The position of the three system buttons for the windows are weird, especially considering how Apple try to be consistent in that kind of stuff.

It really is odd. Also gone are the colored icons, replaced by grey/slate with blue highlights. It's not the blue that's currently used as the default OSX highlighted row color, either. Makes me think that the Aqua theme will seem some changes rather soon.

iTunes has always been doing (for lack of better words) weird shit. That was sometimes a sign of things to come (the beginning of the end of brushed metal), sometimes not. I wouldn’t read much into it.

iTunes is not really the jewel of all of Apple’s applications. At least not anymore. Other applications always seem to have much more polished UIs. Safari is an obvious candidate, all their iWork applications also have pretty nice UIs, as has the iLife suite. Those always seem to be the better OS X citizens.

Combine that with the frequent UI blunders in iTunes (usually at least partially straightened out in subsequent updates) and I’m beginning to suspect that their top UI people are not really working on iTunes all that much.

I’m not even sure whether Apple likes iTunes. For all we know they think of it as this huge, overly complex burden, a trap in which they themselves ran. iOS doesn’t have one monolithic iTunes app that does everything and that clearly seems to be what Apple should have done on OS X. If they could have a fresh start they might. It’s just that they probably don’t want to make that kind of investment. (Consider also that Apple probably doesn’t want to install half a dozen different applications on some poor, unsuspecting Windows user’s PC just so that it can sync to the newly bought iPod shuffle. One application is quite enough and that already makes a lot of people angry.)

Take note: Scrollbars have been matte in iTunes for a few versions now, from before Snow Leopard came out, and we haven't seen wide adoption of those in the rest of the OS.

Reminds me of Tiger, when things were horribly disjointed. Then in Leopard, Apple made a point of unifying the user experience (universal button styles, no brush strokes) to combat tweaks we used to use for that purpose (Uno, etc.). Now, things are starting to re-fragment, along with their mobile OS.

I'm not an OS X programmer. Anyone know how loosely couple Aqua is from the rest of the OS? A tightly coupled system could be the reason Apple's been so slow to change...

My take is they're trying to stay a step ahead of Ubuntu.

Because Ubuntu is some how a reference in UI design?

The new download page hasn't completely rolled out. In the mean time, this direct link works :)

Probably not front-page worthy but upvote your comment as thanks for the link.

I think it's mostly rolled out now anyway, but thanks!

Thanks ed. Been waiting for this one to roll out since the keynote. On a sidenote, is it me or is the new logo hideous?

I pulled up the iLife photos in Finder and compared them at 512x512px with the new iTunes logo and... there is no comparison. The amazing detail we find in the former is strangely lacking in the latter and the result is shoddy craftsmanship.

I'm surprised this made it past Jobs...

Even compared to the QuickTime symbol, which has a similar style, the new symbol seems to lack detail and looks shoddy.

Yes! It looks slapped together from stock icons.

Agreed, the new logo is as ugly as sin.

well the CD in the old icon seems kinda outdated ;) but its strange and needs some getting used to i agree.

"iTunes 10 is safe for JBers+unlockers: DFU mode, syncing, selecting IPSW, all okay (Stay away from 4.1 next week though!)"

http://twitter.com/MuscleNerd/status/22762830722

what's wrong with this link? http://www.apple.com/itunes/

Nothing. But for the first 30 minutes or so a direct URL was the only way to get the installer.

First impression: it's fast, unlike many people here I actually like this GUI, it's more sober, the old one was like a bunch of kids (icons) screaming for attention. Other than that it's the same ol' itunes. I don't care much about the Ping, but it also doesn't bother me having it.

Personally, I'm going to avoid iTunes 10 for as long as possible. I don't need Ping much, not planning on getting a new tv and I can do without a horrendous UI.

Plus iTunes 9.2.whatever is still working fine with my iPhone (which is running iOS 4.1 GM).

Performance does seem to be improved.

Please include MacOSX in the title, not everyone uses a mac..

Truth. I wonder what the percentage of people on HN are Mac users. I'd say something around 80%.

That seems a bit high. Looking at my site's analytics, when we got 50% of our traffic from HN, we had about 45% mac usage, compared to 28% normally. Obviously, there are a lot of conflating factors but that suggests that 60% of HN click-throughs are mac.

What is also interesting is how Linux usage is quite low on HN compared to our regular base; HN appears to be only about 7% Linux. (The people who can't use iTunes at all).

(Again, this is a very rough conclusion; the percentages can easily be way off).

Library access seems a good bit faster on OSX but that could just be the benefits of a cold start. We'll see how it goes in a few weeks without an iTunes restart.

Does it need a reboot after installation?

No, at least not on OS X.

Thanks.

iTunes 10 breaks mt-daapd (Linux DAAPD server), if you're using it, don't upgrade

Thanks :D