iTunes steal GDI and memory resources from my system.

// Haqwin

I was at a interaction design specific conference at June 12-13, from business to buttons. I haven't gotten around to jot down my thoughts about it until now. A short description on some of the seminars follows:

Day one

Keynote by the man, Don Norman. And a little plug for his new book The Design of Future Things - I probably will get this book as all the others. Don't get me wrong this was not just a book review, there was a lot good insights and it was good listening.

Next up was a session with Kim Lenox a really good session. A good look on how they are changing their way of work, they are clearly moving towards a more agile and involved process. I mean; whiteboards, post-its, direct communication and collaboration over the borders. This is getting good and fun. This was a new session, as Ryan Freitas had to cancel  his, and a very pleasant surprise.

Next up was a mix containing three shorter session on New interaction techniques.

Most interesting of these was a session on multi touch and gestures. Quite interesting stuff, this also sprung a small fear that Apple et al are doing their patent stuff here. Multi touch and gestures should be open, not locked down by patents. 

There was a quite fun session on clothes and electronics from cutecircuit.

Last session of the day was by Kars Alfrink from Leapfrog on playful design, how the knowledge from gaming can be implemented on business. There are lots of interesting stuff that can come out of that mix, I'm sure.

Day two

For me the day started out with a keynote by Dr Patrick W Jordan around the four pleasures; Physio, Psycho, Socio and Ideo. This was a excellent session with lots of real world data and anecdotes. Like the clunk of BMW doors and the Heineken psst.

Last out was a workshop on agile methods and interaction design. I think that a few answers came out of that session. Most important though is that developer in agile projects need to get the interaction designers on the right track. Share your knowledge. I think Interaction designers need to learn a lot more on this issue. Many are still stuck in big up front design, and this has got to change.

Sessions, pdfs and stuff can be found at the from business to buttons site.

On a side note, I think that many interaction designers are afraid that they will loose out on the design if not all methods and tools are applied. And some methods and techniques cannot be applied directly in an agile projects. However, the gain in communication and development speed [in agile projects] are  so great that there is no return. They have to learn that you don't need all the answers at the table at the start. And an interaction designers work is not done when the project starts. It has to be done continually during the development.

A little background

So, I sold myself to the space plastic. I got myself an iPhone. After some tricking with the software I got it up and running. There are just a few rough edges left but in all a great experience. It really delivers, a few quirks that you get used to it in no time at all. You have to get used to the keyboard but it only took me a one or two days to nail it.

Most of the basic applications work great, the integration is the best part of it, you can add the address for a contact and from there go to the map and get directions from your home address - real sweet.

The calendar is great but why couldn't it just sync with windows calendar or any iCal file out there? Could it be that they want me to buy a mac? But to be honest, no other phone maker makes it any easier to sync.

A few pointers, the text messaging works great as a conversation but sometimes you need to send to more than one or forward, then there is the SMSD application that handles messages as you are used to. There even is a solution in the works to handle MMS, at SwirlySpace you can have an application that for starters handles sending MMS.

But the functionality, responsively and integration of all other applications are so good it doesn't matter. And the updates the pump out seem to offer more that bug fixes that should have been in place by delivery. But that has to be proved.

So where are all the others?

Why didn't Nokia, SonyEricsson or any other of the mobile companies out there deliver this kind of product?

The main problem here is history. For the past decades mobile phones have been selling on features, the developers are the driving factor, together with marketing. In the beginning you really sold a telephone, just the bare minimum of features (calling, handling contacts and SMS). This was easy, 4-5 items in a menu and you were safe. Add a few extra features and you would sell more, shrink the size, add to battery life. Any other extra feature was a main selling point as there was only so many ways to dial a phone number. But as the feature war went on there was casualties, too bad it was among the users. Marketing locked on to all the features that the techies invented and now they are stuck there. The feature list keeps getting longer and is expected to expand with GSM, SMS, CDMA, Bluetooth, GPRS, MMS, PTT, TDMA, WAP, GPS, 3G, EV-DO, UMTS, HSDPA, EDGE, Turbo-3G, CDPD, GAIT...

Want me to continue? That is what most mobile companies are selling. Not a great phone, web surfing experience, music machine or personal planner. And they are so stuck in selling acronyms that they have trouble to cut lose. Drop all buzzwords and sell an experience.

The only company with a full experience focus, coupled with the marketing money, is Apple. The last building block was the timing, available processing power and hardware to support the UI. They were able to start fresh with no history in what's expected other than a great experience and a fanatic crowd. There are a few players, Neonode is one but unfortunately I think it's too late for them. Another major player here might be Google. They have the muscles to provide a platform, now let the experience guys do something cool stuff with that. Keep the Linux geeks at bay or we will have an interface like Gimp.

Don't get me wrong here I do think that SonyEricsson sell a lot of great phones. I have a few myself and they are my second choice. But I always feel that they have the potential to do so much more. And by the way, if you know most of the acronyms above you’re in trouble, take some user experience and get yourself out of the featuritis.

Mike Harsh did a great talk about media integration in Silverlight. One of the most impressive sight was when a full screen feed was overlayed with nine smaller feeds. Looked great, and when i fired upp the process view it was producing a load in the CPU round about 50%...wow!What more? The media encoder in Expression can be used to produce a live feed from one or more video sources so you get kind of poor mans video studio. Nice...The possibility to use media brushes in Silverlight to wrap it to object, and with some xaml coding you can split the video onto any number of objects.Silverlight now is IE, FF and Safari and from a direct question around opera it was more in the line of a couple of bugs in opera that held it back. Eventually a "coming soon" was heard. And its still beta you know...One thing that struck me was the lack of support for other media formats. Well, I'm not a codec guy but it might be that some of the formats out there put a bit to much strain on the codecs, with the risk of hogging too much CPU cykles. Another is the size of plugin, filling it up all kinds of codecs is not a good thing. And hey, flash do not to my knowledge stream WMV or MPEGS, they use their format. It all goes in through the mediacoder anyway...

Looked into the designer view of blend. And well prepared bindable objects seems to be one of the absolute keys to collaborating with development. To bind buttons to bindable commands in a bindable objects beats having to add an event handler and adding code for that. At least in a designers perspective.I picked up a few tricks along the way, hard to recap in text, I suggest you try it out for yourself instead.

A panel discussion on how to get designers and developers work together. In the panel you found Kristian Bengtsson - FutureLab, Kelly Goto - gotomedia, inc., Chris Messina - Citizen Agency, Luke Wroblewski - Yahoo! It took a slightly different direction, more in the lines on how to get teams to work agile in large corporations. But it resulted in a few insights and confirmations, I try too keep it short:As Chris says, open source design suck! But the fact that this is true probably have to do with the lack of design vision. Visions are good and without them you do not know what problems you are trying to solve.To get agility into large corporates, use bottom up methods. Start in the groups and don't try to sell it to management, deliver and explain what you did. Prove it over and over again until it reaches the top. Kelly is an advocate of scrum as it can be used in bigger scale processes as well as give the flexibility need for the teams. Kelly also described how they were able to get interaction and design into the sprints together with development and that it worked.Now it's late and time to get some sleep for tomorrow.

All of you bloggers are announcing Silverlight but the integration of sevices and silverlight with a really fast .NET CLR (about 300 - 1000 times faster than JavaScript).But one of the things that caught me and brought a tear to my developer eye was the experinece I got when Scott G debugged a silverlight session remote running on a mac. Adding breakpoints in visual studo and catching and running dynamic debugging on to Safari in the mac - wow!Another thing was the dynamic integration, a console app running in a safari session enabled Scott G to dynamically use IronPython and IronRuby right there on the mac- again, wow!All this will be integrated and enabled in Expression 2 and Orcas... so now that I got the shipping version of expression. I don't even have the time to install them before I move on and download the Blen 2 and Expression 2 previews...More to come.