iTunes 7 Mini-Review
After reading lots of people’s initial impressions of the new iTunes 7 release on Tuesday I decided to write my own quick mini-review to talk about my own impressions of this major upgrade. Most of what I have read over the last few days seems overly critical and tells readers little about what new features they might actually like vs. those that get in the way.
This new version of iTunes sports a brand new look which closely matches the direction seen with the OSX 10.5 preview show a few weeks ago. Clearly Apple is trying to start the process of moving to this new, smoother and (in my opinion) refined look. Past iTunes users will be right at home since no major components have been moved (at least not very far!). One notable addition to the interface is the very sexy graphical method Apple added to browse content. On my Mac Mini the album browser was smooth and quick to load each of the album images. Although this feature works great on the Mac, PC users have reported some issues and to be completely fair I did notice the effect was not as smooth on the PC as the Mac. Another change was the order and content of the sidebar. Items are now grouped in (once again, my opinion) a much more logical order. I found I was able to very quickly sift through my collection of TV episodes much faster than in the previous version.
So lets talk about speed, how fast is this new version? The quick answer is, not very. Unfortunately it seems that this version does indeed use a bit more memory and system resources (especially on the PC) which ultimately translates into possible performance anxiety for those with only the base 512mb ram (Mac Mini). Those who have 1gb or more of system memory I think will find performance to be at least on par with previous versions.
Overall I feel the new version of iTunes is a worthy download and with the new addition of movies, a real challenger to long standing pay-per-month services such as HBO and Showtime (once more content is added).
NOTE: Many users have reported that this new version of iTunes has significant bugs, even to the point of possible data loss. Over the course of the last few days and even during some limited testing I experienced no crashes or major bugs….
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