Initial impressions of iTunes 10 (customer experience, geekery, music)
They also hid the AirPlay (nee AirTunes) stuff in a little tiny widget in the corner, which makes it much less clear if AirPlay is available, and they just use a gray vs. blue icon to indicate whether it's active. You have to click on it to learn what your particular configuration is. Considering they're really trying to push AirPlay now, this seems like a curious design decision.
I was also a bit annoyed that when I started it up, it was in "group with album art" view, which I usually turn off, but they've done a bit of tweaking to it to make it actually useful (even though the vast majority of my music doesn't have album art) and so I'm leaving it on for now.
So of course I tried out Ping, and was immediately annoyed by the following aspects:
- It requires your real name, which is tied to your billing account
- It requires your gender, which is of course the binary male/female
- You are only allowed to select up to three genres you like. The list of genres is pretty pathetic and mainstream anyway, though.
- There is no way for independent artists to add a profile (hopefully that will change in the future)
- The "privacy" settings are just "do you want to let people follow you?" and nothing like, for example, "do you want this information to be available?" Apparently, no, they haven't learned from Facebook's bad example.
- The only activity it records is actively purchasing and rating things on the iTunes store. So much for Last.fm-style discovery.

