Because Apple is a $500 billion company generating $100 billion a year thanks mostly to iPhones and iPads, it's easy to forget that iTunes is itself a huge business – set to generate revenues around $15 billion next year.
Revenues like that are bigger than Yahoo and Facebook's revenues combined.
So it's worth paying attention to iTunes, especially when Apple releases an entirely new version of it, like it did yesterday.
Yesterday, the world's most influential Apple blogger, John Gruber, took a long look at the update.
Here's a bullet-point version of what he had to say:
- On the missing sidebar: "iTunes 11 is in many ways a redefinition of what it means to be a modern Mac app. There’s an iOS-inspired emphasis on putting less stuff in your face at the same time."
- On his favorite new element, "Expanded View": "In a graphical list of albums or movies or shows, you click one and it opens in a subview right there under the album/movie/show. Instead of going to a new view, you stay where you are. No way to get confused about where you are, more of a sense of direct manipulation."
- On another good feature, "Up Next": "This is pretty much how I always wanted the old Party Shuffle feature to work — show me what’s coming up, and let me add whatever strikes me to the top of the queue."
- On the new MiniPlayer: "Their goal with the redesigned MiniPlayer was to allow you to do almost everything you’d want music-playback-wise without leaving the MiniPlayer mode. I think they got pretty close."
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