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.)